Anyone else watching any of this? I very much love Brennan Lee Mulligan and there's him DMing quite a few cool people, plus a lot of talk between a ton of good DMs
I'm very curious how my player who summarizes each session is going to describe this one. I ran a pretty long, two part fight and am honestly kind of mentally exhausted now.
In my storm king's thunder game they ended up on the moon by taking a frozen cloud castle and pressing the controls to UP and shooting electricity into the orb to enhance it
they fought a boss battle against the dread emperor (the creepy fuck with the kids on chains) on a balcony as the castle screamed up out of the atmosphere into space (keeping it breathable because, cloud castle)
the nice cloud giant that lives in the place made them tea afterwards and told them it would be a few days to repair the orb. She thanked them for ridding them of her unwanted intruder and retired to her depression over her relatively recent dead wife. party decided to blow their resurrect scroll to raise the giant's wife and she told them they could have anything they wanted from her vault out of gratitude - she didn't know they had already completely looted every copper from her vault, but now they felt less bad about.
Here is where I tested: how many warning signs to does it take?
The giantess told them that this moon of Exandria was dangerous and they should stay in the castle until she can fix it. She told them that the giant glowing dome in the distance wasn't worth it, whatever ancient treasures of Aeor that lie within will be defended beyond reason to still be intact, and they saw a giant tornado circling the dome
So they set off across the moonscape, figuring out that in D&D, objects carry a small amount of atmosphere with them, exponentially based on size, and used their folding boat plus a flying carpet to glide along the moonscape at a slow speed
I told them the tornado changed directions for them, and that as it got closer, they could see a huge man floating within, and that the entire tornado was made of worms, not dust
An arcana check later and I told them that the only thing remotely like this they've read about in the Lyceum is the elder evil, Kyus, but that's crazy.
So they vowed to attack the worm tornado
Sorceress contacted her patron and mom, a Djinn, who freaked the fuck out and told them that what was before them is a thing that scares gods, that they should run while they still can. "So we should hold a bunch of lightning bolts before it gets here to hit it all at once"
I told them they passed an ancient dragon skeleton, stripped bare, covered in millions of bite marks.
"Lets keep going"
and this is how my level 9 party fought a CR 27 Elder Evil - they ended up using a minor wish from the aforementioned Djinn to teleport to the dome of energy (not knowing if they could get inside of it!), thankfully they can, and now they've entered a quest area I planned for them at level 14-16, and I will not make it one iota easier. The party doctor determined that half of the party was infected by worms and would soon die and raise as spawns of kyus, so he had to do emergency surgery to deworm them, it wasn't fun. I told them to use their imaginations to determine how unpleasant removing worms from literally everywhere would be.
Statblock for the thing they fought: It KO'd 2 of them in the first round before sorceress got them clear in round 2
Apparently at some point during an 11 hour stream from WotC it was confirmed that three "classic campaign settings" are going to be revisited in some fashion. Plus more adventure anthology books like Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
Man, the 90s got ridiculous with the setting boxed sets. Masque of the Red Death? Red Steel? Council of Wyrms? Birthright? They've got a huge back catalog to choose from.
When I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge:
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
I'm salty we have zero 5th edition books about whats up with the feywild
There's unofficial material on DM's Guild, at least. Lords & Ladies by Ned Turner has 5E conversions for several 4E Archfey. Also the abeil from 3E, for some reason, though the lore given for them is neat and involves using magical tokens in otherwise normal bee hives on the Material Plane to make the hive's bees into spies for the abeil queens.
i bought a bunch of feywild stuff from DMsguild but I'm just upset at how infrequently wizards puts out books, but they are a super tiny team
That's an intentional decision, and a pretty good one, really. One of the reasons TSR went bankrupt back when was that they were cannibalizing their own market. Too many books, made it way to hard for any group of folks to run a game, and ker-fart. Bankruptcy. From everything I've heard they're trying to keep the releases at a reasonable level.
The factions were a big part of Adventurers League. Completing adventures and missions for your org earned you renown points and gave access to faction specific magic items for cheap and they offered other services. Adventurers League essentially did away with them in the Great Rules Schism of Season 8 but if you can find the Season 7 Adventurers League Player Pack you'll see how they used to function and learn a bit more about them.
I'm salty we have zero 5th edition books about whats up with the feywild
There's unofficial material on DM's Guild, at least. Lords & Ladies by Ned Turner has 5E conversions for several 4E Archfey. Also the abeil from 3E, for some reason, though the lore given for them is neat and involves using magical tokens in otherwise normal bee hives on the Material Plane to make the hive's bees into spies for the abeil queens.
