One thing that should be larger and more prominent is large food and water storage areas. Castles, during sieges, were designed to not only house and feed the normal staff but the subjects from outlying farms as well.
It could be a place to add some details.
Eg: Huge underground cave that was turned into a natural water cistern but is now filled with something else...
Thank you for putting this all together into one spot. I just followed almost everything on the sidebar. A suggestion, though, you may get more traction if you make links that are usable for people using other lemmy instances and kbin. I had to manually search for everything to go subscribe to it.
@Brunbrun6766 The links are still broken for me, only DM academy takes me to the .world community. Sadly, from Kbin I'll just have to search for all these, as the links won't let me subscribe right away.
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. :)
I was thinking about it more as the "sword of dieting" because it should tell you when you're actually hungry, not just bored or whatever, and will stop glowing when your hunger has been properly satiated so you know when to stop eating!
99% of the time, PCs abilities aren’t your concern, all you need to worry about is knowing if it sounds like they something they might be able to do. Worst case scenario just ask them to read the ability description.
He’s one of the (now ex) members of critical role. He was engaged to Ashley Johnson (from critical role, Ellie in TLOU games, waitress in avengers) and they separated with restraining orders because of abuse and general assholeishness.
So critical role is removing him from their content as best as they can so he doesn’t get visibility and such.
Luckily he isn’t in the main Campaigns, just side stuff. But the stuff he’s in he’s usually the main focus (host in Talks Machina, GM in Undeadwood) so it would be impossible to edit him out of those.
No, those are the exceptions I think. I suspect that removing them would have caused too much trouble for the main campaigns, because they would have had to explain that there is missing content and why for anyone who would be watching them for the first time.
tl;dr would be that one of the main actresses on critical role (Ashley Johnston) was in an abusive relationship with this guy named Foster, and Critical Role has now scrubbed every notion of his existence from their page by deleting all videos with him in it.
A valuable lesson on the importance of local archiving and not trusting any online source to stay online.
If I’ve given the party a meaningful choice, I’ll honour it. Having said that, if I’ve prepared an encounter on the path not taken, I’ll reuse/reskin it later.
yeah but not all choices have equal meaning. You go into the left room or the right. It is all the same dungeon, and with out minor choices it just a hallway.
Choice can’t exist without information. If you know nothing, you can’t chose. If two doors are perfectly the same, it’s not a choice. If you have no information on either path in the forest, you’re not really choosing.
Even if it is immediately a false choice, the point of the fork in the road isn’t necessarily one of immediacy.
A poor DM will run the same exact campaign no matter what fork you take.
A good DM will still have the choice you make have impact, even if the immediate result no matter which way you go is a pair of ogres.
Maybe, if you go left you choose to save the prince rather than the princess. Yes, no matter which way you went you were going to encounter the ogres and it’s only the hostage that’s different. However, if the one you don’t save gets killed by the Basilisk-knight, that means you got to make a choice that impacts the campaign.
It just didn’t put you into conflict with the knight that the DM hasn’t written up yet. That’s next week.
Bless is one of, if not the best defensive and offensive spell. It gets way better if you have party members making attack rolls.
Then as you approach level 12-20 saving throws become way more common, so the floating d4 on every save and attack roll becomes dead useful. I would even upcast this to cover you + the whole party. It seems like not a huge deal, but if you turn one weapon attack into a hit, and can save one party member from taking full damage from a spell, etc you have caused an extra ~10-30 damage, and protected your party from 10-30 damage (or from control spells!)
I’m also a big fan of Word of Recall, Death Ward, Holy Weapon, and Aura of Vitality.
Word of Recall can be very clutch. Especially if your party does not have a Wizard/Sorc with any fast travel spells.
Death Ward can protect squishies.
Holy Weapon can supercharge a fighter ( or monk of your DM let’s you cast this on their unarmed strikes). Definitely fun, and dead useful if someone else is already casting Bless.
Aura of Vitality is essentially ~70 HP you can dole out to your party. That’s basically a short rest at lower levels. I’d use this out of combat.
If the spell is on a pc’s class’s spell list and it has components (verbal, somatic, or material), they know if the spell is being cast (e.g. if the wizard sees someone casting Fireball, they recognize it from the arm movements, magic words, and the smell of guano and sulfur). If it isn’t, giving the player a DC (10 + level of the spell) Intelligence (Arcana) check to identify it would also be fair.
I’m not sure but I dont think this addresses OP’s concern re if you use your reaction to figure out the spell you cant then use your reaction to counterspell?
right, yes- but if the spell isnt in their spell list do you then allow them to make an arcana (etc) check to see if they can work out what it is, and if the succeed would that qualify as their reaction?
What I mean is that remembering stuff (like what someone casting a fireball looks like) is what 3rd edition would call a Free Action, like talking. You can do it as much as you like (that can reasonably fit into six seconds) at any time during the turn, and it doesn’t take up any resources (like your reaction). Even though you’re rolling a check, it isn’t using part of your turn.
If it did take a reaction to identify a spell as it’s being cast, that would mean that remembering something would take the same about of time and energy as an opportunity attack.
Yeah this would potentially be a nice solution; I do think it’s fair that if you see someone casting a spell you yourself can cast, you’ll recognize what it is. The one drawback I can see is that it requires me to have everyone’s spell list memorized, which increases the chances I miss one of the matches.
The more I think about the arcana check, the more I’m interested in it; initially I was worried adding additional checks every time somebody casts a spell could slow combat down too much, but maybe I’m overthinking that.
I think that’s possible and can certainly be your head canon or what you run at your table.
That said, I believe the connections between the two are entirely due to the githyanki’s enslavement by the illithids. Learning the wrong lessons from their oppressors is a sad, but not unbelievable, outcome. The note about aboleths is interesting but I’m not familiar enough with their lore to effectively speculate why they would not know about illithids - perhaps they just didn’t come into contact with them until the height of the illithid empire.
This kind of lore stuff is why I stick to homebrew tbh
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