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Plot hook inspiration?

"Holy places are no longer sanctuary from death, and death is no longer sanctuary from anything." —Thalia, Knight-Cathar

-Blasphemous Act

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NPC Inspiration

Hidetsugu’s Second Rite

Hidetsugu never relinquished a grudge. He let it burn within him, gathering ever greater intensity until the final moment of vengeance.

Artist: Jeff Miracola

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Artificer whose verbal components are just him whispering "pleasedontexplodepleasedontexplodepleasedontexplode"

­The somatic components are hitting the thing when it looks like its about to explode

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Just inspiration for devils in dnd.

The Twilight Zone, 1963, dir. David Lowell Rich

SE04E14 Of Late I Think of Cliffordville

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Less an adventure request and more a Monsters Reimagined one- orcs are one of the baseline assumptions in most D&D campaigns, and yet are rarely major movers and shakers on their own merits. Have you any opinions on them, or thoughts on what you'd do differently?

Monsters Reimagined: Orcs

I think if we’re going to talk about orcs, we’re going to talk about a looming divide in the TTRPG fandom, colonialism, and a lot of other heavy topics that I can’t just brush aside if I’m going to engage with this honestly. Orcs are sort of a litmus test to see whether you’re “with it” when it comes to understanding how the media you love can have problematic elements, or whether you want to live in a blind nostalgia space where you can indulge your “Cowboys and Indians” fantasies without anyone calling you on it. 

Also there’s a lot of other diverse voices out there talking about colonialism in d&d, so if this wets your apatite, I encourage you to seek those out and educate yourself. This is just one non-authoritative take from a socially conscious whiteguy who’s been increasingly offput by the cringeworthy legacy of racism that’s baked into the foundations of his favorite hobby. 

With all that out of the way, lets get to the TLDR:  While Orcs don’t necessarily stand in for any one ethnic group, their implementation in the history of tabletop rpgs and associated fiction has almost universally cast them as “The Savage Other”, an underpinning trope of the colonial mindset that justfied exploitation and genocides across the globe.  Abandoning this trope is easy, and all it requires is that we move orcish cultural default from “Savage horde”  onto the role of “Noble Warrior Race”, while aknowledging that these people are thinking individuals with the power of self determination, and not genetically and spiritually inferior brutes who exist only to be cut down.  Also, if orcs arn’t defaulting to evil,  there’s increasingly less reason to have “half orc” as its own ancestry option: Just make them the default orcs and have any mixed ancestry children use whatever stats fit best. 

An analysis of the fucked up tropes that form the orcs, and some unexpected mythological basis for their awesomeness continues below. 

What’s wrong:  To explain why we need to change how orcs ( and most other “default evil” humanoids) are handled, we first need to understand  that for most of human history, people thought war was a good thing. It was the general consensus that those born into other lands and other cultures were both lesser and antagonistic, and that their defeat and ultimate annihilation could only be a net good for their own exitance.  Every expansionist empire has treated its enemies as such, and used their neighbor’s “sinful” nature to justify why they must be subjugated as a way to protect their own “righteousness”. 

Even those of a more pacifistic, “understanding” types got in on this conquest, exchanging massacres, enslavement, and territorial expansion for campaigns of conversion, cultural hegemony, and residential schools. 

Orcs, and other creatures like them began to exist around the dawn of the 20th century, when it became increasingly “less cool” to have your hero go around massacring people left and right. You can see this with characters like Conan: sometimes Conan is fighting lizard people, sometimes he’s fighting swarthy skinned slavers, sometimes he’s fighting evil foreign wizards, sometimes he’s fighting lizard people.  As the years go on, the idea of having a (almost universally white) hero chopping their way through hordes of brown people is an increasingly bad look... so the lizard people and the ape men and yes, the orcs, take a greater presence on the stage. 

This is where the mid-80s pulp fantasy orcs comes from, taking their names from the transmogrified and corrupted elves of Tolkien, but channeling the energy of innumerable “subhuman” foes that existed only to be fodder along the great (white) hero’s path. If you read what old d&d had to say about orcs , it sounds like something out of a colonizer’s field report, with “the savages” living in filth and squalor, practicing all manner of barbarisms ( slavery, rape, twisted spiritual practices). Every detail is there as a justification for WHY these people should be conquered and their lands appropriated by “civilized” people, and this racist propaganda metastasized into the “always chaotic evil” label that d&d orcs typified for most of their existence. 

Think about it like this: As a modern audience, we might balk at someone saying “ These people have the wrong skin and are worshiping the wrong god, you need to go kill them and settle their land”, but “These things are born of evil, they serve demons and we need to cleanse their blight from the world” is literally the plot of several world spanning fantasy franchises. 

