This is for me to organize its for nobody else if i post something "original" here it isnt mine its from some other site and im posting it so i have everything in one place and also i will Not be crediting it because this isnt for you its for me and only me. Go away
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
Trap idea: a small mechanical box that extends a hand with "place 1 gold coin here" engraved on it. If a coin is placed on the hand, it retracts into the box and extends again moments later without the coin.
I've often had a lot of problems telling scary stories at my table, whether it be in d&d or other horror focused games. I personally don't get scared easily, especially around "traditionally horrifying" things so it's hard for me to recreate that experience in others. Likewise, you can't just port horror movie iconography into tabletop and expect it to evoke genuine fear: I've already spoken of being bored out of my mind during the zombie apocalypse, and my few trips into ravenloft have all been filled with similar levels of limp and derivative grimdark.
It took me a long time (and a lot of video essays about films I'd never watched) to realize that in terms of an experience fear is a lot like a joke, in that it requires multiple steps of setup and payoff. Dread is that setup, it's the rising tension in a scene that makes the revelation worth it, the slow and literal rising of a rollercoaster before the drop. It's way easier to inspire dread in your party than it is to scare them apropos of nothing, which has the added flexibility of letting you choose just the right time to deliver the frights.
TLDR: You start with one of the basic human fears (guide to that below) to emotionally prime your players and introduce it to your party in a initially non-threataning manor. Then you introduce a more severe version of it in a way that has stakes but is not overwhelmingly scary just yet. You wait until they're neck deep in this second scenario before throwing in some kind of twist that forces them to confront their discomfort head on.
More advice (and spoilers for The Magnus Archives) below the cut.
Before we go any farther it's vitally important that you learn your party's limits and triggers before a game begins. A lot of ttrpg content can be downright horrifying without even trying to be, so it's critical you know how everyone in your party is going to react to something before you go into it. Whether or not you're running an actual horror game or just wanting to add some tension to an otherwise heroic romp, you and your group need to be on the same page about this, and discuss safety systems from session 0 onwards.
The Fundamental Fears: It may seem a bit basic but one of the greatest tools to help me understand different aspects of horror was the taxonomy invented by Jonathan Sims of The Magnus Archives podcast. He breaks down fear into different thematic and emotional through lines, each given a snappy name and iconography that's so memorable that I often joke it's the queer-horror version of pokemon types or hogwarts houses. If we start with a basic understanding of WHY people find things scary we learn just what dials we need turn in order to build dread in our players.
Implementation: Each of these examples is like a colour we can paint a scene or encounter with, flavouring it just so to tickle a particular, primal part of our party's brains. You don't have to do much, just something along the lines of "the upcoming cave tunnel is getting a little too close for comfort" or "the all-too thin walkway creaks under your weight ", or "what you don't see is the movement at the edge of the room". Once the seed is planted your party's' minds will do most of the work: humans are social, pattern seeking creatures, and the hint of danger to one member of the group will lay the groundwork of fear in all the rest.
The trick here is not to over commit, which is the mistake most ttrpgs make with horror: actually showing the monster, putting the party into a dangerous situation, that’s the finisher, the punchline of the joke. It’s also a release valve on all the pressure you’ve been hard at work building.
There’s nothing all that scary about fighting a level-appropriate number of skeletons, but forcing your party to creep through a series of dark, cobweb infested catacombs with the THREAT of being attacked by undead? That’s going to have them climbing the walls.
Let narration and bad dice rolls be your main tools here, driving home the discomfort, the risk, the looming threat.
Surprise: Now that you’ve got your party marinating in dread, what you want to do to really scare them is to throw a curve ball. Go back to that list and find another fear which either compliments or contrasts the original one you set up, and have it lurking juuuust out of reach ready to pop up at a moment of perfect tension like a jack in the box. The party is climbing down a slick interior of an underdark cavern, bottom nowhere in sight? They expect to to fall, but what they couldn't possibly expect is for a giant arm to reach out of the darkness and pull one of them down. Have the party figured out that there's a shapeshifter that's infiltrated the rebel meeting and is killing their allies? They suspect suspicion and lies but what they don't expect is for the rebel base to suddenly be on FIRE forcing them to run.
