coffeecup-homebrews

[coffeecup-homebrews]

A thing to try: don't make gods for your fantasy TTRPG setting.

Instead, get each player to tell you the god their character follows, then roll a d6 behind the screen.

6: Their god is real, and as powerful as they believe it to be; maybe they even listen to prayers; maybe they even care. Maybe they care more about if your shellfish wear mixed fabrics.

5: It's a real entity, but whose power is exaggerated - like as a river spirit, but they're worshipped thousands of miles away from it for prayers their expertise with rivers leaves them woefully unprepared to answer

4: It's a powerful demon or dragon or monster of some kind which has tricked people into worshipping it - sure it's powerful, but that power is entirely self-serving, it couldn't answer your prayers if it wanted to

3: It's a person who, through real power, political influence or just straight up charisma, has tricked people into worshipping them, or through a series of misunderstandings has been mistaken for a god against their will

2: It was a long-dead person whose legacy has passed into legend - they may once have been a 3, or they may just have been famous in their life and not seen as godly until long after their death

1: Just a wholesale myth with no basis in reality. Maybe your god started off as a cautionary tale a mother made up to stop her children sucking their thumbs and over the retellings the whole "god of war" thing just sort of happened because of the massive scissors, and now the scissors are gone and all that's left is battlefield chants.

And of course, let the players know about this before you roll. Tell them about their odds, but never tell them about their gods.

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PDF available to free members of my Patreon!

[coffeecup-homebrews]

Tymora, goddess of luck, wealth, and trade

"On a merchant voyage, it's not the Wildmother you should pray to to keep away the storms. It's the Lady of Luck. The coin and silks on these boats are hers, and whether they make it to market or not is entirely at her whim. Before a voyage, toss a copper into the sea. Never more, or she'll know you can afford better offerings. And if you're gambling when on the voyage, be it cards or dice, always set a cup of ale aside for her to join the table."

Tymora is a fun one, and I'm a lot happier with this redesign. I wanted to keep that Tyrian Purple color to her clothing, and all the gold and of course, Saffron flowers. She also has a lot more dice incorporated into the design- on her horn jewelry, on her chest piece, and in the pattern on her sash. She also has some draconic features, like the tail spikes, and the dice are labelled in draconic as an aspect of greed.

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Mystra, goddess of magic and wonder

All that the gods held dominion over was theirs to command, and the magic of the World was no exception. Mystra saw this, and as war broke across the world, she knew that should she fall to the blade of Bane Asmodeus as her brother had fallen, so too would the domain of magic be fractured, or worse, owned entirely by the tyrant god.

She knew, too, that she would be susceptible to the corruption that plagued her darker kin. Magic so potent was a covetous resource, and if she turned to darkness it would spell calamity for all beings. She turned then to her lover, young Caethes, the only one who would be clear-sighted enough to heed her well, and asked him to slay her. By this act, magic returned to the World, no longer governed by the divine. All who could sense its gifts could partake of it, and no gifts were forbidden. And so it was that Mystra Ancurya, third-sung into creation, was killed. - "On the Death of the Most Potent", High Priestess Carasta Tenoch of Anatavia, 728 PI

This is how Mystra appears, or, well, appeared in my setting, before she sacrificed herself to return magic to the natural world instead of having a god have control over it. She still has some worshippers even though she's dead, and many of her worshippers consider her to be the one true god, given that magic is the lifeblood of all divine worship. Before her death only the people that she granted power could wield it, and it's hotly debated whether her sacrifice and letting just anyone use magic was a good idea or not and yes. she is wearing Caethes' true form as a bracelet.

[coffeecup-homebrews]

So, Discord has added a feature that lets other people "enhance" or "edit" your images with different AI apps. It looks like this:

Currently, you can't opt out from this at all. But here's few things you can do as a protest.

