#d&d spellcasters

[nat-1-whump]

🪄 Effects of using magic

Fantasy whump ideas no. 1

(I may or may not have been partially inspired by various D&D classes in making this...)

Exhaustion. Using magic is incredibly tiring. Even as their body is still flooded with adrenaline from fighting for their life, Whumpee is exhausted and collapses at the first chance they get. If they're traveling with others, do they try to wake Whumpee up, or let them sleep? Maybe a party member wraps a blanket around them, praying they wake up soon. Or maybe they wake up on the ground hours later, forgotten.

Loss of memory, personality, or even their own sanity. As Whumpee uses more and more of their power, they begin to lose themself. They forget their closest friends, breaking Caretaker's heart when they learn that Whumpee doesn't remember them. Eventually they can't even remember their own name, or why they turned to magic in the first place. They no longer know who or what they're fighting for. And this makes them miserable, knowing that they chose to give themselves up to magic, but not knowing the reason why.

Injury (TW for brief mentions of blood, bruises, and broken bones). Magic takes a toll on the body, and Whumpee has to consider how much they're willing to give. They feel sick, like their organs are melting into slush. Maybe bruises appear across their skin, or blood leaks from their eyes, their mouth, their fingertips, staining their arcane focus red. With stronger magic, Whumpee feels their bones begin to crack. The rest of the party begs them to stop doing this to themself, as Caretaker gently bandages their latest wounds. Or maybe their party doesn't care, using Whumpee as a weapon that can simply be tossed aside when it breaks.

Evil warlock pact. This can work with any of the above, but basically, there is some other entity granting Whumpee their power at a cost. Maybe what it gives in magic, it takes in life force. It could be a malevolent deity that has its own motives for granting Whumpee power, and maybe it's not being completely honest as to what those motives are.

Reputation/social standing. For whatever reason, magic is extremely taboo. Nobody understands why Whumpee uses it, assuming that they're dangerous, monstrous, and greedy for power. Maybe Whumpee didn't even choose to be magical, they just naturally are. Yet, they hate themselves for it, wanting nothing more but to wash the magic from their veins. There's no safe place for them. They're always on the run, pushing away those who care about them for fear of being found out.

[brewerssupplies]

Let's fucking rock!

Here's a cantrip for bard, cleric, and warlock. Hope you enjoy!

[fantastictalesofadventure]

😞🔥

[hatwolf]

Minkar the Mystical

I got to draw and design a TTRPG character for someone again! Always a delight <3 Commission for Scrag of his Aarakocra Wizard Minkar!

Posted using PostyBirb

[honourablejester]

One thing I’m noticing, reading through Pathfinder 2e spell lists after coming from D&D 5e, is that PF2e spells have a distinct ethos of specificity. And by that I don’t mean that they’re more limited or more finicky that 5e spells, I mean that they have very specific effects.

Like. Okay. Example. In 5e, if you want to do psychic damage to someone with a spell, you could pull out Phantasmal Killer, which ‘creates an illusory manifestation of its deepest fears’, dealing 4d10 psychic damage per round unless they make their save. In PF2e, if you want to deal mental damage to someone, there is a spell called Teeth to Terror that creates the extremely specific delusion that the victim’s teeth are falling out and cramming themselves down its throat. In 5e, if you wanted to booby-trap a door, you might put a Glyph of Warding on it, which can either explode when triggered or store a prepared spell of its level or lower (which can do some fun things). In PF2e, you might instead put the Ravenous Portal spell on the door, which very specifically turns it into a mimic the next time someone tries to open it. There are different spells depending on whether you want to turn someone to wood, stone, or glass. There’s also a friendly spell to turn someone willingly to glass, or iron.

What I’m getting at here is, 5e seems to have a general ‘give the ballpark effects and let people flavour it from there’ sort of ethos, while PF2e has a more ‘no, I’m about to tell you very specifically what’s about to happen to you’ sort of vibe?

There are spells to slowly cover someone with paralysing coral growths, impale them on a cold iron spike, imprison them in a phantom iron maiden that heals you as it hurts them, fire a cone of jagged bone shards at them, make someone feel like they’re being crushed underwater, give them a crisis of faith, set a pack of spectral beasts on them, x-ray vision their organs …

They’re so specific. 5e has it’s aesthetic spells, don’t get me wrong, and PF2e has it’s more general spells as well, but Pathfinder just has more spells that do one specific thing, and describe said thing in quite a lot of (often gruesome) detail.

