D&D Inspiration

A blog run by several individuals to provide inspiration for their DM. We're thoughtful like that. 

[mushroomancy]

List of resources for dnd

roll20: Make an account to play the game

Orcpub: For hosting and editing your character sheet

DND Wiki: Homebrew things, races, classes, misc

Players Handbook: Rules how to play how to make a character, all basic information for playing a game

Discord: to talk during and about the game

[mushroomancy]

Mythweavers: another character sheet editor

[occams-lazer]

Homebrewery: homebrew creation tool. Uses basic coding language to great effect.

[mushroomancy]

If anyone wants to join just join the discord server and post your character

[jacebeleren]

http://autorolltables.github.io/#

can randomly generate just about ANYTHING. awesome for dms

[deweydecimalchickens]

Tabletop Audio: background music and sound effects for the ambience.

[corseque]

PCGen - a character creation program that handles all the tricky and tedious parts of building characters, including NPCs.

d20pfsrd.com - all the free information you would ever need to play Pathfinder, an alternative to D&D

[meonlyred]

DiceCloud: Interactive character sheet that can be edit and shared with yourself or others easily. Pulled up anywhere with internet connection on PC, Mac, or mobile device. Use it to also mark down health, death saving throws, spell slots, experience, and more on the fly. 

DnDMagic: List all spells currently available from Player’s Handbook and Elemental Evil. 

5th Edition Spellbook app: Make spellbooks for all your characters, manage spells, prepare spells. Keep track of Spell Save DC, and Spell Attack bonus on your mobile device. 

[hawkeabelas]

Squire - Another character creation and management app. Contains most of the basic info and spells already, with options to create spells, items, classes/subclasses, etc. This is the free version, but pro has more options for DMs, including initiative order control.

[dnd-maps-n-stuff]

RPG Generator - An app that randomly generates things from NPC appearances to criminal gangs. It’s free and a great on the fly DM tool.

[undying-sentinel]

Kobold Fight Club: A generator for building and managing encounters. Good options to help narrow your monster picks and will calculate the XP to help you manage the difficulty. You can also save your encounter and it has tools for keeping track of encounters as well.

Medieval Fantasy City Generator: A nice tool if you need to map out a city but are having some trouble coming up with it, or you just need something on the fly.

Donjon: A site with all sorts of generators, tables, and other resources for various tabletop rpgs.

Weak Magic Item Generator: A generator for specifically making items that are weaker than a +1 item in 5e. There are a lot of interesting effects included on this generator and it is fun to play with.

Fantasy Name Generators: A one stop shop for any of your naming needs. There are an absurd amount of generators here.

[unwell-friends]

After releasing this to my players in my campaign and watching them run amok, I thought other DMs might like to give their PCs a little chaos to play with, too. As a note: The coin value is adjustable, of course. “Unique” is a feature I use simply to denote items created by myself.

[gamescape3d]

New Concept for elf barracks added to Campaign

[dnd-homebrew5e]

Something silly I saw on Facebook. May as well share it.

[deviantart]

In this artist’s reimagining of the fantasy tale, the Lady of the Lake lurks just beneath the water’s surface with a radiant sword. Could this be Excalibur?

“The Lady of the Lake” by JeffLeeJohnson.

[dungeoninspiration]

[prokopetz]

Miscellaneous D&D physiology headcanons:

Halflings can stuff their cheeks like hamsters. It looks really gross.

Dwarves are immune to alcohol poisoning and can’t actually get drunk; “dwarven ale” is an elaborate and improbably successful practical joke.

Elves have a part of their brain devoted to detecting sarcasm.

Orcs respond to umami/savory flavours the same way that humans respond to sweet ones; the taste of cheese is mildly addictive to them.

Gnomes can smell fear.

[noblecrumpet-dorkvision]

Rogue Week: New Traps

A list of new traps to throw at your party’s rogue (or anyone, really!)

The Nightwhisper Trap (CR 10)

Players encounter a ladder with a trapdoor at the top of it. The trapdoor emerges from the floor in the center of the trap room. This 100 ft. diameter circular room is encircled by a giant ouroboros statue. The height of the snake-statue’s body is about 5 ft. and the ceiling is about 15 feet high. A hissing sound echoes throughout the chamber continuously. The ouroboros statue is encrusted with a line of gemstones all along its sides and in the snake’s eyes.

If the gems are forcibly removed from their locations, the trap door above the ladder shuts and locks from the other side. Then the stone slabs that make up the floor begin to slowly open thanks to hydraulics, revealing a 40 ft. pit waist-deep with hissing acid at the bottom. The pit becomes fully exposed over the course of 5 rounds. Those who fall into the trap take 12d10 acid damage each round. Those wearing heavy armor halve this damage for the first round of exposure.

Players will most likely climb to the top of the ouroboros statue, when they will realize that another hissing noise comes from a nearly invisible gas being pumped in through vents near the ceiling (which began as soon as the trap door to the room was opened). Creatures that breathe in the gas must make a DC 16 WIS saving throw or become affected by its hallucinogenic properties. Creatures that fail the saving throw become affected as if by a Confusion spell, potentially running randomly into the pit of acid below. Creatures may make this save at the start of each of their turns, ending the effect on a successful saving throw. Creatures that resist the confusing gas are immune to its effects for 1d4 rounds.

