Category: RPGs

In 5e D&D, the monster template swarm of insects is listed as doing piercing damage. For some of the insect types, this might make sense. For example, some beetle that physically devours things. For many insects, though, the primary damage to a victim would be venom from its sting.

As such, I would propose that you change to the poison damage type for swarms of insects such as wasps.

For 5e.

Truestrike Weapon

Truestrike weapons are most often melee weapons, but some magic item creators choose ranged weapons to enchant. This magic weapon requires attunement.

This weapon interacts with the True Strike spell when cast by its wielder. Whenever the wielder casts True Strike while holding an uncharged Truestrike weapon, the weapon absorbs the True Strike spell, and keeps it active until you make an attack. The weapon can only hold 1 charge of the spell, but the spell no longer requires the concentration of the caster.

The first time that the wielder attacks any target, in any turn after the turn when the spell was absorbed by the weapon, the True Strike advantage is triggered against the target of the attack. Note that for ranged weapons, the spell’s normal range applies, so the True Strike effect does not trigger unless the target is within 30 feet at the time of the attack.

If the Truestrike weapon currently holds no charge, it still counts as a magical weapon for the purposes of attacks.

During my drive home this evening, it occurred to me that my Astralis, Xana, and Classis Umbra settings could all inhabit the same D&D multiverse if you wanted to run them that way.

You could run the game with all of them existing as parallel empires who connect their material worlds via transitive plane-walking. You could even have them all aware of each other. Perhaps they are at war. Perhaps they all coexist in relative or strained peace.

Alternately, and personally I favor this approach, you could run one of them for a long time, as the sole setting of your game. And then, after a long time, you could introduce one of the others as a new game revelation, previously unknown. How would such an empire react to the discovery of a rival whose methods are parallel?

Back in 1987, the 1st edition Manual of the Planes released. I was running one of my homebrew campaigns, and I was inspired by the way that the Ethereal Plane was described in the new supplement.

I had a small hidden kingdom, set in a large oasis in a great desert. It was loosely inspired by Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” but of course I fiddled with it now and then. The “sunless sea” seemed sure to be an underworld setting attached to it, for example.

I decided I wanted it to be the capital of an empire, despite being cut off from its own world by an unforgiving desert. So, I put the Tarrasque in that desert, and had it held back from Xana by a magical wall.

Then, I had the people of Xana have developed “etherships” which let them sail into the Ethereal Plane to get to faraway worlds circling other stars. Their ships would fade from the physical realm into the Border Ethereal, and then sail to the Deep Ethereal. In the Deep Ethereal, they would sail from one part of the ethereal curtain which led to the Prime Material to another part, and then emerge into the Border Ethereal again.

From there, they would peer at whatever world they had found, and decide whether to emerge from ethereal state. Thus, they would create colonies and tributaries far from their own world.

I imagined one of their vessels had been lost, and it had become a terrifying Ghost Ship. I also imagined one being cast through an ethereal cyclone into the astral plane. I dabbled with the idea of using the astral plane instead of the ethereal but if I recall correctly, I was not sure I wanted to deal with the githyanki being a major threat and I liked the idea that perhaps elemental associations from the Ethereal might better fit a kingdom hidden in an oasis in the desert. I remember thinking that my ghost ship idea would still work, because an astral storm could still cast a ship into the ethereal.

My campaign players never even visited that part of the world. Of course I used to talk to my players about various parts of the world I was designing which they had never visited, it nonetheless never was shown “on camera”. Xana didn’t really get much flesh to beautify its skeleton of ideas, because it never became important to the game.

Then in 1989, Spelljammer came along, and my group was for a time enamored of its space-fantasy where ships simply flew into the sky, kept their own atmospheres, and sailed to other worlds through actual space. Who needed Xana when you had space opera on flying galleons? To be fair, we were also moving to 2nd edition, and that brought its own tsunami of changes to our games.

I have come back to the idea on occasion. I have reimagined it a few times. One of those times, I instead chose the Plane of Shadow and worked a bit on the Classis Umbra for 3rd edition. At the time, I liked the crazy speed with which players could reach another world, yet not do so instantly.

And then, for 5e, I put forth the idea of the empire of my Astralis setting. Here, the travel from world to world would be done by way of the astral plane, but hopefully with me having thought through it a bit more over the years. The githyanki threat started to seem like a “feature” to me, rather than a bug. Another feature, in my mind, was that astral ships making the journey could NOT hang out invisibly in the Border Ethereal, spying on their prey. Neither did they have aerial superiority, from a deep space level, such as was given to spelljammers. Indeed, a vessel entering the Prime Material through a color pool would likely be doing so blindly, with little idea what waits on the other side of the portal.

