Above-Average-Joe

Hello just your typical DND nerd here. Don’t post that much or really use Tumblr a lot. Joseph-22

[the-griffons-saddlebag]

💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Abjurer’s Bangle Wondrous item, rarity varies ___

You can clasp or remove this metal bracelet around the wrist or ankle of yourself or a willing creature within your reach using an action. The bangle emits a ward of abjuration magic from it that has a number of hit points determined by its rarity. A creature wearing the bangle can use its reaction when it takes damage to speak the bangle’s command word, causing the magical ward to take the damage instead. Any excess damage carries over to the creature when the bangle’s ward is reduced to 0 hit points, at which point the bangle becomes a nonmagical bracelet.

| Rarity | Ward Hit Points | — | Uncommon | 30 | | Rare | 75 | | Very Rare | 120 | ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for only $1 to $7 a month!

[dare-to-dm]

Ideas for non-combat encounters/events

For when you want some variety for your tabletop RPG.  These events will also give your players a chance to use character skills they don’t often have opportunities for.

Natural Disaster - Have the town the PCs are in catch on fire and see what they do!  Do they cut their losses and run?  Do they heroically try to save trapped townspeople?  What do they do about the aftermath?  Natural disasters are an interesting challenge because there can be lots of danger and drama without necessarily having a villain.  It may also get your PCs to use skills they don’t commonly have a chance to.  You could also try floods, earthquakes, raging storms while at sea, etc.

Powerful Fortress - Put one of your party’s goals in a location where they won’t be able to prevail through combat alone (Example: a fortress where they are vastly outnumbered).  Your players will have to rely on either stealth or guile (or both) to accomplish their goal.  The pacing of such events can be frustrating to some players, but few sessions are as rewarding as a creatively executed heist or infiltration.

Dangerous Crossing - Give them a dangerous physical obstacle to overcome.  A canyon, or a raging river, or quicksand or an old battleground littered with traps and mines.

Festival - Have the PCs encounter a festival or tournament!  With lots of contests! This could be a good opportunity for them to build their fame and fortune (especially if you allow gambling).  Some of my favorite sessions have involved festivals.

Entertainment - Put the PCs in a situation where they have to entertain someone.  What do they come up with?

Letter - Have one of the PCs receive a letter, either from an NPC they’ve dealt with before or from someone involved with their backstory.  This is a good way to make the consequences of their actions seem more real.  You can also use it to introduce new plotlines/sidequests.

Crafting Challenge - Put the PCs in a situation where they need to craft something in order to accomplish their goal.  Maybe they need to make something in order to fix a mechanism?  Or in order to satisfy some local gift-giving custom?  Or they need a forgery?  Maybe as part of an exchange for something else they need?

Lost and Found - Have your PCs discover someone or something that is clearly lost.  Maybe they find an infant in the wilderness.  Or a key with a strange inscription, or some kind of talisman.  Throw in a clue or two to present your players with a tantalizing mystery.  

Inhospitable Wilderness - Have the PCs go somewhere it’s an effort just to survive.  A barren desert, a treacherous swamp with poison gasses, a forest so dense the ground never sees the sun, or even the bottom of the ocean.  Test their endurance and survival skills!

Dinner Party - Have the PCs be summoned to a formal event!  Test them on the battlegrounds of social grace and etiquette!  Even better if it’s in a dangerous environment or an alien culture.

Thief - Have something important stolen from the PCs.  See how they handle it.

Needle in a Haystack - Give the PCs something very difficult to find.  Like a single specific housecat in a sprawling metropolis, or a legendary weapon of which there are many fakes/copies.  

Really, if you need any more inspiration, look at your player’s character sheets and see if they’ve invested any points in a skill they haven’t gotten to use much.  Then invent a challenge they could feasibly use that skill for.  If you can’t think of a situation that could be helped by an Appraise, Craft: Calligraphy or Handle Animal check, you need to practice your own creative problem solving skills!

[bardicknowledgeblogger]

Creating challenges and obstacles that rely on your player’s non-combat skills are not only a lot of fun and more interesting to plan, but really reward your players for fleshing out their characters and making interesting choices.

I had a game when I was younger where my character was a thief, but had learned to play violin and carried one with her when travelling. In a later session we had a chamber to unlock that had a musical piece that needed to be played in order to open it.

