Category: Dungeons and Dragons

Dragons who want not for gold

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I was in need of a person who’s obsessed with high valuable items and making a … hoard of them, if you will. But these items are not simple mountains of gold or gems just to sit on all day. These are unique items. Items with a wonderful story behind them. Rarely crudely stolen but aquired. It’s not a collection of stolen items, but work has gone into them to get them.

This is why I came up with the idea for the Onyx Dragon.

This lawful dragon might always endevour to come by an item justly, but sometimes their obsession gets the better of them. They find an excuse – a lie to themselves – to bend their moral code. If someone else steals it and gives it to me, then that’s probably good enough…

These mental gymnastics are an onyx dragon’s main weapon, which it can easily force on others too. Weakening their will and casting doubt. An onyx dragon may never need to fight to keep hold of their stash – with enough time the theif will talk themselves out of trying in the first place.

Redcap Iron Boots

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Redcaps are fun for just wild violence. Bonus: if the fight you’ve thrown your gang into isn’t cutting the mustard, you can just have Redcaps appear. They show up where ever horrid, blood swathed scenes of terror have happened.

Lets jump to the part where they say “I’d like to loot the corpse!” though.

Redcap Iron Boots
Magic footwear, which grow and shrink in size for their new owner. They’re eager to be worn.

The boots are very heavy, adding at least 50lb to the weight of the wearer. Stealth checks are made with disadvantage. Swimming is difficult whilst wearing these boots.

Attunement: whilst wearing them, leave your feet in a bucket of water for the duration of a short rest. They’ll get properly snug then. If you move towards an enemy and use the last of your movement to get to them (ie. you have zero movement left when you reach them), you can just fudging kick ’em real hard.

The target must succeed on a DC 14 Dexterity saving throw or take 3d10 + STR bludgeoning damage and be knocked backwards 5 feet prone. If the target succeeds, you take 1d10 piercing damage as the boots drain their blood lust from you instead.

Cursed: the boots do not want to be removed. You take 3d10 piercing damage to attempt to remove them. Removing them requires a DC 11 Strength save.

Prescience

ShaneLeave a comment

I couldn’t sleep and was thinking if there was a skill this doesn’t fit into the ordinary 5e skill list. There are lots of skills which don’t appear on the character sheet, but most of them fall into one that is already there. Juggling is probably performance, diving is athletics. I was thinking of skills which don’t appear.

Prescience is one. We know that this is a skill because it’s something that wizards can learn, and it’s not something that sorcerers gain innately. There are many ways wizards learn their skills, and it doesn’t have to be through schooling. Even barbarians can pick up some magic, accidentally. Why couldn’t your Fighter have found a note book as a kid in a box of pornography, abandoned in a bush somewhere. Nestled in the marginalia of the sensual artwork were notes on how to hone the skill of fortune telling.

Prescience

Your Wisdom (Prescience) check allows you to attempt to understand the future, not through deduction but through divination. Your method of prescience may differ from another’s; it could include understanding tea leaves, meditation for some time, or maybe even glimpses of what lies beyond, coming unbidden and uncontrollably.

Peering through time is not entirely understood, and even those most dedicated to the art have been known to be unreliable. Your Dungeon Master may tell you of a cryptic omen or exactly what a foe will do next. They may chose to let you see miles away from where you rest or only meters around you.

So now that skill exists, there’s a few things to think about. The first is proficiencies. Obviously, this isn’t mentioned in any of the normal routes of gaining that tick on your skill list, like backgrounds. Ideally, this might be something the players can learn over the course of the game (using downtime) or give it them during a session zero – maybe swapping one of their normal proficiencies.

The other issue to tackle is that not everyone has access to this ability. You could instead make this into a tool, like the brewing tool kit. You need the crystal ball (worth at least 200 gold pieces) before you can even make use of the skill, for instance.

I prefer to keep it like a normal skill though; everyone can try it but some people don’t have a very high modifier. In fact, instead of the base modifier being 0 (plus zero on your d20), the base modifier could be -10. At first level, proficiency in prescience gives you -8 to the dice roll. The likelihood of hitting the DC to get decent information is low, and probably relies on getting a natural twenty. This makes the skill less useful until later levels.

Rolling 5 or less reveals nothing of the future. Less than 10 gives incredibly vague feelings. More than that gives gradually clearer images. It’s still, of course, totally down how the DM wants to deal with it, and what information (useful or not) they want to give out.

Of course, you could keep the default modifier at 0, but have the DC be set in the 20s or high teens each time.

From Giant Slayer to Hoard of the Dragon Queen

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Back in the day I ran a game for my work collegeues. We started with Giantslayer as a tester, to show of what D&D is to a group of people who had never even heard of a role play game before. Once we were done with the adventure, a few people wanted to carry on and so I began Hoard of the Dragon Queen (which I ultimately abandoned as being too linear, but regret that now).

Here are my notes for the sessions (these ended up being a couple of sessions worth of notes) between the two campaigns.

I quite like these notes. My aim was to have a page-per-scene. All the character names I needed, where I needed them. Any thing I’d likely have to look up – creature stats or NPC objectives. The notes are also fairly reusable and easily updateable once the characters kill someone I didn’t expect them to.

Turn left at the fragile gibbon

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“I doodled this,” they said, casually.

I’ve never been in an adventure with a maze. A dungeon crawl, where the plays have dozens of rooms to clear without a map, are sort of like mazes. Those are rarely designed to get the players lost, or feel trapped, though. It could be because, like Dyson says, that sense of confusion does manifest, but not in a fun way. You’re more like to have your players blindly stumbling from room to room, with the DM grinning with a sense of false achievement.

We could take our pointers from classic text based adventure games, or even point and click adventure games, where you’re given the list of exits from the current scene. The fog of war here is the DM saying, “you’ve not been north, so you don’t quite make out anything in the darkness.” Remembering that, “you have already been south, and you remember that that’s where the gnoll hides.”

An intelligence check might help the players understand the geography of the area, without a map. “With a 13 on your Int check, you are pretty sure that the room to the south is the one you bypassed earlier, when you were travelling past the waterfall.”

Of course, if anyone chooses to be a cartographer, give them an unlabelled version of the map or quickly sketch one out. This kind of play style should be rewarded.

Another feature from a video game that I believe is important is in these situations is travelling from nethack. If a player says “I want to go back to the room with the Naga statue”, I would not make them struggle to remember the way back. I’d definitely list off the rooms they pass through to get there (giving them the opportunity to change their mind and upping the tension), but ten minutes of “okay, I’ll go left. Oh, back then. Right?” isn’t fun.

(An adventure I reviewed a while ago used a maze-as-a-challenge, which was always visible, and the players could figure out how to manipulate it.)