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The Pantheon Domain - A 5E Cleric Subclass Homebrew. For the cleric whose faith is as fickle as the gods themselves. Great for roguelite lovers. You’ll have to figure out what you can do with the tools at your disposal every day. Links in reblog!

You can take your honor with you to the grave. I’m not dying for someone else’s war; I’m not dying for anyone but myself!

So says a Deserter, who takes the military training of a warrior and bends it to means most unsavory. Highly adept at hitting enemies when they’re down, but against an opponent who can give a straight fight, a Deserter will have to be a bit more selfish, setting up advantage with Focused Aim instead. Somewhat of a mix of the Battlemaster and Samurai, mechanically, but the Rogue chassis makes for a very different experience than the raw offensive prowess of a Fighter. Synergizes extremely well with Focused Aim, from Tasha’s, and while potentially doubling your Sneak Attack damage is impressive, it’s actually only slightly ahead of, say, using Booming Blade and keeping your advantage. Naturally, it’s not possible to stack them… at least, not without six levels of Bladesinger, but that means giving up a whole lot of Sneak Attack dice.

The Gardens of Ynn is a point-crawl adventure set in an ever-shifting extradimensional garden. Each expedition randomly generates a new route as it explores, resulting in different vistas being unlocked with every visit.

The adventure is a perfect zero prep session or campaign for any party of fantasy adventurers, no matter the system or the sub-genre. We found most ‘zero-prep’ adventures to be bland and lacking in colour, so in Gardens of Ynn every room, encounter and monster is popping with vibes. It's a big garden full of whimsy and delight and surreal perils.

Gardens of Ynn is statted generically for Old School Systems, but you would have absolutely no trouble using it in a game of 5E if you were comfortable statting up some weird monsters.

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A point-crawl roleplaying game adventure set in an ever-shifting extradimensional garden.

Game-Changing Sites for Writers

A recent search for a specific type of site to help me build new characters led me down a rabbit hole. Normally, that would make me much less productive, but I have found a treasure trove of websites for writers.

Bring Characters/Places to Life

There are a few different places you can use to create a picture of something entirely new. I love this site for making character pictures as references, instead of stock photos or whatever pops up on Google Images.

thispersondoesnotexist: every time you reload the page, this site generates a headshot of someone who doesn't exist. This is great if you're thinking about a character's personality or age and don't have specifics for their facial features yet.

Night Cafe: this is an AI art generator that takes your text prompt and generates an image for it. I tried it for various scenery, like "forest" or "cottage." It takes a minute for your requested photo to load, but no more than maybe five for the program to finish the picture.

Art Breeder: this website has endless images of people, places, and general things. Users can blend photos to create something new and curious visitors can browse/download those images without creating an account. (But if you do want to make an account to create your own, it's free!)

Find Random Places on Earth

You might prefer to set a story in a real-life environment so you can reference that place's weather, seasons, small-town vibe, or whatever you like. If that's the case, try:

MapCrunch: the homepage generates a new location each day and gives the location/GPS info in the top left of the screen. To see more images from previous days, hit "Gallery" in the top left.

Atlas Obscura: hover over or tap the "Places" tab, then hit "Random Place." A new page will load with a randomly generated location on the planet, provide a Google Maps link, and tell you a little bit about the place.

Random World Cities: this site makes randomly selected lists of global cities. Six appear for each search, although you'll have to look them up to find more information about each place. You can also use the site to have it select countries, US cities or US states too.

Vary Your Wording

Thesauruses are great, but these websites have some pretty cool perspectives on finding just the right words for stories.

Describing Words: tell this website which word you want to stop repeating and it will give you tons of alternative words that mean the same thing. It typically has way more options than other sites I use.

Reverse Dictionary: type what you need a word for in Reverse Dictionary's search box and it will give you tons of words that closely match what you want. It also lists the words in order of relevancy, starting with a word that most accurately describes what you typed. (There's also an option to get definitions for search results!)

Tip of My Tongue: this website is phenomenal. It lets you search for that word you can't quite place by a letter in it, the definition, what it sounds like, or even its scrambled letters. A long list of potential options will appear on the right side of the screen for every search.

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Hope this helps when you need a hand during next writing session 💛

NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh

They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.

So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:

“I” →  “thou”

“Me” →  “thee”

“My” →  “thy”

“Mine” →  “thine”

Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.

