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Adventure: Grasping for Answers

Throughout their early adventures the party come into conflict with the agents of the mysterious mage known only as "The Ravelling Hand", a villain of uncertain identity who seems to have lots of schemes and no qualms using violence, trickery, and unexpected magic to get what they want.

Adventure Hooks:

The party first become entangled with the hand's minions when they're asked by an innocuous travelling merchant to deliver a small wrapped parcel to the wizard living one town over. The wizard isn't open to receiving guests, and after sneaking or charming their way in, the party will find out why: her apprentice has been kidnapped, the parcel contains both of the boy's index fingers as well as a note explaining that she can have the rest of him back in exchange for several dangerous texts in her collection, delivered by the party to the same intermediary who hired them. A brawl is likely to ensue as the wizard suspects the party is in on the blackmail, but if they can talk her down maybe they can figure out a way to work together to get the boy back before any more harm comes to him.

Most thieves know better than to try and rob a magic item shop, but most thieves aren't armed with dispel magic infused salt grenades to neutralize the shop's ubiquitous defences. A rash of these attacks across the duchy has shopkeepers worried, and one hires the party to stake out their store for the night when they suspect someone is casing it. Do the party trail the robbers back to their hideout, or interrupt them mid heist only for combat to delay them long enough for those indiscriminate defences to start turning back on?

Spoiler Alert: The mage is in fact an arcanely gifted lesser kraken by the name of Dlexx who seeks to avail itself of all the magical knowledge amassed on land. Sure the deep has its own mysteries but there's a thriving trade in spellscrolls and arcane tomes that don't make it below the waves. Using an old lighthouse as a disguise for its massive form while on land, it uses telepathy and sendings to direct its minions without ever revealing its true nature. Imagine the party's surprise when they roll up to the villain's lair expecting to bully some crusty nerd with a ratty beard and instead the lair sprouts tentacles that drag them into the crashing surf.

Challenges & Consequences

Finding Dlexx is an adventure in and of itself. When questioned, most of the mage's minions admit to never having met their employer, and those high ranking enough to have been summoned to a place called "saltbite tower" in dreams only to later have their memories muddled. Careful interrogation and study of local maps will have the party realize that the tower is infact an abandoned lighthouse, which will narrow their search as they comb the costline for their enemy's lair.

Actually defeating the Ravelling Hand might prove too much for early level adventurers, as in addition to being a powerful mage the kraken is literally in its element, able to breathe and move while the heroes flounder. Dlexx will toy with them, throwing unconscious foes out of the water the way a fisherman throws back a catch that is too small. When the battle is over and it's proved it's point the kraken will collapse the tower and leave into the wide ocean, telepathically taunting them with their inability to follow.

Though the Ravelling Hand will not resurface for some time, the destruction of the tower and Dlexx's retreat into the deep is partially a bluff. The kraken chose that particular lighthouse because it was a short distance away from the coral reef into which it scribed its arcane learning the way a wizard records spells in a book, coiling arms etching formulae into hundreds of yards of living stone. Dlexx must periodically return to the reef to add spells to it, and sightings by locals (or the occasional fish manifesting with magical talent) might clue the party into the reef's existence.

A pair of merfolk siblings named Crashing-Tide and Arcing-Mirror serve the Ravelling Hand as apprentices and scribes, having promised seven years of utmost loyalty in exchange for the chance to bring the arcane knowledge of the surface back to their community. They tend to the reef, and allow the Kraken to borrow their eyes from afar so that it might study the spells scribed there. Several years into their pledge, Crash (the sister) has come to idolize Dlexx and the power it wields above and below the waves, wishing that the whole of their shoal to come into its service. Mirror (the brother) is skeptical, well aware of the kraken's manipulations and distantly suspicious of the conflict that it invokes. Perhaps if the party can intercede with these two they can learn more about their enemy's plans, though doing so will take some careful diplomacy.

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"DM Facing" is actually a great way to refer to it, and exactly describes a problem that I've run into with one of my newer groups of players.

They're not picking up the game, we're two months in and the idea of rolling a die and adding a bonus listed on their sheet hasn't clicked yet. I feel like I have to walk them through and hold their hand every time they make a skill roll. Combat is even slower because despite several reminders they haven't internalized the idea of "standard, move, bonus, reaction" as a limit on what they can do/how they are supposed to interact in combat. I even printed them little cards and they thoroughly ignore.

I feel like I've failed as a teacher, and what's worse I don't even know how! My other group is snappy as heck and picked things up incredibly quickly, and a good portion of them are also first time d&d players. I don't know what changed in the intervening time that's left me playing 90% of the game for them.

