💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺!
Viper Bracers Wondrous item, uncommon (requires attunement by a monk)
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While wearing these twisted, emerald green bracers, you can use your reaction when a creature targets you with a melee attack to make two unarmed strikes against it. For each attack that hits, that creature is poisoned for 1 round, ending at the start of its turn on the round that it would end. This property of the bracers can’t be used again until the next dawn.
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Magic items are items imbued with magic. They have levels roughly equal to the different levels at which spells can be cast. They can be pretty strong and they're reliable.
Legendary items are not magical; not in the same way at least. Legendary items dwarf most magical items by measure of power, but they draw power from belief and faith. Their power is the power that people believe they have. It can change over time, growing or shrinking in power, and many powerful people perpetuate rumors to strengthen or weaken legendary items.
Artifacts are similar to legendary items, but they are tied only to the belief of the people that made them. A culture's belief in an artifact gives it power, and othef peoples disbelief does not impact it.
Mythical items are also similar to legendary items. Only, mythical items do not exist. Perhaps they did once, or perhaps they began only as a rumor or a hope. They manifest only to those their legends most directly affect and only in times of need.
Here's all the recent Peregrine and the Starpainter stuff all together in one post! Click on the links to read a little about each one!
If you don't know already, I'm posting all my writings over on Patreon that you can see for just £1, including this short story and a couple more. I'm going to be writing a lot more of these in the coming months and all my Patrons will be able to see them as soon as they go up - I'm so excited about the stuff I have to share!
Here's the link if you want to check it out!
Also, if you like D&D, here's two magic items I homebrewed from this part of my world, where dreams become reality.
Item 048 : Clockwork Cuckoo
Item 058 : Cunning Crow
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy your trip to the dreamer's circus.
If you cant become a patron but want to support my work, reblog this post!
The more people who see my work means the more likely it is I'll be able to keep doing this! Thank you so much!
Oh yeah totally! I’m a big fan of making players aware of the fact that the world moves without them and telling them their rivals did the quest they’ve been meaning to do for the past four months is a pretty great way to accomplish that.
The Rival (derogatory): party that is, whether seemingly or legitimately, significantly more accomplished than the players. Best used to stir up petty drama and/or inspire subtle action.
The Rival (affectionate): the party that happens to show up to claim the same or parallel jobs, is as skilled as the players, and is fair about competition. Best used as a non-lethal testing method, or as a resource to be tapped in large, multitask quests.
The Kennys: just as skilled as the players, only job is to show the players they are in deep shit, usually by rushing in and dying or worse.
The New Kids: significantly weaker than the players, but eager to prove themselves. Use to either inspire mentoring or to trick the players into calling themselves dumb by calling out repeats of the same dumb shit they pulled.
The Experts: hired agents by the government, use to show how you interpret law, procedure, and the relative power of elite officials in your setting. These parties should be both generic and static; if an elite dragon hunting team is level 5, they stay level 5 forever.
The Sweepers: as or more skilled than the players, they exist to take on time sensitive quests in exactly the ways they don't want. They are the bad ending group, and exist to add, not relieve, time sensitive pressure.
The Kevins: a party that exists only to be found injured and going away from the quest location. Use to drop clues about encounters and to instill fear.
The Five Daves: a joke party that the players will of course get attached to and of course seek out for jolly cooperation and thus you find yourself having to voice these clowns in increasingly unlikely and unclownlike situations until they become as or more fleshed out than the players characters.
Garden of Graves
Graveyard Plant Encounter for D&D 5E
Troy’s got a brand new encounter for you today, which includes three custom stat blocks for three deadly animated plants, with lovely tokens by Austin and Dave!
Dungeon map Set no. 4 - a sealed tomb and a golden artifact!
Some of this is based on last week’s worldbuilding sesh with our DM.
‘What if – was the sort of elf that touches absolutely everything??’ ‘What if our party wakes up and it’s been 500 years and even brooms have gone out of fashion?’
I was wondering if you’d be able to help me flesh out a loose idea I had for a location that I’d like to include in my homebrew setting at some point.
It’s a theocratical city-state with a heavy bell aesthetic. Like, the city is absolutely littered with bell towers, and whichever divinity is worshipped here uses bell as their holy symbol. Aside from being situated in a seemingly peaceful stretch of grasslands, and world itself being somewhat high-magic… that’s all I have so far.
Any ideas as to what this place could be beyond the vague idea I’m sitting on? And what sort of adventures do you think could be had here?
I’d appreciate any help you’re willing to offer with this! Thank you!
Setting: The Plains of Stormgraven
"Leave it to fanatics to build their home in the one place the gods seem intent on wiping off all the maps.”
Setup: Once the sight of a great transgression against the divine, the grand pastoral realms now known as Stormgraven are today an expanse of calm, rolling fields, tempest haunted badlands, and expansive, half buried ruins that only hint at the calamity still echoing through the plains to this day.
There are three sorts of people who live in the region:
Scavengers looking to pick through ancient ruins, (which can be sorted into “academic” or “tomb raiding” types respectively) There’ve been ruins so long in the plains that this group has solidified into it’s own ethnicity with cultural rites, festivals, and a nomadic, adventurous flair.
Simple farmers wanting to make good use of land despite the rustlers looking to steal their livestock and the cyclones looking to steel their houses, mostly made up of descendants from a long fallen empire.
