The World Brewery

brewing settings, NPCs, items, monsters, plotlines, and pretty much everything else, with some tips and tricks mixed in. Support Me on Ko-fi

[theworldbrewery]

multiclassing tips + masterpost

so you want to multiclass? sounds good! here’s how to do it well.

The number-one thing to remember is that when you multiclass, you’re going to be a low-level whatever you multiclass into. That means if you want to keep up with your non-multiclassing party members, it helps to choose a multiclass option that suits your existing class.

Ideally, you want to multiclass when you’re mid-level or high-level in your base class. Until you reach those levels, the benefits of continuing on the class you began with tend to outweigh the benefits of multiclassing, so it’s best to lie in wait for the perfect opportunity.

While I understand thinking of multiclassing as “i want to be a rogue, even though I’m a wizard, so I’m going to take a few levels in rogue,” it isn’t really the greatest approach. If you wanted to be a rogue, you should’ve been a rogue from the start. I fell into that trap with my cleric who eventually multiclassed into warlock. It wound up being a cool moment in the narrative, but it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped because I was too low-level in warlock for those clutch things I was imagining, and I didn’t have the patience to work my way through warlock. 

Instead, think of multiclassing as taking a dip into another class’s skillset. You don’t want to tie yourself to that new skillset, you want to use it to accentuate what you already have. A barbarian going two levels into druid--just enough to wild-shape--has a lot of perks, but if you pursue druid too far, the classes diverge too much. 

Obviously, none of my advice trumps the golden rule: if you’re multiclassing for narrative/roleplay reasons, you can do whatever you want! If your ranger multiclasses into paladin because Character Development, it doesn’t matter that it’s not optimal (although tbh you’d need above 13 in 4 stats to make it work, plus a decent CON)--- your satisfaction as a player is the most important part.

In the posts linked below, I assume that you’re already at least 8th level and potentially higher in the starting class before dipping into a new class. 

Artificer

Barbarian

Bard

Blood Hunter (WIS)

Cleric

Druid

Fighter

Paladin

Monk 

Ranger

UA Revised Ranger

Rogue

Sorcerer

Warlock

Wizard

If you’ve been enjoying our multiclassing posts, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi!

[animentality]

[theworldbrewery]

perhaps my honeymoon is not the time/place to be putting together a Good Society hack just so i can use it to run a political intrigue fantasy cult-theocracy game, but the spouse has been enjoying it so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[monamoni]

The Waterfall That Refuses to Fall

[monamoni]

West Kazakhstan 🇰🇿

[inbabylontheywept]

In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

[someemochick]

[fishingscam]

op didn’t add a link so here’s a link to his patreon where all of his minis are free to download please support him if you can

[marlynnofmany]

I would absolutely download a dragon, and I’ve already shared this with my D&D group. We’re gonna have some adventures! Thank you to everyone who made this possible!

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

As it was becoming clear the US was headed into trade war territory, I got really interested in farming and the logistics of keeping people fed. I turned that interest into "your cool city needs a food supply," available now!

it's a hack of "i'm sorry did you say street magic" and "Microscope," two gold-standard worldbuilding games. It was polished by Nico MacDougall, who gave me some great advice on how to make this game really align with the themes and ideas I had in the draft.

I've always been a sicko about logistics and agriculture (growing up in the US midwest will do that to you), and I hope this game helps people think about how great a privilege it is to eat.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

If there was one thing I could retroactively erase from existence in the entire history of the tabletop RPG medium it would be the concept of using "perception checks" or "investigation rolls" or any similar mechanics in dungeon-crawling RPGs to determine if the PCs can see a detail in their environment.

"A DC 15 Perception roll is required to see..." "A DC 20 Investigation roll will reveal..." no. Shut up. If the thing is in plain sight or can be perceived with the senses by simply existing in this space and taking a look around then the PCs are perceiving it and describing it to the players is part of your role because you are their source of sensory information about the in-game world.

And if it's not in plain sight or deliberately concealed in some way then they simply DON'T perceive it but can reveal it by narratively interacting with their environment until one of their actions undoes whatever's concealing it, not rolling a die to see if they can Perceive Hard Enough to reveal it.

