#dnd handouts

[quillowisp]

From my Curse of Strahd handout pack on Etsy. IS NO FUN IS NO BLINSKY. I made a toy tag. I'm super proud of the decorum involved in this. I finally had a proper use for all of the marginalia critter art I've been saving over the months lol

[davidralphlewis]

Full newspaper included in the last post's handout. Had a lot of fun making this

[daftpatience]

dm tip from a people pleaser, while its fun to indulge you players, if you have certain themes or wants dont be afraid to enforce those boundaries cause otherwise youre not gonna have any fun

TY this i find myself nervous about bc i dont want to be controlling but youre right and i gotta try!!! aaaug

[salokorai]

Decided that I can actually also post a bunch of item icons and handouts I recently created for my campaign.

[livingsand]

[thesezombiestastelikeashes]

One of my players in my D20 Future Game is having a hard time remembering that NPCs continue to have motivations when they're not being observed

So I made them a handy guide. In the most 80s cyberpunk visual imaginable. Feel free to steal and redesign for your players!

[teathomass]

A map our Dungeons & Dragons group found in the chief chambers of an orc den. It appears to rate the quality of loot on a five-star scale, and denotes a few locations the party did not know about.

The text is hand-written by myself too, using D&D5e’s dwarven script, but it’s just English with a different alphabet. The idea is, it’s written in goblin. Goblin uses dwarven script. No different from my days learning the Star Wars aurebesh by heart. Our Ranger, who can read goblin, actually decoded it in real life for fun. I love alternative alphabets, they’re really fun.

[tomesmithpress]

Welcome to the House of Information, home to Elcastor's legal Thieves Guild!

In Act 1 of this year's ttrpg releases you get to meet the guild's Maestro and learn a little bit about the delightful mysteries and corruption that shroud the island.

This release will include:

Character Art

Item Art

A Map (Two versions, with and without grid)

PDF with information on the guild, important characters, an adventure, and how to make your own House of Information/Thieves Guild contract

Blank handouts for contracts and guild license cards!

[eyydragons]

A set of handouts made for my friend's new(ish) DnD campaign.

This is not bribery.

[chronotsr]

No. 1 - G1, The Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (July 1978)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): Erol Otus, Dave C. Sutherland III (cover), David A. Trampier Level range: Average of 9, preferably 5+ players Theme: Standard Swords and Sorcery Major re-releases: G1-3 Against the Giants, GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders, Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff, Dungeon #197, Tales from the Yawning Portal

I'm not sure if G1-G3 are the most remastered adventures of all time, but it's gotta be competitive. I think Tomb of Horrors might have it beat, but I haven't counted. The 4e conversion [the Dungeon #197 one] is really weird in particular because…4e feels like the edition least interested in the legacy of DND? It was boldly doing its own thing. A good quality, actually.

Anyway, it's time to slag off* on a beloved adventure. Note, I am using the earliest copy of G1 I can find, which is from waaaay later when D3 was complete. I apologize.

*And by slag off, I mean "be critical of at all". In practice, this module is actually showing some unusual acumen compared to its contemporaries.

EDIT: I forgot to mention a rather important thing when this was made live -- note the title there! We are officially in ADND land now, so put away your little brown booklets and switch over to the fuck-off awesome player's handbook with the iconic Moloch statue!

Somehow I had gotten my whole life at this point never really…understanding what this structure was supposed to look like? It looks like this.

I honestly think exterior shots of dungeons are critically underrated. Handouts are amazing and being able to flash the back cover art to safely show the party "like this" is actually great, I deeply wish that….any? of the previous modules had done that? I think the only one that did was Tsojconth. Weirdly, the interior drawing is very subtly different. Look at how the logs face:

Not a huge deal but, a kind of weird inconsistency that top one looks like a stockade and the bottom one looks like a log cabin. Side note, we know that the long dimension of this is using 210 feet tall logs, which is to say, the size of an average redwood. These are some big fuck-off trees -- which could be a very interesting detail about the local area.

Now the setup is pretty simple. You were hired to go beat up the giants because they've been raiding the local humans, figure out why they're raiding, and comeback posthaste. The locals have kitted you out with horses, guides, maps, et c -- but no compensation, they have simply omitted a finder's fee (cheap bastards). Also, if you fail, they'll execute you. With friends like these, who needs Giants?

