#DnD5e

[comikbook]

ITS FINISHEDDD

[osteoptimist]

TTRPG character who is on a quest to discover lost ancient knowledge. They read part of a text that was written thousands of years prior, and now they need the sequel so bad they don't care how many haunted crypts, ruined temples, and forgotten necropolises they have to bust through to get it.

having to wait for the next book in a series to be released is evil wtf. all literature should have already been written 2000 years ago so i don’t have to wait to read it now

[luckyblackcatxiii]

It's been an age and a day since my last CoS NPC design but I finally found the energy and inspiration to sit down and get around to designing one again! She's become rather prominent in our game finally so it felt appropriate to tackle Mrs. Bookclub herself: Fiona Wachter!

Our DM described her as being a woman of control who wouldn't let a hair get out of place, so I committed to that line of thinking by making her look sharp and precise, especially when compared to Lydia Vallakovich (WHO I THOUGHT I POSTED UP ON HERE YEARS AGO BUT I GUESS? I DIDN'T??? Or the post got deleted idk, that works I need to re-vamp her and her family a little anyway).

While being a no-nonsense type, she is a noblewoman as well so while not sporting much frill, she still has enough decoration on her to announce her status (as well as her extended mourning for the loss of certain family members through her choice of blacks and mourning cap/veil). I kept being wishy-washy on which late Victorian decade I wanted her dress to lean towards--since our Vallaki leans towards that era aesthetically--but I'd say her tastes range between late 1870s to 1880s.

[actualsailboat]

Renna

[tegabiart]

Saltig goes to Barovia

[halfwaytonowhere]

Why have you stopped? I need more! What are their names? How did they meet?? I’ll add on:

Human: It feels like we’ve grown closer, so I hope you don’t mind if I ask… Why do elves��I mean Erandil—why have you all taken human children and replaced them with fae changelings? I also heard you rumors you intentionally kidnap or trap people to make them dance to death or entertain you forever.

Elf: What? That’s ridiculous! I admit I have heard of a few Erandil that take pity upon human couples who recently lost a child and bless them with a near perfect adoptive child that also lost their family... I had assumed you’d heard about the “Right Home, Any Race” initiative they created. It’s the same with dwarves and other races. As for your… other claim… My father once knew someone who complained that humans always trampled over his mushroom circles, so he started making the trespasser do a little dance as repayment for the damage. Not sure how that got so blown out of proportion.

Elf: Hi. Stupid question. Is it true that you guys live in trees?

Human: What? No. We live in buildings on the ground. I thought elves lived in trees.

Elf: We also live in buildings on the ground. What?

[theablokhus]

“Tell me, goddess: What am I to do?”

[reichenbachfalle]

i played as a bard for the first time! (……like a month ago) and this is my coward gusli player Pryanik

[dungeonmapster]

The Druid's Treehouse Asset Pack

patreon.com/dungeonmapster

[osteoptimist]

If you enjoy 4e or thought any of these ideas sound neat, I also suggest checking out Draw Steel by MCDM! It isn't out yet, but I've been following the development and playtests and it seems really promising. It takes a lot of inspiration from 4e.

Building on the idea of healing surges, each character in DS has a set number of Recoveries that are spent when an effect would heal you and restore a third of your Stamina. But it also introduces Victories, a special resource gained by overcoming challenges that lets you use your best abilities easier. This means that at the end of an adventure when the players are approaching the boss, they're at their strongest (lots of Victories) AND at their weakest (low Recoveries, might die if they can no longer heal) at the same time, which makes for great dramatic pacing.

While it is explicitly a game about killing monsters, Draw Steel also has really fun rules for a wide variety of downtime activities, and an awesome Negotiation subsystem for important social interactions. The Negotiation rules literally require you to imagine the NPC as a complex, three dimensional person with their own perspectives, desires, and inner conflicts in order to succeed. I've seen it happen at the table, it brings NPCs to life in the minds of the players like nothing else.