[theworldbrewery]

personally I like how some TTRPGs handle it, where you only roll for something if there are consequences for failure. those consequences can be loose, e.g. you fail your Perception check ergo you don't see a secondary exit before a monster catches up with you. or they can be specific: you fail your Perception check so you don't notice the person pickpocketing you.

rolling to see ambient environmental elements, when there is no reason the characters couldn't just keep rerolling Perception checks, is worse than useless because you either A) lock characters into being unable to interact with the environment (and thus play the game), or B) waste time as your players continuously reroll the check until they succeed.

[aninventoryofthepossible]

How I Broadcast VOID 1680 AM

One of the key aspects of my solo playlist building game is that the radio station is real, and if you submit a playlist and DJ breaks I will broadcast your show on the air and stream it on YouTube. The game is, after all, about expressing yourself and finding fleeting connections while you do, so it only felt right to help facilitate that in real life.

This is how I do that. You can check out some broadcasts from me and VOID 1680 AM players here, and check out the game yourself here.

Go live. Build your playlist. Record your thoughts. Someone out there needs to hear what you have to say.

[filibusterfrog]

some fake diseases

[lazzmap]

I re-designed the map order worksheets during my time at WOTC as manager of cartography. Mainly it was just to make the worksheets completely digital and accessible for anyone who was to design maps for our game worlds. These are the final versions which were being used up till 2003 at WOTC.  The list of map symbols goes back to the dawn of role playing game maps and TSR.  Dave Sutherland and Dennis Kauth were the two people who really started all of the organized nature of making map orders easier to produce for the TSR RPG R&D design department.  

Dennis Kauth was originally from an engineering background, so he even made sure that all of the symbols had a corresponding number in case of the situation where someone was not able to draw things out in a competent manner, they could just simply write a number on the map reference and circle it, thus making “it” the object or feature from the master key.  The mapping standards is one of the first things Dave & Dennis showed me when I started work in the mapping department at TSR in the early 90s.  

In those days the whole thing was a large packet of stuff in a folder,  including several different sized blank map pages, the symbols list and a  blank fold-up poster map sheet printed with a hex grid for the old ‘gazetteer” style maps and a few examples of how to draw a proper map reference.  For the most part everyone in R&D used these map standards to create their map references,  however there were always a few that would come in on cocktail napkins and such but it was really worth it to have a standard  for the map orders.  Fun little bit of history,  Good times and Good gaming!

[annleckie]

@peanuts-n-soap

[probablygoodrpgideas]

A campaign about returning magical items from whence they came.

Not in the “plunged into the fires of Mt. Doom” sense. 

Artifact repatriation.  The heroes work for an international commission aimed at reversing centuries of plunder.  Oh, sure, the adventurers of yesteryear may have had solid reasons for looting the Ancient Tomb of the Noonday King, but those justifications have passed, and the Noonday King’s regalia really should be returned home, not sitting in a foreign adventurer’s ancestral manor.

Possible adventures include:

Archaeologically respectful dungeon crawls, aimed at returning items to original context if possible

Consulting and cooperation with host museums in native cultures to provide security and academic collaboration

Liberating artifacts from foreign collections, if imperial governments or plutocrats or nobles initially refuse to return them

Realizing that an ancient conspiracy is modifying paperwork and falsifying academic reports to turn the repatriation committee into a MacGuffin delivery service for an ancient lich-king

Persuading the world to keep going on with the good parts of this program even if the one time an ancient lich-king nearly got most of his ancient rivals’ regalia delivered to his tomb home under false pretenses so he could start some real shit, because, hey, they stopped him, the system worked!

[creativerogues]

My Template For Creating Dungeon Rooms...

About Your Dungeon Room…

Dungeon Room Name: What’s this Dungeon Room called? Instead of calling it “Room #3 on Floor 2″, try making each room unique by calling it something like “The Corridor of Knives” or “The Sinking Square”. 

Naming your Dungeon Room peaks the interest of any DM reading it, as well as keeping the Name stuck in your head so you don’t have to flip through all those DM Notes mid-game…

Dungeon Room History: What’s the History of this Room? Is it the bedroom of a mad alchemist? Or is it the bathroom of a powerful necromancer?

