dungeon-oracle

[dungeon-oracle]

You see, if you enter into a pact with me, I'll grant you supreme power in exchange for your service. And you can in turn grant others supreme power in exchange for their service, and so on. It's definitely not a pyramid scheme. Don't look it up.

[dungeon-oracle]

Hear ye hear ye shameless self promotion

I'm Athena and I run TTRPGs for a living, and I'm looking for players for several new weekly D&D campaigns I'm starting. This here is a masterpost of all the campaigns I'm currently recruiting for - but if none of these catch your eye, worry not! I run monthly rotating oneshot games every Monday, so there's something for everyone. Beginner/new player friendly! Thursday 6:00 PM CST - Curse of Strahd - NEW! Beware ye who enter the Mists of Ravenloft. This classic gothic horror campaign is set in the dreary land of Barovia, the first Domain of Dread, home to Count Strahd von Zarovich.

Friday 6:00 PM CST - Wild Beyond the Witchlight - Ongoing (1 seat available)

A fantastic, whimsical Feywild adventure in the splintered domain of Prismeer - the current party is exploring the splinter realm of Yon, where the Dame of Unhappy Endings spins tales of tragedy and woe from her mountain castle, the Motherhorn.

Saturday 12:00 PM CST - Phandelver & Below: The Shattered Obelisk - NEW!

An expansion on the original starter set adventure, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, this is a classic high fantasy campaign staged around the frontier town of Phandalin - and the rediscovered legendary Forge of Spells hidden nearby.

Saturday 6:00 PM CST - Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos - NEW! A magical world boasts many places where students can study magic and many sages who take eager learners under their wings. But being accepted to Strixhaven University is a special honor, the dream of many young students.

Sunday 12:00 PM CST - Light of Xaryxis - Ongoing (2 seats available)

A swashbuckling space opera set in the Astral Sea, the party is in a race against the clock to defeat the Xaryxian Empire before their home planet is consumed to provide energy for the star Xaryxis. The current party is en route to Vocath (the moon and the mercane who named it after himself) to persuade the mercane to call in his debts in Doomspace - forming a coalition meant to take down the Xaryxian Empire.

Sunday 6:00 PM CST - Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus - NEW! There's a certain irony in going to hell on a Sunday - specifically the Nine Hells, where the fate of an entire city rests solely on the classic struggle of good vs evil.

[dungeon-oracle]

[dungeon-oracle]

Hello, my little woodland critters. Today just for fun I'm going to walk you through the process of generating a character for the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I'm just going to use Men & Magic for this one but might do another one later with the supplements!

First, we get some dice. Three six-sided ones to be exact. I'm actually going to grab some with pips rather than numbers because that feels more authentic. Then, we roll and record their sum, repeating times, generating six ability scores. Here we go!

Strength 9 Intelligence 17 Wisdom 12 Constitution 16 Dexterity 13 Charisma 13

Yippee! As a witch these make me very happy indeed.

Next, we'll pick a class to play. Based on the abilities I rolled I'm of course going to pick the magic-user (the witch class didn't exist yet, alas). And as a magic-user, I'm actually allowed to futz with the numbers a bit, removing two points from Wisdom to gain an extra point in Intelligence. This gives us our finalised array, and we can now know the effects of each ability on the character.

Strength 9: no effect Intelligence 18: +10% to earned experience, eight extra languages Wisdom 10: no effect Constitution 16: +1 to each hit die, 100% chance to survive certain spells Dexterity 13: +1 to missile fire Charisma 13: maximum of 5 hirelings with +1 loyalty

Okay, languages. The character speaks the common tongue of the continent she lives in, along with an alignment language. I'm going to pick Neutral as my alignment so that's the language I speak. I also speak eight creature languages, which I'm going to pick later.

For equipment, we're going to grab our trusty 3d6 again, roll them, and mulitply by ten to find out how many gold pieces we have. I rolled 10, so I have 100 GP. I'm going to buy a dagger, the only weapon a magic-user is allowed. In addition I will buy 50' of rope, a large sack (for treasure), a leather back pack, a water skin, six torches, a flask of oil, a small silver mirror, a bunch of wolvesbane (in case of werewolves), a bunch of belladonna, and a bug of garlic (in case of vampires, or pizza). Not sure what the belladonna is useful for but you can never be too sure. This leaves me with 48 gold pieces that I will use to buy rations when I'm heading on an expedition of some sort. To calculate my encumbrance, I add my dagger's weight in gold pieces (20) to that of my miscaellanoues equipment (always 80, though a referee is allowed to make sure this stays within reason), for 100 GP of weight. I'm well within the limit for light foot movement, which will likely mean I'll have the responsibility of hauling loot out of the dungeon. Maybe I should invest in a second sack…

As a magic-user of the 1st level, I am titled a Medium, and will require 2,500 experience points to reach 2nd level (Seer). I roll 1 die (six-sided), adding +1 for my Constitution getting a total of 2… Tha'ts how many hits my magic-user can take before death. Let's hope she rolls better on the next level, assuming she survives. She fights with the strength of one man!