You do of course understand that the reason most people prefer DND 5E is that it's one of the easiest systems to learn? Like I'm sorry it's all well and good to 'break up the cultural monopoly' but I have Dyscalculia and DND is seemingly the only tabletop system that doesn't consistently ask me to do a hefty amount of complex math. I've never given WOTC a penny but the reason I've primarily played 5E over basically everything else is it's the only system that was extremely easy to learn and completely self explanatory. (Also - I like elves and magic and shit.) You roll one dice to see if you can do a thing, you add whatever your plus or minus is, and then roll damage where appropriate. Easy. Meanwhile seemingly everything else is like "Okay so you roll two dice except sometimes it's four and then you take this stat and you divide it by that dice roll and then you add a number equivalent to the day of the week unless it's a leap year then you times that by three and if you get a prime number you can lift that coffee cup." Like have you ever heard of Villains and Vigilantes, for instance? It's fucking insane.Like I'm not saying I don't get why you wanna make this point? But I feel like I have to point out that most people who make indie TTRPG's don't seem to focus on accessibility when designing their systems and they are EXTREMELY intimidating for new players. And often, what people who are big into TTRPG's do is assume that because THEY fully understand this system and how it works, new players will too just as easily. The amount of times I've spoken to a GM, said "This sounds a bit complicated", and they've gone "No no no it's easy" and then described the most complicated set of rules I've ever heard is ridiculous.

Okay it sounds you’ve had a very narrow range of experiences with RPGs then because D&D 5e is on the higher end of complexity when it comes to RPGs and most indie RPGs are actually a lot less complex than D&D 5e. Like, Villains & Vigilantes is not the median when it comes to RPG complexity. There are systems even lighter than D&D out there. :)

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Dungeon: Grandfather's Hungering Maw

Said to have been carved by an exiled dwarven king after his name and ignominious deeds were stricken from the records of his clan, this brooding edifice contains a darkness far deeper than any normal glacial cave.

The dungeon's name comes from a settlement in the foothills, with a mostly human population ignorant of the monument's dwarven origins. In their myths the face is infact that of a great giant, tricked by the folkhero founder of their village into staying very, very still while he was served a great feast, growing so spoiled and indolent that he was eventually buried by the mountain snow and froze solid. A recent series of avalanches that've buried paths and even destroyed homesteads have put it into people's heads that grandfather might be waking up.

Adventure Hooks:

A merchant caravan the party is riding along with takes a detour up into the highlands, following rumours of a village that's paying a premium for foodstuffs of late. Upon arrival they're strongarmed out of their cargo by a crowd of armed villagers, who heap the provisions on an overburned yak cart set to depart up the mountain on the next day. Fear of the giant has made some of the villagers turn into a panicked mob, emptying the granaries and raiding their neighbour's larders to supply ever larger and hastier "tribute" runs up to the mountain's mouth. Food is growing scarce in the village, and those with the foresight to worry about winter provisions dare not speak up: An old woman was accidentally killed trying to fend off the toughs uprooting her garden, and her still warm body was piled into the yak cart next to her unripe rutabagas.

Seeking the power of her infamous ancestor, a disfavoured daughter of the dwarven throne has ventured to the Maw with a group of sellswords in tow in the hopes of discovering the means of making herself queen. Down into the mountain's gullet they've found a great labyrinth, hewn over centuries by the still shuffling corpse of the nameless king, unable to fully rest until he has constructed a tomb worthy of his hubris. The would be ruler and her entourage are eating well thanks to the unsuspecting villagers' food deliveries, and have a few agents in town helping the process along while they continue their delve.

There's more than a stone worn skeleton and a few fortune hunters inhabiting the depths. A millennia ago Ahlkenahl the Vanquisher was a feared demon of war, thought invincible before the dwarven king forged a ring with the fiend's true name inscribed upon it and forced the Vanquisher to pledge an oath of eternal servitude. Driven into exile along with his mortal captor, Ahlkenahl has resentfully laboured alongside the king as he descended into witless undeath, even centuries after the ring was lost somewhere in the tomb along with the chipped fingerbone it rested on. The demon's occasional demolition filled bouts of rage cause the avalanches on the mountain's exterior, and they've only grown more frequent as he's attempted to stop the Heir and her underlings from finding the ring.

It's a three way race between the players, the dwarven heir, and the fiend to see who can find the ring first, having to not only battle eachother, but subterranean monsters, collapsing tunnels, and freezing glacier caverns along the way. Of course Ahlkenahl doesn't play fair, as the fiend can revive any body that finds its way into the Hungering Maw (such as dead villagers loaded on the Yak cart or slain sellswords) into undead minions, growing in strength as the situation becomes more desperate. The fiend can even send the undead down into the valley to do his bidding, chasing after whichever group managed to get the ring first or even go on a murder-filled supply run to bring back more bodies.

Simply getting the ring isn't enough to control Ahlhenahl, as the war-demon's true name is written in an infernal script that must be researched before it can be understood and spoken aloud. This gives the party a chance to catch up if the heir makes it out of the labyrinth with the prize and vice versa. It likewise gives Ahlkenahl's undead minions time to become a real threat both in number and as he deliberately creates more fearsome versions.

The Vanquisher can freely communicate with anyone holding the ring, an ability originally intended to allow the exiled king to command his bound demon in the field which now allows Ahlkenahl to whisper temptation into the ear of whoever holds it. Think of what he could do for them if they let him out of the labyrinth, the enemies he could slay, the kingdom he could carve on their behalf. Sure it would mean unleashing a walking massacre on the landscape but what's a little carnage between pactmates?

