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Draycott Village and its Were-Problem

Our latest article features a peaceful farming village, a missing generation of skilled monster hunters and... violent rampaging beavers??

→ Read more about it here!

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Shopkeeper: Yrjo Spenkrank, The Unfettered Flunkey

“I’ve had many call me odd, in my years, monstrous if they were feeling cruel. But I’ve lived long enough to know that being ordinary makes you predictable, and predictability gets you killed.”

Appearing on lonely roads, shaded alleys, and ruined corridors with only the creaking of wheels and the rattle of vials to herald his approach, wandering alchemist Yrjo steps from the darkness to provide the party with unorthodox solutions to their heroic problems.

Shunned in his small village due to a malformation at birth, Yrjo’s curiosity at his circumstance led him to the study of anatomy and the healer’s arts, eventually piecing together enough knowledge to reach adulthood as a competent bonesetter. In a different time, with more accepting people, Yrjo would have made a great doctor, apothecary, or surgeon, but Isolated as he was in an ignorant land, Yrjo was forced to follow his calling elsewhere….

Serving for decades as the assistant to mad scientists, necromancers, and a succession of other villains doomed to be devoured by their own hubris, Yrjo developed a talent for outliving his employers: Slipping out the back door of their lair just as the experiment went wrong with sack full of research notes and valuable reagents. Building quite a collection of forbidden knowledge over his career, Yrjo now wanders from settlement to settlement, plying the physician’s trade until he a new dark scheme worth suborning

Adventure Hooks:

While he’s well stocked with all manner of potion and tinctures available for modest fees, Yrjo’s true utility to the party comes in his knowledge, identifying evil entities or curses, and performing all the careful doctoring that regular healing is unable to provide. The alchemist is even able to perform resurrections on the cheap, provided the departed’s friends don’t mind doing some light grave robbing and bringing them back as a patchwork cadaver fuelled by necro-electrical energy.

It’s a trade secret that most villains know eachother, often working with the same suppliers and contracting out to a shared pool of potential minions. As a freelancer, Yrjo is often overlooked by the greater class of evildoer, meaning he’s more than happy to gossip and give the party directions regardless of whether they’re looking for leads, bounties, or introductions.

Yrjo is getting on in years, and though he’s loathe to admit it, his old bones and his bad shoulder are having trouble hauling his cart with him. Socially awkward and hesitant to settle down given his poor history with average people, a party that makes use of the old alchemist’s services might find him showing up more and more on their adventures, shadowing them but unable to work up the courage to ask to tag along as their camp doctor.

Before the party head off on an adventure where the old man cannot follow, consider having him speak of his long-neglected wish to attend an institution of higher learning, which will obviously have your party scrambling to have their mad-science grandpa enrolled as soon as possible so he can fulfill his dreams of being a real doctor. Alternatively, should the party come into position of a manor/keep, Yrjo will be happy to stay behind and set up a lab, keeping them well stocked in potions and other alchemic utilities.

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Adventure Setting:The Dreaming Weald

Setup: while the feywild spills over into most wild, ancient places, there are some stretches of the material plane that have been wholly suffused with the essence of fairyland, and the nature of what is “real” becomes soft and pliable as different realities mingle.

The Dreaming Weald is just such a place, a storied stretch of Forrest untouched by any but the oldest elvan empires and run through with the deepst magic. Often travelers through the region don’t know they’ve stumbled into the weald until the path takes a wrong turn and suddenly directions like “left” or “right” or “down” come into question. Impossibilities flourish here: ponds hang above the ground, the trees press so low and dense that it feels as if one could be undergorund, you may encounter selfaware visions of people long thought lost.

most travelers avoid the Dreaming Weald, knowing that to tarry too long among its distorted acres can lead one to slipping away forever into the lands of imagination. Others still seek out the Weald, looking to enjoy its impossible sights or claim a bit of its wonder for themselves.

Adventure Hooks:

Leaving behind her friends, family, and a good number of unfinished commissions, a distraught artist has run off to the Dreaming Weald looking for a way out of her creative fugue. Plenty of people are willing to pay the party to venture out to the Weald and retrieve her ( whether out of love, concern, or a desire to not see their investment wasted). When the party ventures out, they find that the artist has been reveling with the fey, and has forgotten her previous life, having unwittingly traded away her memories and burdens for a talent at bringing her paintings to life. The Fey are loath to give up their new “court artist”, so the party will either have to engage in a game of wits and wagers to get her freedom, or attempt to abduct her, risking fighting a whole army of painted guardians in doing so.

The Borders of the Weald are expanding, and this worries the nobles who’s lands and estates may in a few years be swallowed by the land’s increasingly whimsical chaos. Taxes and levies cannot be raised when the roads your officials travel on begin to spiral off to nowhere, nor can the harvest be brought in if some stray curse gets into the village well turns every pesant into a goose. A druid must be found to curtail the weird and wild wilderness, and to reestablish the borders.

Before the Weald was wild with magic, in a time of errant elf-knights and deepest lore, it was the domain of the Stag-Lord, a powerful enchanter who appears as a villain, monser, or obstacle in many folk stories that now pervade the region. While no one tale captures the truth of the Stag-lord’s nature, all can agree that his grave lays at the center of the Forest: the trees having taken up his magic when their thirsting roots broke through his tomb and fed on the rich earth his body had become. Some dabblers and dark practitioners make pilgrimage to his tomb, seeking to gain a little power for themselves, or to commune with this spirit on the curse-scented breeze.

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If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

mishkatelwarriorgoddess

Thank you so much for this!

rosdottir

Gotta show off some of the creatures in Herbarium! I had some AMAZING artists working with me on this project; these are drawn by the incredible Hanghul. And backers can get an early look at the full stat blocks!

