New material: Shadowy adamantine

Whole Grain Games returns!  Eight years is a fairly long time.  I’ll be posting various items and such I’ve worked up for Dnd 3.5/3.PF.  However many of these concepts and items can be easily translated to 4E or 5E.

Description: One of the most powerful dwarven metals, adamantine is delved from the heart of the world by talented dwarven runemasters.  It is so hard it cannot be worked without magic. The shadowy sorcery necessary to work the ore permanently affects the metal, imbuing it with spiritual powers.

Two example items crafted from shadowy adamantine:

Hale shadowy adamantine shirt This beautiful and dark forgemail +1 (chainmail class, +9 AC, +1 enhancement, total +10) has the ghost touch and sour attributes, and confers fast healing 2 to the wearer.  (Sour: Any creature vulnerable to poison becomes dazed for one round after dealing damage with a bite attack.  The wearer cannot be held in the mouth of a creature, nor can they be swallowed whole.)

 
 

Bloody blade The bloody blade is a dark and twisted shadowy adamantine blade.  It is appears jagged and poorly cared for with a warped edge; in the light it has a distinctive reddish glint.  This blade is nearly intelligent and has a very powerful drive for blood.  When handled the wielder can feel its throbbing need to taste living blood. This sword functions as a shortsword +3, has a critical threat range of 18-20 and a multiplier of x3.  This weapon allows one re-roll per attack to overcome a miss chance due to cover, concealment, invisibility, blinding effects, blur, etc.  The Bloody Blade is wounding 3 (opponents who can bleed take 3 point of damage every round from each hemorrhaging wound) and vicious: it inflicts 2d6 extra damage and 1d6 damage on the wielder with every successful strike.  When drawn, it confers a +2 morale bonus versus fear and hold effects.  No creature’s damage reduction applies against the Bloody Blade. If the wielder has killed a creature with levels equal to the wielder’s minus two or higher within 24 hours with this blade, they receive a +2 morale bonus to hit. This blade cannot be sheathed without drawing the blood of an intelligent or monstrous creature.  The wielder may intentionally cut themselves (or another willing subject), dealing 4d20 damage.  If the wielder chooses to draw no blood, the sword cannot be sheathed or set down, and deals 1d6 Con and Wis damage per hour to whomever drew the sword last.

 

 

Using Consumables

 
I wanted to talk a little about consumables today. I think with judicious use you can help to balance a party and encourage them to try new things.

Consumables are a great way to give out treasure without impacting the game in the long run. An abundance of heal potions too powerful? No problem, stop handing them out and the problem should slowly go away.

Consumables can also be a way for a DM to help shore up party weaknesses. If the party is light on healing, more cure pots are always appreciated. No wizard? Find ways of working in items with utility uses.

I especially like consumables because they can help give an “epic” feel to big fights. If the party has a limited resource pool they don’t often tap, a really tough fight will force them to spend what they have. This makes the fight feel really knock down and drag out, and can allow an epic fight to continue longer than the players without consumables could normally go. They’ll remember that victory against the dragon where they had to pull out all the stops and still barely squeaked by.

 

Lovecraftian Horrors: The Taker

“The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods.” – H.P. Lovecraft

This is my second post creating Lovecraftian monsters for the D&D world (see the first here.

Today I’m working on the taker, a disgusting horror found in fetid swamps. The taker is monstrosity resembling a cross between a leech and a hydra. It’s long, black and faintly segmented body is ten feet long and glistens with slime. The front ends in a mass of squirming rubbery black tentacles. The tentacles expand and contract like worms, and each ends in a small, circular toothless mouth.

This monster follows the common theme of “disgusting tentacled thing attacking under water” (see A New Hope and Fellowship of the Ring). However, it should be found on land in swampy areas as well, and adds a few horrifying elements to the mix.

The taker preys on fleshy creatures, ambushing them from under the water and moss covered pools in dark bogs. Each limb makes one grapple attack when the taker uses a standard action to attack (like a hydra). The taker may attack with every tentacle on an attack of opportunity. On a successful grapple each tentacle deals constricting damage and drains the victim’s blood. Each point of constitution drained grants the taker 5 temporary hit points.

If the grappled target fails a Will save (DC 15), it suffers 1d4 points of Wisdom damage as the taker’s alien mind forces itself into their consciousness. The taker now controls the creature for 1d6 rounds as per dominate. The taker can communicate using a grappled creature as a mouthpiece. This ability is useable once per day.

Any victim drained to 0 Constitution rises in one minute as a zombie, its grey flesh covered in bruised sucker-bites. The zombies ignore the taker, and the taker ignores the zombies.

Because of this side effect, many casters ally themselves with takers, providing victims and then commanding or controlling the undead.