My expert advice is to lightly tease this second threat LONG before you introduce the initial scare. Your players will think you're a genius for doing what amounts to a little extra work, and curse themselves for not paying more attention.
Restraint: Less is more when it comes to scares, as if you do this trick too often your players are going to be inured to it. Try to do it maybe once an adventure, or dungeon level. Scares hit so much harder when the party isn't expecting them. If you're specifically playing in a "horror" game, it's a good idea to introduce a few false scares, or make multiple encounters part of the same bait and switch scare tactic: If we're going into the filthy gross sewer with mould and rot and rats and the like, you'll get more punch if the final challenge isn't corruption based, but is instead some new threat that we could have never prepared for.
Treasure is ubiquitous in D&D, it’s presumed to be one of the default motivations, if not the only motivation behind many adventures, despite the fact that very little thought has been put into the systems by which the DM generates the treasure and the party plays around with it. After nearly two decades of being a DM I can’t count the number of times I’ve made a treasure horde and handed it out to the players while feeling as if the fun game we had been playing had suddenly been put on pause.
It took me a while to realize that this was because unlike combat ( the favourite child among d&d’s many subsystems) very little attention had been made to making loot feel good at any stage of the process whether it was down to the mechanics or even the presentation.
While below the cut I’m going to get into systems about easier ways to generate treasure, rebalanced magic item prices, and how to get your players in on the fun, for now I want to focus on this element of presentation when it comes to handing out loot.
Here’s some of my findings, in no particular order:
Just like combat has “ Roll initiative” and “how do you want to do this?”, handing out loot should have codified phrases to indicate that the party is entering into a specific period of game time. It’s a ritual that will not only get them excited but have them in the right kind of headspace required for absorbing new information. The phrases I’ve been using are “ You spill out your plunder across the table/dungeon floor and there you find_____” and “With that sorted, you pack away your spoils, and return to the adventure at hand”
I completely ignore art items/gems, they’re a neat idea for flavor but they slow things down at every turn ( coming up with them during loot generations, players recording them) and are almost always junked for gp at the first possible opportunity. The exception to this is valuable trade goods/collectors items, which I mention being worth X gp in value but worth MORE if the party can find an associated merchant ( as a questhook)
GP comes first, followed by the names of the items and a brief as possible physical description. Players can ask questions generally on what items do but either have to call dibs then or divy them up on their own time. Listening to the dm dispassionately read out the stats of an item is boring as hell, only eclipsed by the dm describing the indepth LOOK of various items and then asking the party to roll checks to identify/figure out of the items work. Speed in divvying loot keeps the momentum of the game going and you want to tap into the “OOOH, SHINY” impulse of your players before their eyes glaze over.
I HIGHLY suggest keeping a party doc with the stats of all your items copy/pasted into it. Divide the doc up by characters/in the cart, so your party can always remember where shit was. Ask one organized player to be the one to keep track of the party doc and share it with the others. Call them “quartermaster” they’ll love that shit.
Unless the item in question needs to be used immediately “ It’ll be in the party doc” is your answer when they ask for stats. Update the partydoc after session so your group can have the whole week to look at it and get used to things between sessions. Gearing up with new loot is just as much homework as leveling up a character, and is best done away from the table.
After you’re done checking out the treasure generation rules below, also be sure to check out my systems on handling shopping trips, making identifying items more interesting, and managing party wealth. I’m sure you’ll find something there that can help improve your game.
all the tips I found for drawing a fantasy map are like :) “here’s a strategy to draw the land masses! here’s how to plot islands!” :) and that’s wonderful and I love them all but ??? how? do y'all decide where to put cities/mountains/forests/towns I have my map and my land but I’m throwing darts to decide where the Main Citadel where the Action Takes Place is
okay so i know i said most of this in the replies but it might be easier to actually reblog and say stuff instead lmao
Cities - go near water! freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there. Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.
for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end. rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat
mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains! mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey). a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half. These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks
Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact. think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies
forests - depends on how warm the area might be. coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too
If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower). if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)
You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)
and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains
tl;dr i like to think of major climate events that might have also shaped the land on top of some basic rules
I’m planning to run a shadowfell arc with my long running campaign, and I’m planning to play with the theme of memories, memory loss, items and books absorbing memories and the like. There’s this mansion with an evil shadowy figure collecting/stealing peoples memories etc etc, and I would be super intrigued to see what your take on an adventure/arc like this would be?