This is emblematic of how orcs (and other “monster races”) are in modern fantasy fiction, all the tropes of colonial era propaganda made literal so as to absolutely justify the colonial power fantasy that a lot of d&d adventures are rooted in, and attempt to assuage any moral misgivings players might have about wanting genocide. The current edition even has gone so far as to make its orcs soul-slaves to evil, reality destroying gods and its gnolls ( a subject for another time) cannibalistic demons given flesh. 

How do we fix this: I think the fandom has largely managed to pry orcs away from the “always chaotic evil” archetype they were shackled with when I came into the hobby, and they’ve comfortably settled into the “Big, boisterous, stronk friend” role that serves them best. 

What I think orcs lack, stripped from their racist origins, is a new baseline mythology that can be socketed into any campaign like dwarves have “ Honor and ancestors” and elves have “ ancient lore and nature”. So here’s what I got: 

Just as the dwarves were made to craft and the halfings to tend the fields, just as the humans were made for cities and the elves were made for beauty, So were the orcs made for the fight. Sown from dragon’s teeth or carved from iron mountains when the gods and heroes of the dawn age needed an army, the Orcish people find their origin in those first glorious and terrible wars, born with weapon in hand and no fear of pain or death. 

No one conflict created the orcs, as each regional tangle of clans can generally trace their ancestry back to a single legion, cadre, or even warband called into existence for some important task of divine violence.  Sometimes wicked, sometimes righteous, the memories of these mythic deeds echo down the orcish lines, granting them the supernatural toughness they are famous for today. 

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Kobold variant: Red

(The start of a series about more draconic kobolds.)

Physicality:

Larger than most kobolds and physically stronger

Heat resistant

Elder (old, skilled kobolds) might have a natural fire breath weapon

Spellcasting (?): Bane, Produce flame, burning hands, fire bolt, create bonfire, heat metal, etc.

Personality:

More hotheaded, angry

Violent

Greedy (Large hoards)

See themselves as better than other kobolds.

Battle notes: Will never flee or surrender. Possibly add barbarian traits or skills to a few.

Lair:

Fire/lava in areas

Mountainous areas preferred.

Grissly trophies

(Maybe include lair actions of Red dragons that the kobolds have manufactured themselves)

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Weaver ants can use String Shot only when they're wielding one of their larvae.

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Tivadar’s Crusade

Artist: Dennis Detwiller TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

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The Keep

Raise the drawbridge! Or lower it, you do you. Surrounded by a deep moat filled with murky waters, this simple yet effective defensive structure is an ideal deterrent to any would be assailants, as long as they don’t have really tall ladders, a catapult to launch them over the battlements, or the power of flight. Fully animated and featuring four variants – bridge up, bridge down, brazier on and off, this highly versatile map can easily become unique to your game and setting with some custom tokens, be they guards, siege weaponry, or goats swimming in the moat. Whether your bridges are up, down, falling down, burn, a Jeff or a Beau, this map has you covered!⁠ ⁠

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A flower that acts like a mantis and a mantis that acts like a flower

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NPC Idea?

Dawnhart Mentor

Artist: Antonio Bravo TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

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Anyone know how to make stats?

Ogre Menial

Artist: David Rapoza TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

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Anyone wanna help me stat this?

Briar Hydra

Flora and fauna alike rose to Yavimaya’s defense.

Artist: Caio Monteiro

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Worldbuilding

Settlement: Senlella the Revel-Scarred Rampart

By edict of the Counsel the following acts are to be considered a breach of the peace and subject to fine and imprisonment:

1.Gathering in groups of ten or more individuals either in public, or in private

2. The sale or consumption of any substances capable of causing an altered state

3. Singing

4. Dancing

Addendum: the counsel has elected to remove two seats so as to not violate the first decree of this edict. Counsellors Brenna and Xhen, who opposed to the passing of this decree have been imprisoned pending their trial.

Senlella Prevails

Setup: Little more than a provincial hubtown, Senlella was once one of the greatest fortifications of the old imperium, a town sized castle intended to hold off both monsters from the hinterlands and the rebellion of lower classes. When the imperium died Senlella lost its purpose, and those left behind made a home of the hollowed out edifice, turning the watchtowers into tenements and setting up markets in the parade grounds. The imperium built walls ended up holding long after the fall of the nation that erected them, and so people settled around Senlella for safety, and so it’s population grew a little more with each new crisis over the next two centuries.

Walls and parapets however cannot protect you from everything, as one night a strange and lurid moon appeared above Senlella and made its people go mad with joy. Now two years on from the incident, the people of the rampart are forbidden from speaking of “The Great Shame” as a fundamentalist faction has wrested control of the city. Initially these militants (Known as the Prevailists)  sought to restore order, but as their grip on power tightened it became obvious that their true aim was to curtail the “immoral” behaviour they felt invited the moon’s appearance in the first place. Now Senlella sits on the edge of toltalitarian collapse, in need of heroes who can help wrestle it back from the brink.