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Some of my favourite witchy items in Herbarium 🌿 There’s still time to back it, and I can’t wait to share the whole thing with you!

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Some of the plants in Herbarium! There are currently 60+ included in the supplement, but I’m working to add in some more - I’ve got my bestie Kit Buss working on writing some particularly spooky adventure seeds for more of them too!

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Dumb NPC ideas to use when your players decide to explore that town you didn't prepare anything for

A scholar that is clearly lost, however you're not sure how he is someone important at all. It even looks like he's glad that he didn't manage to arrive at the event on time.

An old lady (of a race that has a long lifespan), that knows a little way to much about the party's adventure... She doesn't spends much time talking about it though, do you want to buy her pots?

A kid. Just a kid. Make them annoying.

A knight that is very proud about their job and duty, but they just want their shift to end so they can go home to their wife.

A merchant that has a cart in the middle of the fair, however everytime the party goes to another shop or stand he pops up from behind the counter. Turns out the town doesn't receive many merchants so he has to supply all of their needs. He's stressed.

A teen dragon that discovered how to transform into a human, problem is they definitely look 30 but they still are just a teenager, and a moody one.

A shop owner that fucking hates commerce. She's in it because of her family, so she tries to sell the goodies pratically for free and she really wants you to take all of her items. The catch? It's a feather shop. Not magic feathers, not pens, just normal feathers. Probably from a bird that died that morning.

A janitor from a library or big shop that is just too aware of everything. Like, they point out the players class or race without barely batting an eye. They comment on how they "had never seen a chaotic good one in real life". And indirectly disses the players choices they made 2 sessions ago? (Basically a character for the dm to rant a little while not completely breaking the 4th wall)

A woman in her mid-40s (or the equivalent) that is just really excited to meet the party? Her dream was to be an adventurer when she was little so she is definitely asking some weird questions.

A blacksmith that makes weapons purely for the aesthetic. He really doesn't care if it's functional or not, he's just doing cause it looks cool.

A bard that got kicked out of their band or caravan. At first you don't know why but after their 3rd performance of a one-person musical you get it. He wants to stick with the party though. Good luck.

A doggie!! It's cute!! And fluffy!! And it talks!! And it talks? A DOG THAT TALKS!!!!

The most ripped person the party has ever met, they have tons of skulls of big animals on their shoulder. They polish them. They hang them on a wall and start to take notes. They are an archeologist.

A magician that is really not magic at all, he's just so good at card tricks that the town thinks he's a sorcerer. He's freaking out.

A girl that is immune to all kinds of poison, however that is making a little bit hard for her to pursue her cooking career. Apparently poison ivy is not a good seasoning for most people.

An artist that is just really calm and friendly but everyone's afraid of them. The party has no idea why.

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Betulaceae family (world building- tree people)

foundry-fabrications

Happy Halloween everyone! It's that time of the year again and that means it's spooky project time! Those who have been with me for a while know that every year for Halloween I put out some big thematic project for my favorite holiday. For this year, I wanted to keep the rework train going and rework a previous year's project. And that project is my Corpseweaver class!

Before we get started I just want to take a second to shout-out @dm-clockwork-dragon and his Necroficer class, which helped inspire many aspects of my own take on the "Frankenstein-ing" monsters together concept.

I also want to mention that I still have a huge GDrive folder of 100+ creepy creatures and malign monsters pulled from across the internet to inspire your own amalgams!

In a way I got lucky this year. I started reworking my corpseweaver MONTHS ago so I already had a lot of it done. I was hoping to have the basics done in time for a campaign I was going to be in but time got away from me and I ended up playing something else so I've just been slowly working on it over time. Before October even began the entire base class and one of the subclasses were mechanically done, which left only two more subclasses to finish and I needed to rewrite all the fluff text which was honestly pretty cringeworthy in my opinion.

So what are all the changes? IT'S A LOT! I reworked how the class collects resources and the amalgam creation system completely from the ground up. The old systems were overly complicated and REALLY bookkeepy so I simplified them. Now you get Flesh, Bone, and Exotic from creatures and you use those in specified amounts to make amalgams and make alterations. The system for doing so has been greatly streamlined. Now you have a dedicated stat block that all amalgams are based on and that gets modified throughout the creation process.

Another major change is that the base class is no longer a spellcaster, so all those features have been moved to a subclass of their own, the Skaab Scribe. I didn't like how based in normal magic the old class was as I always wanted it to be more focused on mad science, alchemical formulas, and occult ritual.

And one of the last huge changes is that the Soma Smith has been removed from the class completely and will likely never return, though the name does live on as the Fleshwarper has been renamed. As much as I liked the idea of the old soma smith, I felt that it didn't fit the class upon further examination. Its whole deal was about creating new life basically from scratch and that's not what I want this class to be about. That's actually a theme that I kept seeing in the flavor text throughout the class as I've been working on it, creating new life, and it's a goal of mine to remove it wherever possible. The class does not create life, it reanimates the dead, and in my mind those are very different things.

So yeah, on that note those are the biggest changes but obviously everything got touched in some way. As with many of my reworks, this one is an overhaul on a grand scale, and one I'm honestly quite proud of.

As for the updated aesthetics, however, I have mixed feelings. Overall I think they fit the class much better than the default theme I was using before but there's a lot of visual jank that I'm not a fan of. I also would have liked to use better artwork but I had so little time to finish this as it is. I was also forced into using GM Binder for this project instead of Homebrewery because the theme I chose doesn't work with HB very well so that was less than ideal. For smaller projects it's not a big deal but for something this huge all the weird little issues I have with GMB start to compound and get frustrating. It's not a system I like but it has its uses sometimes.

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