Dungeon: In Memoriam
At the end of it all, we are all just stories
On the edge of the tidelands there is a grand and forgotten estate. Not forgotten in that it is abandoned, but forgotten in that a lapse of memory hangs about it like a fog. Even most who live in the nearby village can recall its existence while looking right at it, and only then a few paltry details about how it has affected their lives or the history of their home.
The source of this amnesia is the work of a shadowcaster by the name of ██████ ██████, who has taken the estate as his own while perfecting the art of stealing stories. Like other shadowcasters, ██████ wields the powers of remnant and entropy inherent to the shadowfell and has a particular fascination with how the memory and narrative surrounding a thing can survive independently of that thing's destruction. Originally presenting himself a medium and exorcist, ██████ was hired by the estate's original owners to deal with a lingering ghost problem, only to discover that there was a rift to the shadowfell in a root filled room in a corner of the greathouse's basements.... a room that no one seemed able to remember.
Taking advantage of such close proximity to the upside down, ██████ began experimenting, eventually creating an umbral ink that would steal away facts and moments of time when placed on the page, allowing him to make ghosts of people and places without even needing them to die. For now ██████ is content to tinker, but it's only so long until stumble upon the conspicuous absence he's shrouded his activities under, or the lives he's disrupted in the process.
Hooks:
Within the party's bag of holding or the pack of their most rougish member the heroes discover a bound together stack of pages, which detail their encounter with a man named ██████ while out on the road earlier in the campaign, described as an innocuous scholar with inkstains on his cuffs, always seeming to be writing in his travel journal. He offered insight on their adventures then seemed to disappear. Should the party destroy or damage the pages, they'll suddenly remember this encounter, them managing to steal these pages, and the fact that the man's shadow more often resembled a tree than that of a human
The party visits a seaside village, and while most things seem normal, there's a woman clearly in distress that the locals are keeping well away from. She claims she's lived in the village all her life but most seem to think she's a stranger, those few who do remember her thought she ran away when she was just a lass (about the age that she started working at the manor). Like many of the servants, ██████ worked some magic to keep her on thinking he was the master of the estate, forgotten by her neighbours, but forgot to fully edit her story to prevent her from visiting her parents grave on the anniversary of their deaths some decades past.
██████'s ink comes from a great unnatural tree that grows up through the foundations of the manor from the shadowfell below. Adapted to eat away at the memories of ghosts, the shadowcaster gorges this tree on the stories of the living, creating an ever deepening wellspring of power and a never ending supply of umbral ink. Drunk on power and the possibilities of playing blackout poetry with people's lives, ██████ does not realize that the tree is literally undermining him, threatening to drag the whole estate down into the land of the dead, erasing whole swaths of the countryside as the manor's library is drowned in amnesiac gloom.
“Censor is such a dirty word, I prefer to think of myself as a freelance editor, one whose services come at a reasonable price and are available indefinitely after publishing, regardless of who the original author might have been.”
Adventure Hooks:
A bookseller is at his wits end and calls upon the adventures for help. After agreeing to publish a borderline seditious novel from an author with a scandalous reputation his shop has been repeatedly vandalized, with much of his stock befouled by splattered ink or shredded to tatters. Worse yet, many of his rarest and most expensive volumes having whole pages excised without their cases or bindings being touched.
The players witness a confrontation between two troupes of actors that nearly comes to blows in the streets. Thespians are territorial as street gangs after all, and the aggressors in this conflict claim that the others store a new script penned for them under contract by a famous playwright. The other performers claim the script was in fact written for them, and now both groups are out for blood looking to find the double-crossing author who’s suddenly disappeared.
On the eve of a breakthrough, the party wizard (or perhaps an allied mage) opens their spellbook to discover that their research notes are gone, the pages ripped out at some point in recent hours. The party will have to retrace their steps to determine exactly where and how this theft occurred, and just who had the skills and motive to approach them unseen and steal the discovery right out of their hands.