Gary starts with some mild railroading (you accepted the job already, you are already kitted out, you already walked to a nearby cave, you waited til dusk to approach, you notice two guards are missing, and the cave is guaranteed to be moderately hidden. Sure, whatever, I'm going to ignore that if I run this tho. Gary notifies us of a few critical details:

Don't run this stock, that's immoral

Any surviving giants will flee to G2 if they have the opportunity (which, kind of inherently punishes clever play that avoids combat?)

There is a 2% chance per round that the wooden structure will be lit on fire due to chronic rain (why is this a dice roll??)

If you will permit me a tangent, player arson is truly the bane of interesting scenarios everywhere. Whenever a player wonders, "why are all the GM's dungeons underground or in stonework buildings?", it's because doing anything else invites arson as the default and best answer to all problems. Magic items are fireproof and most metal items will not get hot enough to be destroyed, so very often the best solution is to burn the place to the ground and loot it the next day. So, yeah. No wood buildings. Gary's fix is to have all the giants flee into the basement, then waste a week of the PC's time for daring to use arson. Kind of sucks!

Tangent complete.

Here's some random interesting bits:

Gary explicitly states that you can pass yourself off as hill giant kids, which is extremely funny. Minus the implicit child murder.

Naturally there are giant moms doing giant housemaid shit in several rooms. Presumably they have giant curlers too.

The secret door is, literally just a doorway covered by a pelt. I have to hand it to them, that'd trip up most players in 2024 AND make them feel stupid for not figuring it out!

The big reveal that Eclavdra the Drow is secretly behind it all is so lightly teased that it feels downright tasteful.

A giant that uses a ballista as a crossbow (based) and spears for arrows (also based) -- between the prevalence of lightning spears and greatarrows, one starts to think of a certain famous video game. Genuinely I think it'd be a fun exercise one day, for someone who is more knowledgeable than me about Japanese fantasy roleplaying culture, to talk about how anglophone fantasy works made their way into Japan and were interpreted.

One of the cloud giants has hidden a sentient giant slaying sword that speaks all the giant languages, it feels like there's a hell of a story going on there that is only alluded to!

To my knowledge, this is the first official depiction of an orc in DND? Which implies that Gary is team pig-orcs, which is cool. Frankly, I love porcine orcs, or even better just pigfolk in general, they're great.

I think it is actually a rather bold early stance for Gary to hold that, even here in 1978, Chaotic aligned creatures are not automatically friends. Granted, that's how it is in Elric, so it's not THAT bold, but clearly everyone else missed the memo. The orcs are willing to side with you at least in the short-run, and in our previous modules it was very rare to have groups of chaotic-aligned creatures fighting one another. It was always just personal beefs. In fact, the overall theme of G1 so far is that despite the boxy-ass dungeon design, there's already a command of naturalism that even modern dungeons really struggle with. Factionalism truly is the gift that keeps on giving for the GM!

So the big reveal internally to G1 (just think of that -- a reveal internally to G1, and externally to the GDQ supermodule -- we're already getting pacing!) is that the orc slaves have rebelled. And -- hey -- good for them. There's also a kind of…built-in companion refill system going on here? So in oldish DND the way it works is, the expectation is the party is not just 5 guys with swords. You've got companions to help fight, and you've got hirelings to do other stuff (test suspected traps, if you're evil). And you can only hire so many of these guys from town, but attrition is going to happen. So the modules simply provides, automatic replacements should you negotiate worth a quarter of a shit. A dwarf slave here, an orc slave there. Maybe a giant dissenter if you're really clever. One of the potential "rewards" you can get is more dudes to throw at problems.

More interesting bits

There is, what I can only really call an abortive idea going on here where there's a scary temple in the basement? But no one worships there and no information is provided. It is merely a fucked up altar. I think I vaguely recall that it's retconned Tharizdun in one of the remakes? They always retcon things to be Tharizdun. Busy man, Tharzy.

Gary, Gary no. Stop it. Stop this 78 guys bullshit. I thought we had established that giant rooms of giant clumps of guys was bad. I know you have terminal Napoleonics brain but stop.

Wait, Steading is a noun? I always thought it was a verb. Yknow, like "Steading those hill giants", taking 'em down a notch. Apparently, a Steading is a small farm -- same etymology as Homestead. I guess mark that as our first Gygaxism?