We could first imagine it in the first person-

“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.

And then replace it-

“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”

Settlement: Javhintor’s Keel

 Lets get one thing straight, no one sane travels during the winter, not even adventurers. There’s no food to be foraged in the wilderness, which makes for difficult crossings and even more aggressive predators. Likewise, traveling into unpredictable winter weather is suicide for all but the most prepared groups as snow or sleet can make normally hospitable terrain impassable, and exaustion compounds quickly when traveling overland. If you’re a sellsword: find someplace to hunker down where you can still get paid without ranging too far afield, contract work is best, but plenty of settlements will have odd jobs you can make due with in the cold, lean days. 

Dizidel Lek, “A traveler’s guide to not dying like an idiot and having strangers turn over your bones for loose change” , Vol. 4

Adventure Hooks: 

In the dying days of autumn, while considering where they’re going to winter, the party receives an invitation from the Jarl of Javhintor’s Keel, a thriving freehold on the edge of the sea of daggers. She’s heard of their deeds and bravery, and has invited them to enjoy the hospitality of her hall, to share mead and songs and good tidings and to lend their prestige to her own.  A message with great potential to be sure, as such offers of hospitality are often trialruns for offers of more formal oaths of patronage. The exchanging of gifts is a common practice to make such occasions official, but what gift to give a Jarl when you and your friends are but petty sellswords with narry a gold peice to rub together between yourselves?  Why not that beast that’s been rampaging through the countryside nearby ? Hunt it, slay it, stuff it, and present its head(s) to the Jarl as a trophy for her wall and a symbol of the strength you could lend to her cause. 

Once they get to Javhintor’s keel, the DM has an excuse to really let the players dig into a setting, see it develop over their three months of stay, get to know the locals, and become part of the town themselves.  Such distractions may include: 

Exploring wrecks, islands and sea caves along the coast for bitesized dungeon content.

Solving the Mystery behind a haunted lighthouse

Earning the respect of Captian Priska and her crew of reavers, earning an invitation to their next raid on foreign shores, and their own snake-venom tattoo. 

Hunt the mysterious ice-red stag that haunts the forest like a ghost

Make a Pilgramage up to the shrine of Tyr on the tallest peak and see what the god of valor has to say about their prospects

Help a mad fisherman capture a sea-beast that’s encroached on the bay and has been devouring all the fish from his neighbor’s nets. 

Apprentice under one of the many grizzled warriors that make thier home in the keel, learning new fighting techniques

Help a pair of starcrossed traders realize that though they’re fierce business rivals, the oracle’s dire prophecy regarding their competitor was infact a very poorly worded dating advice. 

Prepare for all hearth’s eve, in the Jarl’s palace the biggest festival of the winter solstice. Sneak into the mysterious forbidden wing, and figure out who the hell has stolen all the Hearth’s eve presents! 

Setup:  Jarl Irwyf is a shrewd woman, and in possession of an understanding that led her through her youth as an honored warrior and to her ascension as Jarl of the Keel. She understand that it is a warrior’s reputation that prevents their rivals from encroaching, and that by perusing a path of peace and prosperity for her people, she has dulled her own reputation in exchange. Not some tyrant to wage war on a neighbor just to strengthen her own position, Irwyf seeks to bolster her kingdom’s reputation for might and valor by playing host to the realm’s next generation of heroes. To this end she intends test the party’s character and mettle, bind them to her in loyalty, then send them out into the world to accomplish great deeds that might reflect favorably on her patronage. 

Something however seems intent on sabotaging all her plans. Her winter stores are running out faster than expected, sections of her fortress are overrun with rats, and just as the festivities really kick into gear, something goes and makes off with the food and gifts she’d prepared to bestow upon her courtiers.  A diplomatic disaster waiting to happen, as many of those courtiers are due gifts by tribal right, or else Irwyf will have been considered to have dishonored her subordinates. Her only hope now is to let the party in on her distress, showing her hand as seemingly implacable benefactor in exchange for their aid and discursion. 

Keep reading

Dungeon: The Shattered Garden

“ Careful not to cut yourself on all this Pretty” 

Adventure Hooks: 

Seeking a precious artifact, the party is force to make a harrowing climb up freezing, alpine mountains to gain access to a castle that was said to have fallen from the sky. Finding the ruins of this structure deep within a mountain rift, they must explore a labyrinth of jagged shards and broken halls, hoping that the whole beautiful calamity doesn’t cave in. 