Setup: While most cultures who develop the printed word have libel laws or an office of censor, there are always those who wish to go above and beyond to control the words others have put on the page. For those people ( or atleast those with the funds to pay), there’s Ms. Muddle, an agent of no particular loyalty that will gladly use all her skills to remove the offending text from public circulation.
Ms. Muddle is an inherited title, passed down from one agent to the next, and currently in possession of one Ashlynn Fife, a disarmingly charming young woman who’s brought a certain magical flair to the role. While Previous Muddles contented themselves with threatening printers or destroying reputations, Fife uses a squad of summoned faeries to slip past traditional wards and locks and attack the pages themselves; fulfilling her client’s requirements while also perusing her own mystical agenda.
The party is likely to encounter Ashlynn acting as proxy for an incensed but otherwise powerless benefactor, looking to hire out and use magic to make life difficult for their competitors. She likely bears them no specific ill will, but will certainly make their life difficult should they choose to interfere with her assignment.
How would you handle a murder mystery in D&D? A lot of spells would make short work of most mysteries (speak with dead, zone of truth, various command spells, etc). Now of course those spells do have limitations but still.
Does the party you're currently running the adventure for have access to these abilities? No? Then don't sweat it. Part of leveling up is gaining access to abilities that let you circumvent certain types of adventure ( such as teleportation letting you skip minor travel). Mysteries are best run low level when the culprits are mortal with mortal motives.
Agatha Christie It: one of the hallmarks of detective fiction is that due to circumstances, all the suspects of the crime are bottled up in the same location, letting the detectives ( and audience) have a limited number of targets to chose from as they build up a case. Have your mysteries happen in isolated places with a limited number of variables to sort through.
Magic can only go so far. Any society that knows about magic is likely to have laws about when/how that magic can be used, especially in matters of law. Cornered your likely suspect and used dominate person to force out a confession? A) the party aren't lawmages recognized by the magistrate, that confession isn't reliable in court B) someone ensorcelled could be compelled to say anything, so enchantment isn't trustworthy. C) Using magic against someone in that way is tantamount to threatening them with a weapon, hope your party is prepared to also go to court.
A good mystery is all about piecing together incomplete information, meaning that no one person ( and thus no one spell) contains the complete truth. The dead person won't necessarily know what killed them, just who they suspect, and any good killer would know they needed an alibi/decoy in order to throw off witnesses. Having your party pick through these clues is the fundamental fun of solving mysteries.
Likewise, it's not enough to know that someone did the crime, the party has to PROVE it, which requires gathering more evidence than just a magically compelled confession. Sure a spellcaster could kit themselves out for solving crimes, but that just means the murderer is liable to take a swipe at them while the gang is split up and searching for clues.
Give one player the "Wild Magic Flu", where they gain the effects of Wild magic, no matter their class. Whenever they attack or use a spell, roll a d20 to decide if they get put on the D100 of misfortune.
If the D100 lands on 99 or 100, the player has their Wild Magic lifted. Any permanent effects caused by the flu are not lifted.
commission for @ske1th of their grilled cheese wizard, who can only cast a grilled cheese-conjuring spell & has a teleporting grilled cheese stand (inspired by this)
Villain: nγwɿiɒӘ lɿɒƎ , the Reflection in Rebellion
Suffering is like shattered glass, one moment of disaster resulting in irreparable damage and innumerable opportunities for pain.
Setup: Few care for the current duchess’s reign, as her hard handed grasp on authority has snubbed many a noble underling and commonfolk alike. A few among her detractors have even begun to whisper that her long dead brother has been seen wandering about the wilderness or appearing in visions and speaking of the justice that must be undone.
