World Builder Blog
Return of the Villains!
Publisher’s Choice Quality Stock Art © Rich Hershey / Fat Goblin Games
How great is it when a baddy the players thought they bested walks back into their lives (after surprise screwing them over)? The looks on their faces as they realize their enemy is back and stronger than ever (player characters level up so why can’t my villains?) is one of GMing’s greatest rewards.
In worlds full of magic, like those found in Dungeons & Dragons, villains have plenty of options to live (or unlive) to fight another day. Not every villain should keep showing up like a bad penny, but if you pick one or two over the course of a campaign that always have a contingency plan, your players will love to hate them. This post contains a few ways to keep your villains coming back for more.
Great Escape
D&D is filled with spells and magic items that allow a quick and easy escape (that the players can also attempt to counter once they realize how the villain keeps getting away). Spells like greater invisibility, fly, planeshift, teleport, or even a clever use of feather fall can see your villains saying, “Smell ya later,” to the player characters. Villains who aren’t spellcasters could use magic items that cast spells or create similar effects or they might have a spellcasting henchman nearby, prepared to dimension door them out of any bad situation.
That Was My Double
Magic can create illusions and simulacrums that look like the villain the players are trying to kill. The horror players have when the paladin’s sword turns an evil mage into a pile of snow is two-fold. First, the villain is still alive. Second, the real mage is powerful enough and has the costly resources to cast the simulacrum spell!
Even if your villain doesn’t have access to magic quite so badass, there’s weaker spells that might do the trick (like a minion casting disguise self to look like the boss) and mundane tricks (like disguise kits and twins).
Illusion spells can also be used to fake deaths! Get as creative with those spells as your players.
Back from the Dead
Many fantasy roleplaying games have a way for player characters to return from the dead without so much as a scratch. Spells like revivify, raise dead, and resurrection can and should be used by villains with resources to spare. Most villains likely have a death contingency plan in place involving one of these spells! You can have a gaggle of fun with this and really blow some minds, especially if your villain’s plan involves the reincarnate spell.
Undead
There’s nothing like bringing a slaughtered villain back again and again through undeath. To demonstrate this, I’ll tell you the story of Ninaran, an NPC in the fourth edition D&D adventure Keep on the Shadowfell.
As a cultist of Orcus, demon lord of undeath, Ninaran was the perfect person to return from the dead. After slipping away from the player characters several times, they eventually killed her. Then she returned as a vampire! When they burned her body, she returned as a wraith. After they killed her wraith form, her soul inhabited several million worms and she came back as a giant spawn of Kyuss. Every time she showed up, the players cursed, fought like heck, and then celebrated her defeat. To this day if I even utter the name Ninaran, they react with fear.
It makes sense that evil people would have no qualms about coming back into the world as undead. In fact, many villains might be hoping the characters kill them in order to return with more power as a lich, mummy, or vampire.
New Fiendish Look
Know what happens to the souls of evil creatures when they die? They go to the Nine Hells, the Abyss, or a similar negative energy plane. Most start as the lowest beings of that plane and must claw their way up to becoming a greater fiend. Yet when a really powerful evil creature dies its soul is made into a really powerful fiend from the start. Maybe this powerful fiend finds a way out of the lower planes and starts hunting the characters with its new evil powers!
Share with Me
What about you? How have you had villains live to fight another day? Share with me in the comments below!
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
Monsters without Borders
Hey everyone! Lots of irons in the fire this week and many upcoming secret projects (2018 still has some huge announcements coming), but I wanted to update you about latest DMs Guild collaboration.
Monsters without Borders is a collaboration of several DMs Guild authors that takes some of the freakiest beasties from the site and puts them into one Pay What You Want tome. This release is actually a smaller preview of an even bigger bestiary collaboration coming soon called Monsters of the Guild.
My contribution to this bad boy is the werespider, which you may have seen before in my product Arachnids, Wraiths, and Zombies. The werespider has been updated and perfected in Monsters without Borders and now includes some killer art!
The best part of Monsters without Borders is that all the author royalties are going to Doctors Without Borders, one of the greatest organizations in the world. It’s a foundation of heroes.
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
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HUGE Thanks and the D&D Community
If you’ve followed this blog at all in the last three weeks, then you know I was running a Kickstarter with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips. Thank you so, so much to everyone who donated, helped get the word out, and offered words of wisdom and support! I can’t wait to share more of the Demonplague with you!
The D&D Community
Last week I saw a debate on social media about who is and is not a member of the D&D community. It turned ugly as some folks insisted only gamers could be part of the community and others said that anyone who watched a show like Critical Role or listened to a bunch of dope D&D podcasts were included. I don’t want to get into who said what, since there was a lot of drama and name calling, but I did want to provide context for the rest of this post.
That conversation got me thinking about just how big and amazing the D&D community, and to a greater extent the RPG community, is. Here’s the truth. If you interact with the D&D brand, you are part of the community. If you’re a gamer, a Critter, a The Adventure Zone fan, a reader of the comic books, a person who reads rule books but prefers not to play, someone who loves talking about but not playing the game, a fan of the movies, a D&D miniatures collector, a fan of D&D video games, a reader of D&D novels, a person who watches the one season of the cartoon over and over again, or just my father popping in to read and possibly comment on this blog post, then you are a welcome part of this circle.
If you don’t play the game and decide you want to, let someone know. There’s lots of friendly, awesome gamers in this circle willing to show you that roleplaying games are the greatest pastime ever. If you don’t want to play, that’s cool too! We’re glad as heck to have your voice as part of the conversation. You bring a unique perspective to the table and make things like playing D&D for an audience as a way to make money a reality. You make dreams come true AND you count Lin-Manuel Miranda among your numbers. Thank you for making D&D bigger than it’s ever been, for growing the RPG community, for lessening the stigma of the hobby, and for sharing stories, debates, and discussion. Many of you are personal friends I would not have made had you been barred from this community and my life would be worse for it.
To my fellow gamers who agree, thank you. This debate turned into something so positive because of you. The support you showed to non-gamers in the community was outstanding. You’re growing the hobby by reaching out to others. It’s working! More people are playing D&D than ever before because those non-gamers in our community are dipping their toes in the water and becoming gamers. If they didn’t feel welcome, they’d never have given it a shot. That would mean less awesome people to play with, less amazing ideas coming from a smaller population of players and DMs, and less money in the hobby. It would also mean less people getting into RPGs in general, which would mean less awesome games from smaller publishers. Even when people you welcome into the community don’t pick up dice, they still add nuance, fresh perspectives, jokes, and depth to the conversation about D&D and spread the word about RPGs.
To those who disagree, what gives? What do you gain by not opening your arms to other people who are already here loving some aspect of the D&D brand? You know what happened when Marvel comic book readers welcomed people who didn’t read comics but enjoyed superhero movies and TV into their community? We got movies like The Avengers and Black Panther. We got TV shows like Jessica Jones and Legion. D&D has the same potential. We’re gonna have a movie soon… and if the community is big enough it might actually be a GOOD movie. More people in Hollywood will understand what D&D is and be willing to put money behind the film to get great talent to work on it. There’s endless possibilities for D&D video games, novels, and more that all come true if our community continues to grow. Don’t get in the way of that. Why ruin it for yourself? The D&D brand is larger than the game and that helps us get more awesome content both in and out of our games.
More to the point, don’t ruin it for others. If someone new wants to be part of this community, welcome them with open arms (unless they’re a bigot or a murderer or something). They’re a human being, so treat them as such. You might even make some awesome new friends when you open your mind to the D&D community being larger than just people who play the game. You don’t have anything to gain by shutting them out. They’re here and they’re badass.
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
Demonplague Preview: Tomar’s Crossing
There’s only a couple days left to get in on the Demonplague Kickstarter! If you follow this blog at all you know I’ve launched a Kickstarter with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips! You can read all about The Demonplague adventure on the Kickstarter’s page. In a nutshell, this fifth edition adventure takes characters from level 1 to 20, can be dropped into any homebrew or existing campaign setting, and is designed for GMs old and new.
Last week I revealed two pages from the adventure’s introduction. In this post, I want to give you the first two pages that describe Tomar’s Crossing, the only town that survives the natural disaster that begins the adventure.
What do you think? Interested in the adventure yet? You can find out more about The Demonplague on the Kickstarter page or by listening to the this episode of my podcast, Table Top Babble.
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
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Ryan Hennesy’s Table of Dungeon Smells
Invoke as many senses as you can, not just sight. This is a piece of advice I’ve received and given countless times when it comes to describing rooms in a dungeon. Be it in box text you’re writing for an adventure or just in the way you describe a chamber in your home game, the more senses you can involve in a description, the deeper you can immerse the players into the story. No one knows this better than my buddy and designer of this very site, Ryan Hennesy.
Since I’m still recovering from the flu and since Ryan knows the nose knows, he offered to write-up a table of a unique dungeon smells and their effects! Check out the following pungent potions he’s created!
Dungeon Smells
When the players enter a dungeon, or a particular part of the dungeon, roll a d12 and check the result on the table. The scent you choose will help inform the makeup of the rest of the dungeon.
| Upon entering the room… | |
| 1 | … a faintly wafting hint of rusted iron reaches your nostrils, carried on a gentle breeze from deeper in the dungeon. The oxidized aura reminds you vaguely of the taste of blood. |
| 2 | … you smell a warm calming scent of lavender and honey, inviting you to close your eyes and rest. The dichotomy of the pleasantness of the scent with the dankness of the dungeon makes your head spin. You must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (DC 13) or become disoriented, losing your sense of direction within the dungeon. |
| 3 | … your nostrils are overwhelmed by the powerful aroma from the smoke that swirls around the ceiling. Curiously, it has the distinct balsamic notes of pipe tobacco. |
| 4 | … the cloying fragrance of rotting fruit, apricot with a hint of sour grapefruit stuffs your nose and throat, making it difficult to breathe. |
| 5 | … the space is permeated with the foul stench of decaying animal carcasses, stale urine, and animal dung. It’s almost exactly how you’d expect the den of a ferocious predatory beast or monster to smell. Weird, huh? I wonder if whatever lives here has some kind of relationship with the nearby settlement of… oh, look at the time! Let’s move on to the next, um, fragrance. |
| 6 | … you notice the stinging scent of sulfur seeping from cracks in the walls and floor, making your eyes water. Any flame, mundane or magical, has a 20% chance of causing an explosion unless it is of fiendish origin. If a flame burns at any point in the sulfurous space, roll a d20. On a 1-4, the gas ignites. Make a DC 15 saving throw. On a failure, you take 5d6 fire damage, taking half on a successful save. The PC nearest the igniting flame automatically fails the save. |
| 7 | … you wrinkle your nose at the unpleasant odor of wet dog and mildewed cloth and paper and fabric. While the smell is disgusting, the fact that there are no immediate traces of any animals nor any objects that could mold is even more unsettling. |
| 8 | … the earthy aroma of mushrooms and other edible fungi fills the air in the form of spores, reminding you of the last time you had a decent meal. If it has been more than 24 hours since you ate a warm meal (that is, food cooked using for immediately before consuming) you become famished and begin experiencing severe hunger pangs. Famished creatures must succeed on a DC 16 Wisdom saving throw or they succumb to their urge to eat any visible mushrooms, and, if no mushrooms are immediately visible, they begin licking the walls of the dungeon.
The GM decides the condition(s) resulting from mushroom consumption and dungeon wall licking. |
| 9 | … your lungs fill with briny ocean air and the smell of salt and seaweed recalls to you your time around (or stories of) ocean-faring fishing vessels. You’d even swear that for a brief moment you felt a gentle sea breeze, though that couldn’t possibly be true. |
| 10 | … your senses are assaulted with the unmistakable smell of burning flesh. An acrid flavor hangs in the moist, unmoving air, immediately triggering your gag reflex. Succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or you begin retching uncontrollably for 1 minute. |
| 11 | … you think for a split-second that you’ve been teleported into a bakery or brewery as the delicious incense of yeast—the signature aroma of freshly baked bread and amber ale—whisks you away. Not literally, to be clear. Although, that would be pretty awesome. Think about it: one moment you’re in this dank dungeon, the next you’re noshing on homemade baguettes and the latest lambic to come out of Bachendorfer’s.
Anyway… why does this dungeon smell like bread? |
| 12 | Roll twice on the table, combining the results. What could possibly go wrong? |
If you like Ryan’s work, follow him on Twitter (where you can look at his amazing art and cartography) and check out his web design page!
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
Neal Powell’s Sojuzga
Have I got a treat for you! A few weeks ago, the amazing Neal Powell of the Block Party Podcast Network, asked me to look over a fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons critter he created called the sojuzga. As a wicked DM, I fell in love with the mind-controlling monstrosities. I asked Neal if I could post the baddies on my blog and he graciously agreed.
I have the flu this week, so I’ll keep my own words short and let’s Neal’s horror do the talking. You can check it out below and grab a PDF of it here: Sojuzga PDF
If you like Neal’s work (and you should), check out his awesome game design project over at his site The Struggle Is Neal, where he takes album covers and turns them into RPG inspiration.
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
A Magic Feat
Publisher’s Choice Quality Stock Art © Rick Hershey / Fat Goblin Games
We need more spells that deal necrotic damage. When I showed off my lichtouched sorercous origin, this fact was pointed out to me by several people. The subclass has some features that rely on the character being able to cast such magic and is less valuable because of the lack of necrotic-slinging spells.
The obvious answer to this dilemma is to create some new spells that deal necrotic damage, which I intend to do, but I want to playtest the subclass now and I need some reliable magic to do so. Rather than also playtest many new spells, I could playtest just a single new feat. That got me thinking about creating a feat that allows casters to change the damage type of their spells. I ended up making one of those that I’m sharing below!
Designing Feats
Though feats are small when it comes to the amount of text they have, they’re one of the most difficult pieces of the game to balance. They tend to be powerful rule exceptions that don’t have a lot of math to help balance them. Feats vary widely from Actor to Lucky to Sharpshooter to War Caster.
The only thing we have to balance feats against (aside from other feats) is the typical ability score improvements. Characters can take feats in place of these, so they should be of equivalent power. When you design a new feat, ask yourself (and others you trust):
- Would I rather take an ability score increase to my lowest score than take this feat? The answer to this question should be no (in most cases).
- Would I give up an ability score increase to my most important ability than than take this feat? The answer to this question should be yes (in most cases).
My first thought was to create a single feat that allows a caster to change the damage type dealt by one spell to any other damage type, but that is far too powerful and versatile for a single feat. Thinking more about it, the more balanced thing to do is allow for one energy type to be swapped for another each time a feat is gained.
Behold the Energy Substitution feat below!
Energy Substitution
Prerequisite: The ability to cast at least one spell
You have mastered the magical flow of two energies so well that you can interchange them. Choose two of the following damage types: acid, cold, fire, lightning, necrotic, poison, radiant, or thunder. Anytime you cast a spell that deals one of your chosen damage types, you can convert it to the other chosen type. You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, select two more damage types that you can interchange with each other and the damage types you chose when you selected this feat previously.
Feed Me Back
Let me know what you think of these feats in the comments below. Too awesome? Not awesome enough? What would you change?
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
An Ode to Small Cons
I’m on my way to Winter Fantasy in Fort Wayne, Indiana! What is that, you ask? Why it’s one of the greatest gaming conventions around!
I love enormous gaming conventions. Seeing 60,000 people who all know what a wood elf ranger is gathered in the same place for four days at Gen Con is astounding. It’s an immersion in geekdom like no other. The convention floor is enormous, there’s games in the meeting rooms of every hotel in a six-block radius, and the local dining establishments change the names of food items on their menu to include Drizzt Do’Urden’s name. (I hear his lavender eyes dark chocolate cupcake is delicious.)
If you have a taste for gaming and the means to get to Gen Con or some other large convention, I suggest you do.
That said, small conventions are equally incredible for a different reason. They feel like a relaxing vacation. Big cons have a lot going for them in terms of number of games, stuff to demo/buy, celebrity guests, and variety of experiences, but they’re also a grind. They’re crowded, expensive, sprawling, and a hustle.
If you’re ignoring the small conventions (less than 1,000 people) because you don’t think they’re worth it, I urge you to think again. I get a ton out of Winter Fantasy, AcadeCon, and others.
Cheaper
As many Winter Fantasy veterans say, “Fort Wayne hates money.” Small conventions don’t need enormous city centers, so they happen in smaller towns with convention centers. Every price from badge to food to hotel is cheaper at a smaller convention as a result. You can eat like a king for a day in Fort Wayne for the price of a beer and a burger during Gen Con in Indianapolis.
Easier
With less people competing for events it’s easier to get the games you want, a hotel nearby, and take care of registration issues. Planning for Winter Fantasy is much easier than planning for Gen Con.
Enormous cons take over entire convention centers and the surrounding hotels. Smaller cons generally have one large room in a convention center or a few meeting rooms close together in a hotel. You don’t have to sprint from one event to the next, because at worst your next game is 100 feet away. You can easily get back to your hotel to grab something you forgot or put away leftovers before your next game.
Because no one is rushing and everyone is gathered in the same place, it’s easy to stop someone and ask them for help. With less people, convention organizers and staff handle even the smallest of problems with gusto, making it very easy for you to relax. (Side note: Even small conventions are a TON of work for the organizers and staff, so be kind and grateful for their amazing work!)
More Intimate
It’s easier to make new friends that you play with multiple times over the course of a small convention. Old friends have more time for meet-ups and games. You have time to have actual conversations rather than quick hellos with people. It’s astounding!
Even small cons tend to have amazing special guests like Rob Schwalb, Chris Lindsay, Lysa Chen, Satine Phoenix, Ruty Rutenberg, and/or Shawn Merwin. If you want some good one-on-one time with those people, catch them at a smaller con where their time is a little less constrained. (They’re likely still busy, so don’t hog all their time.) I made a lot of great contacts and friends by attending smaller conventions.
Shout Out Your Favorites
I’m discovering new conventions I love every year. Tell me your favorites in the comments below! And don’t forget to come join me at a very small D&D convention in a castle in France!
If you like what you’re reading please follow me on Twitter, like World Builder Blog on Facebook, check out my podcasts, find my products on the DMs Guild, tell your friends about the blog, and/or leave me a comment and let me know you think. Thanks!
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