Young me was so PUMPED to be able to stand up and shout “I can play it! I can open the door” - the silly little thing I had taken purely because I thought it was neat for my character had suddenly become a relevant and key skill. It was awesome.

And now, I get to recreate that for my players all the time. Me and the other DMs in my group have included blacksmithing challenges, acrobatic obstacles, sessions with social intrigue, etc… all to allow for diverse characterization.

[shipburner]

Unfucking Dungeons & Dragons

The concept of some humanoid or near-humanoid species being naturally inclined to evil is a racist one, and, unfortunately, a prevalent one in Dungeons & Dragons, exacerbated by the fact that these “evil species” are frequently the “ugly” ones. Drow are a particularly glaring example - “made black because of their ‘evil’”?! Fuck you - but the duergar - “the slaves … learned only to enslave, really makes you think don’t it” - and the orcs - “they feel the CALL to evil in their Gruumshy HEARTS” - are also super not good. (There’s also a fair degree of ableism, with “insane” monsters - in such cases, I honestly think “unaligned” would be a better description for “too far gone to understand morality”. Evil implies a choice.) Honestly, I wouldn’t mind so much if these weren’t supposed to be naturally-occurring species - always evil demons or fey are fine, because they’re made of magic and stories, although care should of course be taken not to make them look like naturally-occurring species - but elves are really just fragile pointy-eared monkeys, and they have excuses. However, these evil humanoids are also genre staples and often quite aesthetically good. To that end, I offer the Unfucking D&D Guide, which provides what I think are solutions to this problem. (It should be noted that I am whiter than plain yogurt, so my ideas should be taken with a grain of salt and definitely not take precedence over the ideas of non-white folks. If I’ve said something fucked-up in this, please let me know and I’ll fix it.)

Duergar. Keep the “enslaved by illithids, made grim & psionic” bit, toss the “learnt evil from them” part. The duergar are joyless, or can appear so - you can play them either as gloomy and fatalistic or as eccentric and unreasonably concerned with “corruption” - but despite whatever mood they possess, make sure that they are thoroughly dedicated to making sure the horrors of the Underdark stay in the Underdark, and are as righteous and honorable as their hill and mountain cousins.

Derro. The derro are an “insane” species; I bring them up only because I saw them confused with duergar in one post about racism in D&D. Their lore has not been constant - the current lore is “dwarves enslaved by illithids, tortured into madness, and now they’re eeeeeeeevil”, which is ableist, not racist - but their metatextual origin is among the detrimental robots, or Deros, of pulp author Richard Sharpe Shaver’s stories (or possibly delusions). “Born from the dreams of a mad author” would actually be good lore if you can make that author a tragic sufferer of schizophrenia in a time before it was understood rather than an ~*~eViL mAdMaN~*~, but in any event, change their type to construct, fey, or fiend, and, most importantly, don’t take them seriously. The derro are pulp villains, and their evil is grandiose and nonsensical. They ought not to be seen as realistic; they ought to be seen as Snidely Whiplash, Commander Claw, or Heinz Doofenshmirtz. “Reasons” are for other genres.

Drow. Return drow to their mythical roots as trow, nocturnal hunters, tricksters, and magical artisans dwelling in the hollow hills. There’s high and wood elves; dark elves can find a niche. Lolthite culture is good villain fodder, but make sure that you can handle an “evil religion”, and make sure that all types of elves participate.

Goblinoids and trolls. Make them fey, and abandon Tolkien for Rossetti and folktale. Goblins make cruel bargains; hobgoblins attend faerie courts; bugbears hide in closets and create electricity from feed on children’s screams; trolls lurk under bridges and love riddles. As fey, they’re not evil, simply alien and lacking in empathy towards mortals.

Gnolls. If you use the Volo’s lore, change their type to fiend and be done with it. If you want to have them be natural humanoids, go read Ursula Vernon’s Digger for the best-written hyaena-furries in literature and base gnolls off that once you’re done crying.

Kobolds. Kobolds are already draconic cleaner wrasses in lore; there’s no reason that metallic dragons can’t enjoy them as well and influence some populations to good.

Illithids. The mind flayers certainly have great potential as villains. However, there is nothing about their psychology that impels them thither. Their biological requirements could easily be met by feeding on those close to death, whom I might imagine would willingly donate their brains as food or tadpole incubators in exchange for a painless death and the surety that their memories would live on in the illithid. Also, create food and water spells exist.

