robesandwizardhats

[robesandwizardhats]

Now live!

Interactive Map Directory

I've made a new interactive directory for 3+ years of maps, each map page including previews and links to where you can find them, both by Patreon tier and for purchase/download.

Explore by category and play with live filter tags to find the map that's right for you. There's even a free sample download at the bottom of the Highlights landing page!

[robesandwizardhats]

finished making my way through Elden Ring and wanted to do a few illuminated style takes on some of my favorite looking characters <3 

[robesandwizardhats]

Lamb of God, sheer your fleece.

For now thou art an unholy beast.

twitter l insta l redbubble

[robesandwizardhats]

Thank you for the ride, Critical Role. 

Song is Ashes by the Longest Johns

[robesandwizardhats]

Dungeon: The Bloodmoon Belfry 

“You just can’t keep a good doomsday cult down. I would know, I’ve tried” 

Adventure Hooks: 

Strangers have been spotted on the roads at night, monks and other holyfolk of no familiar order, who make silent procession down deserted trails bearing red-tinted lanterns and deep tolling bells. Folk report waking up inexplicably as these figures walked along the edge of their farmstead or through the village square, and their eerie columns are the subject of much rumor. 

The Moon has been oddly large in the sky the past few nights, and some say it has a pinkish coloration just after dusk finally falls. An odd phenomenon to be sure, one the local astronomer is quite taken with. She’s commandeered a booth at the local coffee house with her various tomes and notes, and is willing to by rounds for passers by  if they can share information about any strange phenomenon they’ve sighted, as well as the exact time and location of the event. 

Sensing danger may be close, the witchhunter Aramar enlists the party for help on his next raid. If his information is to be trusted, the monks amassing in the countryside are the remnants of a dangerous, heretical sect that needs stopping. If they’ll join him on this mission, he may take the party on as his apprentices, or put in a good word for them with the Bishop. 

Famed for making some of the realm’s best cannons, the town’s foundry recently burned down, possibly taking the foundrymaster with it as her body could not be found. Now her morose apprentices sell what little stock and scrap they could salvage from the blaze, hoping to raise a little money and possibly rebuild their livelihoods. 

Setup: The Monks of the Drochliean Heresy adhere to the teachings set down by a mad church scholar who claimed that the moon was the true tomb-palace of the gods, and that through special ritual, the souls of the worthy could ascend to those ivory halls and gaze upon the divine reliquiae. Though the Cardinal Drochlan is long dead, in times of unique lunar conjunction his acolytes gather from their boltholes and hermitages to summon his spirit and receive his wisdom.  These rituals have the unintended side effect of unleashing wild and unpredictable energies into the local atmosphere, as well as drawing the attention of malevolent beings from both the underworld and nocturnal abyss. 

Keep reading

[robesandwizardhats]

Marionette by MI QI

[robesandwizardhats]

Villain: The Evenfall Empress

Adventure Hooks:

Wretched flying beasts have been emerging from the wilderness, hunting and devouring those caught out at night before burning up in the light of dawn. These “Gloamstalkers” aren’t native to the region, and seem to have manifested all of a sudden.  A famed local ranger seeks the party’s aid in capturing one alive and transporting it to a dark safehold for study.

Travelers report seeing a grand castle out on the moorlands or rising from the depths of the forest, towers standing out starkly against the ominously low hanging moon. Since these tales never correspond to the location of any local structures or the moon’s actual phase or portentousness, most dismiss them out of hand as the fancies of out of towners.

Strange symbols have begun to appear in across the region: walls graffitied with  pair of skulls under a crown, or grisly totems found in the wilderness recreating the same only with bone and rusted nails. It’s not until the party meets a knight astride a skeletal horse carrying the banner, both rider and mount’s eyes alight with ghoulfire that they learn what it means: These lands are to be claimed by the Evenfall empress, and they would do well to submit when the time comes.

Setup: History has all but forgotten Kiviara Vilse, the unrecognized and unwitting by-blow of a faltering dynasty, who spent much of her life as a servant in the castle that for any justice should have been hers. Years of abuse darkened her heart, and attracted the attentions of a malign spirit that saw in the young woman an ember of hatred that would burn the very heavens if only it was nurtured. Stoking her envy and ambitions, the spirit led Kiviara to perform wicked rites and sacrifices, opening a way into the Shadowfell where her training could be complete.

Returning to the material plane near a century after the fall of her father’s house, Kiviara stands at the head of a host of shades, sorrowsworn, and worse. Fealty and tribute is what she seeks, sowing fear across the land until the people “recognize their true sovereign” and bend the knee. The castle folk have been seeing is the shadowfell reflection of her childhood home, cut free from its foundations in the underworld and slipping between planes at her command. Each night it appears in a different place, allowing Kiviara to deploy her forces wherever she wants to project power. 