 

Fork of Prodding

 
Sunday Fluff:

Erinbar’s Fork Of Prodding   This ornate silver dinner fork is decorated at the end with a clear gem. When the fork is touched to an object, the gem lights up to indicate various properties of the object: Green: Object is poisonous Red: Object is magical Yellow: Object is undead Blue: Object is pregnant   (In the unlikely case that more than one effect applies, the gem winks each relevant color in series).   The divinations offered by this fork are continuous and useful, and many a user has had their life saved by noticing a green glow indicating the steak they were about to dig into has been poisoned.

 

Valentine’s Special: Healing

 
Healing can be a pain sometimes. Sure, some people really do like spending their actions healing their party members, or simply don’t know enough about the game / aren’t assertive enough to do anything more than react in pre-programmed ways. However, for a lot of people that end up playing a healing class or a main party healer it becomes a chore.

Fourth Edition will be solving this to some degree. WotC has acknowledged that most group buff and group aid powers will not consume your actions. As an example, they have mentioned healing auras and the healing smite power of the paladin (hit your enemy and it heals an ally). While the flavor of that may be a bit strange, it does address a gameplay issue.

Here I will address what can be done in 3.5, focusing mostly on the druid (because the main party healer I DM for is a druid). Some of the solutions, however, are not in the SRD, but could be roughly duplicated using their base concept and some house rules.

 

The Math of Critical Hits

 
It’s been announced that in Fourth Edition there will no longer be any rolls necessary to confirm criticals. This reduces the number of rolls in the game (I think a good thing) and increases player enjoyment (also a good thing!). However, this got me thinking about the math behind 3.5E criticals.

 

Cursed Items: Backfiring Fireballs

 
It’s a classic, but it’s hilarious every time: the backfiring wand of fireballs. I almost never give out genuinely cursed items in my game, so this really took the players by surprise.

Description: This slender ebony wand identifies as a wand of fireballs (caster level 8) with a full 50 charges. When used, the fireball detonates in the square it was fired from. Any character using identify on this item may make a Spellcraft check (DC 25) to discover its curse.

 
Because it has a full 50 charges players should be tempted to use this item often instead of saving it for desperate fights. This reduces the chance they will cripple themselves in the process, leading to laughter instead of anger. (I would also consider changing the curse on the fly to be “fizzling” if the party attempted to use it when they were in a very bad way).

I think this item can really lighten up a game. I actually laughed out loud when my group decided to give it to the party bard because he felt like he wasn’t contributing enough in combat. Like all cursed items, though, it should be handled with care.

 

Interesting Locations: Valley of Darkness

 
A while ago while browsing the Internet I discovered the Italian town of Viganella. This town is situated in a steep mountain valley and suffers a unique affliction: every year for 84 days the town receives no sunlight whatsoever.

 

Magic Items: Elvira’s Rainbow

 

Elvira’s Rainbow was crafted for the fairy princess Elvira by her doting grandfather. It is a beautifully crafted silver shortsword. The blade is extremely narrow and thin, but strong and flexible. It shimmers with a rainbow light as prismatic colors dance within the metal. The pommel is set with five round stones: emerald, ruby, amethyst, sapphire, and yellow diamond.   This sword functions as a +1 shortsword (with the silver property for damage reduction purposes). As a free action, the wielder of this sword can cause it to gain one of the following attributes and may switch between them with a free action: fiery, cold, acidic, shocking, or holy light. Each attribute does 1d6 energy damage.   Elvira’s Rainbow was crafted to grow with the fairy princess. It automatically becomes Small or Medium sized when held by a Small or Medium sized creature.

 

Lovecraftian Horrors

“All made o’ squirmin’ ropes… sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything … nothin’ solid abaout it … great bulgin’ eyes all over it… ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin’ an openin’ an’ shuttin’… all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings… an’ Gawd it Heaven – that haff face on top…” – H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

 
Few writers managed to evoke so much terror and revulsion about their creations as Lovecraft. He did more with less. Most of his creatures were never described, or at least not in detail. However, if we’re to use them in D&D we need to give them details, stats, and abilities. I’ve spent some time working on creating various Lovecraftian invaders for my campaign which slip into the world through rifts, gliding in from unspeakable regions between worlds for unknowable purposes.

There are many monsters in D&D (most are Abberations) which owe at least a little to Lovecraft’s influence. Today I’ve borrowed the beholder and repurposed it as a nameless entity which wields mysterious powers. It is not meant to be a boss creature, rather it is supposed to be a bizarre, terrifying and evocative encounter. In my world these creatures will methodically drive all the inhabitants in a town insane, causing horrific acts of violence among peaceful townsfolk before folding the town out of existence completely, transporting all the lost souls to an unreachable hell beyond the known planes.