Hooks:

The party is likely to hear rumours of Senlella before they ever see it: Tales of a weeks long riot/hedonistic festival and the spectacles that were witnessed by those caught in its periphery, the dour and mirthless “shamer gangs” that now wander the roads throwing jeers at young lovers and assaulting minstrels. Things become all too personal when the party comes face to face with one of these gangs when they barge in on a tavern the heroes are staying at where someone (like their bard) is giving a performance. Its only a brawl, but thereafter the party are singled out as enemies of the Prevailists, marking them for further interference but also appeals by those they oppress.

As kicking a whole faction of puratanistic militants out of a town isn’t something the party can do on their own, they’ll need to rally the people to their cause in order to even out their numbers. Lucky for them they’ll have help. Rilvi Pennybent was one of Senlella’s foremost performers before the fundimentalists overturned the town, or atleast she was before some of the joyless thugs smashed the gnomish woman’s instrument and “accidently” broke her hand before she gave them the slip. A  born rabblerouser with friends all over the province, Rilvi will hear of the party’s deeds and entreat them to help save her town, even if she has to smuggle them in under cover of night.

Rilvi is convinced that though fearful and beaten down, the general populace wants these zealots gone, and what the party needs is a big symbolic gesture to give the people hope and convince the less ardent Prevailists to see reason and join with their neighbours. Her solution? Prisonbreak: with their increasingly tyrannical edicts the council has been overwhelmed with “breaches of the peace” and has been tossing people by the dozen into an old imperial bastion that they’ve rechristened “The Grinners Pit”. Rilvi has constructed a plan so devilish it just might work, but she need the heroes’ help to pull it off.

Keep reading

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Heya! Running a campaign for my players that's loosely based on The Witcher. Amy chance you can cook up a Witcher-esque ranger/artificer (alchemist) faction for me?

Faction: Knights of the Ratcatcher King

It’s dirty work, but someone’s got to do it

Adventure Hooks: 

The party accept a bounty from a noble interested in ousting a nest of monsters from a long abandoned village and resettling the surrounding lands. However, after the party ventures out to the derelict settlement they discover a) A detachment of highly organized monster hunters has already disposed of the beasts with ruthless efficiency b) they were just the latest adventuring party the noble had sent, the rest having died and been devoured by their supposed quarry.  While most of these well equipped hunters brushes the party off as “Freelancers” one heavily scarred but social member of their company offers the party a few tips on accepting the wrong sort of jobs, going so far as suggest they seek out their group again if they want to “get serious”. 

In the depths of some dismal dungeon the party finds a chamber rank with the smell of rot, long dead monster corpses surrounding a single figure with their back to the wall and a gun still clutched in their hand. Despite the numerous deadly wounds this stranger suffered their gear is of a much higher quality of the party’s own, should they be able to find someone to mend it of claw slashes and acid stains. 

Plague or disaster strikes the settlement, and as the people panic and the powers that be squabble or prepare to make a hasty exit, the party is approached by a dour woman with a veteran’s bearing and surgeon’s dispassionate reason. There will be hard times ahead, harder if the party does not act quickly. Will they have the stomach necessary to do what needs to be done and save their home? 

Setup: The name “Ratcatcher king” started as a jest, for after flood struck the city and plague swept through the streets, the landed nobility joked among themselves about the hubris of the commoner who wrote to them demanding aid for a city drowning in its own dead. They might not have listened but the people did, understanding that their home didn’t just need saving, it needed triage, sudden decisive action on a multitude of fronts that required not only brutal practicality but also the efficiency of people who knew what the fuck they were doing. 

Quarantines went into place, military planning given not only to the disaster relief efforts but to soup kitchens and field hospitals, the elimination of plague vectors and the defense against monstrous scavengers that always sweep in during such times of crisis. When the letters went out again, they bore the sigil of the rat, cage, and crown, and carried with them the threat of reprisal should aid not come swiftly. 

That was how it started, and in the century since their founding the Knights of the Ratcatcher King have turned from a band of volunteers to outlaws to a chartered martial order with branches in every kingdom with the sense enough to have them. They care little for politics of peace or war, choosing to instead focus on existential challenges such as plague, calamity, or monstrous infestation, treating these threats with a workmanlike efficiency and the grim practicality of folk doing a public service. 