I’m kind of vibing with it, not going to lie. And I have so many questions about the individual spellmakers who came up with each one. Like, why did you make a spell specifically to make someone terrified of their own fucking teeth? What circumstances led someone to think they needed an on-demand phantom iron maiden? What exactly goes on in Golarion?

[akitasimblr]

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[dungeonmalcontent]

Psionics: Spellcasting & Specialties

It's here! (And I'm gonna be straight about this from the start, its $9.99, and it's worth every penny.)

This book. Has taken far longer than it had any right to. It's also better than it really had any right to be. This started as a post it note on my wall. It is now 42 pages. It contains rules for adding psionics into 5e without making it a whole new thing that only some people can kind of take advantage of.

This isn't the mystic UA all over again. This is psionics for EVERYONE.

Three types of psionic spellcasting that work on any spellcaster. ANY spellcaster. I don't care how complex your multi-class is, this book works on it. I made specific adjustments for every spellcasting feature, including third-casting (do you know how relatively obscure third-casting is? There aren't even official rules for multiclassing a third-casting spellcaster with other spellcasting classes.)

Six feats that add or empower psionics.

13 subclass options (one for each class) that use psionic abilites.

35 psionic spells. What's a psionic spell? That's a spell in the psionic school that this book also adds; these are spells only accessible to characters using psionic spellcasting. There's also rules for roping older spells from other books into the psionic school to better sort out who can use what.

Have I mentioned before that there are also three new creature stat blocks? The various features and abilities in this book necessitate the creation of three new creatures. Are they summons? Yeah, that does dampen the excitement a little, but they can be encountered in the wild too and (I'm excited about this bit) they aren't just an extension of your action economy. These creatures don't have to listen to you.

I'm really excited about this. It's a big project. I'm glad it's finally complete. I get to move on to other things on my list, and I can finally blab about details for this project (which I will do gradually).

[dead-lights]

florencia devampiro // test renders

so i made elle devampiro's mother-in-law because of course i did.

[jaypea00101010]

Freezing Smite and Sacrifice

A double whammy this time, not only a new spell for your paladins, but showing off a new Method of Worship for the priest to go with it!

Freezing Smite is, as you can probably guess, a new Paladin spell for your 5e games. While there's already plenty of different damage types represented in smite spells: thunder, fire, and psychic twice to name a few, there's not yet an official cold based smite spell.

Freezing Smite exists to fill that void, while it deals less damage than even some first level smites, the extra effects are where it becomes really useful, speed reduction and loss of reaction is extremely useful, helping your allies get away from enemies and not being chased down, or not having to worry about getting counterspelled this round for example.

Where this becomes really interesting though is when we look at the next new method of worship The Priest Class will be getting next update: Sacrifice

As with all of Priest's Methods of Worship, at first level this grants the priest a new spellcasting focus: a knife or weapon that deals slashing damage, requiring you to wave the weapon as you cast spells; and an improvement to some spells, in this case, smites.

If a priest hits a creature with a weapon attack, they can choose to cast a smite spell as part of that attack (much like Paladins do with their Divine Smite feature), this can be any smite spell that priests know, which will of course be all official smite spells. A feature stolen with permission from heavily inspired by @cardstockcaster's conviction paladin optional class feature.

Priests aren't the best in melee combat usually, not having very good weapon proficiencies for it, but combined with War as your Deity's Domain, or Judge as your Divine Calling, both of which grant you proficiency in all Melee Weapons, a Priest can become a monster in the front lines, smiting foes left and right in a way paladins could only dream of.

Keep your eyes peeled for the level 1-13 Priest Class playtest, featuring Freezing Smite, and Sacrifice, coming very soon!

[memento-mariii]

My pet peeve about Forgotten Realms' Drow lore is that despite being told that Drow Society is this super restrictive, matriarchal society with reversed gender roles, we are rarely shown Drow househusbands. In fact, most of the named male Drow characters are portrayed as either career soldiers or arcane spellcasters. This is explained by saying that drow society, as it revolves around the worship of Lolth, regards arcane spellcasting as far inferior to divine spellcasting of clerics, and that while only women are allowed to have high-ranking positions in their armies like the generals and the lieutenants, the grunts and the footsoldiers are mostly composed of men.

My problem with that is..... One, you can't claim that you're reversing the gender dynamic in your fantasy setting and have what's considered to be "a man's work (derogatory)" in said setting be wizardry and the military, two jobs whose real-world counterparts (academia and the military) are *also* considered "a man's job (complimentary)" and are highly male-dominated fields in the real world, come on.