Our second Gygaxism is gill, which is "a quarter pint of an alcoholic drink", which is to say a few mouthfuls

Always end your adventures with weird, ominous non-diegetic text. On the flip-side, absolutely do not do what the adventure does, and end on a teleporter that takes you to the next dungeon. That is the worst option.

Anyway, that's the whole Hill Giant situation. Honestly, it's better than I remembered, but in proud module tradition up to this point it gets weirdly filler-y in the basement. There's just something about basements that makes dungeon designers stop giving a shit, I swear. I do need to give the man his due, even though he was a shitass person: Gygax wrote an 11 page module that is of noticeably higher killer-to-filler ratio than any of his contemporaries. G1 is better than any of its predecessors, pound for pound. It is way, way shorter which is I suppose a plus to me and a minus to others, but -- there is a clear internal logic to this place that is tragically missing from (say) The Dwarven Glory. And that internal logic is the beginning of good adventure design. Anyway, we have two fun tidbits to discuss before we end for the day.

First up, we have an of-the-time account of events in Dragon #19! It turns out that in Origins '78 they played G1-G3's prototype. The account is of the winners (mostly West Virginians, a few Michiganders), who used their magic extremely liberally to hide what they were doing as well as to scout. They did opt to light the place on fire, good for them! If you want to check this out, it's on page 3. I will mention G2 and G3 here as relevant later.

Second up, there's a weird interquel hiding in Dungeon #198! Hanging out as an informal G1.5 is "The Warrens of the Stone Giant Thane!" I will not review it in full because my understanding of 4e is, basically just skimming the PHB and reading the DMG, but essentially the Stone Giants are hypothetically aloof and not particularly loyal to their Fire Giant superiors, but someone gave them The Rock That Makes You Crazy and so now they are. Smash the rock!

Man, map design in the 4e era was so fucking bad. It looks fine, but like, this is four circles. And downstairs is, of course, cave as far as the eye can see. Aren't stone giants supposed to be skilled carvers? Anyway, If you feel like G2 would be too big of a jump mechanically compared to G1, this exists. I'm sure you could use it if you liked, and certainly there is a Genre of Grognard who would be kinda tickled at the thought of finding "lost content" for el classico GDQ.

Next week, we cover G2, which was also in July. So was G3! They're triplets!

[leidensygdom]

I've seen you posting about what I think is a DnD campaign, and I'm wondering what software the screenshots are from?

It is a DnD campaign, even if an odd one!!

We use FoundryVTT, which is an absolute godsend. It's a Virtual TableTop (like roll20), with a few differences:

It's single payment. $50, but it goes on sale, and it's very lenient with the license (one person gets it, the whole group can use it to DM as they'd wish! they don't really care)

No subscriptions or extra payments after that. You get the entire software with all of its utilities for that.

It's self-hosted (think like Minecraft servers) but it's easy to set up and it's wonderful since you don't need to worry about storage

It comes with just all sort of functionalities out of the box and it's far much more fleshed out than roll20. There's a lot of integrated TTRPG systems in it already (including 5e, Pf2e, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, etc), which update constantly

The software itself is also actively updated and they add more functionalities constantly- It's already VERY good, but they keep expanding it!

A very important one, but it allows modding and has a very active modding community, so if there's a functionality the base software doesn't have, chances are that someone already did it. for example, the healthbar or the turn markers are mods

Honestly the devs are pretty cool too and I appreciate the work they do

For some of the cool functionalities it has that I really use (most of which roll20 doesn't have)

It's just really well optimized and they actively work on optimizing it further with every update!

This one is very important to me, but it allows animations natively, which I use quite a bit for animated tokens. There's people who have done animated spell effects and such too. It supports webm, which are much better than gifs

Overall a LOT of visual customization. You can set lights in the scene with lots of animation, filters, there's a mod to add weather and particle effects, you can have forehead tiles (basically stuff that is over the character), etc.

