Dungeons and Comets @cometrpgs - Tumblr Blog

Hey remember those d100 tables I hastily made a week or so ago thanks to a suggestion from @probablybadrpgideas ?

Well I made an improved 2.0 version and made up 50 items for you to have a play with! I even included illustrations and an NPC!

This is my first time uploading to dmsguild, so hope I've gotten it correct. Please enjoy!

Download Pay-What-You-Want here!

probablybadrpgideas

Magic does not flow through invisible lay lines that drift like rivers through the sky, but through the mycorrhizal network within the ground of the world

It's why magic doesn't come so easily to those in large cities

This is partly true in my D&D setting (Morterra). I took "the weave" literally and made it warp (divine magic) and weft (non-divine magic that spread through a mycellial network, complete with a kind of mushroom that causes a wild magic surge if you eat it, specifically a kind of ink cap that's used to make magical ink for wizards) - Paper

losttrailsmaps

Elven City Map Pack

Welcome to Sen Alari, an elven city nestled amidst ancient forests, its skyline adorned with tall, graceful spires that seem to touch the sky. Elaborate palaces with ethereal architecture rise like dreams, while lush gardens bloom with enchanted flora, creating a realm of mystical beauty that enchants all who enter.

This map pack was inspired by my recent Lord of the Rings binge. It features 14 total maps, including city streets, palaces, bath houses, and much more.

You can download 4 of these high-res maps for free here.

blueboxbeagle

By LabradoriteKing on Pinterest

fuckyeahdwarffortress

A handy guide for your Jewellers and Gem Cutters.

I accept payment in trillion-cut black diamonds.

Chop chop.

writing-prompt-s

Useful!

maxkirin

ONE PAGE LEFT is now available. This is a role-playing game you can play solo and the rules fit in a single sheet of paper!

Can you survive a slasher movie?

🎲 ROLL A KILLER 🏚 ESCAPE THE MANSION

Did I mention the game is FREE? 😉 👉 mkirin.itch.io/one-page-left

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!

sirobvious

Now I’ve got people thinking that when I say that TTRPG campaigns shouldn’t be scripted, that I mean that they must be 100% improvised right there on the spot with zero planning or structure. I can’t fucking win.

And therefore critical role must be destroyed

thydungeongal

I think people are just so used to the idea that GM prep = writing out the exact sequence of events you want to happen in a session that the very suggestion that the GM shouldn’t simply dictate a sequence of events sounds to people like “no prep at all.”

Anyway, listen up: it’s possible to do prep without your prep being based on “what will happen in the session.” You as a GM can plan places for your party to go and explore, or events that are currently taking place around them. The “what will happen” is what the group decides to do in those places and situations.

(where a lot of people go wrong in adventure design, and in fact this is reflective of the whole “the GM plans the story” philosophy, is that it can easily relegate the player characters to the role of onlookers to the actually interesting events taking place around them with no way for them to interact with those events because their interactions are often limited to “sometimes we gotta beat up some strangers”)

theresattrpgforthat

Some things that can be prep:

place descriptions

NPC lists

questions about what happens (is the robot actually a god? What if their guide starts to mistrust them? What if the next room tries to eat them?) - these are not commitments, these are possibilities

things your characters want (Alice wants to stab something, Bob wants a father figure to bond with) so you can remember to give it to them

leading questions to ask your players (“Hey Alice, why do you hate this city so much? Hey Bob, what’s one good thing you can always get at the Toad & Whistle?)

roll tables of funky little items that they could pick up

event timelines & clocks (unless players do something about a, b will happen)

stat blocks if your game has that

leaslichoma

Apparently in China peach wood (Along with the rest of the plant) is believed to have properties that repel evil spirits, a little similar to silver in European legends or iron for both European fae and West Asian/Middle eastern Jinn. Taoists sometimes keep swords made of peach wood because of this. This made me realize something. If you took a peach wood stick, and attached studs to it of both silver and iron you'd end up with a club or staff (or mace, flail etc.) that would have the weaknesses of many kinds of supernatural creatures while still retaining effectiveness as a normal weapon (peach is a hardwood and silver's poor edge retention doesn't matter for studs). You could even keep adding new stud materials to get something ridiculous that affects over 120 catalogued folkloric monsters. Since you just need a few little studs you could even get some really expensive materials like meteoric iron (a thumb tip sized meteorite can still cost like 10-20 bucks I think). I could somewhat feasibly make a weapon that affects every monster ever thought to walk the earth, from vampires and werewolves to jinn and jiangshi and even mankind.

down-sizing-redux

Club of Fuck That Supernatural Shit And Also Everything Else

luntfontanne

HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT

danskjavlarna

Source details and larger version.