Ogres. Ogres are wilderness-dwellers who prefer to maintain their personal territories through fear instead of actual force of arms; the idea of the monstrous, anthropophagous ogre is a deliberate sham. They are actually capable of great heroism, even if they aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed and okay to be honest I started out trying to build up to a Shrek joke but I think I’d take this over canon lore.

Orcs. Orcs are an easy fix; all you need to do is remove Gruumsh from the equation and they don’t have a bullshit “call to evil”; in Eberron, without objective gods, the people of the Shadow Marches believe that half-orcs are the proof that orcs and humans are one people, so there’s even in-game precedent for orcs as members of society.

Yuan-ti. There are two ways to do this. One is to dump all the lore and just have sexy snake cults, although don’t dress them like Asian or Aztec stereotypes like a lot of the art does. (The 3.5 Monster Manual yuan-ti pureblood looks like she’s constantly accompanied by an inappropriate bamboo flute riff, I swear to Istus.) A sexy snake cult (and I am including malisons, abominations, and anathemas in the term “sexy”, not just purebloods) should be fun for everyone.

The other way is to keep their personalities and dump everything else, because if you keep that, you get truly excellent villains. I mean, these fuckers. How dare they drag something as pure as snakes into their Ayn Rand bullshit. Villain yuan-ti should be something transformed from willing or deluded humanoids (histachii raise the sacred snakes and the children of the yuan-ti, who possess their parents’ original race at birth). Couple that with the fact that since snakes very definitely have emotions, yuan-ti logically should as well, which means that they only think they’re above emotions. Now you have Objectivists roped into a magical pyramid scheme, which should offend no-one who doesn’t deserve it. You can mourn for the beings they once were, or just laugh in their dumb faces. Also, the sexy ones all look like Ayn Rand.

[shipburner]

hey real quick request before i go to bed: reblog this post to spite tumblr user bravestcolour and all their uncritical ilk, who asked me if this post was a joke and who spat back the benefit of the doubt i gave them back in my face

[cheskamouse]

This is right up there with my rant “Tolkien is not your GM.” 

[zunadahalforcbarbarian]

Interesting. As a firm believer in, “allow information from every avenue and critically analyze to see if you want to employ said information into your creations”… I shall reblog

[above-average-j]

A mini I painted recently for a character I’ll be playing. Love how he turned out and I’m happy to get out from behind the DM screen.

[the-griffons-saddlebag]

💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Wind-Up Merchant Wondrous item, rare ___

This soft toy figurine is 5 inches tall and weighs 1 pound. You can use an action to wind up the toy using a crank in the back, causing it to release a thin strip of parchment listing 3 magic items and their costs from the list below. The toy then whirs and animates slowly, walking and bowing slightly, and can’t be wound up again until 24 hours have passed.

Roll 3d12, recording each number rolled, to determine which of the following magic items are listed on the parchment. At the GM’s discretion, reroll duplicate results.

d12 | Item Name | Cost 1 | potion of climbing | 25gp 2 | potion of healing, common | 25gp 3 | spell scroll, 1st level: “comprehend languages” (25%), “detect magic” (25%), “feather fall” (25%), or “identify” (25%) 25gp 4 | broom of flying | 50gp 5 | dust of disappearance | 50gp 6 | eversmoking bottle | 50gp 7 | goggles of night | 50gp 8 | immovable rod | 50gp 9 | potion of growth | 50gp 10 | potion of resistance | 50gp 11 | restorative ointment, 2 uses | 50gp 12 | ring of water walking | 50gp

While the toy is animated, you can use an action to deposit any number of coins into the slot on the toy’s belly and speak the name of an item listed on the parchment. If the value of the coins deposited in the toy is equal to or greater than the cost of the named item, the item magically appears in your hand or at your feet (your choice) and is removed from the parchment. The spent coins are then lost.

The toy remains animated for 5 minutes or until each item has been purchased from the list. When the toy stops animating, any deposited coins that weren’t spent on the listed items clatter to the ground below it, converting them into smaller denominations as needed, and the parchment turns to dust and is destroyed.

An item purchased from the "wind-up merchant" disappears after 24 hours, or early if you attempt to sell or trade it to another creature. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for only $1 to $7 a month!