The sheet and inventory management system is so much better than roll20! you can drag and drop features, classes, spells, all that sort of stuff. Pf2e's module is particularly well done and you can just drag about everything and get a sheet ready in no time

it has a delightful vision system with integrated walls, fog of war and so on (yknow, that thing that roll20 has behind a paywall, but better)

integrated rulers and templates too!

and of course just endless customization with mods

a really nice system for journals, player notes, handouts, etc

fairly specific but you can make both lootable chests and interactive shops for your players with a mod and I LOVE that

I could fawn ALL day about how much I love this software. I ran my campaign in roll20 for two years and the amount of wrestling I had to do with it was infuriating! I really recommend FVTT to pretty much anyone. It can be a bit overwhelming at first since it's a bit harder (given how much functionality it has), but once you get used to it, it's hard to go back to other stuff tbh

[quillowisp]

From my Curse of Strahd handout pack on Etsy. Here is the Durst family crest! I probably could have made it a little more interesting, but I figured i could keep it simple with these mcmansion owning tiny lords

[davidralphlewis]

Sent my players a little letter to kick off a new campaign

[justafriendofxanders]

enjoying your leverageposting!! question for fun if you want: do you have any headcanons about hardison?

hi thanks so much! i'm glad my descent into madness is bringing some enjoyment to people. 😄 this isn't so much a list of headcanons as it is one i've been thinking about a lot involving hardison running a game of dnd -- he chooses 5e (assuming some timeline wibblyness) not because it's the simplest system out there, but because he figures it's the most accessible given the cultural baggage around it. it's not that the others aren't smart enough to figure it out (they definitely are), but they're a little intimidated by the various handouts hardison has printed out and put into individual binder sleeves. eliot (jokingly) gives him a hard time about not wanting to dress up as an elf and do "nerd shit." hardison picks up on everyone's reticence and goes, "well if this is too complicated we can do a different system," and then stays up all night gutting and retooling the entire game and making premade character sheets and a presentation explaining how to play, but then something more important comes up and nate's gotta pull the plug on their scheduled game night. hardison gets actually bummed about it and they can tell because he insists "it's cool" and is not actively bringing it up except to occasionally give them sad puppy-dog eyes from the corner.

anyways the team make it up to him one night when he comes home and they're all sitting around the table wearing silly costumes. a couple of them have brought dice; eliot's the only one with a d20 and is arguing with nate who's brought, like, craps dice ("it's a very distinctive rolling system"), except hardison's reworked it into some 3d6 system so technically nate has the right ones. (no one can tell if nate actually knew this all along or just got lucky.) sophie's like, "oh i have six-sided dice!" except everyone knows they're loaded and she's not allowed to get them. also every single one of them is a control freak who gets upset when their rolls don't go well ("a BABY could pick that lock"). after a while, parker starts consistently rolling very well, and no one can prove that she's manipulating the dice but also no one can prove that she's NOT manipulating them.

hardison also makes premade characters for everyone based on what he anticipates their playstyles will be:

parker's a cool thief that can only do three things (sneak, steal, and stab) but does them very well

nate's a shifty used car salesman of a bard that tries to talk his way through every situation

sophie's a beautiful actress that everyone recognizes and adores. tries to seduce her way out of the situations nate gets them in.

eliot is squeaky the gnome. he grumbles about it until combat rolls around and everyone learns squeaky is built to kick absolute ass.

[winking-owl]

Ya girl's fallen on financial hardship so I'm taking drawing commissions. All will be traditional pencil drawings (colored pencil double) available as a digital scan or physically mailed to you (with additional shipping cost).

Get a drawing of your pet!

Or your favorite animal!

Detailed Handouts for tabletop rpgs (can even do these in code, cipher, or fantastical languages)

More examples of my work in a reblog below! Base price $40 but variable based on complexity. Will draw: animals, dnd handouts, objects, humans/characters (but they are not my specialty) will not draw: n*$*f*w*, intense gore (reserve the right to refuse) half of payment up front and half after completion, no tweaks once the commission has started.

Even if you're not interested I'd appreciate it if you'd pass this post around!

[mistwood]

even if they don't tell me directly, i like to think that my family has been having fun with our dnd campaign. i'm trying to make it as fun as possible without overwhelming my parents (my sister has at least played bg3) and i've been printing out handouts, making item cards and spell scrolls, did custom lego minis from our years of lego sets, stuff like that. i'm mostly doing it for myself too bc i've missed playing physical dnd soooo much like i love my friends and our campaign but i haven't played in person since high school.... i missed being at the table t_t