D&D and other stuff

Just a fan of D&D 5e, particularly the more mechanical side of things. I'll mainly post my homebrew and some tidbits regarding homebrew design here, but you might also see some of my other interests here.

[nopehomebrew]

Welcome!

I go by Nope in online circles. I'm just someone who's into the more mechanical side of D&D, and as such I like making homebrew creations, both for my own game and just for the fun of it.

As such, you can expect this blog to mostly include D&D 5e homebrew, as well as some of my thoughts on the homebrew design process and D&D in general. Occasionally I might share some thoughts or tidbits for my other hobbies as well.

Along with some tags that I feel will be self-explanatory, here are the explanations for other tags I'll use on this blog:

#completed: Completed and polished homebrew, flush with art and formatting. I'll put homebrew here only if I think it would fit as is in an official product.

#draft: Homebrew that is mechanically complete and in theory can be used, but may not be as finely balanced and will be missing things like flavour text and art.

#one off: More minor pieces of homebrew, like singular feats and spells.

#behind the scenes: Some tidbits of design notes, ideas and other WIP stuff.

[nopehomebrew]

Ball Lightning

Up next is this spell, which serves as a concentration AoE that you can move around and ram into enemies. It’s sort of a powered-up version of Storm Sphere, which mechanically speaking is one of my favourite spells in that it does lingering AoE in a very interesting way, so I took some inspiration from that spell to make this one.

[nopehomebrew]

Absolute Zero

I am alive! University started and I was just swept up in all the things that entailed - but I am back, and ready to release more homebrew! First off, continuing where I left off with my collection of high-level spells, is Absolute Zero - a 9th-level spell meant to absolutely (heh) lock down a wide area and potentially petrify entire armies in ice.

[nopehomebrew]

Saturate

You ever look at someone and think to yourself ‘Wow, the pH of their blood is way too high for my liking’? This spell is for you! With just one 7th level spell slot you can violate your setting’s equivalent of the Geneva convention several times over! As if regular spells don’t already allow you to do that

Saturate occupies a similar niche to Finger of Death and Disintegrate - high single-target damage with a (relatively) minor benefit.

[nopehomebrew]

Fumigate

Of the various damage types, poison is definitely one that gets the short end of the stick, both in terms of damage resistances and in terms of spells. I thought the niche existed for a powerful poison spell that could really cripple a massive swath of enemies, so here it is!

At the tiers of play you’ll be casting this, the damage is really just a secondary effect to the main course: mass application of the poisoned condition, without concentration, and being much more persistent of an effect in that it requires 3 successive saves to end on a creature. The exhaustion is a nice cherry on top too.

[nopehomebrew]

Icicle Garden

Looking through the collection of spells in 5e, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of gaps in elemental magic - so much so that attempting to play a caster specialising in any element but fire all but necessitates reflavouring some spells to suit your damage type.

u/KibblesTasty must’ve thought so too, because in his amazing Casting Compendium he set out to fill these gaps with excellent, well-balanced spells that really seem like they should be in the game proper. Do check out his stuff if you haven’t already, I guarentee you won’t be dissapointed.

Kibbles’ ‘generic’ elemental spells fill out all the way to 5th level, so one of my pet projects is compiling a collection of spells to pick up where he left off, filling out the gaps from 6th to 9th level, starting with a recent creation of mine: Icicle Garden.

Hope you enjoy, and stay tuned for more high-level elemental spells over the next few days!

[nopehomebrew]

Ranger Archetype: Winter Warden

The final fully-completed subclass I made is the Winter Warden, a melee-centric ranger archetype that focuses on area denial and slowing your foes to a crawl.

[nopehomebrew]

Monastic Tradition: Way of Red Rivers

The Way of Red Rivers is a monastic tradition focused on damage over time and pure aggression, accumulating Wound Points on an enemy with successive unarmed strikes and then spending them all to open their wounds and bleed them dry!

[nopehomebrew]

I Fucking Love Blade of Disaster

That's it. That's the post.

Among the prestigious halls of 9th-level spells in D&D 5e, you will find all sorts of impressive spells, earth-shattering in their power and changing the very fundamental rules of reality itself. True Polymorph and Shapechange allow you to transform into literally anything, limited only by the boundaries of your knowledge and experience. Imprisonment traps your target in a prison so perfect that the only thing that can free them is magic of an equally impressive magnitude - that is, if they can find the creature at all, trapped under thousands of miles of rock or within a jewel buried in a dragon's hoard. Meteor Swarm is the most damaging spell in the game bar none, dealing a whopping 140 damage on average over a truly massive area, enough to end entire encounters and rout armies on the spot. Psychic Scream has you blast so much pure mental energy at your targets' minds that their heads explode. Let's not forget about Wish, a magic so impossibly powerful that its name really just speaks for itself.

Blade of Disaster is what happens when you take all of that magical power and condense it into the shape of a sword.