The game has a big emphasis on making it fun for the Director to design and run combat encounters. You get a special resource, called Malice, that increases every round and can be spent to make monster abilities more powerful or to activate effects that change the whole battlefield. The guidelines for building encounters are robust and monsters have their own roles to help you create encounters that are more like actual puzzles to be solved with tactics than a slog of just rolling to hit the nearest enemy each turn.

It heavily features Minions as a monster type. Minions have a shared stamina pool, which means even a single-target effect can potentially knock out an entire squad. They also act in squads, so having literally dozens of monsters in play doesn't slow things down at all. I've run encounters with 19 enemies, no sweat.

Because it doesn't treat magic as an entire subsystem of the game that only some classes get access to, there's no martial/caster gap, and all the martial classes are just as capable as the ones that use magic or psionics.

If you liked the Warlord, check out the Tactician class in Draw Steel. It's all about giving your allies opportunities. Use your abilities to make them stronger, take extra actions, or reposition to adapt to the fight as it changes. It absolutely scratches the itch for a frontline support martial.

It also fixes one of the big design flaws in 4e, the way the game encouraged you to always use your powers in order of most to least powerful, with very little variation. First fight of the day? Daily power. After that you'd spend your Encounter powers and so on. Draw Steel instead gives you a variable amount of your Heroic Resource each round, which you then spend to use your Heroic Abilities. These are your biggest and strongest powers, but you can't use them right off the bat and they're all more situational, not always useful in every scenario so you have to decide what the best use of your HR is. Combined with the Malice and Villain Actions that the Director gets, this means that unlike 4e where fights were a nova in the first round followed by cleanup, Draw Steel fights get more exciting and dramatic as they progress.

Okay specific things I like about D&D 4e:

Healing surges are just a really good pacing mechanic and makes resource management important. They also scale better than 5e's hit dice, since a single healing surge always heals a proportion of the character's maximum hit points and the number of healing surges a character has stays mostly the same.

Despite the claim that the game is more combat-focused than other editions, it actually has a lot of objective rules-mediated support for non-combat scenes. I'm not even talking about skill challenges, skill challenges kinda sucked until they overhauled them and even then were kind of half-baked, but even without resorting to them the actual mechanics for the skills have plenty of predetermined, objective rules-mediated uses beyond "the DM determines a difficulty and then you try to roll high."

The Fighter is really fun to play.

I absolutely adore the worldbuilding of 4e. The cosmology actually feels mythological and like it has a mythic history. All the different inhabitants of the universe all fit into the cosmic tapestry instead of being a patchwork of unrelated ideas. Also, it introduced the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Astral Sea, so hell yeah.

Related to the cosmology, I love how it actually sneakily brought back the old Law vs Chaos conflict, albeit with the extremes being Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil and with Good and Evil as middle steps. It's actually really BECMI in many ways.

Also BECMI, the fact that ascension and immortality are written as the explicit end goals for characters. Hell yeag

[meowme0wo]

Full Inferno..!

[comikbook]

heres a quick in progress vid

[ravnicacardsconverted]

Join the Ravnica Cards Converted Discord and come hang out here https://discord.gg/PydYEEY

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To contact me directly for commision info please contact me her on tumblr.

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[manueltorresart]

2/?? She's your lovely drunken clepto momma. This week @criticalrole drawing is Nott the Brave, who is played by Sam Riegel.

[luckyblackcatxiii]

hii, just fyi the link for lydia in the recent fiona wachter post does not work (it leads to just imgur, nothing specific on it.). also, fiona looks stunning, incredible art as always. love the colors you use! <3

Ah, I was worried the link would eventually disappear, so thank you for bringing this up to my attention! I guess, if anything, I can use this as a placeholder to show off the old Vallakovich designs (sans Victor because while I love the outfit I made for him, that's not OUR Victor anymore [plus my gf made a great update version of him awhile back])!

And thank you so much! I'm really glad people seem to be enjoying my Fiona 🥺💕