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While I'd otherwise agree with you that a lot of folks are trying to run games in d&d that would be better served by different systems, I don't see hombrew as a negative symptom in this regard. Homebrew / kitbashing is a fundimental part of the d&d play culture, a part of the same type of play that leads folks to have fun constructing niche character builds.

Then again, I think this is one of the differences between people like me who genuinely like 5e (not just in spite of, but because of its flaws), and a wider audience of people who got into roleplaying and only settled on dnd because it was popular. There's people who genuinely enjoy and have opinions about cocacola, and then there's the people who drink it because it's the default softdrink. One side's a matter of taste, the other a matter of marketing.

Something ive noticed about a lot of people who play dnd (myself included) is that… they arent really playing dnd.

I don’t mean that in the - they’ve homebrewed the system to the point where they are basically playing a completely different game. i mean it in the way that dnd is less of a game and more of a tool or frame work to tell improve stories with friends. Thats why so many tables have a significant amount of homebrew rules or play it loose with the rules - because dnd is secondary to the act of telling a story.

Unfortunately, dnd wasn’t built for such a narratively focused sandbox. It was built around dungeons and adventuring and violence in general - an aspect that is only a fraction of many stories that dnd is used to tell.

I think that is why so many people are resistant from trying other ttrpg systems that may give them a better player experience. They dont play dnd to play dnd but they dont even realize that. The game is secondary so why does it matter what game they play? Everyone at their table is already versed in dnd so they can make it work as a framework even if its trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

This is something ive been thinking about a lot while making my ttrpg Tales from the Aether as I am inspecting my own view and experience with dnd and what i enjoy about it versus what could be done better. Why do me and my friends play dnd? To hang out and tell stories. Dnd happens to be the system i knew at the time we started and thus it is the one we used. But there is nothing particular about dnd that supports this goal while there are many things that hold us back - such as characters archetypes and classes being so ridged and having practically zero guidance for running the game outside of combat or adventuring. This is where homebrew comes in.

Ironically thats the entire premise of Tales from the Aether. I started making it years ago with the idea that this system is specifically a framework for people to tell improve stories with friends. That is the whole point. All of the mechanics revolve around giving players the tools to do what they want while the rules act more as a form of in universe world building (like a hard magic system) than actual rules.

The reason why so many people who play dnd are hesitant or straight up refuse to try out other ttrpgs is because the game is secondary. Its a tool. Its a framework that they can build off of to create the experience that they want. Its familiar so they know how to bend it, what parts to chip off or expand, to give them what they want. A new ttrpg, even if its one that gives them everything they want in a ttrpg, is unfamiliar and thus not worth investing in when they already have something that works well enough.

Idk i may be way off base here but from my own experience and from watching live plays and reading people’s takes on dnd and playing the game… thats kinda the conclusion ive come to.

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Credit to @quiddie for all the little manipulations and twists of the knife in tonight's narration, PERFECT SPIDERQUEEN VIBES.

Seriously " Babygirl, I'll know if you pull your punches, and if you do, I'm going to make it SO much worse" are perhaps the most Lolth words ever spoken.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon: A Bleak Picture

Unsure whether they've been trapped inside a painting or been cast back in time, the party must venture through the desolate ruins of a once warm and familiar place to rescue a number of innocents that've gone missing after being abducted by some shadowy force.

Adventure Hooks:

The party arrive in the town of Valasren on innocuous business, following the rumors of a ruin, attending a nearby shrine, or visiting some old friends. When they arrive they're given an unexpectedly amiable welcome by lord Lucas Kevral, who's heard of their earlier exploits and wants to cultivate a good relationship with such aspiring heroes. While taking him up on an invitation to dine at his castle, the party spy a gloomy painting depicting Valasren in ruins. Lord Kevral explains that it was painted to commemorate the near destruction of the town some generations ago, when one of his ancestors left the settlement defenceless to go off seeking glory in war. His grandmother commissioned the painting from one of the survivors, and hung it in a place of honour so she nor any of her descendants would forget their duty to defend the people.

As the party pursue their mission around Valasren they'll begin to notice a number of disappearances that only seems to climb as time ticks on. Rumors begin to circulate about something moving in the night, stalking people, creeping into their homes when they're asleep, leaving only open doors and empty beds come daylight. These rumours become all too real when the party awake one morning to find one of their number missing, taken without a whisper from where they slept. A scattering of untrustworthy witnesses say they saw an unnatural figure carrying a sack up the hill towards the Lord's castle, giving them at least a ghost of a trail.

Following the trail back to the palace eventually leads the party to the painting, an inexplicable cold draft intermittently drifting from its now permeable surface.

Background: The painter who witnessed the destruction of Valasren was a true master, and was years later able to immortalize the hopelessness they felt in that moment through their skill with the brush. There is power in such emotional resonance, and transformed the painting into an overlap with the shadowfell, where the town's sorrow had likewise been reflected. Not quite a portal, the painting never did much harm but making the already drafty castle hall a little more cold and unwelcoming at night, at least until recent days.

Drawn by the warmth of life and merriment on the air, A Snatcher has discovered the painting and forced its way through, one by one dragging inhabitants of Valasren into the upside down for an unknown purpose.