Keep reading

[robesandwizardhats]

⚔️ 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Mourningsteel Eclipse
Weapon (morningstar), rare ___

This dreadful spiked weapon is designed to represent the sting of the moon-covered sun. Forged from mourningsteel, the metal that makes this weapon has been steeped in the blood and misery of fallen warriors of brutal conflicts. When you hit with an attack using this magic weapon, the target takes an extra 1d6 necrotic damage.

While holding this morningstar, you can use an action to speak its command word to cast the "darkness" spell from it with the following changes:

• The darkness extends from you in a 10-foot-radius sphere and moves with you

• While holding the morningstar, you can see through this magical darkness as if it were dim light.

• When you hit a creature within the darkness using the morningstar, its bonus necrotic damage increases to 1d8.

The spell ends early if you drop or stow the morningstar. Once used, this property of the weapon can’t be used again until the next dusk. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for less than $10 a month!

[robesandwizardhats]

I FINALLY FINISHED IT

…is Dark Souls even relevant anymore?

This is my personal farewell to a game series that has managed to captivate and move me like no other. Perhaps you will find a few of your own experiences reflected within it, too. If you’ve found this comic, I’m glad we could undertake a small part of this journey together. Enjoy!

(I would have liked to include so many more things but ajksdkflkanc I’m just glad it is done)

[robesandwizardhats]

Companies are no longer grounded in reality.

My roommate recently came home pale-faced, like he’d seen a ghost. More like witnessed a massacre. Mass-firings were just done at his company. His job, he’d been assured, was safe. All of his coworkers weren’t so safe, and he had to get texts and phone calls from his work-friends, people he’d worked alongside for years, people he‘d gone out to have drinks with, learn they were no longer employed. To say he had survivor’s guilt would not be hyperbole.

Was this because the company had fallen on hard times? The pandemic has been rough for a lot of industries. No, actually, the company had turned a very nice profit both last year and previous, even in such a troublesome market.

The problem was, you see, the company’s stock price hadn’t risen quite as high as had been projected. They’d made money, sure. Quite a lot of money, in fact. But too many people had projected, i.e., bet the company would do better.

How did the company offset this “loss”? Easy: fire people. Quickest and easiest way to pad the numbers.

No but you don’t understand stock had fallen a percentage point! There was no other way!

We see it all the time. Hugely successful companies reporting ‘record-breaking’ profits then fire huge segments of their workforce - the very people responsible for those record-breaking profits. Why? The money “saved” on personnel costs can boost the stocks even higher!

If your company is struggling, not turning a profit, losing money, people expect layoffs. But to work hard, be successful, your company churning along strong and healthy, and you still lose your job? For what? Because half a percentage point that was dictated by speculation, guessing, by gambling that things would go up or down a certain amount on a graph of rich-people feelings?

I wonder how next year’s speculations will be affected with the information that the company laid off a lot of the people responsible for last year’s profits? Probably not much because the workers are just the components at the company; it’s the leadership that drives the ship, that makes the successes. Those leaders whose bonuses are coincidentally decided by, among other things, the stock price.

Companies are no longer grounded in reality.

[robesandwizardhats]

— Éowyn, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields

Paintings by Matthew Stewart, Nick Robles, Chris Rahn, Çağlayan Kaya Göksoy, Craig Spearing, and Stephen Graham Walsh

[robesandwizardhats]

Hiya!

Im prepping a ball for my players to go to (its hosted by the mob, half of the PCs are the children of the leaders), and I'm wondering if you had any suggestions on stuff that could happen there! I have a couple of events and bits of gossip and stuff, but I'm running out of ideas (most of the ones i have are expanded on thanks to forums and friends). Thanks!

Drafting the Adventure: Throwing a Party

There comes a time in every adventuring party’s career where they must attend some kind of celebration, whether it be in their own honor or as part of a larger adventure. Ranging from peasant festivals to the indulgent fetes of the upper class, celebrations are to regular social encounters what dungeons are to a random skirmish. Just like dungeons, celebrations are at their best when the group is attempting to explore and navigate a larger structure, looking to discover a way to their goal while fighting a time pressure while fighting against the clock, all the while attempting to dodge various hazards that will slow them down or eject them from the premises. While not every bash the party attends has to be run like this, having an idea how to run a celebration-as-encounter gives you access to a framework that can support important dramatic beats for your campaign, or launch unexpected new ones. 