What a miserable place for a heist. What treasure is so grand that it could make a self-respecting thief leave the poorly guarded vaults and easily duped nobles of the city, trudge halfway up a mountain, and risk freezing their precious lock-picking fingers off in the process? How about the Hyborian Stylus, a weapon of such power that any warmage worth their salt would pay out the nose for the chance at wielding it.  To get their hands on this treasure, the party will need to outwit an ostentatious but heinously bloodthirsty oni by the name of Banehail, who treats the dungeon as her own personal gallery/art instillation.

Sometimes things in the life of an adventurer are simple. You hear rumors that someone saw a castle made out of clouds crash-landing on a mountainside, you grab some friends, go on a hike, and investigate. Maybe you get eaten by wolves, maybe you grow as a person by confronting the unkown, it’s not that complicated. 

Challenges & Complications: 

Situated at the bottom of fissure high up in an alpine mountain range, the party will have to battle through harsh conditions to even get to the dungeon site, and then figure out a reliable way of getting down into the dungeon, ascending up with their prize, and finding their way back down the mountain. This may not prove too challenging to a party only interested in stealing one or two items from the dungeon, but the Garden is filled with numerous, weighty treasures, all of which can slow the party’s escape. 

While some rooms and pockets of surrounding architecture survived the impact unscathed, most were either reduced to reduced to piles of jagged detritus or so structurally compromised that they might as well be uninhabitable. The party must test their caving skills, managing tight squeezes through once beatific galleries or prepare descents into wings that now slope at treacherous angles. Delicate floors crack like glass under the party’s treasure-laden footstep, and ceilings may at any time collapse into razors if too much damage is done to the surrounding rooms. 

Entering the Shattered garden is no protection from the chill outside, as harsh boreal winds surge through particular hallways and seek to rip the life-giving heat from a potential explorer’s bones. THe greatest of these dangers is gallery which contains the Hyborian Stylus itself, which may freeze characters solid if they linger in it too long. If the alarm is sounded, the elemental denizens of this dungeon may paradoxically open the doors to this most valuable of treasures, transforming the Shattered Garden into an indoor blizzard in the hopes of flushing out the warm-blooded intruders. 

This dungeon is part of a larger adventure path “A Kingdom Washed Away”, which you can find the rest of @dailyadventureprompts​

Cursed Jewelry! Remember, canonically Identify doesn’t pick up curses, so have fun tricking your players into getting cursed. <3

As war grips the land, a group of warriors band together to protect a population of displaced peasants and towsnfolk as they winter in an ancient mountain fortress.  

Led by the veteran warleader Voadicia, the warriors have amassed a sizeable force of skilled fighters and eager recruits to their cause. Little interested in the goings on of the wider war, their group of holdouts has none the less attracted the attention of the embattled monarchs of the region, who see this rogue warband as a needless complication in their plans of conquest. 

Quest hooks: 

The party is made up of the initiate members of the warband, tossed together from deserters and aspiring peasants who wish to put themselves between the innocents in their charge and the horrors of the war. Their tasks are endless, scouting, exploring the reaches of the ruins, searching for more supplies. Should they cultivate a reputation as trustworthy and capable warriors, they will be brought into Voadicia’s councils about how best to defend their crumbling fortress, and what to do AFTER the war has passed. 

Allied with one faction in the war, the party is sent to negotiate with Voadicia’s warriors after several raids are made on their patron’s supply train. With careful persuasion the warband could be turned from a liability into a powerful ally, if only the party can mind their manners against a disillusioned band of brigands, or get past the fact that their patron is Voadicia’s former leige lord, who would more than happily see her in irons or with her head on a pike as an ally. 

Though the ruins the warband has taken as their home are said to have belonged to a line of forgotten kings, they are infact the last edifices of an ancient empire that spanned the continent and far eclipsed the development of the barbaric present. Vast treasures still remain undiscovered within its vaults, as do powerful artifacts of a forgotten age. Should they be discovered and put to use, it might just be enough to turn the enclave of warriors and refugees into a kingdom of their own, and Voadicia into a reluctant queen.