And two, how has this supposedly super-strict matriarchy sustained itself for so long? We've got this class of abused, oppressed, and very rightfully disgruntled gender, many of whom are a. combat-trained and has to vastly outnumber their female superiors, due to how the whole "military hierarchy" thing works, or b. can shoot fireballs and blow up stuff with their minds. Meanwhile, the Drow women mostly stick to religion and politics and lounging about in boudoirs in fantasy dominatrix gear. So what's stopping the men from staging a rebellion? Not to belittle the power that religion and politics hold in a pseudo-feudalistic medieval pastiche society, but I always assumed the reason the church and the crown was so powerful in medieval Europe was because they controlled the military!*

(*don't quote me on this, I'm not a history major)

Look, I don't mind depictions of fantasy bigotry in fiction (I quite enjoy them actually!), and it's possible to reverse the oppressed and the privileged class in a fictional society so that's opposite from real life in a way that it still poses pertinent questions about real-world oppression in our real-world society (e.g. Egalia's Daughters) , but I don't think Forgotten Realms quite manages to do that. If anything, it's weirdly reminiscent of that "feminists don't *actually* want to work jobs, they just want the men to do all the work for them and for women to reap ALL the benefits" antifeminist rhetoric ☹️

(To be clear, I'm not saying that Ed Greenwood and R.A. Salvatorre are misogynists, just that they either were confused about how sexism actually operates in the real world, or that they had some unexamined biases and hangups surrounding feminism that they perhaps failed to address.)

I don't mind fantasy bigotry in my fiction, but I want my fantasy bigotry to be realistic or at least believable, y'know?

[nat-1-whump]

Mending spells are for objects, healing spells are for people. That was one of the very first things Whumpee learned from Mentor as a spellcaster. Though they weren't quite sure what caused this difference, they also weren't one to test it. Every spell Mentor taught had been passed down and refined for generations, so Whumpee trusted that they had good reason for emphasizing that such a distinction existed.

Well, at least, they never intended to test Mentor's instructions. Now that they'd tripped and fallen into a ditch full of jagged rocks while looking for spell components in the woods, they were considering it as an option.

A boulder scraped against them on the way down, leaving a thick red streak of blood along the edge of the ditch. They groaned as they lay on their side. Each frantic, shallow breath sent a wave of stabbing pain through their body, undoubtedly because of a broken rib or two. As their mind stopped spinning, they realized they were clutching at a large gash that ran across their stomach.

They pushed themself into a sitting position, still cradling their stomach. "Mmnh... Somebody. H-help! Please!" Tears ran down their cheeks, stinging the cuts that dashed across.

Moments passed, yet there was no response. Whumpee began to try to call out again, but they were taken by a coughing fit and fell onto their back. They winced, feeling blood spatter from their lips.

Whumpee cursed themself for using up their one health potion earlier in the day on a stupid scraped knee. And then foolishly separating from the rest of their party, which was surely hours down the path by now. They hadn't even properly learned how to cast a healing spell, one of the more difficult spells to learn, thinking that carrying around a potion meant they wouldn't have to.

At this point, even if a mending spell wasn't specifically meant to heal, they figured it had to be better than nothing. And they knew it well, having used it to repair things countless times. They closed their eyes in an effort to calm themself enough to focus. They took a shaky breath, rested one hand above their stomach and clutched their spell focus with the other, and whispered the spell.

A soft light shone from Whumpee's palm. It flickered for a moment before fading away. Whumpee propped themself up on their elbow to look, only to find that the wound continued to flow steadily, coating their fingers with sticky blood. Nothing had changed. They sank to the ground again, defeated, when they felt a warm tingling sensation across their skin.

A scream tore through their throat as their flesh started to warp, twisting into strips and sprawling across the wound like vines. The pain left them writhing on the ground and choking on splintered cries.

"... Ple-please... It hurts! Make it stop!" They weren't sure to who or what they were calling, but it didn't matter. Every desperate plea went unanswered in the empty forest, as the magic continued its work undisturbed. Whumpee sobbed with each surge of pain. Every movement sent a sharp, burning pain from their wound, but they couldn't hold still, not like this.

Finally, the pain slowed down to a dull, throbbing sensation. Whumpee shuddered and carefully pulled themself back onto their elbows to look. The wound didn't look much better than before, other than having some rough strands of flesh stretched across as if it had been clumsily sewn over with rope. At the very least, it seemed like the spell had pulled the wound shut by a little bit and slowed the bleeding.

