The Homely Brewster

A collection of DnD 5e homebrew, mostly reblogs but also original content (#thehomelybrewster). All original content made by me is free to use but please don't claim it as your own unless you make significant alterations to it. My main is UndefeatedNils.

[dinolich]

Caracles for @chalkrub! Had to squeese one more in, worms rock

[writers-solace]

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world

[anim-ttrpgs]

How to Navigate the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Rulebook (or any large PDF) More Efficiently

It came to my attention that possibly a lot of the people who don’t know that there’s an easier way to navigate the Eureka rulebook PDF than just scrolling.

This will probably help many of you who have woes about the page count (even though I must also remind everyone that the Eureka rulebook is shorter than every WotC edition of D&D by word count. The page count just looks higher because we use big font.)

If you are using Foxit PDF Reader, click here.

It will open up a table of contents on the side that you can quickly and easily use to jump around and make navigating the rulebook a lot faster.

If you’re using Firefox to open the PDF, click here.

Then click here

This will do the same thing and open up the table of contents on the side. I have never come across a PDF reader that didn't have some feature similar to this although it might not always be in the same spot.

Was this helpful?

I didn’t know this and it is helpful.

I didn’t know this and it isn’t helpful.

I did know this and it is helpful.

I did know this and it isn’t helpful.

Voting ended onNov 28, 2025

[prokopetz]

I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position the want the GM to be in.

[multidimensionalmusicalmess]

I just want to shout out this extremely accurate comment; I used to be one of those hesitant people, and this was exactly why.

[srune]

only thing that comes to mind today.

[deadgenerations]

the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.

[sunspotpony]

So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.

[noctumsolis]

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.

[trismeowgistus]

It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately

[walking-fandom]

I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.

[crazy-pages]

The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.

And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.

Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.

Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.

You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.

And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.

There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.

Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.

[prokopetz]

Squinting grumpily at the latest "system-neutral fantasy sourcebook" trying to puzzle out which specific version of Dungeons & Dragons the author is picturing when they imagine a perfectly generic RPG.

[dukeofriven]

Flip to the section on elves, maybe you can tell by how many well-intentioned reparative racial subcategories there are.

[prokopetz]

Sometimes in spite of the complete absence of explicit game mechanics you can 100% tell that the sourcebook in question is situated in a milieu in which "elf" is a character class.

[themightytej]

School's Out for Summer on RPG Trader

A bundle of 44 family-friendly TTRPGs for the holidays

"School's Out For Summer" is a bundle of 44 family-friendly tabletop RPGs for only $20 available through the month of August! My own Inner Light is included, as well as dozens of other games ready to play with kids before they're gone again to another school year. Grab it before it expires at the end of the month!

[thecreaturecodex]

Mahar

“Mahar” © Philip Rice, accessed at his gallery here

[D&D owes a lot to At the Earth’s Core and the rest of the Pellucidar novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The idea that the interior world is full of strange psychic slavers is a classic D&D trope, what with its aboleths and illithids, and they owe a lot to the mahars here. Also, I can’t believe it took me this long to realize, but the quaggoths of D&D are clearly inspired by the mahar’s favored minions, the sagoths. I like this art because it tries to make the mahar look like a rhamphorhynchus, as opposed to just a generic winged humanoid. I love you, Frazetta, but your mahars don’t look a damn thing like pterosaurs.]

Mahar CR 8 LE Aberration This creature looks like a man-sized pterosaur, with full hands growing from its wings. It seems capable of walking on both two and four feet, and has a long tail ending in a diamond-shaped fin. Its hands and feet are webbed, and its beak has small, sharp teeth.

A mahar is a strange pterosaur-like creature of the Hollow Earth with dangerous psychic powers. They are distant relatives of the rhamphorhynchus, but have much larger bodies relative to their size—they stand around six to seven feet tall. They have altered their forms through selective breeding and alchemical mutations—they can swim like a seal, have prehensile hands able to manipulate tools, and are all female. Once the female mahars learned how to engineer their hormones to lay eggs parthenogenically, they exterminated their males. Rumors exist of male mahars living in less “civilized” regions, but whether such creatures are unusually small or unusually large varies with the telling.