I'm quoting myself here because I just did some thinking through of the world building implications of a folk belief in spy bees.
Perhaps a paranoid, corrupt duke orders all the apiaries shut down? Maybe people catch bees and keep them in little containers whenever they go to confront someone, threatening to release the bees (who will surely spread word of what they have witnessed). Maybe beekeepers are consulted to divine what the bees have witnessed during their flights.
Maybe towns build wicker men to put prisoners in and release bees into them.
i bought a bunch of feywild stuff from DMsguild but I'm just upset at how infrequently wizards puts out books, but they are a super tiny team
That's an intentional decision, and a pretty good one, really. One of the reasons TSR went bankrupt back when was that they were cannibalizing their own market. Too many books, made it way to hard for any group of folks to run a game, and ker-fart. Bankruptcy. From everything I've heard they're trying to keep the releases at a reasonable level.
If they did Spelljammer I'd prefer a version that includes as much content as possible inspired by 4E's The Plane Above: Secrets of the Astral Sea, which was 4E's take on fantasy outer space. Make travel between Material Plane worlds and the scattered motes of the Astral Plane possible. I'm curious which of the weirder elements of Spelljammer would make it in a 5E update and what would get cut (myriad aliens that are like established D&D creatures but not, blatantly unrealistic physics about air envelopes surrounding people in space, astro dinosaurs, the Phlogiston, crystal spheres with embedded "stars" and living constellations, Guyver and Gamera knock-offs, etc).
Planescape is a thorny subject to me in that I'd like more planar info but don't like the Great Wheel as the one true cosmology of all D&D worlds (plus apparently now the Magic: The Gathering planes) and don't care for Sigil as the greatest planar metropolis. I'd prefer more competition and direct contact between inhabitants of Dis in the Hells, the City of Brass in the Plane of Fire, the other cities of geniekind, Hestavar in the Astral Sea, Zelatar in the Abyss, etc, rather than Sigil being the neutral hub city of the multiverse. Plus Ravnica already has the "giant city of warring factions" niche covered.
Dark Sun would force WotC to finally make up their minds about how to handle psionics. Plus they might have to figure out what warlock patrons exist on Athas if they go the 4E route of keeping that class in while cutting out clerics. A very large selection of Athasian monsters would be a must, too, unless they want to do a lot of re-skinning.
i bought a bunch of feywild stuff from DMsguild but I'm just upset at how infrequently wizards puts out books, but they are a super tiny team
I think a part of the problem is that Dragon+ is a very poor replacement for the magazines. DMs Guild is probably the actual intended replacement for the old magazines in terms of player and DM content, but barring releases that current and former official D&D team members and contributors have had a hand in the content on DMsGuild feels less legitimate. Back in the day only a handful of submissions were approved, and those that made it in were subject to editing before being presented alongside cool artwork and professional graphic design in an official context. As it is now there's lots of content of varying quality in terms of writing, mechanics, and visual presentation.
For example, Ned Turner's Lords & Ladies has an incredibly generic yet decent bit of cover artwork of a fairy princess that would look equally at home on a short storybook for young children (I guess that could be the point, but it doesn't look like the cover to a D&D product and the character isn't recognizable as anyone detailed within). There's no interior art pieces (no art is better than bad art, at least), the concepts are interesting and tries in places to fit older concepts into established 5E lore (bringing back a lot of 4E archfey, including my somewhat obscure fave the Sovereign Elk, as well as re-casting the pre-4E eladrin as sidhe that are closer to the "primal elves" described in 5E's Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes), but I can't speak to the quality of the mechanical design because I'm not really an expert in evaluating such things (although the Sovereign Elk's "Titanic Size" trait, which specifies "Any attack made against Sovereign Elk from below 20 feet deals half damage", raises an eyebrow).
Much the same could also be said about Blood War Compendium 1: Generals of the Abyss (which I just noticed is also by Ned Turner) save for the fact that the cover is much better and clearly features one of the demon lords detailed in the book. A neat detail about this one is that it includes suggestions for integrating its content into Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus.