Challenges & Complications:

Once the party figure out there's something up with the painting, cut to the abducted player waking up in the ruined shadow-town. There's no corresponding painting anywhere to be seen, and because they were taken while they were asleep they're likely a bit exhausted and missing most of their gear. They'll have to be quiet and clever to escape the nightmare things and lingering spirits that dwell within Valasren's shadow, but doing so may give them vital clues about what's really going on. Keep the tension on until the isolated hero is backed into a corner, then have the rest of their friends arrive.

It's a grim irony that before war came to Valasren, the painter was working on capturing the beauty and peace of their home town on canvas, only for that work to be destroyed in the town's raising. Thinking it lost forever, the painter added it in as a detail nearby the burnt out remains of their workshop as a meditation on the happiness thought taken from them. Like many things lost to the mortal world, an echo of the painting has come to reside in the shadowfell, and acts as the exit portal back into the land of light. Finding it though is a problem, the snatcher has removed it from it's resting place and given it over to the terrible entity lairing in the castle. Where they've put it, who can say?

Numerous townsfolk have been pulled into the shadowfell and are scattered about the echo of a place they thought they knew. Lost, affraid, and isolated, many of them have run for cover or have started to sink into the spirit siphoning torpor that afflicts all to dwell too long in shadow.

Extra special thanks to @dm-tuz , who's monsters are ALWAYS an inspiration.

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i think you had a good analysis on the grimlocks & how to fix them overall, but i disagree that taking an "ancient aliens" route is a good way to fix them. i know it likely wasnt your intent, but all the ancient aliens stuff is also based in racist ideals of which societies were "advanced" enough to make certain things, and are also often quite antisemitic. sprinkling some stuff from that into the grimlocks gives it a good chance of just becoming racist in a different way

Friend I am all too familiar with the conspiracy theory/quack archaeology headspace so when I touch on that iconography I do so with deliberate intent.

The fundamental context of the ancient alien theory is "These buildings are too impressive for nonwhite savage people to build, they must've been constructed through advanced technology handed down by a white atlantian/interdimensional/alien civilization from whom the white explorer claims decent."

I'm a big fan of playing with problematic fiction tropes (especially in the pulp genre) by swapping perspectives around to the people the author doesn't expect you to sympathize with, and in the case of the ancient aliens setup it's something along the lines of "Man it sucks that this asshole with lazerbeams showed up, enslaved us, fundamentally altered what we were and forced generations of our people to labour to death building him a palace. We should unionize and kill that guy"

I was specifically inspired by the brilliant Innsmouth Legacy novel series which reinterprets Lovecraft from the perspective of the people his fiction acted as a veil for his (and the entire pulp genre he was a pillar of) prejudice.

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Hi! I’m the asker who sent the thing about grimlocks. I wanted to thank you for answering my ask, since not only have you helped make grimlocks more interesting in my mind to use, but I’ve also had the idea of a mechanically gifted slightly magitech underdark group for a bit, and your idea for grimlock fits that idea perfectly! I offer nothing but respect for what you do here.

Happy to help friend! We were both looking at the same blank space and thinking "hm, something should go here."

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I've actually been toying with the idea of the party's "camp" as an upgradable thing that grants various bonuses, whether by kitting out different ranks of gear or recruiting npc followers to manage baggage/cooking/medicine etc.

The idea is that the party is at their strongest when they set off from TOWN, topped up on consumables and supplies (a generic resource) that will last them an entire adventure.

While they're out in the WILDERNESS, the party can only take a full rest while they're at camp by spending supplies, and you have to have a reasonably safe area (what I call a "haven") to make camp. The party can spend supplies bg3 style to take a long rest, or can use them to fuel the various abilities they've unlocked for their camp. They can likewise spend supply to reach into their packs and pull out a useful item rather than having to track things like lamp oil uses, firewood, etc.

The camp is the entry level adventurer's version of a stronghold, something with tangible benefits to invest in along with traditional character progression while at the same time not tying the party down to one particular region. I know from experience that you can't force a party to put down roots before they're ready, no matter how many fixeruper keeps, deeds to windmills, or tavern owners looking to pass on the business you throw at them.

I'm almost imagining something along the lines of the blades in the dark crew sheet, with listed upgrades that can either be purchased or crafted outright, or serve as seeds for future adventures. Something like "hey, there's a spot on here for someone to act as our guard, do you think that merc back in the starting town is still available? She still owes us a favour from when we helped her in that bar fight, lets circle back to ask her and see how the questgivers have fared since we left"

I think we should make the Ultimate D&D, built on the best concepts and mechanics from the game's history, one that truly supports the Three Pillars: Dungeon, Wilderness, and Town.

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I think this is the most I've ever agreed with Colville on anything, which is saying something because the man is a genius.

TLDR: Running smaller adventures (like, the span of a level or two) is healthier for your games in the long run because it gives players a sense of accomplishment. The endless mega adventures are pushed by publishers because they make more money, but promote bad design/play habits that not only put undue expectations on everyone involved but also rob the story of vital momentum.