FOR SERVERS YOU ARE AN ADMIN IN

Go to Roles -> @/everyone roles -> Scroll all the way down to External Apps, and disable it. This won't delete the option, but it will make people receive a private message instead when they use it, protecting your users:

You should also make it a bannable offense to edit other user's images with AI. Here's how I worded it in my server, feel free to copypaste:

Do not modify other people's images with AI under ANY circumstances, such as with the Discord "enhancement" features, amidst others. This is a bannable offense.

COMPLAIN TO DISCORD

There's few ways to go around this. First, you can go to https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/requests/new , select Help and Support -> Feedback/New Feature Request, and write your message, as seen in the screenshot below.

For the message, here's some points you can bring up:

Concerns about harassment (such as people using this feature to bully others)

Concerns about privacy (concerns on how External Apps may break privacy or handle the data in the images, and how it may break some legislations, such as GDPR)

Concerns about how this may impact minors (these features could be used with pictures of irl minors shared in servers, for deeply nefarious purposes)

BE VERY CLEAR about "I will refuse to buy Nitro and will cancel my subscription if this feature remains as it is", since they only care about fucking money

Word them as you'd like, add onto them as you need. They sometimes filter messages that are copypasted templates, so finding ways to word them on your own is helpful.

ADDING: You WILL NEED to reply to the mail you receive afterwards for the message to get sent to an actual human! Otherwise it won't reach anyone

UNSUSCRIBE FROM NITRO

This is what they care about the most. Unsuscribe from Nitro. Tell them why you unsuscribed on the way out. DO NOT GIVE THEM MONEY. They're a company. They take actions for profit. If these actions do not get them profit, they will need to backtrack. Mass-unsuscribing from WOTC's DnD beyond forced them to back down with the OGL, this works.

LEAVE A ONE-STAR REVIEW ON THE APP

This impacts their visibility on the App store. Write why are you leaving the one-star review too.

_

Regardless of your stance on AI, I think we can agree that having no way for users to opt out of these pictures is deeply concerning, specially when Discord is often used to share selfies. It's also a good time to remember internet privacy and safety- Maybe don't post your photos in big open public servers, if you don't want to risk people doing edits or modifications of them with AI (or any other way). Once it's posted, it's out of your control.

Anyways, please reblog for visibility- This is a deeply concerning topic!

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Thank your fucking DMs. They're putting in a lot of work and deserve at least that much.

[coffeecup-homebrews]

Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

[coffeecup-homebrews]

Avandra, goddess of change, travel, fate, and freedom from it

"And as the Dread Lord rose the blade to cast down the rebels that still stood before them, they prayed, not to any of the gods that existed now, but a simple cry for a saviour. As the blade swung down, it was met not with the flesh of mortal but the flesh of the divine, as Avandra had appeared in flame and raised her arm to block the Tyrant's blow. She took in her hands a standard-banner, the icon of the black hand burnt away with the fire of her magnificent wings, and took to battle. And so a new goddess was born. All praise to Avandra war-born, she who turns the tide, layer of the paths." -From Songs of a Winged Traveler, 529 PI

Avandra in Ellowyre is known as chiefly the goddess of freedom, and has domains in war, peace, trickery, light, and life. Her worshippers include travelers, rebels, and those who want to live outside of the laws of civilization. Alongside Ioun and the Raven Queen, she makes up one of the three goddesses of fate, with her role being she who lays the paths ahead. She emphasizes personal choice in her teachings, and even though she sets down the path ahead, she delights in deviations from it. She has little organized clergy, but shrines to her can be found on any major road, offering blessings to travelers.

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D&D 5e supposedly has a GM shortage and idk maybe if the player culture of the game didn't treat GMing as a thankless job and the rules of the game as an issue to be fixed by the GM maybe things would be better. Ah well, who knows. Maybe a couple hundred more "we ruined the GM's campaign on purpose" memes will make people enjoy running the game better.

[coffeecup-homebrews]

If you want to do research into ancient and medieval European cultures my advice to you is to always double check that the websites you’re reading from aren’t run by new age spiritual people who don’t cite their sources or fascists. Especially the fascists. Look out for them. Keep your head on a swivel.