Sean McGovern's Emirikol's Guide to Devils is one my favorite DMsGuild product so far. At nearly 250 pages it is a massive tome, and it's filled with lore that has been gleaned from throughout D&D history and amalgamated into one body that combines Planescape's Ancient Baatorians with 3E's Pact Primeval with 4E's origin for Asmodeus and devils (this unfortunately means it conflicts quite a bit with official 5E lore, but the book came out before even Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes). Its cover is superior to those of Ned Turner's previously mentioned publications, but the interior art pieces are more of a mixed bag (the opening of the book credits every piece in the book to its artist, btw). None are as good as the cover, and a few are kinda bad. The writing quality isn't that great in some places, unfortunately ("The realm we know today as the Nine Hells is also known as Baator. Before the devils arrived, creatures known as the baatorians dominated the plane They had a hierarchy much like modern devils do."). The author is primarily concerned with getting the ideas across rather than evocatively describing them. However, if you want a centralized source of information about devils and named dukes and archdukes that incorporates lore from all pre-5E editions there is no better resource. Want to know how long an ice devil has to serve before being promoted to a pit fiend? Want to know the various Ministries, like the Ministry of Mortal Relations, and who runs which? Want to know who is in Archduke Mammon's court? Want to know what alcohol devils drink? Want to learn about devils from editions gone by like dogai, hellchain weavers, indwelling devils, kalabons, hellforged devils, and xerfilstyx? Want to learn about individual devils who were only ever mentioned in one section of one book in the entirety of D&D history (such as Mammon's daughter Baelzra, who only existed for a sample combat encounter in Avernus in 4E's The Plane Above)? This is the ultimate source. It could definitely be refined and I'd expect better writing quality out of an official book, but as a collection of Infernal lore drawing from official sources (the most useful of which are noted in the opening pages) it is unparalleled.
Psionics seems well defined on the monster side in terms of game mechanics. The Innate Spellcasting (Psionics) trait gives monsters spells but specifies they don't require any components. In contrast, both of the spells featured in that article require verbal components. Plus there are already many spells that deal psychic damage.
Maybe Tasha's includes subclasses that let certain spells be cast "psionically" (that is, without components). Though that begs the question of what the difference is in terms of flavor between a Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer casting Mind Sliver without components via Subtle Spell and another subclass "psionically" casting Mind Sliver without components.
From a flavor standpoint I also find it kinda weird they made Mind Whip one of Tasha's aka Iggwilv's signature spells, considering that her two big defining traits are "raised by Baba Yaga" and "wrote the book on demons". Tasha's Hideous Laughter is more on-brand, but I guess she can experiment with other stuff.
In my current Monday night game my samurai got a sword that has that magic property to damage non-magical weapons when the person using them against me rolls a 1. Due to the damaged weapon it causes them to have disadvantage until it is repaired.
I got to use it for the first time last night. A bugbear was attacking with a mace and his poor attack left him with just a club as the mace head fell to the floor. The bugbear didn't even last until his next turn so really the ability didn't have any effect on the combat what so ever; but it felt completely bad ass!
Think I finally decided on a final boss for my Underdark campaign:
Shoth-Gorag, BBEG of the 4E Chaos Scar series and a Far Realm entity. I'm gonna have the kuo-toa be its followers, and since the kuo-toa have a reputation for making up fake gods the party will brush them off until this dude shows up (I'll probably need to make-up a kuo-toan name for this guy, too; "Shoth-Gorag" doesn't sound like a name the kuo-toa would invent).
In my current Monday night game my samurai got a sword that has that magic property to damage non-magical weapons when the person using them against me rolls a 1. Due to the damaged weapon it causes them to have disadvantage until it is repaired.
I got to use it for the first time last night. A bugbear was attacking with a mace and his poor attack left him with just a club as the mace head fell to the floor. The bugbear didn't even last until his next turn so really the ability didn't have any effect on the combat what so ever; but it felt completely bad ass!
Posts
Anyone else watching any of this? I very much love Brennan Lee Mulligan and there's him DMing quite a few cool people, plus a lot of talk between a ton of good DMs
... you realize this sounds extremely passive aggressive, right?
Oh fuck, I just did, and I am sorry! I didn't mean to, I was attempting to do a silly bit where I overexplain the joke! That's on me, sorry
they fought a boss battle against the dread emperor (the creepy fuck with the kids on chains) on a balcony as the castle screamed up out of the atmosphere into space (keeping it breathable because, cloud castle)
the nice cloud giant that lives in the place made them tea afterwards and told them it would be a few days to repair the orb. She thanked them for ridding them of her unwanted intruder and retired to her depression over her relatively recent dead wife. party decided to blow their resurrect scroll to raise the giant's wife and she told them they could have anything they wanted from her vault out of gratitude - she didn't know they had already completely looted every copper from her vault, but now they felt less bad about.
Here is where I tested: how many warning signs to does it take?