What I was struck by in the video was how much the non-d&d media I've grown up with (open world games, streaming series, epic fantasy books) have coloured my expectations for how long the default d&d game SHOULD be. Sure, I can keep a whole campaign's worth of information in my head down to the accents of the shopkeepers in all the settlements we've visited and the machinations of courtly power players we'll never get to meet, but I can do that because I'm a freak with a head for details and my players mostly aren't.

By stretching out my stories too far I was diluting their effectiveness, as vital information and emotional beats were lost over weeks and months. I was inadvertently inflicting marvel-fatigue on my own party, putting too much work into setups that I might never get a chance to land because building up to big shocking twists and AHA red string moments was what I was conditioned to expect.

I know I was doing this because it's the exact same thing that I see happening with a lot of media I've tried to get into in the recent past and ending up bouncing off of. Just like with marvel (especially the later phases) there's a constant feeling of "what you're looking at doesn't really matter, this is just to set up to something that's going to pay off later", which is so pervasive that it prevents me from getting genuinely invested in anything. I hate that shit, and I would definitely hate inflicting it on my players.

I also applaud Matt here for repeatedly bringing up the idea of "the health of the game", as it's an umbrella term that can not only be used to describe a lot of good practices, but a mindset that we should take around our own tables for ensuring everyone (us DMs included) are having a good time now and into the future.

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academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”

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Hi! I really like your other takes on Underdark races, and wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on improving grimlocks? Beyond the permanent blindness they have and the whole being humans who adapted to the underdark, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else done with them.

Monsters Reimagined: Grimlocks

Would it surprise anyone to learn that a d-list d&d monster has It's roots in 1800s ideas about eugenics and bad adaptations of genre fiction? No? Then you've been paying attention, top marks.

Asker is absolutely right in their assessment that there's not really much to grimlocks. They're one of many "hostile tribal primitives" that have filled out the monster roster ever since the original developers lifted them en mass from the pulp adventure stories they grew up reading.

A common theme among these pulp works and the early scifi that inspired it was devolution, the idea that a people could degrade from greatness back into an animistic nature. The most well known pop culture example would be HP lovecraft's deep ones, where the author's fears of race mixing manifest as monsters that literally push humanity back down the evolutionary ladder to the stage of fish.

There's plenty of different ways to explain the origin of this writing trend, but I like to chalk it up to an anxiety resulting from the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution by a society that believed wholeheartedly in scientific racism. If intelligence (read: whiteness) wasn't just a god given right but was infact inheritable, then it could also be disinherited, bred out of a population whether by on purpose or by accident. This made it so important to practice good breeding (read: eugenics), to preserve the pure stock from falling to degeneracy (read: miscegenation) and introducing undesirable traits into the genepool.

We can see fear this with grimlocks, humanoids who were inherently lessened by their "adaptation" to life underground, losing their intelligence and eyesight and descending into a state of barbarism. Given that this is one of the few d&d monsters that mention evolution at all, we can trace this feature to their likely inspiration: The morlocks in H.G. Wells' Time machine, published a scant 36 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

I'm not well read enough to know whether Wells pioneered the idea of subhuman descendants, but I can say that most of his imitators missed the point of his writing: Wells saw in his day an increasingly indolent upper class inflicting brutal and dehumanizing labour conditions on the poor to support their own carefree lifestyle. He satirized this in his book by showing that while the descendants of the rich had devolved into beautiful, useless, idiots, the descendants of the workers devolved into subterranean ape-things who maintained the machinery that allowed the eden like existence of the rich while farming them for meat. Say what you will about Wells' race politics (Neither degenerate fop or inbred ape can withstand the smarts and strength of the enlightened colonial Englishman) but his writing was specifically class continuous, and the brutality of the morlocks was a direct result of the exploitation of working people in his own day and age.

When the morlocks were adapted into the grimlocks , the d&d writers kept their canibalistic streak but specifically removed their class based origins as well as their mechanical knowhow. This is a near identical process to what happened with a creature the worlocks helped inspire: Tolkien's orcs, which were likewise turned from a commentary on the brutality of the industrial age into warlike primitives. It's a bit of a trend.

If you wanted to "fix" the grimlocks I'd go one of two ways:

If you want to engage with themes of primality, make them legit underdark dwelling primates/australopithecus type of creatures, just figuring out tool use and language. Make the rumours of them being descended from cave-exploring humanoids a common myth made up by surface dwellers.

If you want to get spicy about it though, give them back their mechanical aptitude and maybe mix in a few more dashes of pulp "lost civilization" ancient aliens nonsense. Have them dwell in great mechanical complexes beneath the earth, worker drones who've long outlived the creatures that enslaved them and scribed mechanical knowledge into their very being. Originally denied understanding of the machines they toiled to build, work, and maintain, the grimlocks jealously guard the science they've spent generations reverse engineering, giving them the reputation of being violently territorial for those underdark travelers who venture too close to the megastructures they inhabit.

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DM Tip: Lining up the Pieces

A few years ago I saw a video that changed the way I design combat encounters, using chess pieces and 4th edition monster roles as a handy way of conceptualizing the enemy roster and making better combat.