Threat Level: This is how deadly this Dungeon Room is. Is it no threat at all, a simple setback, a moderate threat, or straight up deadly to anyone who enters?

Dungeon Motif: Is the Dungeon Underground, Abandoned, or does it lead to another Plane? 

Selecting a Motif for the Dungeon Room based on the Dungeon can be pretty crucial. A mega-dungeon buried in the desert is very different from a ruined mega-dungeon that’s underwater…

Layout

Dungeon Walls: Are they stone or wood? Are they bare or decorated with elaborate tapestries and faded paintings?

Dungeon Floor: Is it stone, glass, wood, or something else? Will it make a noise if an oblivious Adventurer walks in?

Temperature: Is it unnaturally cold or unusually hot in this room? Maybe as the Party ventures deeper to the core of the earth everything gets supernaturally hot, or maybe as they venture deeper into a creatures lair, the air becomes supernaturally cold and the Adventurers can see their own breath!

Illumination: Is the room pitch black or lit by torches, or does the Room have small magical flames that burn forever?

Room Features: This is what’s in the Room. Statues, chests, pools of water, broken bottles. Room Features can be whatever the Adventurers see when they first enter the room, and what they could find if they explore the Room further.

Encounters

NPCs: This is usually a social encounter, such is meeting and talking to a friendly denizen of the dungeon, or maybe the ghost of a long-dead tomb-robber…

Traps: From corridors that flood with lava to false stairs that lead to a pit of boiling oil, these are the dangers a Dungeon Room (or corridor, or even stairs leading to the next Room or Dungeon Level) can have to stop any unwanted treasure-hunters.

Wandering Monsters: These are the Monsters that could possibly be found in this particular Dungeon Room, just in case the DM wants to spark some combat after a long session of busting down Dungeon Doors.

Puzzles: This is for the DM that likes to test their Players smarts. Maybe your Dungeon Room isn’t filled with Monsters, but instead a carefully composed riddle that only the Denizens of the Dungeon would know, and failure to solve such a puzzle could lead to a painful death at the hands of the Dungeon Room itself!

Hidden Treasure: It’s always good to put a little something in every Dungeon Room, most will be missed, but it’s always good to at least have something for the snooping Adventurers to find if they managed to survive whatever else they’ve just been through while going through this Dungeon.

[sleepyspoonie]

d&d disability mechanics

so im disabled, and i have a disabled d&d character. i didnt like not having an in-game mechanic to express my character’s disability in more than words, so i decided to make some and then ended up making others.

a lot of these were made while consulting someone who has the disability or from my own firsthand experience, but some aren’t. if you want to critique some of my choices, message me! i’ll be able to either edit the ruleset or explain my reasoning, and i want it to be the best it can be.

note: a lot of the save DCs are left vague in this so you and your DM can determine how difficult they are to meet.

this is under a cut because it’s really long and so i can update it. if you want to see something added, message me!

(#dungeons and dragons, #long post, #death cw, #limb trauma)

Keep reading

[lauraharrisbooks]

Beyond this, consider how these professions might vary depending on who the customers are - nobles, or lower class. Are they good at their job or just scraping by? Do they work with lots of other people or on their own? City or village?

For younger characters:

Apprentice to any of the above

Messenger/runner

Page/squire

Pickpocket

Shop assistant

Student

Looks after younger siblings

(Images all from Wikimedia Commons)

[evelynatthecircus-blog]

Also consider:

Candlemaker Ferryman Factor (looks after business for an employer in another city) Tiler Cutler Beekeeper Apothecary Interpreter Furrier Moneylender/Banker Winemaker Tinker (small trader who repairs stuff) Nightsoil collector Customs officer Also a bonus for animal related professions: Fowler (supplies game birds for eating) Warrener (catches rabbits on your land for you to eat) Ostler (looks after your horses) Falconer (looks after your falcons) Cocker (looks after your fighting cocks)

[wotenoise]

I need more fantasy rpg in my life that isn’t d&d-style. I think it’s time for some Sword & Backpack.

[pomrania]

100 Jobs for Fantasy Characters (that aren’t knight or peasant)

((long list, so it’s below the cut))

Keep reading

[probablygoodrpgideas]

Yes, this is good and important

[filibusterfrog]

core classes as undead :)