Mad Gaming Madness

One of the mainstays of the Eberron setting is the idea of communities, both inclusive/organic (settlements, cities, organized religions) and exclusive/artificial (secret societies, cults, criminal gangs). In the 3.5E rules, the Eberron Campaign Setting book introduced the Community domain for clerics, designed for a cleric to encourage group effort. The one saint in the canonical material that characters can actually meet is devoted to this domain. This is my attempt to convert the essence of the 3.5 domain to 5E. There's not much too the 3.5E domain: just a list of spells, a diplomacy bonus, and calm emotions once per day. 5E domains are far more defining and grant far more power than that. I worked this one from the ground up, with some help from a few ENWorld commenters.

The new edition of D&D has inspired a large number of people to "roll their own," and with modern desktop publishing tools being available so cheaply (or even free), it should come as no surprise that a lot of it is really polished. Here are a few sites that I find particularly useful; I can't swear to the balance of all of their materials, but there are some great ideas in there and some very polished game elements I use myself.

I've been a fan of gnolls for years. Most recently, under 4th Edition, Keith Baker wrote an article about playing gnolls ; since I'm a huge fan of his Eberron setting, as you can imagine, I'm very familiar with his work. I made the following conversion of gnolls into a playable race, informed by the Monster Manual , but not slavishly bound to it. It should be pretty well-balanced.

I realize I never posted the follow-up to my earlier post on magic items in Eberron . Well, Real Life bogged me down for a while, but I intended to post a "shopping list" from my group when they made it to Sharn. I'm still working on it. I've converted a bunch of the alchemical items and special substances from 3E and 3.5E, but it's taking a while to do minor magic items. I've stolen a few from this list to pepper my adventures, and I recommend checking it out. Below are the special items.

They snuck it up on me! They've restarted the biweekly Geomorph Contest over at Inkwell Ideas. They lost some momentum, I believe, when they put it on hold for GenCon (and I totally understand why -- they've got a lot on their plate for the Con, and I appreciated them putting it on hiatus over just not saying anything about it and leaving us in the dark). Therefore, they've extended the deadline for the current contest, which has the "building" theme. I had been watching, but when they didn't restart it right after GenCon, I kind of lost track. I'm happy to throw my hat in the ring again, although my stuff pales in comparison to the artists that submit stuff.

I've always been a huge fan of artist Dave Trampier , and loved his comic strip Worm y , which ran in Dragon magazine from 1977 to 1988. Wormy had a great story and depicted a fascinating world, the realm of Mascentia. While it was the standard generic-fantasy D&D world, the strip told stories from the point-of-view of the monsters -- sentient, intelligent creatures with drives just  like humans, who had to deal with the occasional overzealous "adventurers" who invaded their homes, slaughtered their families and made off with their hard-earned belongings. When 5E D&D was still in playtest, one of the first races I homebrewed was the trolls; most of the protagonists of Wormy were trolls, after all.

So, the next bout of Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest is "tombs/a tomb." I think I can do this.

So I had another idea for a geomorph for Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest . I'm a big fan of Stonewerks' village geomorphs , which can be used to make an instant fantasy village (or, with a little work, a modern country village). I thought I'd make a tile in that style as an homage.

This time around Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest has the theme of "a shrine."

So, Inkwell Ideas has started a biweekly dungeon geomorph contest , and they've gotten some great results already . The idea is, they give a theme every two weeks, and you have those two weeks to submit up to 3 geomorphs; it looks like they're giving away nice prizes, too, such as their DungeonMorph Dice , or Chubby Monster Games’ Moleskin Maps . I thought I'd play along.

So, I was directed to this cool site recently: Tabletop Audio . It's a site with many ten-minute soundscapes to play during games. The site tags them pretty well, as to whether they've got ambience (i.e., rattling chains, water dripping, etc.), minimal music (nothing with voices), or both. The list of soundscapes is pretty extensive, everything from Sleeping Dragon, to Strangers on a Train, to Warehouse 13. I've been trying it out, and it's easier than making my own playlists of sound effects using Softrope , which is what I had been doing. The soundscapes are 10 minutes long, and loopable.

So this year, I had several really good ideas for my One Page Dungeon Contest submission. Sadly, my imagination was captured by the material in the thread " Ten Foot Poles: How Do They Work? " on RPG.net, and especially the idea of the Most Ancient and Worshipful Order of Roodsmen and Pole-Tenders that we developed there. As I was driving one of my DMs home last week, I suddenly had the idea for my submission -- the Vault of the Pole, the testing ground for apprentices of the Guild who seek to become journeymen. I pictured apprentice pole-tenders (called "tenders") frantically trying to overcome the obstacle course in a series of dungeon rooms while a deep sonorous bell tolls every minute or so. And so, that's what I went with.