Whumpee stared up at the sky. Though they'd left in the bright afternoon, the sky was now fading to a warm purple, speckled with a few faint stars. If this was the best they could heal themself, they had no better choice than to wait and hope someone found them, and soon.

[squirmydads-creations]

#6 on the list of 10 D&D Minis that every group should have is spellcasters! These are all Reaper Bones minis from the 2012 Kickstarter, I use Bones minis as testing grounds for different paint techniques and different color combinations. One of the things I'm currently working on is dry brush highlights that don't wipe out the detail, I'm trying to train my hand and my eye and I find the best way to do that is lots of practice. Cheap minis are very handy for this purpose.

[yousadclownofaman]

WIP teaser

Aldebaran’s Ring

Guide our Curse Through Howling Void

To Ripe Distant Minds

[sagesariadnd]

You know a detail I really love when it comes to spellcasting in D&D and tv/movies?

When the magic has its own signature or style based on who's casting it.

The Legend of Vox Machina is a great example of this, because pretty much every school of magic - and sometimes even the individual characters - have a distinct visual or technique. Delilah's necromancy is a prime example; it's all in shades of black and purple with jagged lines, it sounds like the screams of the damned, and it pulls from life essence, either from blood sacrifices or even just the jutting veins in Delilah's arms as she's casting, as if it's pulling the energy straight out of her body. Scanlan's magic is all flashy and transparent purple, radiant magic such as Pike or Kash's is gold and glowing. Keyleth I noticed does a motion of pulling energy out of the gem in her staff for a lot of spells, and I also noticed a lot of her spells make her cry out as she's exuding force, which feels very correct for druidic magic because it feels almost primal or instinctual.

Honor Among Thieves did this a bit, too, specifically thinking of the final encounter with Sophina, when she and Simon have the Bigby's Hand fight. They're obviously both casting Bigby's Hand, but Simon's is made of stone from the pebbles and cobblestones on the ground, while Sophina's is red and fleshy, much like her undead nature.

My Friday night character Sheyleigh, as a Way of Shadow monk, has access to a handful of spells using ki, which is how I ended up going down a rabbit hole of thinking of ki as just another way of channeling magic. I thought of spellcasting through that lens as Sheyleigh, and describe pretty much all of her spellcasting through a series of tai chi moves, like she's gathering her ki into one place to make the magic happen. And when she multiclassed into a trickery cleric of the Traveler (I'll get into that story when I make a proper post about her), I also considered his style and how their aesthetics mix - when she first started going down the path of multiclassing, I described her attempting to channel her ki into a Guiding Bolt, and the way I described it was intentionally inspired by Dragonball Z's Kamehameha and the various bending techniques in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Honestly, ATLA is a good reference for a lot of abilities when it comes to monks, and not just if you're playing Way of the Four Elements.

This is honestly one of the reasons why I love playing bards so much; music is so diverse and evokes so many moods, that there really are endless options for how that manifests into music. My bardlock Ameila, for example, used to have a hurdy-gurdy which her patron was sealed in, and I used the music of hurdy-gurdy player Andrey Vinogradov for the sort of musical palette of the character. There's a very dark, ominous sound to it, that I felt represented the darkness of her patron and an element of Ameila being a bit afraid of her own powers, with heavy inspiration from HP Lovecraft's __The Music of Erich Zann__. Conversely, my folk hero bard-rogue Glerble the Goblin is very boisterous and flashy, and his spells and inspiration come from epic ballads and over-the-top one-liners. I've had ideas kicking around for a tiefling bard who creates music exclusively through prestidigitation and minor illusion to put on synthesized music and light shows like a magical EDM performer, I've considered a bard-monk who fights using a bass flute as a quarterstaff or kashakas as nunchaku...honestly I could be here forever talking about all the different ways I've considered bardic magic.

I don't know if I had anywhere in particular to go with this. Just saying that it's really fun and cool to consider how magic may look and feel different from school of magic to school of magic, and from character to character. If you haven't tried roleplaying out your spellcasting components, try it sometime! 10/10 would recommend!

[friendlyschroom]

Emissary’s Retreat

6th-level Conjuration Casting Time: 1 minute Range: self Components: V, S, M (red chalk dust worth at least 30 gp, which the spell consumes) Duration: 1 Day

      You mark yourself to your current location and if you take any damage during the duration of this spell you will be teleported back to your marked location, ending the spell. If something is blocking the marked location, you appear safely in the nearest unoccupied space. This spell also works through planar travel. You can use your action to dismiss the spell early without being teleported.

Classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Wizard