The Timeline

Think of your celebration as being divided up into acts or phases, depending on the general temperament/activity of the guests and the major events you’d like to see take place. When building your acts it’s important to have a goal in mind, something the celebration is building towards regardless of whether the guests or the heroes know about it. This goal often intersects or contrasts in some way with the party’s own objective, forcing them to jam themselves into the sharped toothed gears of polite society in order to get what they want. Here’s a brief example below, where the group’s goal is to ingratiate themselves with the influential duchess. 

1 The guests arrive: general meet and greet, folk are a bit tentative

Party meets their intermediary and gets introduced to a few people before getting to split off. Their quarry is nowhere in sight

2 Full Swing: guests loosened up by good drinks and good company

the Influential Duchess finishes up with social niceties and begins talking with friends, the party might have an in, but they need to figure out who the duchess will open her conversational circle for. 

The Long Awaited Viscount arrives fashionably late making a spectacular entrance, all but announcing his attempt to woo the Duchess’s daughter

3 First Dance:  The party, their new acquaintances, and the duchess are all swept up into the dance, with only the most stubborn of wallflowers being spared from participation. 

Atleast one of the party members has a chance to talk to the Duchess, but she is distracted worrying about the Viscount's intentions for her daughter. 

Briefly introduce the party to the Viscount and the Daughter, let the party know they’re on some kind of collision course. 

4 Refreshments: guests are in very good spirits but the Duchess is on war footing, walling her and her daughter off behind a circle of close acquaintances and trusted social allies. Any forays the party makes is likely to be seen as a ploy of the Viscount's to gain access to her daughter.

Cut out of the loop, the party must contend with all those who don’t pass the Duchess’s muster, but if they made friends with the shy handmaiden earlier, they have an in.  

5 Second Dance: The duchess’s wall temporarily breaks for social propriety, letting the party begin to close in once again. 

During this dance, the Viscount covertly releases a monster he had polymorphed and secreted onto his person. In the rampage, he and the daughter run off. 

The party is forced to decide between battling the monster with improvised weapons, or pursue the Viscount, trusting that the guards will take care of it. 

6 Here’s where the story turns: Do they duel the viscount and the daughter preventing them from leaving, or let them slip away? Do they battle the unleashed monster, proving their bravery before the assembled guests, or are their casualties among the attendants? 

This example celebration obviously has an unexpected and violent twist at the end, but it’s possible to run one completely straight and have just as meaningful story affecting consequences. 

Below the cut, I’m going to give a few different archetypes of the sort of encounters one can have during a celebration, and how to run them in a way that will save you time both during your planning and at the table. 

The Opportunities

Less than an encounter, an opportunity represents a narrative thread available to the party during a particular phase of the celebration’s timeline. Ideally there should be more opportunities than the party can capitalize on at once, through some may be hidden unless the party is adventurous or perceptive. Don’t feel a need to be too rigid on how an opportunity “triggers”, as you want to give the heroes an excuse to enjoy all the delightful content you’ve made for them.  Lastly, some phases are going to have less opportunities, so once these are exhausted, feel free to move ahead. 

Here’s some examples to consider: 

Fleeting: Directly related to events that are going to occur in later pheses of the celebration, these opportunities represent a way for the heroes to get ahead of the challenges to come. Think of them as keys to doors that the party have not yet encountered, with the challenge of a celebration-as-encounter being figuring out which opportunities are going to pay off in future phases. 

Reoccurring: These stick around for most of the celebration, filling out your list of available opportunities. If a party member doesn't’ know what to do in a particular phase, have one of your Reoccurring opportunities seek them out. Gossips are likely to want new people to chat to, and someone seeking aid will likely grow more bold as the situation gets worse.  

Stray threads: Unrelated to the celebration itself, a stray thread is a bit of worldbuilding, rumor, or quest hook that draws the player’s attention away from the mission at hand. These can be great ways to foreshadow upcoming events, or present options for the party for after their current adventure resolves. 

Wallflowers: If one of your players feels like they’re not the party type, don’t worry, there’s likely some NPCs that don’t want to be there either. Staying as far away from the social battlefield as decorum will allow them, they’re likely to have wound ways to amuse themselves and be glad of some company. Wallflowers might need to be generated on the fly, but try to match them to the introverted character’s interest. A groundskeeper shares a flask with the uncivil barbarian, the awkward wizard stumbles across a great aunt playing chess against herself on two different boards. The troublemaker stumbles into a couple of bastard cousins playing cards in the smoking room. 

Art

[robesandwizardhats]

Skystead City

Get Access

[robesandwizardhats]

Villain: !rhu-nyJi , Outer God of Anathematic Architecture

“I thought I’d seen it all, yeknow? Chaos spirits, Mad titans, mage-gods that could remake reality…..You delve into the forbidden lore deep enough and you sort of get numb to the weirdness after a while. That thing though…. there’s a line that even I won’t cross… and it starts just short of my prospective patron giving me mercury poisoning and turning my bones to chalk by way of a friendly introduction.” 