I’ve wanted to refer back to it for ages now, but I can’t seem to find it.  As such, I’m going to reproduce it’s wisdom here for everyone’s benefit and hope I can find the source one day.  ( I feel like it was a Matt Coville video, but my searches have turned up nothing. Seriously, if you can find it I will be extra grateful).

TLDR:  You can break down enemy combatants into six (ish) roles represented by different kinds of chess pieces, and you can mix and match them when designing encounter to create fun tactical scenarios. You can also use this as an alternative to CR picking a “budget” of these enemy roles based on how many players are in the fight.  Check out the types below the cut: 

Infantry (pawn):   Generally weaker and mechanically simpler than any other type of combatant, the infantry uses teamwork or sheer numbers to overwhelm the party. This can be anything from rank and file soldiers to a necromancer’s skeletal minions to a pack of wolves, anything that takes up space on the battlefield and prevents the party from targeting who they want or generally getting their way in a fight. 5e combat is a numbers game, and the infantry is there to swing the numbers in the enemy’s favour (until the party cut through them to even the odds).  Infantry likes battlemaps with chokepoints they can hold and crossroads they can use to outflank opponents. When budgeting they’ll have a balance of 2 infantry per 1 player they’re matched against , but the weaker they are, the thinner you can spread them.

Brute (rook): High defence, high offence, the brute is an outright threat that the party should not want to take in a head to head fight. Giants, beasts, constructs, and heavy armoured warriors are your traditional brutes, but you could also go with a buffed to hell battlemage getting all up in the party’s face. Conversely, every brute has some kind of weakness that the party can exploit. They might be slow, or be unable to maneuver as easily, or like a werewolf, fiend, or troll, have particular weapons or damage types that overcome their natural resilience. Their job is to force confrontation, blunder into the middle of combat and force the party to act defensively rather than proactively. They soak up the party’s frontline’s attention while forcing the mid/backlines to scatter under the threat of too much raw damage.  The brute Likes open spaces where they can have a direct path to the party and dead ends they can corner their targets against. Budget: Around 1 per 3 players

Skirmisher (knight):  A very broad type of opponent, the skirmisher’s job is to bully  the party’s weapsots whenever they’re exposed. They can do this by being ranged fighters ( traditional archers, magic users) or by being highly mobile (stealthy, mounted, flying, teleporting). They’re the bane of the party’s backline, generally targeting whoever has the lowest armour/or least health, then using their evasiveness to deny any kind of retaliation when the group rallies to protect their squishy friends. Skirmishers have great offence but are generally pretty weak, made helpless when you can deny them their movement/terrain advantages.  Skirmishers like unfair fights, terrain that gives them a movement advantage, cover, or allows them the highground over their foes.  Budgeting: 1 per 1-2 players. 

Controller (bishop):  The controller’s job is to fuck with the party, Either by locking down some of their stronger options (counterspelling, mind control, status effects, grapples),  by manipulating the battlefield in some way that disrupts planning (aoe spells to prevent grouping together, summoning to reinforce numbers,  barriers and banishment to single targets out), Or by advancing the baddies’ goal while the party is otherwise occupied (the cult priest finishing the disastrous ritual, the master thief making off with the mcguffin) forcing them to split their attention. The controller likes to distinctly be away from combat, and will usually be on the otherside of some kind of hazardous/hard to bypass barrier, sometimes of their own making. Budgeting:  1 per 2-3  players: 

Support (king): Usually a healer, bodyguard, or some kind of buff-bot, the support wants to piggyback on other sorts of units or make them better at doing their jobs. Generally this means they’ll ignore whatever the party is doing to focus on staying with effective range of those who most benefit from their abilities. Supports will stay back in safety while throwing out buffs, bodyguards will put themselves between the party and their designated defendee. They tend to prefer whatever type of terrain most benefits their partners. 1- 2-3 players

Elite (queen): Something to be reckoned with, an Elite mixies the strength and abilities of two other kinds of combatants and uses both to devastating effect. Combine a brute and a support for an unstoppable frontline commander, or infantry and a skirmisher for an elite striketeam that attacks in perfect coordination before fading back into the shadows.  Mix and match for whatever combination you think would be most interesting for a situation, then supplement it with a different unit or two for contrast.  Elites make up your traditional “big bad and minions” bossfight, without escalating to the full party challenge of “solo” monsters. Budgeting: 1 per 3-4 players. 

Picking the right Pieces:

Generally what you're going to want to do when planning a combat is to first think of what the baddies are trying to acomplish with the fight then pick 2-3 different types of baddie that you think would work well in concert to achieve that goal. "Kill the party" is an all too common goal, but you could easily imagine others that provide for dynamic stakes:

A group of forest bandits intend to rob a caravan, so they unleash a captive warbeast as a distraction while their archers rain chaos from above (Infantry, brute, skirmisher)

A villain abducts an important npc into a carriage while their dutiful muscle run interference (controller, brutes)

A necromancer hurls curses from behind a barricade of gravestones while their undead minions pour from surrounding tombs ( Controller/infantry)

While the party is ambushed by an archer in a tower, a cloaked figure waits in the underbrush, waiting for them to thin out and begin picking them off one by one (paired skirmishers of different types)

After the fighter is tricked into single combat against the mounted arena champion, the rest of the party will have to search the crowd for the caster secretly channeling healing magic to their opponent. ( combined brute/skirmisher elite, support)

Once you've got your pieces picked out, you can start designing the battle arena taking the desires of each combatant into account while also throwing in any environmental flourishes you'd like to enjoy.