I can memorise one 1st level spell for my journey. Not knowing what I might face in the dungeon, I pick something witchy that I think can really save the group's butts: Sleep. All level 1 spells are in my spellbook so I don't need to worry about which ones I can memorise.

And that's pretty much it! Now we just give the character an imaginative name… How about Naiviv?

Onwards to adventure and glory, Naiviv the Medium!

[dungeon-oracle]

Wares of the Wandering Wayfarer

Need a general store for your TTRPG campaign? The Wares of the Wandering Wayfarer is a system-neutral shop with NPCs, inventory, and more!

→ Check it out here!

[dungeon-oracle]

My friend's D&D character for my Saturday TAZ: Balance campaign - he's a witch/wizard named Victoriano (or V for short). The little eyes are all of the spirits he can summon! This was my Secret Santa gift to her for my personal hangout server.

[dungeon-oracle]

Probably the most dramatic combat encounter I've ever run in D&D 5e is the time I ran Castle Ravenloft as a five session siege in a no-long rest zone, as the finale of a Curse of Strahd campaign. By the time my players were ready to attempt to storm Castle Ravenloft and kill Strahd, they were armed to the teeth with anti-undead weapons and spells. The fighter was a werewolf, so physical damage (bludgeoning, piercing, slashing) was negated, and they had made allies of the werewolves, wereravens, Van Richten and Esmerelda, as well as a few DM PCs I introduced. The only way to produce a narratively satisfying ending where the party didn't curb-stomp Strahd the moment they found him was to run the whole castle as a siege and only allow short rests. By the time they got to Strahd in the final session, they were almost out of healing, running low on spell slots and class abilities, and had used most of their magical item's single use abilities. It made them actually think about when and where to use what they had - more than they ever did in any other part of the campaign. And it made their final confrontation with Strahd more exciting and desperate.

Many D&D 5e DMs ignore the game's own suggested structure of having multiple encounters per adventuring day, and while they aren't entirely wrong to do so (the suggested number of encounters per adventuring day doesn't quite line up with the actual math of the game nor does it produce enjoyable gameplay for those who don't enjoy D&D's combat, i.e. the part that D&D is the most about so you know what are we even doing here). Instead they focus their attention on trying to run only a single, narratively satisfying combat encounter. Which often works against itself because you will find yourself hard-pressed to get a dramatic combat out of a single battle in D&D 5e when player characters will be going into battle at full resources.

Because in most cases D&D's resource management is really at its best when it's not about managing resources within a single encounter but over multiple encounters. If you can expect only one encounter per adventuring day "should the wizard cast fireball now or save it for later" really isn't a relevant question in most encounters. In most cases the answer is "cast it now because the more enemies are dead by the end of this round the fewer attacks the party will have to potentially suffer next round."

And it often ends up eliminating all tension as well. If characters can count on having all their resources available for their one combat encounter of the day then they can pretty much rest assured that they will have enough healing and damage at their disposal to eliminate the enemy. The GM can hope to alleviate this by adding enemies that can take out party members quickly, but it is a risky proposition in many ways: the dice can swing one way and eliminate a player character before the group has a chance to react at all, which isn't exactly a failure on the party's part, it's just dumb luck (now, dumb luck is sometimes a valid way to introduce tension, but in the context of an encounter that is supposed to feel dramatic a character being taken out during the first turn before there is any input on the player's part can feel anticlimactic). Characters have very limited resources available to them to actually actively mitigate damage. Most of the time if a character loses initiative they are at the mercy of the enemy, being entirely reliant on the enemy rolling low on their attack/them rolling high on their saving throw. Some characters have reactive defenses available to them, but that's the thing: only some of them.

On the other hand things swinging the other way and an enemy having a single bad round during which they fail to deal meaningful damage to the party can conversely begin a death spiral for the enemy, where characters will be able to reserve resources that would normally be spent fighting back against enemy assaults on simply focusing on damage.