The Resoundant, a community of religious exiles from a neighboring kingdom who fled to the plains after they lost a generations long civil war that they also started. Fleeing a “decadent and ungodly” homeland some two centuries ago, they’ve built themselves a great polis warded from the region’s hostile weather by it’s innumerable sacred bells.
These three groups push against eachother with varying levels of hostility: The Resoundant hire the scavengers to clear out ruins for them to ensure the land is safe for settling, but believe the treasures pulled from deep undergorund belong to them by divine right. The Farmers are happy to feed the holyfolk in exchange for warding against the storms, but chafe under the increasingly restrictive religious duties that are added to their lives. The scavengers bring plenty of outside coin into the region with their trade, but seem more than happy to turn bandit when times are lean.
Hallowtoll, the great city-state of the plains is where all these peoples and conflicts mingle together, a turbulent place in the otherwise peaceful plains, or the only calm eye when storms sour the countryside.
Adventure Hooks:
Hired by outsiders to delve a particular ruin, the party finds themselves at odds with a scavenger-band who’s been exploring the region for generations. Does the party clash with the locals, or make their way past their initial foux-pas to work with them? How about sharing their wealth with the band, rather than some outside historian who decided to lay claim to it?
Forced to stop their travels by a windstorm that threatened to blow them off the road, the party shelters alongside a farmer-enclave built partially under/into a hill. it’d be a fine, folksy time getting to know the families and townsfolk sheltering there with them, if not for the quarrelsome Resoundant preacher who’s seems intent on finding fault with everything and every one. On the fourth night in, and with no signs of the storm clearing up anytime soon, The preacher is murdered, leaving the party with an Agatha-Chrsitie style mystery to solve. There’s also the added threat that if the culprit isn’t found and the Resoundant find out, there’s a good chance that the enclave will come under threat of some more retributive members of the faith.
The belltowers of Hallowtoll are a wonder all unto themselves, with families and priests alike competing to see who can built the biggest, grandest, and loudest tower in their region. Older towers are often left to crumble as newer projects capture the attention of their patrons, creating a warren of urban dungeons rife for exploration. Likewise, all this fevered building is likely to attract the attention of certain strange forces of architecture that come to dwell within the abandoned geometries.
History: The source of the gods ire is the Olgracian dominion, a state over two millennia gone that none the less managed to offend the gods so bad that the heavens still havent forgiven them. The Olgrac were a proud people who worshiped a god of forge and field, and so had a surging, well armed populace that they used to subdue their neighbors into vassaldom. This was typical for just about any empire through history, but what made the Olgrac different was their habit of taking home the statues and idols of their neighbor’s gods in chains to represent their defeat, and throwing the priests of defeated nations into their forges to create weapons infused with divine magic.
Needless to say, the other gods didn’t like this, and collectively summoned a windstorm of such magnitude that it leveled the Olgracian capital, blew out the priest-eating forges like a candle, and ripped the mostly-innocent forgegod into so many pieces that not even their name is remembered to this day. The storm raged for a century, scouring the dominion from the earth and providing such a good deterant that just about everyone stayed away from the Stormgraven plains until a few centuries prior to the present day.
Further Adventures:
The forge-god is not dead, but scattered, ripped asunder into a number of aspects that subtly long to be reunited. Once contemplative and mostly peiceful, the forge-god now has a desire to revenge himself on the other gods, and will seek to rebuild the Olgrac dominion using the Resoundant as their new chosen people, coopting their faith and their resentment against their exile for its own ends.
Here’s some idea for some aspects:
An ever-burning ember of creativity and skill, which has come into the possession of the master of one of the Hallowtoll Bellfoundes. the master’s mind is now full of ambition and drive, and bells worked in fire of this ember whisper the forgegod’s influence to those that hear them. The forgemaster also has cannons on the brain, and is testing out various designs.
A mummified hand and forearm found in a ruin. which points the way towards great treasures of the old empire. Currently in possession of a scavenger band that’s gone full bandit, gathering other outlaws to itself and following the “relic’s” direction for even greater plunder. Unbekonwsned to any of them, they also happen to be gathering weapons and artifacts of the old empire that are important for the forgegod.
A scarred stone, sheer enough on one side to be used as a grand table, that gives the lands surrounding it bounty and fertility. A secret circle of elders among the surrounding farmer enclaves know the secret of the stone, and meet to sacrifice troublesome members of their groups or unmissed outsiders upon it to ensure its gifts, buring the bodies in the earth around it. On this makeshift altar the other aspects must be gathered, at which point it will crack, and the forgegod’s new body will walk free.
Just ran this for my group as a one shot! Stormgraven served as a fantastic setting. Also used the architect prompt linked at the bottom for a plot, and the whole thing had a kind of dust bowl, frontier-fantasy feel about it. It went well! Got good use out of the Resoundant, and got some short but solid moments out of the farmers and the scavengers. It ended with a duel between two PCs, a shoot out with an army, and the whole land being doomed, with farmers, scavengers, and holy folk alike forced to wander east, searching for new lives; Stormgraven was abandoned save for one (half-assedly resurrected pc) horseman wandering its windy wastes forever more, perhaps as a curse, perhaps as a guardian, perhaps simply trying to find himself.
Amazing, always glad to hear of some of my prompts getting some use!
The frontier/dustbowl is EXACTLY the mood I was going for with this, to the point where I was thinking of combining it with another one of my western prompts to make up part of a larger setting. If you ever wanted to run a sequel where the party ends up out east beyond the badlands into a sort of “California gold rush” scenario, I think that’d work out great. It even has a short bell-based questline that can follow up with the Resoundant.
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