One of the fun things to play in 1E D&D was a half-ogre. Basically, the archetypical half-ogre was big and dumb, and you're only job was to hit things. Locked door? Bash it open. Hobgoblins threatening the party? Hit them until the fall down. Subtlety was lost with this character; but that was the point -- if you DMed a game, and someone wanted to play a half-ogre, you knew they didn't want to talk to the townsfolk or rub elbows with the nobles; they were only here to kill things and take their stuff.

A lot of people on various game message boards seem to think that D&D 5E's de-emphasis on magic items means problems for Eberron. From what I can see, nothing could be farther from the truth.

One of my favorite supplements from D&D 4E was Heroes of the Feywild , which really opened my eyes to how to run adventures in the Realm of Faerie. And one of the fan-favorite parts of the book was the new race section. I ended up having a number of Pixie player characters at my table over the years. I was impressed with the work done on them -- despite the potential for abuse or the possibility it would end up terrible, they actually made pixies playable and interesting, with unique-but-not-overpowered abilities. They got my seal of approval. With the advent of 5E, I was pleased to see the Pixie and Sprite in the Monster Manual . They have apparently decided the two races are related but slightly dissimilar -- Pixies are essentially nonviolent versions of Sprites, with a few magical abilities changed out. While the new edition has an emphasis on simplicity and the Pixie definitely isn't a simple race, I think they can still work as a PC race option. Below the cut, I ...

Magic is the lifeblood of Eberron, encircling it like the Ring of Siberys and seeping up through the earth from the bones of Khyber. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this pervasive magic is the appearance of dragon­marks among seven of Khorvaire’s common races. Dragon­marks are elaborate skin patterns—more intricate and colorful than birthmarks, more distinctive than any tattoo—that also grant their bearers innate magical abilities. There are twelve families of dragonmarks, each one associated with a number of closely related manifestations. A thirteenth mark, the Mark of Death, has faded from history, and no living creature on Eberron carries it.      When it is used, a character’s dragonmark grows warm to the touch. It becomes fever hot when its spell-like abilities are used up for the day, and must be allowed to cool before its power can be drawn upon again.

You were born to one of the thirteen dragonmarked houses that wield enormous power throughout Khorvaire. Perhaps you have manifested one of the magical dragonmarks that showed your descent from a house member, or were born to someone who was granted member-ship or married into a house; regardless, you have lived a life of privilege and responsibility.      The dragonmarked houses are deeply entrenched in the economic and social ecology of Khorvaire. All guild monopolies are controlled by the houses, which fix prices and maintain quality standards. Although the houses are forbidden from holding lands or political office by the Korth Edicts, many dragonmarked heirs have great influence in politics due to their affiliations and personal power.

I'm not completely happy with this one. Part of it is, I want to know how the new system will handle psionics, which has always been a bad fit for many fantasy games. The other is, well, the kalashtar's actual psyche and essence has always been kind of vague and undefined, which kind of fits their origin in the Realm of Dreams, I guess.

EDIT: So, Warforged were supposed to be in the Dungeon Master's Guide, but were cut for space. I had posted a preliminary version, based on an update of the playtest version. However, I've since seen a version done by Keith Baker for a one-off character for a 5E game he played in , with input from designer Rodney Thompson. While Mr. Baker states quite clearly that he hasn't done any testing, and that this isn't in any way official, I like it quite a bit, so this is what I'm using for my game. I cleaned up Mr. Baker's paragraphs into the standard format.

With shifters, the problem is the new edition's focus on simplicity. Shifting changed your characteristics, and if you wanted your shifting to become really good, you had to take a tree of shifter feats. There were builds focusing entirely on maximizing your shifter advantages. The new edition doesn't really do temporary ability score changes in the same way -- the barbarian's rage, for example, gives a boost to damage and hit points, but doesn't require recalculating your character's abilities. Similarly, the gauntlets of ogre power / amulet of health / headband of intellect change the impacted ability score to a flat 19 -- a +5 bonus that's easy to plug in, and lasts indefinitely as long as you leave the item on. So I decided that 5E shifters should get their +1 stat bump from their trait, and tried to make the traits (which I had to rename "legacies" because "trait" in 5E is a very specific thing) almost as powerful as a feat, ...