Of course this hasn't always been the case in D&D: the conventional wisdom in older editions was that player characters would have to delve into dungeons on limited resources and conserve those resources throughout the adventuring day. And this basically is how 5e is supposed to be run: but for a variety of reasons it also runs against the idea of combat being dramatic. If most combats during an adventuring day are just obstacles to be overcome, it eventually does make combat feel routine. Which, you know, somewhat also undermines the idea that combat is supposed to be dramatic.

But also, on a per encounter level, there was a brief moment in a bygone age known as "fourth edition" when player characters regardless of class had meaningful decisions to make within an encounter: compared to 5th edition, daily abilities were at a premium, which makes sense, because in 5th edition the assumption is that characters will have more daily resources they must juggle throughout a long adventuring day. 4e does also assume multiple encounters between long rests, but its adventuring days are noticeably shorter. Furthermore, healing is a finite resource in 4e on both a day-by-day and an encounter level. Characters can take a second wind action once per combat to spend a healing surge to recover some hit points, after which they are reliant the party's leaders (whose standard healing abilities are limited to two uses per combat. Scary!). And while 4e combats could also get swingy, the numbers were usually set up in such a way that a single swingy round would usually not take a player character from 100 to 0 percent. Like in 5e, most characters lacked reactive defenses, but they usually still had time to act before they were dropped.

But even 4e didn't fix one issue of D&D combat: that it often lacks permanent consequence beyond just "your character is dead." This is of course not an issue for the type of play that D&D natively supports and there are exceptions to this rule in the form of some creatures that can inflict other consequences on characters, but due to the abstract nature of D&D's combat the outcomes of combat are usually "my character fell to 0 hit points and died" or "my character dropped the enemy to 0 hit points and they died."

Speaking of those alternate consequences, an encounter with a basilisk that turns a party member into stone isn't necessarily fun as a dramatic combat encounter because it simply takes out one party member from the action, meaning they don't get to enjoy the afterglow of having defeated the enemy. Or if they do it's because a party member could cast a spell that undoes the petrification which is like. Oh, the character was only dead temporarily. You know what genre of play temporary death as a minor setback works really well in? Dungeon crawling. It also ties nearly into the logistical side of the game.

Anyway, point being, there are multiple contradictory design issues inherent to the very idea of combat and how it should be handled in tabletop RPGs and not a single correct answer. But D&D does not natively support a model of a single dramatic encounter per day, because that runs against the game of resource management and attrition inherent to it. D&D's combat can often lack tension on a per-encounter basis, but that tension arises are the very latest once characters need to start conserving their resources.

Or idk.

[dungeon-oracle]

Casio's Familiar: Playpen!

Playpen has 8 unique forms based on the emotions his egg was imbued with (by Casio) before it hatched. Each form has a special breath attack he can use once a day.

Each day, Playpen's form is decided based on rolling a 1d8 die. You never know which one you're gonna get!

Aside from that, Playpen's stats and abilities are the same as the ones listed in the Find Familiar spell and pseudodragon stat block!

[dungeon-oracle]

The Gardens of Ynn is a point-crawl adventure set in an ever-shifting extradimensional garden. Each expedition randomly generates a new route as it explores, resulting in different vistas being unlocked with every visit.

The adventure is a perfect zero prep session or campaign for any party of fantasy adventurers, no matter the system or the sub-genre. We found most ‘zero-prep’ adventures to be bland and lacking in colour, so in Gardens of Ynn every room, encounter and monster is popping with vibes. It's a big garden full of whimsy and delight and surreal perils.

Gardens of Ynn is statted generically for Old School Systems, but you would have absolutely no trouble using it in a game of 5E if you were comfortable statting up some weird monsters.

[dungeon-oracle]

Stat block for the Skuttlebuddy item from TAZ: Balance

[dungeon-oracle]

Stat block for a magic item in my friend's Spelljammer game

[dungeon-oracle]

Another stat block for a friend

[dungeon-oracle]

Me after today’s D&D session of Curse of Strahd.

[dungeon-oracle]

My friend's item got an upgrade

Custom stat block for a friend's magic item that summons a bear mount for her character to ride (it's just a normal bear stat block with the name change, posting it here for storage)

[dungeon-oracle]

More Cards Against Barovia

[dungeon-oracle]

Homebrew D&D One Shot #13

A haunting low-level adventure that I plan on opening a Curse of Strahd campaign with. This might be my favorite one I've created. It demonstrates how not all adventuring parties become heroes, and just how dangerous the world can be. Y'know, fun things for your game of make-believe.