I once decided to give all my players a single minor magical item at lvl 1 just to help their characters settle into their roles.
The Ranger got a quiver of elven kind (guaranteed 20 non-magical arrows per day)
The wizard got an indestructible spellbook (no need to worry about losing spells)
The monk/rogue a cloak that made it easier to conceal his identity
And the hobbit-like bard... a dagger of warning.
I thought they'd appreciate the LotR nod. Except I made a campaign of intrigue, where the baddies were hiding in plain sight. I dreaded that damn dagger. Somehow, through sheer luck, the bard immediately forgot about it after their first encounter. It never came up again.
There was a campaign a long time back where I gave the party something called the "Infinite Tapestry." It was kind of a low-grade portable hole, a 10'x10' tapestry that depicted an image of an empty stone masonry chamber with bare walls. If the tapestry was hanging vertically and you touched it while speaking a command word, you would appear inside the tapestry where there was another similar tapestry on the fourth wall of the chamber showing the outside world. Both tapestries had to be hanging flat and vertical for the connection to work, otherwise the other tapestry turned black and temporarily inert.
Basically, it was a portable clubhouse. They furnished it, went on a minor quest to get ahold of a magical hot tub to put in there, used it to store all the unwieldy things that parties liked to lug around. Since the connection was relatively "fragile" and could be disrupted easily, trapping whoever was in there until the tapestry could be hung from suitable supports again, they were always careful about using it as a literal camp - they slept outside of it whenever possible and took care not to all be inside at the same time. Which was a bit frustrating because there was a secret to the tapestry that I really wanted to force them to discover.
It wasn't a portable hole, the chamber wasn't an extradimensional space. The tapestry was actually a two-way portal to the Feywild, specifically to a chamber in the basement of an ancient abandoned castle that was the ancestral home of the secret Big Bad of the campaign. But they never examined the masonry inside to discover that the "back wall" was slightly different from the rest (it was a bricked-up corridor leading to the rest of the basement) and circumstances never arose where they'd be able to determine that they were on a different plane of existence in there rather than an extradimensional space.
Eventually, though, an opportunity arose. Through sheer happenstance a minor enemy of theirs discovered the secret of their tapestry, including the command word. He went into the tapestry to search through the party's stuff, but the party spotted him entering it so they took down the tapestry to trap him in there. They spent a day prepping to fight the guy, and then when they were all good and ready they put the tapestry back up... and saw that during the day the guy had spent trapped in there he'd figured out the thing I had wanted the party to eventually figure out, breaching the back wall and escaping into the castle in the Feywild.
So now the party had to dungeon-crawl the ancient castle chasing the trail of this guy, discovering a bunch of stuff about the real Big Bad of the campaign in the process, and once that whole multi-session extraveganza was finished they had graduated from having a simple "clubhouse" to having a whole castle in their pocket. It became their major base of operations and many future adventure seeds focused around it.
It was a lot of fun, but if you're a DM that likes a well-organized storyline it might be troublesome. I had no idea when exactly they were going to discover that whole new branch of the campaign they were carrying around with them.
This is such a great idea! I guess your party already knew about portable holes from previous campaigns and were just assuming that’s what it was? A tricky instance of characters acting according to player experience! Sounds like it worked out really well though.
Yeah, most of my players over the years have been veteran enough that the standard stuff can usually be assumed background knowledge. I think I even gave them a bag of holding so that they'd eventually have a clue from the fact that it didn't blow up from being taken into the tapestry, but as soon as they realized what it was they got rid of it to be "safe" and never took it in there. In hindsight perhaps I should have had a bag of holding be already inside the tapestry chamber when they discovered it, left over in there as loot from the previous occupants. Though that may have clued them in too quickly. Always a balancing act. :)
That’s awesome! My friend group tried out DND in a similar way, none of us had ever played before so one stepped up to DM. I’ve become a DM myself since then, almost begrudgingly at first but I’ve really come to enjoy it. But if I may ask, what got you to set up a DND community before playing yourself? Were you inspired by communities on other sites, or by following campaigns (Critical Role et. al)?
I have been immersed in the D&D community for over a decade of my life. I’ve owned most of the books of the last 10 years, and I have listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, consumed every comic there is to consume, ready days of articles, etc.
But my friend group has always been either uncoordinated, in different parts of the world, or just different places in life that things have never lined up for us to actually play the game. FINALLY things have lined up just right and I am DMing not one but TWO groups!
I think this is pretty funny but depending on your players, they might check all 3 for mimics! Some of us were traumatized once and now we are very suspicious…
@plum This is the first time a Mimic I placed that was successfully triggered, and this particular group of players didn't vocalize any suspicions on the book being the Mimic. We ended the session with joking that everything is now a potential mimic, especially that rock over there, or perhaps that Stalagmite, maybe even my sword is a mimic now.
I just gotta patiently wait for the Mimic funny business to calm down before I place another one, muhahahahaha.
My favourite is the mimic accidentally/on purpose placed inside a bag of holding. Any time the party take something out of it there’s a nonzero chance it’ll be a mimic instead of what they were after.
Seems like a good way to grant the party a bag of holding early on. They just come across it discarded in a corner somewhere, and are stunned that an item in such good shape was just abandoned. It appears brand new and has a mix of mundane objects and apparent treasures inside, and the words “Bran’s Bag of Holding” is stitched in elegant lettering on the outside. If they try to dump it out to do an inventory, one random object remains inside. It takes a very high skill check to notice this, as the mimic mimics the inside of the bag as it holds on. If they dump the bag out a second time, the assortment of objects is the same except for a single item. Asking around reveals that Bran was a famous local adventurer who disappeared suddenly.
Funnily enough, i'm doing a Roll20 campaign with a group of friends, and the setting is that their adventurer's part of an ingame adventurer's guild (helps explain new members and real life absentees).
I was thinking about having them meet another party that's part of the guild since my players aren't the only ones whose a member.
AWESOME! Keep it up. I ended up doing a quick 2 session DM fill in for my crew while our main DM was on vacation. 2 years later and we have yet to finish my homebrew campaign that came from it.
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