[the-griffons-saddlebag]

💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Wind-Up Merchant Wondrous item, rare ___

This soft toy figurine is 5 inches tall and weighs 1 pound. You can use an action to wind up the toy using a crank in the back, causing it to release a thin strip of parchment listing 3 magic items and their costs from the list below. The toy then whirs and animates slowly, walking and bowing slightly, and can’t be wound up again until 24 hours have passed.

Roll 3d12, recording each number rolled, to determine which of the following magic items are listed on the parchment. At the GM’s discretion, reroll duplicate results.

d12 | Item Name | Cost 1 | potion of climbing | 25gp 2 | potion of healing, common | 25gp 3 | spell scroll, 1st level: “comprehend languages” (25%), “detect magic” (25%), “feather fall” (25%), or “identify” (25%) 25gp 4 | broom of flying | 50gp 5 | dust of disappearance | 50gp 6 | eversmoking bottle | 50gp 7 | goggles of night | 50gp 8 | immovable rod | 50gp 9 | potion of growth | 50gp 10 | potion of resistance | 50gp 11 | restorative ointment, 2 uses | 50gp 12 | ring of water walking | 50gp

While the toy is animated, you can use an action to deposit any number of coins into the slot on the toy’s belly and speak the name of an item listed on the parchment. If the value of the coins deposited in the toy is equal to or greater than the cost of the named item, the item magically appears in your hand or at your feet (your choice) and is removed from the parchment. The spent coins are then lost.

The toy remains animated for 5 minutes or until each item has been purchased from the list. When the toy stops animating, any deposited coins that weren’t spent on the listed items clatter to the ground below it, converting them into smaller denominations as needed, and the parchment turns to dust and is destroyed.

An item purchased from the "wind-up merchant" disappears after 24 hours, or early if you attempt to sell or trade it to another creature. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for only $1 to $7 a month!

[above-average-j]

Painted a Helmed Horror for the campaign I DM for. The party got a chance to make one and added it to their party. His name is Huebert.

[above-average-j]

Painted this battle scarred snowy owlbear today. I think it turned out really good with the little weapons I also had glued on to make it look like they were stuck in him.

[above-average-j]

A Kobold mini I finished painting today for a boss fight coming up in the campaign I DM for. Love how it turned out.

[dnd-homebrew5e]

So, Manticores come out pretty early in campaigns and then are gone from there.  I made a poll on my Patreon asking which low leveled CR monster should make an appearance once more, but stronger and scarier. The chosen winner was the Manticore, so I bring you what is known as the Feral Manticore. If you decide to use this in your campaign, I would love to hear the lore you come up with describing this creature into your world. 

If you ever want to help me decide on something to make such as this creature here in my monthly poll, you can gain access to exclusive content as well on My Patreon!

[above-average-j]

Update on my frost giant mini. Base coating is a pain and I’ll be needing to finish it next week since I’ll be busy into the weekend.

[above-average-j]

Been starting to work on this frost giant mini I got for Christmas. Only did his base, first layer for his skin, and his axe head for now since he is fairly complicated for his clothes and such.

[above-average-j]

Got this mini from a family member for Christmas. I’ll probably work on painting it this week. Easily the largest mini I’ll have painted and it looks great.

[above-average-j]

Finished painting this mini today. Kinda glad with how it turned out and I think it’ll be fun when I get to spring it on my players for our campaign.

[above-average-j]

Here is a Gorgon mini I painted earlier today. Added some runes to his back to give a little more flare and so I can customize him a little to be a mini boss in my campaign.

[above-average-j]

A Mummy Lord I finished painting that my players are planning to fight in an upcoming session.

[bace-jeleren]

Here in Magic the Gathering, we have a variety of dragons that include but are not limited to:

Horrible Gremlin!

Actually a Cat!

OOOOooooooOOOOooooo

[gelectromancer]

And that’s not all! Here we have:

Vroom vroom!

A Ghosty Boi

Cat in Black

[bace-jeleren]

Let’s also not forget:

Tsuchinoko Real!

Just a Really Pissed Off Moose!

Dedicated Scalie!

[bace-jeleren]

Additionally:

Lotsa Spaghetti!

Jay Leno!

[commandtower-solring-go-deactiv]

Let us not forget

Thin and Crispy

Hot and Spicy

Thicc and Meaty

A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A !