As an added benefit for DMs like me who don't have the inclination or budget to collect huge batches of minis, it's SUPER easy to pick up a second hand chess set or two and use them as stand ins. Your players will have an instinctive understanding of what each piece does which will help them understand the roles outlined above.

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Dear Dapper - you're so great at helping me think through ideas and creative blocks, and you have such great thoughts about DnD religions, so I hope this question is perfect for you. (Forgive the length, feel free to trim in any posting).

Our campaign is set in a world where the gods found some "clay" and sculpted a world out of it. Most of the various plots stem from the earliest, most powerful creations having various emotions about this act (resentment and reformation, jealousy, an overextended sense of ownership, or feeling they can redo it better). In the past, the sense of resentment led to a war where the traditional, but respected, judge-like, ferryman-style psychopomp god of death was killed. He now exists as a partial remnant, God of Undeath - the dark moon. The other gods then fled, abandoning creation.

My character started as a cleric of the light moon goddess, and as perhaps the most mythologically invested player, I've been expanding to become pan-theistic - trying to round up what remains of divine power into beneficent hands (ie, against the bbeg). In a recent story arc, a part of his soul was stolen, then given freely to this God of Undeath.

The God's angry (presumably about being killed - the how is an upcoming plot point). He's viewed as asleep, and wants to 'wake' the living world into undeath. His worshippers are secretive necromancers and the undead. Otherwise his themes so far are generally gothy, macabre and evil.

I think my character's desire is to try to restore him in some way, or at least, 'wake' him into some element of his former neutral/benevolent self. As a player, I want to toy with the scary, gothiness of this change, and dance with temptation a bit. As both, I want to find some good or positive elements to the Undeath angle that I can spin.

What ideas does this generate for you? In particular, what are some positives from undeath that I could play with? Why would a normal living wizard fall into the necromantic worship of this 'deity' (other than the selfish desire for immortality as a lich or vampire)?

Thanks for any thoughts you might have!

Fundamentally any depiction of the undead are really a portrayal of our relationship TO death, and the many reactions we can have regarding it's suddenness, tragedy, and inevitability.

A god that's angry about their own inevitable demise strikes me as one that's stuck mid way through the seven stages of grief, a state not unlike undeath because it leaves those trapped in it unable to move on. Cultists might think they're gaining immortality through undeath but really they're trapping themselves in bereaved stasis.

The ultimate resolution then is taking steps toward catharsis and acceptance, of letting go, and coming to terms with the loss as a form of exorcism. Perhaps your character also had a significant death in their life and had trouble moving on, and wants to give this god the same hardwon peace they finally achieved, or achieve it by working things out through this god.

I find it interesting that "gothy" is a term that's brought up multiple times in your description, because one of the big parts about goth subculture (other than a kickass music scene) is a philosophy that asks us to not shy away from the fear of death but instead look at it head on, unpleasant as it is, and say " I embrace you and in doing so I acknowledge how great life really is"

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Adventure: The Big Ambitions of Baron Bittly

Monsters from the primal expanse of the Drovidiin Wilds have been appearing without warning in the kingdom's heartland, somehow teleported hundreds of miles to rampage through towns and cities. After more than one skirmish with the beats, your party has ventured to the bordertown of Thimblewell on the edge of the wilds, seeking answers.

Adventure Hooks:

Though the party have heard whisperings of the beast attacks before, their firsthand exposure to the phenomenon comes when they hear screams and cries coming from the town's fancy playhouse. An acid spitting drake has somehow found its way inside the building during the middle of the performance and its rampage threatens to bring the house down.

Tasked with tracking down a crew of bandits that've been plundering local caravans, the party's raid of the outlaw's encampment is thrown into chaos when one of their targets breaks open an innocuous crate, pulls out a glowing glass canister and smashes it in the middle of the melee: unleashing a beast in a burst of blue light into an already chaotic final battle.

The party find a strange tension when they arrive in the town of Thimblewell. Though the settlement has a long history of being beset by monsters from the primeval wilderness it borders, there've been no attacks for the past several years and no one seems to want to talk about why. Eventually a disgruntled former guardsman points them in the direction of the local landholder, an amateur mage with a reputation for conducting strange experiments. He fails to mention that said mage has a defence system built into his manse, and that he's been expecting the party's arrival for some time.

Background: Irnett Bittley was never a mage of large talent, both because he was unable to summon up the showy displays of elemental mastery that would have earned him a living as a court wizard, and because his self important streak made him too proud to ever suffer suffer through an apprenticeship. He was a great mage, destined for great things, and the fact that others couldn't see that was their failing.