The concentration of magic is so great that it becomes an impossibly sharp crease in reality itself. There is nothing in existence it cannot cut. Adamantine? Rent like paper. Magical armour? Bifurcated seamlessly. Forcecage? Passes through like it's not even there. It's essentially a sword-shaped gap in reality, with all the horrifying implications that entails.

Mechanically, it's a Spiritual Weapon hooked up on every drug in existence that also took 5 levels in Fighter for Extra Attack. It's a bonus action to cast, and bonus action to use again, which means you're free to dump your actions on your other devastating spells while dealing 8d12 force damage each turn, lowball. That's not even getting into the truly ridiculous numbers when you crit - which, by the way, happens 15% of the time for every attack. It's not uncommon for this spell to just decide to deal upwards of 100 damage one turn, with minimal investment on your part.

Are there objectively more useful 9th-level spells out there? Sure. Meteor Swarm blows any other damage spell so far out of the water it's not even a competition. But Blade of Disaster occupies a sweet spot in my heart because it's just so fucking cool. Specifically, I think it perfectly encapsulates that even at the pinnacle of magical achievement, the source code of reality at our fingertips, we are still beholden to our caveman urge to return to simplicity.

We obtain the very peak of magical power, ideas previously thought impossible now just a thought away, and some based as fuck archmage's first thought is 'what if we made it into a sword.'

Perfection.

[nopehomebrew]

Bard College: College of Jesters

Next up: a literal clown college lmao

The College of Jesters focuses on debuffs: both doling them out, and taking advantage of their foes’ failures with their Fool’s Mockery, truling clowning on your foes as they make just about every roll with disadvantage.

[nopehomebrew]

Druid Circle: Circle of the Leviathan

One niche that I saw was somewhat lacking in existing druid subclasses was an aquatic druid. The closest we have is a Land druid attuned to Coastal terrain, but that’s just a change in spell list and doesn’t evoke the unrelenting wrath of the sea in my opinion. The Circle of the Leviathan is a druid subclass that focuses on forced movement, grapples, knocking creatures prone, and close-range area denial.

[nopehomebrew]

Sacred Oath: Oath of Secrecy

Flavour and mechanics wise, the Oath of Treachery is one of my favourite Sacred Oaths, and I was dissapointed that it didn’t manage to make the cut into Xanathar’s from UA. So, I took it upon myself to create the Oath of Secrecy, a paladin subclass focused on invisibility, intrigue and underhanded tactics.

Hope you enjoy!

[nopehomebrew]

Martial Archetype: Implement of Violence

To start things off for this blog, I’ll post a bunch of subclasses that I made as part of a personal challenge to make one subclass for every class. These have also been posted on Reddit in r/unearthedarcana, so if you want to see more of my completed homebrew you can find me there as u/nomiddlename303.

This martial archetype, the Implement of Violence, is the first subclass I made as part of this challenge, inspired by Hank from the Madness Combat series. The subclass puts a heavy emphasis on switching between weapons to perform combos, and is overall a very aggressive fighter subclass that incentivises leaping into the fray.

Hope you like it! Feedback is much appreciated.

[nopehomebrew]

Ah, looks like my posts are finally showing up in the tag search. I don't want to dump all my posts into the tag immediately, so I'll queue the reblogs out over the next few days.

Sorry if this annoys anyone - I'm very new to this site so I'm not too sure what the etiquette around 'bumping' your posts is.

[homebrew-a-la-traumaverse]

The Oath of the Inchling - Homebrew Paladin Subclass by Nines

It is a simple fact of adventuring that at some point, you're going to fight a giant monster. Who better to take inspiration from than the ones who have to fight giant monsters every single day?

Links in reblog, as usual.

[nopehomebrew]

Nice subclass! A very unconventional oath for paladin, both thematically and mechanically. Just some bits of feedback I have:

Colossus' Shadow is a very cool ability, but I can see some abuse potential with its interaction with Great Weapon Master; the flat +5 to hit completely negates the -5 penalty that balances GWM, turning it into an unconditional +10 damage on each swing, which is probably too much. One very simple fix is to make any shrunk weapons lose the Heavy property, thus making it incompatible with GWM.

Titan Felling Aura could probably have its extra damage scale in some way. Maybe something like 1d6 + half paladin level like the Conquest paladin's aura; both deal extra damage under quite specific circumstances, and Aura of Conquest also immobilises frightened creatures so I think it's fair for this aura to deal a bit mire damage.

Heaven's Piercer seems underwhelming for a capstone, especially for taking an action to activate. I would give it some more benefits - maybe give unlimited uses of Shining Needlepoint for the duration? One crit every round for 1 minute is far from the most broken thing you can accomplish at 20th level.

[nopehomebrew]

Ranger Archetype: Winter Warden

The final fully-completed subclass I made is the Winter Warden, a melee-centric ranger archetype that focuses on area denial and slowing your foes to a crawl.

[nopehomebrew]

Monastic Tradition: Way of Red Rivers

The Way of Red Rivers is a monastic tradition focused on damage over time and pure aggression, accumulating Wound Points on an enemy with successive unarmed strikes and then spending them all to open their wounds and bleed them dry!