Notes on the benefits of Joining the Ratcatchers and future adventures below the cut: 

 Faction Perks: 

There’s always work ploughing shit: The world is never free of Crisis, and the knights divert their resources where they can. Should the party sign up, they can be expected to move from assignment to assignment much in the way of a member of a mercenary company out on contract for a fixed length of time. They will be paid extraordinarily well during this period, with their housing, food, and medical needs cared for by the Knight’s support staff.  High ranking members of the order are likely to be given more freedom as they are expected to carry out more nuanced and far ranging missions, but can still expect the same hospitality. 

Suit up: The violent utilitarianism of the Knights’ mission means that no resources can be spent on graft or pointless loss of life, and so they equip even their rank and file with access to high-grade gear suited for a life of battling monsters, plague, and the forces of nature. Early adopters of technological innovation, the party an expect access to gasmasks, advanced prosthetics, and even gunpowder should the setting allow it. 

Under a rat-strewn banner: Opinion is divided on the Knights, on one hand they’ll swoop in to save you from the brain-moles or werewolves infesting your village, on the other they tend to be heavy handed once they’ve decided that a particular settlement is theirs for the saving. The appearance of the Knights en mass is seen as an omen of doom, so the party can expect to be given a wide birth while at the same time respected during crisis situations. 

By Cage and Crown:  As both hunters and healers, the chapterhouses of the Order are some of the greatest repositories of monstrous lore and medical knowledge in the realm, containing many treaties others might consider profane or heretical. Researching the bane of monsters or the cure for obscure ailments might just be worth the rigorous life of a ratcatcher for those in need of such knowledge. 

Source

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Dragon ideas

fun behaviors to give dragons that aren't feline/canine based

cause as much as i love dragons purring and roaring i wish there was just more variety in how they would act

clacking their teeth together to show contentedness/happiness (budgies)

using tails as a defensive weapon in a whip like fashion (iguana)

twitching to express that they're not a threat to members of their species (hognose snake)

feeling calm when eyes are hooded/covered (birds of prey)

head bobbing as a threat display (anoles/bearded dragons)

flattening neck or sides to appear bigger (snakes/lizards)

mantling over food to protect it from hatchmates (birds of prey)

wiggling neck as a courting maneuver (budgies)

audibly grinding teeth as a warning (macaques)

maintained eye contact as a challenge (gorillas)

pounding wings against sides as a threat (gorillas)

slapping other dragons with their claws when their personal bubble is invaded (seals)

hoards used as a site to impress mates (birds of paradise)

snorting when undergoing heightened stress (horses)

making repeated loud noises with surroundings to establish territory (woodpeckers)

loud constant arguments with other dragons when roosting (bats)

building lairs that cause a domino effect of change in the land around them (beavers)

slapping their tails against the ground/water as a warning (beavers)

wiggling tail tip to attract prey (various animals)

wiggling tail tip as a warning (snakes)

plucking or scraping off scales as a sign of stress (parrots)

raising spines/frills as a response to danger and carrying on with their usual business as they believe they're protected (lionfish)

and im not saying canine and feline behaviors are wrong or bad to give a dragon (people wouldn't write dragons with those behaviors if they weren't fun in the first place!) but i feel for creatures that are mythological giant winged lizards that you can do more and get experimental with it. often the more unfamiliar behavior the more dragony the dragon feels

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lot twists for campaigns!

A List of Plot Twist Ideas

A character's strength defeats them.

A character's weakness saves them.

A gift is really a danger.

A gigantic meteor streaks across the sky.

A missing child planned their abduction to get back at their abusive parents.

A stranger enters the story, informing the characters that they are all being watched. 

A surprising person ends up being the puppet master behind everything.

A terrible storm moves in, threatening all.

A weakness of a character is actually their greatest strength.

An object has a special meaning.

An otherwise straightforward romantic comedy leads into horror territory.

Red Herring — All suspicion points to one character, but when the truth is revealed, it's another that did the terrible deed.

The antagonist is living two lives.

The conflict the protagonist was going through was a practical joke.

The conflict the protagonist was going through was a ruse concocted by their friends to help them with confidence or to overcome fear.

The conflict the protagonist was going through was a ruse concocted by former victims of their bullying.

The dead body isn't dead.

The goal achieved ends up making things worse.

The informant is actually the mastermind.

The love interest is the antagonist.

The most skilled character succumbs to the least skilled character. 

The narrator is not the person we thought they were.

The parent is really the grandparent. 

The protagonist is living two lives.

The protagonist receiving help actually doesn't want it.

The protagonist that doesn't seem to want help actually does.

The smartest character is the first to be outwitted.

The strongest character is the first to die.

The supposed mastermind is actually a red herring.

The weakest character is the villain.

The wrong first impression of a character.

What first seemed like a wrong first impression of a character ends up being right.

What seems like a dangerous object at first is actually a gift that helps the protagonist. 

When the protagonist solves the mystery, it opens up a Pandora's Box.

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs