Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

 The following items are condensed from dreams, impressions, and tales drifting through the Feywild, or in similar fairy or dream realms. While items with similar effects may be created by mortal magicians, there is no known way to create these specific items. They must be found among fey and dreams, or obtained from another owner. Within a fey realm, the Wings of Thistledown and Wand of Whimsy are often found as part of a stereotypical fairy costume for dolls.  But, since they are normally found in the toy chests of fey giants, the magical items in question will be scaled to work well for most small and medium creatures. Wings of Thistledown These are small, costume wings which go on a character's back. The wings may be made of nearly any lightweight material including starched fabric, stiff paper, feathers, wire and gauze, or tufts of cotton. They may attach via separate straps, or be sewn into an outfit of particolored leotard and crinoline tutu.  When the wings are ...

The following are a set of rules (limitations mostly) I came up with which would allow 5th Edition D&D to be used for lower magic settings and types of games.  Maybe something closer to historic-fantasy, though this might work for other kinds of settings as well. Note that each of the elements below is essentially a separate toggle, you can use some and not others, as the setting dictates. Races Players are generally only allowed to play human characters.  However, DMs might allow one of the following options: Option 1:  Quirky Humans  - Certain other races may be allowed, but are reskinned to simply represent slightly unusual humans. Option 2:  Shunned  - Certain other races are allowed, but represent weird beings from outside human civilization, shunned by most decent folk. Some individuals and organizations may view them with sympathy, but there’s every chance of a mob rising up against them. Option 3:  Dying Race  - Alternately, other ...

The Astral Navigator's Handbook is my completed entry for the HexDrive Zine Jam . The HexDrive Zine is something being put together by Micah Anderson & Anxiety Wizard. As they  described it : [HexDrive is] about the greatness of spelljammer, and how none of us have read spelljammer ... do not read spelljammer! (if you have, forget everything!) I'd never gotten involved with these kinds of game jams in the past, but this concept meshed perfectly with some ideas I'd been thinking about for years now, so it seemed like the prefect excuse to get things down in print.  Possibly this is the fastest I've ever written a game supplement from scratch, managing to crank the thing out in two about weeks start to finish. The Astral Navigator's Handbook is a largely systemless CC-BY licensed supplement intended for use with your preferred fantasy role-playing game.  But unlike Spelljammer, it could be shoehorned into a game of slightly more sci-fi style space opera...

This was originally in response to the question: What are some villainous factions for a D&D campaign? Below you'll find just a bunch of well meaning folks who believe they're on the right side of history. The Trans-Planar Liberation Front (a.k.a. “The Egg Breakers”) Slogan: Crack the shell and let all fly free! The Trans-Planar Liberation Front has one goal: Break down the barriers which separate the prime material plane from all the others and set all those who live here free to wander among the planes as they will. They view the mortal realms as a prison, or at best a creche where overprotective parents have kept their children cooped up too long. This isn’t how souls of sapient creatures were meant to live! Surely everyone longs for the wild lands beyond this existence. If this was a personal goal of the members, things might be fine. But the TPLF view all mortals inhabiting the material plane as prisoners, even if they don’t realize it yet. So members s...

Another response to a  Quora question . Choose one or roll 1d20: 1) Dragons are the bower birds of the monster world. They need to make their lairs as shiny and full of cool stuff as possible to attract a mate. 2) The riddle: In marble walls as white as milk, Lined with a skin as soft as silk; Within a fountain crystal clear, A golden apple doth appear. No doors there are to this stronghold, Yet thieves break in and steal the gold. Actually alludes to dragon eggs, the embryos of which require gold during certain developmental stages. 3) There was once a more common form of vegetation called Glintweed, whose leaves had an iridescent sheen when viewed in direct sunlight. For various reasons this plant functioned as ideal nesting material for dragons. Unfortunately, as humanoids began to mine large quantities of precious metal ores, dragons started running into a variant of the dragonfly / oil problem : To the instinctual side of a dragon’s brain, lustrous highe...

A Quora user asked the question: In DND, can a Tiefling be born from two human parents? My answer to any question along these lines is almost always going to be: Yes! (setting norms permitting) To find out why mummy and daddy are human and you're not, pick or roll 1d20: Thauma-genetic manipulation at the fertility clinic. Surrogate birth. Cuckoo demon left an extra bun in their oven while no one was looking. Your twin sibling looks perfectly human though. Parents made a pact with the Infernal powers, dedicating their next child to the Grand & Decadent Cause. (ANGSTY TEEN TIEFLING: Jeez! Lay off mom and dad! I don't wanna do your stupid dark destiny plans!) One of your parents used to be an infernal pact warlock before you were born. They turned from that path a long time ago, repented, and tried to make amends for the things they did during those times. But a part of the pact they'd overlooked ensured their first born would be a Tiefling. So here you are...

I've come to realize that most of the RPG related ideas I come up with end up shuffled away to some forgotten corner of Quora, never to be seen again.  So, to collect them all in one place for easier reference, a few of those I liked better are getting transferred here. If you found an ancient Dwarven cookbook in a long forgotten ruins in Dungeons and Dragons, what recipes might you find? Recipes and cooking advice found in dwarven cookbooks tends to fall into one or more of the following categories: References to rare monsters (ones not listed in the MM, or listed by an untranslated dwarven name), but only described in detail as to how to gut and cook them. Might mention poison glands or horns or such, but not always directly helpful in identifying how to combat the thing. References to some highly prized ingredient (like Silphium) which was key for so many things, ultra healthy and made everything better, but which can no longer be identified. May not exist anymore or i...

Disclaimer: Any views indicated here are from my own amateurish lay study of the subjects. Please consult an appropriate theologian or appropriate lore source for more accurate information on real-world religious and cultural beliefs and practices. On Twitter Kiel Chenier asked : One thing I struggle to do in #dnd5e is use gods effectively. Gods and pantheons never really interested me. Chalk it up to growing up around abusive zealots. As a consequence I often use fantasy religion as an evil force in my rpg writing, which feels limiting now. How fix? In response Erik Jensesn suggested : Hang out with some people of faith (who you get along with) who don't have those same scars and chat about how their religious practice intersects their daily living. As someone "of faith" who has been largely insulated throughout my early life from abusive zealots, this is something I've struggled with myself over the years, at least in the way that D&D clearic-type-ma...

Over the past years, I've run a few sessions of the Hero Kids RPG for my daughter Katherine (9), her brother Charles (7) and a friend of theirs (8). Hero Kids is kind of a light-weight tactical game with figurines (or cardboard cutouts) moving around a 1-inch dungeon grid.  It is a bit less "theater of the mind" than I usually enjoy, but my daughter in particular has seemed to like it. And suggestions that we might try something without the figures and dungeon tiles had her skeptical that you could get a good idea of where everyone was without them. Sessions in the past have either used pre-published scenarios or, more often, just me laying out dungeon tiles and plonking down figures at random for her to fight.  Which is fine with her, but I find not very mentally engaging. So today I suggested that she run a game instead and come up with the adventure herself. She's pretty in to creative projects of any sort, and took to the challenge with gusto. I almost th...

Today for your reading pleasure, a brilliant and delicious excerpt dredged from the corners of the internet: ---- >> Anonymous 06/02/12(Sat)06:24 No. 19334013 Anonymous No. 19334013 06/02/12(Sat)06:24 No. 19334013 Once, we had an elf who fucked one human, once, and developed this psychotic obsession with bringing him back to life after he died. She sort of faded into the background after a while, we forgot about her, but two campaigns later her research started popping up, and this escalated until it turned out that she was basically getting ready to harvest all life on Earth to try and bring her pet goldfish back to life. By the end of it were were up to our balls in hideous soul-stealing goblin mutants that ate souls and vomited them back up as pearl catalysts for some ancient resurrection ritual. Five fucking campaigns of fighting this insane elf, motivated by love and heartbreak to destroy the world and overthrow the will of the gods to bring her husba...

Wyrms & Warrens is the primary fantasy heartbreaker I've been working on for awhile now, based largely on the Swords & Wizardry SRD with significant modifications. I've broken it into a Player's Handbook (PHB) and a Warren Keeper's Guide (WKG).  Altough the WKG is still in its infancy, the PHB is more ore less complete and available for download at the links below. This project is a labor of love, available for free to all for use, modification and critique. Player's Handbook v0.451 ( pdf ) ( odt ) - 8/14/16 Player's Handbook v0.41 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.4 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.3 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.2 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.1 ( pdf ) ( odt ) 8/14/16 - Edit:  Table of Contents fixes, typos, formatting, etc. 8/13/16 - Edit:  Major changes to magic systems. Addition of illustrations, etc. 8/10/15 - Edit:  Updated Hurl power to include information about small anim...

On Sep 19, 2012 +Ramanan Sivaranjan said: Any Dark Sun game I run now could never live up to the game I imagine in my head. I never actually played Dark Sun back when I was buying and reading all the books, so it's even more mythic than it really should be. But yeah, old school Dark Sun hex crawl. I can imagine that. This is pretty much exactly my experience of Dark Sun:  An epic setting that no one every played, and which could now never live up to the promised dream. BUT, a hex crawl seems like the prefect fit.  And I say this as someone weened at the teat of story-ish, plot-heavy AD&D adventures, an who has never played a hex crawl (and precious few dungeon crawls) in my life. I think the thing is that the big ticket plot features in the setting are all so in your face: killing off a sorcerer-king, inter-city-state politics, saving Athas from further environmental disaster, etc.  If those are your goal, it's so front-loaded from the get-go that being kill...