A hole on top of the tail (near the mouth) of the ouroboros statue reveals that the statue is hollow. A third hissing sound is heard from inside, revealing the hollow statue to be filled with poisonous snakes. Treat the entire length of the statue’s interior like a Swarm of Poisonous Snakes. Each 5-ft. section has its own set of hit points. A wall behind the trap door forces someone entering the statue to travel around the room along its entire length through the snakes to reach the “head,” where a lever can be found that ends and resets the trap. If the lever is pulled, a secret door opens above the player to let them out of the statue, vents open to disperse the confusion gas, the floor slabs begin to close (over 5 rounds), and the trap door over the ladder opens.

Perception:

The hissing noise is coming from multiple origins, the floor, the ceiling, and the statue.

The device trigger can be spotted if the gems are investigated very carefully.

A strange but faint smell in the air might alert players to the gas before they become fully exposed, but only if they are in the chamber for more than 5 rounds.

Countermeasures:

Finding a way to open the trapdoor to the ladder is difficult but not impossible (DEX check with Thieves Tools DC 24). However, if it isn’t done quickly others won’t be able to reach it from across the pit of acid.

A large quantity of water, perhaps from several Create Water spells or a Decanter of Endless Water, will nullify the acid.

There are too many vents to cover to stop the gas but covering one’s mouth with a cloth grants advantage on saves against the gas.

Reaching the reset lever isn’t easy, but somehow breaking the statue at its head or finding and opening the secret door there (DEX check with Thieves Tools DC 18) would allow easier access to the lever that stops the trap.

A Fireball spell cast inside the statue forms itself to fit inside from the force of the blast. This damages half of the statue’s length of snake swarms.

The Dread-Mill (CR 7)

Keep reading

[crossconnectmag]

Atmospheric Apocalyptic Digital Art from Alex Andreyev

Hello, my name is Alex Andreyev. I’m an artist living in Saint - Petersburg. I’ve been drawing, painting and doing graphic design over last 20 years. My last project is an animated film “Koo! Kin-Dza-Dza” (senior concept artist), the winner of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2013 (best animated film). You can buy all my pictures in a high resolution for print on my site - alexandreev.com/

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[diceprophet]

Costs of a Failed Skill Check

Game Master Tip: Failed skill checks must affect and/or advance something. Otherwise, it’s just meaningless, time-wasting, and pace-breaking padding.

Have you ever had a tabletop experience akin to the following exaggerated strawman example?

PC: “I want to look for tracks.” GM: “Roll for Survival/Nature/whatever.” PC: *Fails to meet the DC* GM: “You don’t find anything.” Party: “Alrighty. We go home, then.

QUEST FAILED, everybody goes to sleep in the game world and IRL

My own personal rule of thumb is: a failed skill check doesn’t always outright fail a quest. Instead, these unfortunate events costs the party in-game resources. Resources include, but are not limited to, money, time, hit points, supplies, etc. Essentially, a failure streak results in depleted resources over time, as opposed to abrupt anticlimactic mission failure. If there is no mechanical effect for a mandated skill check other than “for the rollz,” just get on with it and move the players to where/who they need to be/meet.

Please keep in mind that I’m not stating that parties should be allowed to proceed if they keep failing. I’ll leave it up to individual GM preference, but after enough consecutive failures you gotta drop the axe or move on.

Here is an example of each of the three main aforementioned costs, to get the think-tank bubbling. I usually come up with at least two for all applicable skills, perhaps more if the check is likely be invoked multiple times in a game (Perception, Nature, and Survival come to mind the most).

Money

The usually silver-tongued bard failed to charm a guard (Diplomacy) into letting the party into a quarantined part of the city. The watchman instead offers to grant you passage and his silence in exchange for double his current rate.

Time

[To clarify, I am talking about in-game time, not IRL time. You and your players have places to be, after all.]

The ranger follows the wrong set of tracks (Survival) for several hours, and the party is forced to double back in order to find the enemy encampment. When they finally arrive, the orcs had taken the extra time to fortify their defenses and place scouts along the perimeter. The sky has also become noticeably darker, which would give the enemy’s inherent darkvision a keen advantage in the fight to come.

Health

The druid, in an attempt to regain her bearings, focuses too much on the surrounding foliage and fails to notice (Perception) the wandering mother bear escorting her two cubs. True to its matriarchal and overprotective nature, the bear charges forward, teeth and claws bared.

[Optionally, I’d force a hard DC follow-up check for the entire group to avoid taking damage, just to be fair. Details about who gets hurt and how badly, how the conflict is resolved, etc. is entirely up to GM’s discretion and player’s actions. The point of this is to be a quick hazard, not a prolonged encounter. Quickly resolve it and move on with the quest.]

[bchangart]

Using my D&D game as a platform for ideas and quick concept practice ;) this is a forest guardian spirit. And some of the concept sketches.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Refer to all treasure chests as “a mimic…I mean, treasure chest”. Your campaign has no mimics in it.

[notesz-b]

A few previous designs without a tail, except the quadrupeds. Not sure to give them one yet, their balance doesn’t depend on it.

Don’t want to waste those pretty colors.  (;﹏;)

[yourewalkingthroughthewoods]

Our Ranger has a raven who has an Ioun stone that increases her intellegince. 

Our DM: What’s a raven’s favorite drink? “KAWfee”

[spiritofally]

Back in middle school, my friends and I used a very simple coded language for writing secret messages. I saw some posts about needing to hide one’s beliefs from partners/bosses/parents so I wanted to share it with you! These would also be great to incorporate into sigils since they are simple lines and dots.

[somethingdnd]

Write secret messages for your players as puzzles for dungeons

[a-wandering-minstrel]

Nightmare by Marek Madej

[basalt-dnd]

Just a higher CR ooze.