Excavated: my collection of vintage dinosaurs, mammoths, and other prehistoric imagery.

skelenby

Im working on a magic school ttrpg based on Kids on brooms; mine's called Teens on Mana

#I've spent a good 30-40 hours on it in the last 3ish weeks #im so so so normal about it :)

wheelie-sick

“oh, I live in a desert and-”

“wow that must be so terrible” “deserts are so ugly” “I would never want to live in a wasteland like that” “it’s just empty nothingness”

wishing 10,000 exploding hammers upon you

behold New Mexico

[ID 1: tall, snowcapped rocky mountains rising above a plain filled with desert scrub

ID 2: brightly colored banded cliff walls of several mesas climbing their way into mountains

ID 3: a desert prairie

ID 4: colorful hoodoos against a twilight sky

ID 5: white sand dunes as far as the eye can see

ID 6: a collection of hoodoos against a stormy sky at sunset

ID 7: a juniper tree standing with a cliff wall in the background

ID 8: several juniper trees on a rocky landscape]

jadewolf-writes

And the Mojave!

jadewolf-writes

No, wait. I’m not done. I love the desert too much.

Have some Utah! too.

And those last two should be a reminder that humans have been living and thriving in the desert for thousands of years!

snommelp

My beloved Sonoran Desert

thydungeongal

Anyway don't listen to the haters; your D&D character doesn't actually need a twenty-page backstory for your GM to read as homework so they can integrate as much of it into their prep as possible. The GM shouldn't have to read a lore document that they then carefully integrate into their prep so they can feed you Da Slop.

You can just show up and go "hey check it out my guy is an Elf named Morningwood" and then play to find out what this Morningwood guy's deal is.

maximumzombiecreator

On the (relatively rare) times I get to be a player character, I prefer to leave my character's backstory relatively open so that I can retroactively make that character care about whatever the campaign is about. After our characters pick a fight with the local constables, the campaign turns to overthrowing the oppressive king? That's perfect for me, because (I've just decided) my shitty dad is actually one of the king's knights, so my character is deeply invested in this.

On the (much more common) times I'm GMing, I'm just crying and screaming and begging players to stop making the most interesting thing that will ever happen to them happen offscreen in the backstory. A PC backstory where everything that happens in the game will pale in comparison to when a god directly intervened to help you fight off an army by yourself is so much worse than not having a backstory at all.

masked-rat-deactivated20250611

Wait, that kind of "I'm adding this to my background" kind of play is a *good* thing?

Then again I'm coming from a mostly LARP background, where that kind of thing would probably be seen as metagaming to try to involve yourself in the setting. Which I think is a bad thing. Or maybe it was only a bad thing when I did it and when everyone else did it they considered it a background tie or something.

If I'm the DM, I want three to five bullet points and nothing more.

maximumzombiecreator

There absolutely are people who would consider it terrible form. It's always something I've talked about in session 0 so my GM knows to expect it. It's also something I'm careful never to make solve a problem, it's either neutral or it's causing problems for me. "Oh yes, I've just invented thing in my backstory that fixes this" is usually bad (unless I'm playing a game like Fate where mechanics exist to do that) but "oh, I've invented this thing in my backstory so that I'm not just fucked, I'm double fucked" goes over much more positively.

vulpes-nothus

It's been said by pixar writers, "coincidence should get your characters deeper into trouble, not out of trouble." Or something along those lines. Anyway, it a great rule of thumb for inventing backstory on the fly.

"My dad is a lord, so we can talk to him to get an audience with the king," is probably bad, and should be a before session discussion with the GM if it's to be done at all.

"My dad is a lord, so we need to avoid the courts entirely," might look good, but is more likely even worse, because your are just avoiding the whole scenario, not getting deeper in.

"My dad is a lord, and if he sees me I will be arrested, so I need a disguise," is good. It engages the scenario, raises the stakes, and probably needs zero prep from the DM (unless they really, really did not plan for getting an audience to have a fail condition at all and never even thought about guards for the kings court until you said that.)

mantis-lizbian

i make player characters and NPCs in a pretty similar way: a good paragraph is generally all you need, maybe two if you're feeling fancy, but when you're explaining to your GM and other players who your character is, you want to approach it like an elevator pitch, giving us more of an idea of who this character will be, rather than who they have been. you can do that by explaining some of who they have been, but again, just the highlights. three to four sentences and no more than half as many clauses among them.

when i'm a GM, i'll often ask my players for one background element to maybe try and work into the campaign. and this background element should be a one sentence hook that's fairly flexible. he's got an adventuring cousin he was close to growing up, but hasn't seen in a while. she's looking for missing book from the library of the mage school she studied at. as a player, be okay with the GM adding their own embellishments to this element, and as a GM, get a feel for what these embellishments would be best by seeing how this character is played.