Mahars are more than a physical match for an ordinary human, but prefer to use their psychic powers to render such comparisons irrelevant. They can command the minds of creatures to approach them as if in a trance, whereupon the mahar can rip them to shreds without resistance. The hypnotic stare of a mahar addles the minds of their foes, clouding their judgement and opening them up to devastatingly precise attacks. Mahars prefer to fight in groups to alone, preferably behind an army of slaves, and rapidly flee if their mental powers are resisted or their slaves defeated.

Mahar society is built around slavery, with the mahars as masters commanding lesser beings through telepathic threats. Quaggoths are a favorite servitor race, and thipdars (giant pterosaurs—treat as an advanced quetzalcoatlus) are used as beasts of burden. Mahars are completely deaf and incapable of vocalizing, but intricate dances, performed either by the mahars themselves or by their slaves, hold a similar social position to music. Mahars are carnivorous, but limit themselves to fish and reptile meat as a matter of course. Eating a mammal as simply a meal is seen as taboo, but humanoid slaves are killed and eaten as part of religious rituals. 

Mahars advance by character level. Psychic and mesmerist are the most commonly taken classes, but some mahars train as alchemists.

Keep reading

[butt-berry]

Like if you think he should be allowed a sausage

[prokopetz]

Organising my recently downloaded indie tabletop RPG manuals/playtests/etc. is always fun because it's like:

10 000 SWORDS AGAINST HEAVEN

FULL-METAL SPIRITS GODSMASH

THIS MACHINE HAS MEAT IN IT

THE THUNDER IN OUR HEARTS

SCHISM: THE NEW FLESH

Wet Grandpa

[prokopetz]

[prokopetz]

Trolling my biologist D&D player by sending the party on a quest to prevent the destruction of a mystical seal, and when they finally get there it quickly becomes clear that I'm actually describing a walrus.

[thecreaturecodex]

Welp, the Archives of Nethys lost their partnership with Paizo. This means they're taking down the legacy PRD, which was my preferred site for years! Expect a lot more broken links in the reruns, which I will try to remember to fix.

[sallllltywater]

Commission for bsky fella. Actually It's not a skaven character but a DnD ratfolk, doesn't matter, It's a tinker-rat!

[gnarlyghost]

-Wizard Market-

MTG Mat for Boston Cube Fest

(I’ve got some freelance availability coming up next week, get in touch if you’re looking for cool artwork)

[vanessagillings]

On to the next adventure!

[skarchomp]

"he's trying to fuck the elf" is a great voice acting exercise. you can try out so many different tones and inflections and it's fun every time.

[batgirlpits]

@anim-ttrpgs

I was reading through the blurb on disability in Eureka and I made notice that it mentioned specific things not being free in the USA. My question is in what way does the game assume Yankeedom and what changes would be needed to support say a disarmed police, rare firearms, and socialised medicine? Would it ruin the game and the fantasy of the genre and the like?

[anim-ttrpgs]

Good question, I have a pretty in-depth answer I think. It definitely would not ruin the game but any time anyone asks about a change to Eureka I’m obligated to first explain why Eureka is already the way it is before I explain how to change it.

Eureka is very much an American game, specifically a US South game. Its outlook on the world is both informed by life in that region and the social commentaries it makes are most primarily focused on that region.

This region more specifically,

and just Louisiana and Texas if you want to get even more specific.

Some of the rules kinda obviously assume the adventure is taking place there even compared to other places in the USA, such as the fact that just about any PC has access to purchasing firearms from the start. Most of the official adventure modules (adventure modules are very important to Eureka) also take place in the US South, in places where NPCs won’t think twice about it if a PC comes to talk to them with a handgun on their belt.

("WP" is "Wealth Points," something derived from the PC's Wealth Skill on character creation before every adventure and then spent to determine what items they can start an adventure with. Since a PC starts out with only about 11 WP on average, you can see that firearms are as prohibitively expensive to own legally in Eureka as in the real life USA.)

There are definitely adventures I’ve played where one or more PCs just had a handgun the same way they'd have a wallet or cellphone but never ended up using it.

Actual combat, especially combat with deadly weapons, is pretty rare in Eureka in general.

The Eureka adventures that take place definitely in the US South are:

The Eye of Neptune

An oil rig off the coast of Texas in 2020.

FORIVA: The Angel Game

Shreveport, Louisiana in 1999.

Murder at the Belle Nuit

Lake Charles, Louisiana in 2017.

James Stabbed Him (fan-made adventure)

The middle of nowhere, Texas in the present day.

A Horror New to this World

The middle of nowhere, Texas in the present day.