-Taken from the Memoirs of Valgreif the odious, dark lord (retired)

Adventure Hooks: 

Fraught with difficulty and delay, the construction of a grand cathedral comes to yet another halt as it appears the master architect has suffered a mental break: attaining builders with a hammer and walling himself up inside the most secure.    The duke who’s footing the bill foe this project is tired of the endless complications that have seen this great work of architecture stalled since his grandmother laid the foundations, and is eagr to finish the project with or without his architect’s cooperation.    Sending in the party to investigate, our heroes must hunt a chisel and bludgeon wielding madman while navigating increasingly impalpable passages that alternate between claustrophobic and absurd.

A grand festival is marred by a grisly series of murders, Bodies found Dismembered, parts hanging from thin wire and posed in eerie tableaus in grim imitation of Celebration and dance. Following the clues, the party discovers the murderer is a harmless seeming old woman, a master puppeteer invited to perform at the town’s behest but disappearing on the eve of her performance.    Confronting the inexplicably murderous granny, the party discovers that her body is as dead and strung up as her victims, piloted about by a murderous tangle of metallic wire that seems intent on continuing its macabre art.

Something is wrong in the city’s poorest slum. Everyone can feel it: the alleys that twist their shape when no one is looking, or the slight taste of blood in the public fountains, not to mention the disappearances, not that anyone with the power to do anything about it cares. Or atleat they won’t not until several of the district’s derelict buildings inexplicably pick themselves up and go marauding through surrounding neighborhoods, looking to demolish other buildings and acquire their lotspace like a mob of hermitcrabs fighting over shells. 

Setup: Called the Dancer in Calamity, the Kinnabari jester, architect of unmaking, or the Lord of toppled towers, the outer-god known as !rhu-nyji is perhaps one of the most outwardly destructive forces of the multiverse.  A reckless world shaper who wishes to subvert all structure and hierarchy ( be it social, divine, architectural, biological, etc), all of reality is like hot wax in the red-titan’s influence, malleable and pleasing to mold. 

Inexplicable even by the standards of most other extraplanar beings, !rhu-nyji’s influence governs those who’s lives dissolve into paradox: artists that destroy, doctors that harm, or rulers who abuse their populace. Those who wish to disrupt the cosmic order are also drawn into the Dancer’s service, whether they be heretics who wish to subvert the will of the gods, or aberrations who find common reality to be displeasing to their form.  

Cities and other mass constructions seem to hold a fascination for the red titan, who delights in corrupting sturdy, reliable structures into shifting, hostile places.   Brick and metal transmute to bone and gristle, and vise versa. Floorplans sprout new rooms like malignant growths, and gravity becomes a subjective flourish of the architecture. 

Keep reading

[robesandwizardhats]

Some idioms for fantasy races and classes shared by u/nagonjin on reddit. Follow her on instagram (@lyresforhire) for more D&D idioms.

My favorite one is the bard one “When I am song”

[robesandwizardhats]

Hello, everyone!

Today I have for you a Wizard’s Tower surrounded by the sea. The reclusive wizard has taken a liking to hear the waves before going to sleep at night, and just after waking up at dawn.

A very defensible position by one so capable of such advanced magic, your party will have to be careful not to anger the owner of the tower. Or maybe they’ll try to help the wizard in the defense of their precious location.

The creature tokens for this map are a Korred, a Skulltaker and a Tarn Linnorm. Emerald tier gets the Korred while Diamond tier gets all three. In addition, Sapphire tier gets extra creature token variants.

You can see a preview of all of this week’s Patreon content here.

Thank you very much for taking a look and be sure to check out my Patreon where you can pledge for gridless version, alternate map versions as well as the tokens pertaining to this map.

[robesandwizardhats]

⚔️ 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Wyvernblade
Weapon (rapier or shortsword), rare (requires attunement) ___

This blade’s guard is fashioned after a wyvern in its design. You gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with this magic weapon.

The weapon has 3 charges and regains all expended charges daily at dawn. While holding the weapon, you can use an action to expend 1 of its charges to fly up to 60 feet in a straight line toward a point or target that you can see. If the target is a creature, you can also make a special attack against it using the blade. On a hit, the target takes an extra 4d6 poison damage, and it can’t use its reaction until the start of its next turn. You have advantage on the attack if you fly at least 30 feet toward the target in this way. At the end of your turn, you can choose to fly up to another 30 feet either horizontally or downward. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for less than $10 a month!