The giantess told them that this moon of Exandria was dangerous and they should stay in the castle until she can fix it. She told them that the giant glowing dome in the distance wasn't worth it, whatever ancient treasures of Aeor that lie within will be defended beyond reason to still be intact, and they saw a giant tornado circling the dome
So they set off across the moonscape, figuring out that in D&D, objects carry a small amount of atmosphere with them, exponentially based on size, and used their folding boat plus a flying carpet to glide along the moonscape at a slow speed
I told them the tornado changed directions for them, and that as it got closer, they could see a huge man floating within, and that the entire tornado was made of worms, not dust
An arcana check later and I told them that the only thing remotely like this they've read about in the Lyceum is the elder evil, Kyus, but that's crazy.
So they vowed to attack the worm tornado
Sorceress contacted her patron and mom, a Djinn, who freaked the fuck out and told them that what was before them is a thing that scares gods, that they should run while they still can. "So we should hold a bunch of lightning bolts before it gets here to hit it all at once"
I told them they passed an ancient dragon skeleton, stripped bare, covered in millions of bite marks.
"Lets keep going"
and this is how my level 9 party fought a CR 27 Elder Evil - they ended up using a minor wish from the aforementioned Djinn to teleport to the dome of energy (not knowing if they could get inside of it!), thankfully they can, and now they've entered a quest area I planned for them at level 14-16, and I will not make it one iota easier. The party doctor determined that half of the party was infected by worms and would soon die and raise as spawns of kyus, so he had to do emergency surgery to deworm them, it wasn't fun. I told them to use their imaginations to determine how unpleasant removing worms from literally everywhere would be.
Statblock for the thing they fought: It KO'd 2 of them in the first round before sorceress got them clear in round 2
Fuck yeah, gimme dat Hollow World
forgotten realms: 3rd edition
greyhawk
and the one everyone wants
forgotten realms
Greyhawk
Dragonlance
Dark Sun
Planescape (build off of Avernus?)
Dragonlance (A boy can dream, can't he?)
Fuuuucking lol. Having just read about Castle Greyhawk's origination and history...
Let's not set our hopes too high, eh?
but really
sigil
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
There's unofficial material on DM's Guild, at least. Lords & Ladies by Ned Turner has 5E conversions for several 4E Archfey. Also the abeil from 3E, for some reason, though the lore given for them is neat and involves using magical tokens in otherwise normal bee hives on the Material Plane to make the hive's bees into spies for the abeil queens.
That's an intentional decision, and a pretty good one, really. One of the reasons TSR went bankrupt back when was that they were cannibalizing their own market. Too many books, made it way to hard for any group of folks to run a game, and ker-fart. Bankruptcy. From everything I've heard they're trying to keep the releases at a reasonable level.
MCDM is pretty much making Birthright But Better so no need for that.
I'm quoting myself here because I just did some thinking through of the world building implications of a folk belief in spy bees.
Perhaps a paranoid, corrupt duke orders all the apiaries shut down? Maybe people catch bees and keep them in little containers whenever they go to confront someone, threatening to release the bees (who will surely spread word of what they have witnessed). Maybe beekeepers are consulted to divine what the bees have witnessed during their flights.
Maybe towns build wicker men to put prisoners in and release bees into them.
And more power to them!
Planescape is a thorny subject to me in that I'd like more planar info but don't like the Great Wheel as the one true cosmology of all D&D worlds (plus apparently now the Magic: The Gathering planes) and don't care for Sigil as the greatest planar metropolis. I'd prefer more competition and direct contact between inhabitants of Dis in the Hells, the City of Brass in the Plane of Fire, the other cities of geniekind, Hestavar in the Astral Sea, Zelatar in the Abyss, etc, rather than Sigil being the neutral hub city of the multiverse. Plus Ravnica already has the "giant city of warring factions" niche covered.
Dark Sun would force WotC to finally make up their minds about how to handle psionics. Plus they might have to figure out what warlock patrons exist on Athas if they go the 4E route of keeping that class in while cutting out clerics. A very large selection of Athasian monsters would be a must, too, unless they want to do a lot of re-skinning.
I think a part of the problem is that Dragon+ is a very poor replacement for the magazines. DMs Guild is probably the actual intended replacement for the old magazines in terms of player and DM content, but barring releases that current and former official D&D team members and contributors have had a hand in the content on DMsGuild feels less legitimate. Back in the day only a handful of submissions were approved, and those that made it in were subject to editing before being presented alongside cool artwork and professional graphic design in an official context. As it is now there's lots of content of varying quality in terms of writing, mechanics, and visual presentation.