[coffeecup-homebrews]

Tearing through the battleground with a terrifying smile, dancing through the night in blood covered robes, the Path of the Maenad is all about these unnerving contrasts 🩸🍇

You can get hold of screen reader friendly PDFs HERE as a free member however, if you can afford it, please consider becoming a paid member instead. Even joining at Tip Jar level would help me towards my goals of lowering my retail hours and spending more time creating.

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[coffeecup-homebrews]

The Imperial Intrigues party! I love them all and I can't wait to throw them into more Situations

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Updating my Commission layout and pricing! I have plenty of open slots for commissions, and would really appreciate the money over the holidays. DM me here or on discord (@vertiline) if you're interested! If you don't want a commission right now, do consider reblogging so this reaches a wider audience

[coffeecup-homebrews]

I am having a severe flavour problem with the new 5.5e warlocks. And I kinda saw it coming, but I also thought that maybe they’d do something about it before we got here. But, well. Apparently not.

My problem is this: taking up the warlock subclass at level 3 instead of level 1 has turned all warlocks, flavour-wise, into absolute idiots.

“Through occult ceremony, you have formed a pact with a mysterious entity to gain magical powers. The entity is a voice in the shadows—its identity unclear—but its boon to you is concrete: the ability to cast spells.” (PHB 2024)

You have explicitly and purposefully made a deal with something you don’t know the identity of.

Now. You could always play the warlock as having done that, if you wanted to play someone a bit reckless. But. It was an option, not baked into the class. You could also have met your patron any number of ways and decided how to deal with it, going into the pact knowingly and with foreknowledge of the potential consequences. Because you choose your subclass at level 1, your patron and your relationship with them was essentially your first decision as a warlock. So if you were in a pact with a devil, you had the chance to be knowingly in a pact with a devil. It was a choice you might have knowingly made.  

Here, though, your warlock put a phone call out into the void and won’t know for two more levels what exactly picked up on the other side. Which bakes a considerable amount of recklessness and frankly outright stupidity into the class concept.

Weirdly, both sorcerers and even clerics come out of this shift better, of the classes that used to get their subclasses at level 1. Sorcerer, it kind of makes sense, when the magic is in your blood regardless, that it just might take a while for the nature of the magic to become fully apparent. Sorcerers, by the nature of their lore, never had a choice what magic they possessed. It was always luck of the draw and the potential idiocy of their ancestors. And clerics, their subclass is a choice of domain, not patron, so they can still be devoted to their particular god from level 1, and just choose which aspect of them to exemplify at level 3. So clerics, even with the shift of timing, are still making more or less the same choices. Their god is still a conscious choice from the start.

But warlocks are now explicitly stated to be gambling on the nature of their patron for power.

Of course, you can just ignore that. You can say that your warlock fully knows what patron they’ve made a bargain with from the beginning, and it’s only at level 3 that the patron considers them valuable enough to start giving them identifiable, tailored abilities, or some similar justification. Before that, it’s something like a trial period, where they decide if you’re worth keeping on and having abilities that could link back to them. Ignoring the text and telling your own story is still (and always) an option.

I’m just faintly annoyed that they built the idiocy into the text. That the new Pact Magic feature outright states that you were dumb enough to make deals with mysterious voices from the beyond without the first clue who that voice might be.

I mean, warlocks are rather implied to be not the most sensible people from a standing start. But I'd like to have the option of my dumbass having made calculated risks, instead of just gambling blind, you know?

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Moonweaver, Candlebearer, Sehanine in Ellowyre is goddess of the night and the hearth. All lights that glow in the darkest night are her domain, be they the lights of distant stars in the Celestial Heavens, or the lights of a fire tended in the most humble of homes. She is a goddess of protection, of the peace that twilight brings, and the warmth of the night. Her clerics have the power of the domains of twilight, peace, moon, and life.

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Hey there! Though I've been around the dnd tumblr community for a while over at @coffeecup-homebrews, I decided to open an art blog as well! I'm opening commissions because I am a busy grad student and need to make rent. Check out some of my work on my blog, and dm me if you're interested or if you want to see more of my work!