I made a little packet/handout for people who find the Player Handbook’s explanation of filling out character sheets with stats. Apologies for any typos!
Feel free to message me with corrections or suggestions for improvements.
Concept: That scene in every 90s high school movie where someone shows the new kid around the cafeteria (”that table is the nerds, those are the jocks, the goths, the cheerleeders” etc) except it’s a medieval tavern and each table has a different d&d class.
Something I think is often unappreciated about D&D is the sheer lengths it’s willing to go to in order to make sure every kind of dragon – and it has rather a lot! – has a unique breath weapon. Anybody who’s played a D&D-inspired JRPG will be familiar with the standard options: some dragons breathe fire, others breathe ice, other shoot lightning out of their mouths, and so forth. Then we get to these guys:
Amethyst dragons hork up an enormous gemstone that can be spit with pinpoint accuracy up to 75 feet, and explodes on impact with a sixty-foot blast radius
Black dragons just fire-hose a sixty-foot-long stream powerful acid out of their mouths, like HWAAARRRF
Brass dragons exhale either a stream of blisteringly hot air, or a jet of narcotic gas that puts living targets to sleep
Bronze dragons can spit lightning bolts, or alternatively exhale a mind-altering gas that compels people to run away
Copper dragons also have the acid-barf option, or they can exhale a gas that slows down time in the affected area
Crystal dragons exhale a spray of razor-sharp shards, which is expected, but the shards also glow brightly, forcing anyone in the area to save versus blindness
Emerald dragons just scream really loudly
Fairy dragons burp up a cloud of euphoria gas that inflicts no damage, but makes everyone in the targeted area high
Green dragons huff deadly clouds of chlorine gas
Mercury dragons shoot giant lasers
Sapphire dragons have a sound-based breath weapon, like their emerald counterparts, but theirs is an ultrasonic “brown note” that causes psychological as well as physical damage
Steel dragons exhale a deadly poison, with the twist that the vapour always fills a perfectly cube-shaped volume, regardless of surrounding barriers; the dragon can exercise perfect control over the cube’s dimensions
Topaz dragons have a reverse breath weapon that sucks water out of anything in the targeted area, inducing dehydration in living victims
vicious mockery is such a good spell. you can do damage by insulting people. you could yell “begone thot” and deal a point of actual damage. imagine a reality where muttering “deactivate your almonds” at someone makes them stub their toe.
I can say with some certainty that the cornerstone of any good adventure setting is a good town to get to know and explore in your downtime, just like you explore the wilderness in your “UP” time. You have to do MORE than the classic trinity of Tavern/forge/item shop, your players are going to be living in this place for ages, and overall it’ll have more impact on them than the main villain of your story.
A town provides a location for your characters to be actual CHARACTERS, rather than a set of features attached to a sword or spellbook, It’s going to be the neutral point they return to between each sub adventure.. It’s what you’re going to put into jeopardy once the big arc finally closes out , so you’d best spend some time fleshing it out or else all of those dramatic notes are going to fall flat.
Describe your town like you’d describe a key dungeon set piece. What’s the vibe? What do the characters smell and hear? How does it change from hour to hour, season to season? What’s the colour palate? Are there recurring motifs? How do people here participate in their culture beyond simply being citizens? If there are different districts or key sections to your town, describe those and the shift that occurs as a bit of narration every time your players move between them.
Towns are also a great place to install adventure hooks. It’s likely that there are secondary and tertiary effects related to your adventure, and as such there’ll be a host of NPCs ready to talk about how their lives have recently been disrupted by this or that , allowing your players to piece together what’s really going on in the world at large.
Who do your players know in town? Friends, family members, colleges? There’s a good chunk of backgrounds that give you the special power to “know” people in town, who are those people, how do they relate to your adventure hooks? Sure, wandering into a new town and checking out the tavern is a classic way to start a new adventure, but your players have likely done it before. Why not have them stay with the warlock’s eccentric aunt? Or have them bunk down with the fighter’s old garrison in the watchtower on the city limits? Giving your players these sorts of ins allows them to get a leg up on getting invested in your setting and your adventure, as opposed to having it all develop from scratch.
The best towns are fusions of different elements. Different strata of social class, different industries, conflicting aspects of history. No settlement simply started as a town, it starts as a borderland fortress, or a landowner’s villa, a sheltered trading post, a mining colony. As history progresses the settlement changes, drawing new sorts of people and building it’s own personal culture.
An easy way to build up a town’s story is to ask five simple questions of yourself:
What founded the town? what’s happened in the town? what made the town what it is today? what is the town becoming? What are you planning to DO to the town in the course of your adventures?
Happy Delving~
@ my possible players: hope yall are ready for double chaotic neutral bard elves
ProbablyPartyPoison 