Tired of being challenged or denied by people who genuinely knew better, Bittley picked up stakes and went to the boonies seeking to find a pond small enough to consider him a big fish. He found it in Thimblewell, a little town sorely in need of a handymage, and he could have been happy and well liked there if the need to be great wasn't etched on his soul. Thimblewell had a monster problem, and while Bittley was no battlecaster he did have a knack for bindings and containment spells. If he managed to catch a monster by supprise while it was distracted by the local millitia he could shrink it down and hold it in stasis, effectively defeating the monster by kicking the can indefinitely down the road.

The townsfolk heaped praised upon him for his heroics, only to have their goodwill spat right back in their faces as Bittley started asking for increasingly steep "donations" to keep his enchantments in place, all but threatening to release the beasts again if his impromptu tax wasn't paid. Fast forward a couple of decades and Baron Bittley has become rich enough to buy himself a title and become Thimblewell's defacto ruler.

Still not content to be a backwoods landbarron, Bittley's latest scheme is to sell his stockpile of captured beasts one by one to unscrupulous individuals who are in need of a good monster: thieves in need of a distraction, poachers and collectors trafficking in rare specimens, nobles who'd prefer an untraceable and indiscriminate means of assassination. This enterprise is making Bittley even more rich, but with success comes paranoia, and we all know how dangerous a paranoid mage can be.

Challenges & Complications:

1: The drake was intended as a means of assassination, targeted at a countess and her heir attending the playhouse's performance in one of the box seats. As the party runs in to save the screaming commoners, they'll potentially be diverted by the countess's guards, intending to save their employer's life before anyone else's. Saving the noble might earn them a rich reward at the cost of many lives, but choosing to look after the common people will earn them the ire of the acid-scarred heir, who watched them save the rabble while his flesh burned and his mother was crushed to death under rubble.

2: After the party have defeated the bandits, they'll find three more of those arcane canisters left in the box, each containing its own miniaturized monster waiting to be unleashed. The caravan the bandits robbed was smuggling these beasts to a buyer with dangerous aims, meaning the caravan's owners now have good reason to want the party silenced. Do the party report their findings? Extort those who hired them at the cost of a knife in the back? Or do they just take their offbrand pokeballs and run, dreaming of the chaos they can cause.

3: Baron Bittley knows the party is coming for him thanks to his spies in town, he also knows he could never hope to take them in a fair fight. Thankfully he’s got access to magic, so he doesn’t need to fight fair, allowing them into his home only to catch them in a trap that will shrink them down to a few inches tall, whereafter it’s a simple matter of mage-handing them over into the basement bound dowry chest/prison he’s made for all those in town who’ve dissented to his rule over the years.

Thankfully the tiny townsfolk have been working on a jailbreak for some time now, having painstakingly sawed their way out of the box while their inattentive overlord’s been distracted domineering the world outside. The greatest hurdle to their escape has been the wild landscape of the junk fulled manor basement, filled with various pests that’ve become arcanely mutated from the leakage from the mage’s lab on the floor above. The party will need to engage in some borrowers esque traversal across the basement, up through the walls, and into the lab if they have any hope of reversing their predicament.

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[dailyadventureprompts]

Hey friends I want to reference a youtube video that talks about d&d enemy tactics in term of chess pieces but I can't for the life of me remember who made it. Can anyone help me out?

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Simpler Monsters = Faster Combat

Been thinking a lot about different ways to tune 5e the way I want it, and I was inspired by a recent chat about how bullshit CR is as a mechanic to ponder over how d&d does its monsters in comparison to other games.

What fundamentally slows combat down (both at the table and during prep) is the mechanical assumption that the monsters/baddies/npcs controlled by the DM have to function on the same mechanical framework as player characters: standard/move/bonus/reaction action economy, HP, AC, Damage numbers etc. While some of this is in the name of game balance, we can all admit that it's clunky as hell and could stand to be overhauled.

In a lot of ways d&d monsters are the way they are (huge stat blocks, a pain to modify/homebrew) because of the old wargaming/competitive/adversarial days of play, specifically in that every monster had to have a canon range of stats so that the DM coudn't "cheat" in the party's favour or against it. I think the pursuit of good gameplay has largely evolved past this obsessive need for objectivity over the past 50 years.

Once you run enough d&d you realize that monster stats don't actually matter. The baddies need enough offence to threaten the party and enough defence to hang on long enough to make the combat interesting, with the actual spice of the combat being tactics, goals, and special abilities. For several levels during an ongoing campaign (lvls 6-9) I swapped out traditional monster HP for gnomestew's "10 good hits" system. None of my players noticed the change, and suddenly my prep/running the session became 1000% easier because there were way less numbers to take care of.

Over the past couple years I've branched out into games using the PbtA and FitD systems, which run the combat encounters through the same gameplay framework as they do skill resolution. Fighting a demon to the death is mechanically the same as escaping away from an avalanche, and while this game design is quite elegant, I want to preserve d&d combat as the tactical miniature skirmish minigame that it is.

I think I'm going to start work on a combat hack, something that will let you port in any vanilla or 3rd party monster you'd like for theoretically any CR range. I'm going to wrap in some of the developments made by the 5e successors (daggerheart, mcdmrpg etc) along with my own ideas about how to make the system run smoother.