Where’s Tom? (unreleased official adventure module, currently in early playtesting)

New Orleans, Louisiana in the present day.

Another thing is the paranormal elements of Eureka’s setting are very much US South-influenced, particularly Louisiana/New Orleans. A lot of modern New Orleans folklore just… is the kind of environment Eureka presents, where objectively dangerous monsters have homes, jobs, and friends.

Before we get to the fact that Eureka is definitely very easily playable in other geographic locations, I’m going to urge that you do give the default geographic location a chance. If you’re too picky about where an adventure can take place, you’re going to really limit yourself off from a bunch of really good and well-constructed mysteries. It’s also my private experience that the more media people are exposed to where all or most characters are Southern in a way that isn’t a joke, the more it humanizes this region, and that’s something we kinda unfortunately need from time to time. (Not that all PCs need to be from the region, they could be visiting/immigrants from basically wherever.)

Now about Eureka adventures taking place anywhere else.

There already exist several Eureka adventures taking place notably outside the USA.

Muted Swallow (fan-made)

Vancouver, Canada in the present day.

Murder at Raspberry Hall (fan-made)

A remote English estate in the 1980s.

The Dorfteich Murder (fan-made and not yet fully reviewed by the A.N.I.M. Team like the other fan-made ones here)

Peitz, Germany in the 2000s.

The thing is, information still works roughly the same way and so do the physics and lethality of bullets no matter where you go, and those are some of the most important aspects of Eureka.

Socialized Healthcare

This one’s easy, just reduce the WP price of healthcare-related items if they’re provided by the state (even to 0WP if appropriate), and reduce or remove the Wealth Skill roll related to hospital visits.

Rare Firearms

This one’s easy too. There are a ton of places in the USA already where firearm and other weapon ownership is severely restricted already. Eureka already says to check the local laws for wherever an adventure is taking place against the available purchases in the Inventory part of character creation. That applies anywhere, not just US states. If it’s taking place in Paris, France, look up what items a PC would be allowed to have in Paris, France.

There are no Eureka adventure modules to date where I think a PC having a firearm, or even owning any kind of weapon at all, is a necessary part of solving and surviving the mystery with the exception of The Shootout at Studio 12 but come on, it’s called The Shootout at Studio 12. This is the only Eureka adventure where violence is pretty explicitly unavoidable. Eureka PCs have access to guns not because guns are always expected to be used, but because it is something they would realistically have access to in the default region the game takes place in. In fact it is discouraged to give your investigator a gun unless they are the kind of person who would realistically own one.

Disarmed Police

This one is a bit trickier especially since I don’t know where you’re from.

The Heat rules in Eureka (the rules regarding the party attracting the attention of the law and getting investigated by the police) are kinda US-specific in their, well, specifics, such as what equipment the cops have and what the laws are. You’d have to do some research and some adjusting for that. Because, like, getting into a shootout with the cops would be a pretty significant failure state in the first place, Eureka doesn’t necessarily need random patrol officiers to be carrying guns for the game to work. Again, combat is very rare.

As for the cops being inclined towards bias and racism like they are in Eureka, not to be US-centric, but based on my own experience I would be inclined to assume that’s true basically everywhere on earth. Who they’re biased against specifically is just what might change from place to place.

To quote the writer of those three non-USA adventure modules above,

Anecdotally, when I lived in France and England in places that are very very strict about weapon ownership is the only time I have ever seen police officers carrying anything except small-caliber handguns. In England I saw patrol officers in bulletproof vests carrying small SMGs on shoulder straps, and in France I saw full-blown soldiers in full gear including helmets carrying full-sized high-caliber assault rifles in certain places. I have never seen such a thing in-person in the USA. (To clarify these were not special operations, just guys standing around.)

Anyway, wherever you are from or were hoping to play Eureka set in, I hope this answers your questions. What would actually love to come of this is for you to play Eureka using the existing adventure modules to experience them and get a feel for the game and how it works, then write your own adventure module taking place in some place more familiar to you and share it with us/the community. (We don’t take any money from fan-made adventure modules or own them in any way.) With how “life-sim-y” Eureka can be, playing an adventure set in another location can be a lot more like visiting that place than most RPGs, and it’s cool to learn about other places.

[legov7]

yes, come on in and play The Dorfteich Murder to visit fuck ass tiny village Peitz in the eastern German Hinterland.