For example, Ned Turner's Lords & Ladies has an incredibly generic yet decent bit of cover artwork of a fairy princess that would look equally at home on a short storybook for young children (I guess that could be the point, but it doesn't look like the cover to a D&D product and the character isn't recognizable as anyone detailed within). There's no interior art pieces (no art is better than bad art, at least), the concepts are interesting and tries in places to fit older concepts into established 5E lore (bringing back a lot of 4E archfey, including my somewhat obscure fave the Sovereign Elk, as well as re-casting the pre-4E eladrin as sidhe that are closer to the "primal elves" described in 5E's Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes), but I can't speak to the quality of the mechanical design because I'm not really an expert in evaluating such things (although the Sovereign Elk's "Titanic Size" trait, which specifies "Any attack made against Sovereign Elk from below 20 feet deals half damage", raises an eyebrow).
Much the same could also be said about Blood War Compendium 1: Generals of the Abyss (which I just noticed is also by Ned Turner) save for the fact that the cover is much better and clearly features one of the demon lords detailed in the book. A neat detail about this one is that it includes suggestions for integrating its content into Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus.
Sean McGovern's Emirikol's Guide to Devils is one my favorite DMsGuild product so far. At nearly 250 pages it is a massive tome, and it's filled with lore that has been gleaned from throughout D&D history and amalgamated into one body that combines Planescape's Ancient Baatorians with 3E's Pact Primeval with 4E's origin for Asmodeus and devils (this unfortunately means it conflicts quite a bit with official 5E lore, but the book came out before even Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes). Its cover is superior to those of Ned Turner's previously mentioned publications, but the interior art pieces are more of a mixed bag (the opening of the book credits every piece in the book to its artist, btw). None are as good as the cover, and a few are kinda bad. The writing quality isn't that great in some places, unfortunately ("The realm we know today as the Nine Hells is also known as Baator. Before the devils arrived, creatures known as the baatorians dominated the plane They had a hierarchy much like modern devils do."). The author is primarily concerned with getting the ideas across rather than evocatively describing them. However, if you want a centralized source of information about devils and named dukes and archdukes that incorporates lore from all pre-5E editions there is no better resource. Want to know how long an ice devil has to serve before being promoted to a pit fiend? Want to know the various Ministries, like the Ministry of Mortal Relations, and who runs which? Want to know who is in Archduke Mammon's court? Want to know what alcohol devils drink? Want to learn about devils from editions gone by like dogai, hellchain weavers, indwelling devils, kalabons, hellforged devils, and xerfilstyx? Want to learn about individual devils who were only ever mentioned in one section of one book in the entirety of D&D history (such as Mammon's daughter Baelzra, who only existed for a sample combat encounter in Avernus in 4E's The Plane Above)? This is the ultimate source. It could definitely be refined and I'd expect better writing quality out of an official book, but as a collection of Infernal lore drawing from official sources (the most useful of which are noted in the opening pages) it is unparalleled.
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2020/09/dd-celebration-2020-reveals-psionics-are-in-tashas-cauldron-of-everything.html
Psionics seems well defined on the monster side in terms of game mechanics. The Innate Spellcasting (Psionics) trait gives monsters spells but specifies they don't require any components. In contrast, both of the spells featured in that article require verbal components. Plus there are already many spells that deal psychic damage.
Maybe Tasha's includes subclasses that let certain spells be cast "psionically" (that is, without components). Though that begs the question of what the difference is in terms of flavor between a Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer casting Mind Sliver without components via Subtle Spell and another subclass "psionically" casting Mind Sliver without components.
From a flavor standpoint I also find it kinda weird they made Mind Whip one of Tasha's aka Iggwilv's signature spells, considering that her two big defining traits are "raised by Baba Yaga" and "wrote the book on demons". Tasha's Hideous Laughter is more on-brand, but I guess she can experiment with other stuff.
Or it’s a new class
I got to use it for the first time last night. A bugbear was attacking with a mace and his poor attack left him with just a club as the mace head fell to the floor. The bugbear didn't even last until his next turn so really the ability didn't have any effect on the combat what so ever; but it felt completely bad ass!
Comics, Games, Booze
Shoth-Gorag, BBEG of the 4E Chaos Scar series and a Far Realm entity. I'm gonna have the kuo-toa be its followers, and since the kuo-toa have a reputation for making up fake gods the party will brush them off until this dude shows up (I'll probably need to make-up a kuo-toan name for this guy, too; "Shoth-Gorag" doesn't sound like a name the kuo-toa would invent).
That's rad and I might steal it. FYI.