Background: It was said that the old duke was crueler than any devil, for in a desire to see his lands ruled by a strong and unwavering heir he raised his children with the understanding that one day they would have to slay the other to claim their birthright. When the time came and his heirs refused to be part of this sick game, the duke dispatched agents to kidnap their loved ones, and held their lives as collateral. As the tales tell it, Earl Gairwyn knelt before his sister Wynima, knowing she was the better leader and warrior, better able to rescue his family and stand against their tyrannical father. Wynima heeded her brothers last request, presenting his head in a grand ceremony that served as distraction while her forces assaulted their father’s secret prison. Wynima became duchess, and in the decade since her reign began, her guilt over her brother’s murder has seen her increasingly conservative and
The Earl Gairwyn that people have been seeing is not an omen or a ghost, but a Nerra, a shapeshifter from the plane of mirrors who was the real Gairwyn’s childhood playmate and lifelong confadant. Being raised to murder your sister doesn’t afford many oppertunities to make friends, so young Gairwyn spent much of his highly restricted freetime playing before a mirror for company. The Nerra (named Ersatz) lurked in Gairwyn’s reflection for most of his life, watching out for him and learning what it meant to be human through the kindly nobleman’s eyes.
Adventure Hooks:
It has taken over a decade for Ersatz to mourn, all the while building a scheme as monument to his loss. Perfecting his ability to maintain Gairwyn’s form, he’s begun to reach out to the earl’s old supporters, using his miraculous “reappearance” to lend credence to his cause and inspire them to begin working against the duchess. Drawing on Gairwyn’s noble charisma, Ersatz has also made for itself a “what if” kingdom on the other side of the mirror, ruling as duke iver a court of quicksilver courtiers and other figmentary folk who’ve joined in with the game. These entities serve it as spies and messengers, peering out form any reflective surface and making Gairwyn’s ghost seem nearly omniscient.
For her part, Duchess Wynima gives little credence to the rumors of her brother’s “return from exile”, as she remembers his beheading every time she walks into her father’s throneroom or wakes up dreaming of his blood on her hands. As things progress however, the duchess will become increasingly giltwracked and paranoid, tightening her grip on her lands in an attempt to quash this rebellion and silence her brother’s memory.
The party gets especially swept up in all this when a tavern they’re staying at hosts a bard fond of singing ballads about the siblings’ tragic inheritance. These particular compositions happen to swing in a very Pro-Gairwyn direction, and though such talk was permitted by the duchess in the past, her concerns of rebellion have forced her to take a far more hardline edge. It’s up to the party whether they get involved or not after watching the guard come to drag the minstrel away for questioning…. atleast until one of the other patrons makes the decision for them by breaking her pintglass over one of the guard’s helms.
Ersatz, being only an alien imitation of Gairwyn, has no real love for his family and only a burning hatred of his sister, and is driven to this plan more for the sake of doing what it thinks is right by its old friend more than any actual desire to rule the duchy. Such a coup would likely end in disaster, as the Nerra would seek to merge both his material and mirror-world courts together, letting all manner of aberrant beings out to rub elbows with the mortal folk.
Hello! I'd like to share with you a character work game! I call it "Six Secrets" and honestly it's a work in progress but I'm sharing it anyway
List six secrets that your character has.
1 is an open secret
2 is a secret the people close to your character know
3 is a secret that your character wouldn't really care about getting out
4 is a secret exactly one person knows anything about
5 is a secret no one knows about but they sort of want to come out/to tell someone
6 is a secret no one knows and they desperately don't want anyone to know about.
You can also decide who knows and how
The secrets don't have to have anything to do with your actual plot! The secrets can have super low or super high stakes! It doesn't matter! But you will absolutely have a better idea of your character's intentions and state of mind, and you may wind up coming up with some new plot points/obstacles to play with
The encounter: The path is blocked by 1d20+3 magic cows.
The area of encounter are considered an area of Wild Magic. Any spell of level 1 and above that is cast in the area will trigger the wild magic surge which will require a roll on the table of Wild Magic effects from PHB.
A magic cow can be moved by force with a Strength check DC 25 for a total amongst the party or bribed with food with a Animal Handling check DC 13.
Magic cows are very phlegmatic and will remain neutral unless provoked or startled.
Magic cows have stats and attacks of a normal cow.
When attacked a magic cow will be startled with a 80 percent chance. When startled the magic cow will cast Polymorph spell on herself turning into a cow with a 100 percent chance.
Startled cow will alert 1d4 magic cows in the proximity, with a 80 percent chance to startle them.
