My son’s D&D game is now in a Fey palace. A curious thing about this palace is that depending on which door you go out of, it’s a different season. The Stables are outside the east door, where it is Summer. An ambush has been set here with some archers on the top level of the stables, and more evil doers on the ground level to harass the party when they are distracted by the archers.
Map of the ground floor and mezzanine. Each square is 5 feet.
My sons D&D game is now in a Fey palace for a while. A curious thing about this palace is that depending on which door you go out of, it’s a different season. This Hedge Maze is outside the west door where it is Winter. I kept thinking about the hedge maze from The Shining when I was drawing it.
This 300dpi image is 70px per square and should fit a VTT system. Each square is 5 feet, and the hedge is meant to be a significant barrier and 15 feet tall.
Following on from my last post, I’ve been running D&D games for my son and his friends online every week during lockdown for the pandemic and I’m really getting into it.
My current setup is to use Discord for voice chat combined with the Avrae bot to manage combat. The Critter DB site is great for building and storing monsters and NPC. I still use Roll20 as a virtual tabletop, but I ignore almost all it’s features except for the maps. I’m also using D&D Beyond more and more.
At first, I chaffed at the idea of buying digital copies of books I already owned print copies of. I’m not a huge fan of digital copies of any kind, but that’s a whole other rant. Having used D&D Beyond for a while now, I have to admit they have one slick product.
The integration with the Avrae bot means that character sheets can be pulled into Discord directly from D&D Beyond. All their gear and spells and stuff is all there and it’s mostley tracked. Creating characters in D&D Beyond is easy. They’ve clearly put a lot of work into the character sheets.
The catch is that you can’t use anything unless you’ve paid for that content. SRD stuff is available free, but to get any of the interesting races or classes, you need to buy them. Fortunately, they have options for buying only the content you want. For example, the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide is listed at $29.99, but considering it’s mostly fluff, I chose to just buy the spells from that book and only spent about $4.
I bought the entire Players Handbook, because it’s hard to DM without a lot of the contents of that book. But for books like the DMG, I only had to buy the magic items.
The other nice thing is that as the DM, I can start a campaign and share any content I’ve purchased with the players. This is a huge plus for me. The players, who in this case are all kids, can just sign up for a free account, and then access any of the content I’ve purchased without having to pay for it again.
I know I’ve been suckered in and spent more money on stuff than I’ve intended to, but that’s their business model. I’m aware it’s a kind of sunk cost fallacy, but I’m ok with it because it currently makes for easier game play.
It’s been about six months since I got back into D&D, running games for my son. I have learned a lot in that time, including how to be a better DM, but that’s a story for another post. I thought I’d take a moment to go back and reflect on an earlier post I made on a different blog that I use for tabletop gaming (I hadn’t started this blog at the time).
I continue to be more and more impressed with the selection and maturity of the tools available online for gaming. There’s some really great stuff out there. So here’s my updated rundown of the tools I’ve been using and how I use them:
I just received my copy of Eberron: Rising from the Last War and I’m loving it. I bought a copy of the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide recently and while I appreciate the lore, I felt the book was thin on gameplay content. Sword Coast had some interesting subraces, a few new subclasses, and a few new spells. The Eberron book, on the other hand, is chock full of goodies. There’s new races, a new class (Artificer) and tons of other stuff I can’t wait to put into a game. Sword Coast was also physically thin, running to only 160 pages compared to Eberron’s 320 pages. I really feel like I got my moneys’ worth here.
The new information on Goblinoid races is particularly interesting to me. I know it’s a D&D trope that the “good” heroes go beat up on all the “evil” monsters. I’ve always wanted to inject more grey areas into what can be a black and white game. Eberron does just that. Making the Goblinoids into playable races is great. Same with the Orcs. I’d been wanting to make goblins in particular into a more neutral race in my game and Eberron just saved me a bunch of time homebrewing this stuff. I’m going to be dropping the Eberron Goblinoids into my main D&D game holus-bolus. Fortunately, my players haven’t encountered any goblins yet, so no need to retcon anything.
The Artificer class looks fun. I have one evil NPC that I think I will retcon into an Artificer. I had him making constructs in my game, but 5e lacks rules for constructs, so I was just making stuff up. Eberron fills this gap somewhat.
My son has fallen in love with the Warforged race. An intelligent robot like player character, adding a touch of steampunk to the game. What’s not to love? We’ve already rolled up his new character, a Warforged Barbarian Storm Herald, and it will be making its debut in our next session 🙂
The steel of this sword has been blued so that it reflects little light. It appears to be a plain sword, but close inspection shows that it is not tarnished in any way, and the keen edge seems to cry out for blood. Don’t be the fool who tests its edge with your finger. It will cut you.
This item is just a rebadged version of the Rod of the Pact Keeper (DMG, page 197), made as a sword for a Hexblade instead of a rod for a normal Warlock.
Full stats are available on my GMBinder page.
This work by Hugo Stals is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
These are some very cool shades.
Grants Advantage on Charisma based rolls.
Negates the effect of sunlight sensitivity when worn.
Negates Darkvision when worn.
This is the third of three versions of this room.
The room is 35ft. square with the walls and floor made of masonry. There is a 5ft. square stone platform in the middle of the room raised about 6 inches from the floor. A large wooden chest sits in the middle of the raised platform. The room has a high ceiling of about 23ft. There is only one door in this room.
The whole room is a gigantic ancient mimic. The chest is to lure hapless adventurers into the room at which point the “door”, which is its mouth, will close and the mimic will proceed with digest anyone inside it.
Huge monstrosity (shape changer), neutral
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21 (+5) | 12 (+1) | 18 (+4) | 7 (-2) | 13 (+1) | 8 (-1) |
Shapechanger. The mimic can use its action to polymorph into an object or back into its true, amorphous form. Its statistics are the same in each form. Any equipment it is wearing or carrying isn’t transformed. It reverts to its true form if it dies.
Adhesive (Object Form Only). The mimic adheres to anything that touches it. A Huge or smaller creature adhered to the mimic is also grappled by it (escape DC 13). Ability checks made to escape this grapple have disadvantage.
False Appearance (Object Form Only). While the mimic remains motionless, it is indistinguishable from an ordinary object.
Grappler. The mimic has advantage on attack rolls against any creature grappled by it.
Pseudopod. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit : 11 (2d6 + 5) bludgeoning damage. If the mimic is in object form, the target is subjected to its Adhesive trait.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 5) piercing damage plus 6 (2d6) acid damage.
Seed Bombs appear to be small round balls of clay about the size of a golf ball. The surface is hard and has been polished somewhat and has a pattern pressed into the surface suggesting the kind of bomb that it is.
Nicely formatted version of this on GM Binder.
This work by Lucien Stals is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The amazing polish on the surface of this knife will reflect any available light into the eyes of the attacker, blinding them momentarily.
This is another one I’ve posted on GM Binder.
This is also my 4th post this weekend. I don’t normally like to post so frequently and usually schedule posts to space them out a bit but I needed to get the images online so I could use them on GM Binder. I also recruited my son to help with the images. This one is one of his.
This work by Hugo Stals is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.