For Astralis, there is my Astralis Pitch, and a couple of followup articles I threw on here: the Home World and the Fate of Astralis.

But what about Xana? If you prefer an imperial navy of etherships, a hidden oasis capital and its pleasure dome, a terrifying desert with legendary beasts held back by an arcane wall, and a sunless sea beyond where the river disappears into dark caverns, then perhaps it is for you.

The ranger class in 5th edition seems a little lackluster compared to other classes.

I do not think it is as weak as some online haters portray it, though.

I put together a toolbox of tweaks that DMs might consider to adjust the class without boosting it too much.

• Get rid of the favored enemy “2 races” humanoid restriction, and let it be the same catch-all that the other favored enemies are. Yes, I recognize that in most campaigns, this change will make humanoids the most common favored enemy. This actually fits Aragorn, the iconic fantasy proto-ranger.

• Allow favored enemies and favored terrain to change periodically, but not on a whim. Taking a cue from spells known for other classes, possibly let the ranger change favored enemies and favored terrain when they gain a level. This allows for change, but not randomly. It would pace changes with the progress of the campaign. I think this should only be an option when the DM and player agree that the favored enemy or terrain in question is no longer valid to the game.

• Replace spells known with spells prepared. The paladin uses prepared spells like a cleric. Why doesn’t a ranger uses prepared spells like a druid? I get that bards, eldritch knights, arcane tricksters, etc need a spells known category to keep them from becoming spellbook characters. But a ranger feels like a druidic paladin.

• Let rangers use a druidic focus in place of a component pouch, if they prefer. This has a really tiny game effect, but adds flavor. It also mimics the paladin being allowed to use a holy symbol.
  

My goal is to present a very short list of simple changes, with the hope that they are sufficient to make the class more attractive without overpowering it.

In an alternate universe, there is an idealized caricature of you. There are stories to explore in that idea. Of course, this could be too personal for some folks. Holding the mirror that close might not be comfortable. Now imagine a half-dozen of these characters, in fantasy situations.

Standing in line at the grocery store, gathering your snacks for the evening’s game, you see the tabloids. When you get home, the game is the world where those absurd headlines are the truth. No game supplements required. The storylines are already there: Bigfoot was my father, Hitler hid on secret moon base, Man cuts off own head with chainsaw and lives, etc.

A random group of friends discover that their proximity and will generate odd events. Individually, nobody has any powers, but whenever 2 or more people work together, there are powerful effects. Are these easily mapped by trial and error? Or do they vary so much that the only sure factor is the individual actors who participate?

A miraculously powerful being comes to Earth, and decides that art is better than reality. We are all overcome by the being’s projection of paintings, film, sculpture, magazine, and other media, such that they overwrite the world in a kaleidoscope of imagination. With so many possible competing realities at play, some degree of chaos is inevitable.

There is a small town called Dunbar. It has 150 people in it. Theories state this is the upper limit of the average human’s ability to maintain social contact with their brethren. There is nothing beyond this town. It is all that exists. What sort of stories come from that?

Once upon a time, a cloud of energy singularities passed through the Earth, and each one was absorbed by a life form. Every touch-point was changed, endowed with power. Rarefied beasts became the ultimate predators, or the unbreakable survivors. Touched humans became great heroes, or terrifying villains.

A thousand years ago, the first Star-Pharaoh conquered the world. Desiring greater conquest, he called forth his sages. After years of trial and mage-craft, they built him an astral vessel, capable of sailing between the dimensions to reach other worlds. Today, the fleets of Astralis land upon thousands of worlds, serving the whims of a modern figurehead pharaoh, the ambitions of the imperial senate, the conquests of the astral navy, or the greed of the Lightermen mercantile guild.

Throughout history, some people have disappeared without a trace. These are the stories of where they went, and what they created. We do not know this place, yet we frequently touch it with our dreams. It is there that the truly missing go. Somehow they become so attuned to the essence of the unconscious that their bodies slip into that world. Yet, they still dream, and when they rouse, they live amongst the architectures of our imagination and theirs. They wake to a world of fantasies and nightmares, some of their own doing.

This morning, when you woke up, you and some other folks were whatever the fuck you thought you wanted to be. The world is in chaos today. How will this work out? What stories will come of it? How many terrible things will happen because you and some other folks had an idea but hadn’t thought it through?

Somewhere in the universe, there is a house where a boy hid his wishing machine. The house went up for sale, numerous workers fixed it up, a handful of realtors tried to sell it, and dozens of families visited it to see if it was right for them. Each of them projected their wishes for a future upon the house. Now the house is a nightmare of conflicting realities.