Thought I’d capture on here one or two DM tips that I decided to capture for future reference.
Hopefully I’ll remember these once we start our campaign back up.
I don’t think any of the spellslingers in our campaign currently have counterspell as something they can cast. But it’s handy to bear this in mind.
One thing I do need to improve are my descriptions of locations. But I agree with the tip below. So I need to get the balance right.
I think I’ve shared this one before. But better save than sorry.
The nice thing about this one is that you can create tables before hand to roll against, or buy one of the many pdfs that have such tables to save the effort of creating your own. Although I do like the personal touch of creating my own.
A few posts back I wrote a post with some inspiration notes for playing a campaign in the D&D Eberron.
The focus of that post was the lightning trains and movies and tv shows that could be used to inspire plot lines based around trains.
This post looks at another aspect of the Eberron setting, airships.
So what I have below are movies that feature zeppelins, airships of some kind. Some of them have a similar feel to them as the Eberron setting.
Some of these movies are based on other media such as books and manga. In those cases going back to the original source is recommended. Some are so much richer than their cinematic offerings.
I particularly like that these sources of inspiration show air travel as part of the story, and not the whole story.
The airships act as major scenes within the story. Which is how I think I’d use them as well. Not just as a device to get from a to b, but also the location of some plot development.
What movies or tv shows would you add to the above?
Back when I got the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide I was pretty excited by the introduction of Ghostwise halflings in a side box on page 110.
Particularly the following sentence that gave them mounts.
“Clan warriors known as nightgliders bond with and ride giant owls as mounts.”
Who wouldn’t want to be a halfling with a giant owl to ride on?
Ok I maybe a little bit biased. After all I love playing halflings. They are my favourite species in D&D. A carry over from being a Tolkien/LoTR fan.
It gets better being a Ghostwise halfling because their wisdom ability score gets a +1 bonus on top of the usual halfling attributes. Plus they get Silent Speech. Which allows them to speak telepathically to any creature within 30 feet of them.
Then I came across this Dragon Talk video that blew my mind.
Halflings with dinosaur mounts!
That’s frickin cool. It doesn’t get cooler than that.
And all I have to do is run a campaign in Eberron.
I love the opening quote from Eberron: Rising from the Last War for halflings on page 27.
“ZOMBIES? MINOTAURS? THEY DON’T SCARE ME A BIT.
But a howling halfling warrior charging in on a clawfoot raptor? Most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
-Sir Danton ir’Lain, Brelish knight”
These halflings sound badass. Which I always thought they were. This just validates my opinion.
I love the fact that the halflings are nomadic and have close ties with their dinosaurs.
The halfling monk I created many many posts ago would be amazing once changed to fit in to Eberron. Give him a dinosaur mount, and as suggested in the Eberron book theme the monastic tradition around dinosaurs. Maybe name the fighting style after the dinosaur mount that the monk has.
I also like the idea of taking the Silent Speech of the Ghostwise halflings and making that specific to dinosaurs. Something the Eberron halflings developed as their bond between them and the dinosaurs strengthened over the generations.
Oh this has got me so excited about Eberron now and halflings.
I caved and got my grubby mitts on a copy of the D&D source book that came out last November Eberron: Rising from the Last War.
Eberron is “a war-torn world filled with magic-fueled technology, airships and lightning trains, where noir-inspired mystery meets swashbuckling adventure.” (quote from here) A kind of fantasy meets modern world type setting, almost steampunk like in nature, magicpunk!
When I found out about the lightning trains I instantly thought about two movies as inspiration for an adventure or two.
The first was obviously the movie based on the graphic novel of the same name, Snowpiercer (also now a tv series as well). This could almost be a campaign setting! Definitely this is multiple sessions to tell the story. Sadly the other movie that sprang to mind was the Steven Seagal sequel Under Siege 2.
Another couple of movies that came to mind after that were The Commuter and Murder on the Orient Express.
Another movie to watch is Captain America: The First Avenger in particular the train heist where Cap and the Howling Commandos attempt to capture Zola and Bucky dies.
I also thought of Firefly episode 2: The Train Job. Where the crew of Serenity are hired to pull off a heist on a train.
I’ve not even started to think about inspiration for the pulp adventure or noir intrigue. Although one or two of the above sources of inspiration could cross over into those descriptions as well.
The airships is something else to look into for inspiration and I have one or two movies that come to mind for them as inspiration but I’ll save that for another post.
For those that have been following the last couple of posts and my attempt to paint the Wizkids Rather Big Skeleton Dragon will know I wanted to do something outside of my comfort zone for the base.
I had the idea that the base would look cool with some skulls on it. You know like the remains of previous victims.
My memory recalled that there was indeed a product out there in the big wide world that was just skulls. I’d seen it on the shelf of my FLGS.
After a brief google search I found what I was looking for, and I had indeed remembered correctly. Within minutes the box of skulls was ordered and on its way.
With the skulls in my grubby mitts this morning (the joys of next day delivery) I knew I wasn’t going to do the base in a style similar to the box cover.
I chose a range of different sized skulls and therefore species that I glued to the base in some sort of “pleasing way”. Ok there was no real plan for their placement.
Once dry I applied a white primer, which then also had a skeleton bone colour base coat applied over top of that when that had dried.
The knowledge that I will eventually be applying a flock to hide the mess on the base is comforting.
Now I need to do some more waiting before I can do the wash.
I said I’d post with the next stages in painting the dragon skeleton. So here I am keeping my word.
After the wash had dried I dry brushed the bone with the skeleton bone paint. I then used a matt white to dry brush around the bone joints to bring them out more, plus along the spine. I also applied the white to the teeth.
I finished the painting off by applying a red tone wash to the teeth, and certain horns and claws.
The base needs flocking now. But I’d like to do something more than my usual primitive attempt.
The latest addition to the skeleton horde arrived this morning.
Unusually for me within seconds of it arriving it was out of the box and having paint slapped on it!
Ok this isn’t the most complicated paint scheme for a model. The majority of it is Army Painter skeleton bone colour, and the skin on the wings I did as Army Painter leather brown that I made lighter by mixing in some white.
That lighter tone took it almost to the bone colour.
I now have to wait until the wash has dried to do the highlights.I’ll post again with the finished that.
Wow six days since I’ve posted on here. That’s nearly a record. But understandable considering the world we currently live in.
Over the last few weeks I have got some D&D related reading material in.
The first being Volo’s Guide to Monsters. It nearly was Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, but the chapter in Volo’s on monster lore for some of the more popular monsters like beholders, goblins, orcs, etc is what swung it for me. With the lair maps for the relevant monster these are instant adventures/encounters you can call upon at any time.
I’ve been a fan of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing blog for a while now. Being able to look up a monster and get some tactics for it that is not just attack until dead or run away, making them more intelligent, challenging and believable is a great thing to have.
And although this book is a collection of the blog postings that have been revisited, corrected, expanded and some new monsters, just having them in print and handy is a great reason to buy this.
Finally as promised Mythic Odysseys of Theros has finally hit the FLGS. The alt art FLGS exclusive cover is gorgeous. And foil! Sadly the promised double sided Theros map didn’t make it to the FLGS at the same time. With no hint of when it will arrive. Which as far as I can see means extra cost to the FLGS to send them out to customers. I knew WotC would manage to screw things up for this somehow.
With the new wave of Wizkids minis hitting stores I took the opportunity to buy a miniature to add to my undead horde now it was a reasonable price to get. I’ll reveal more about that mini in another post once it’s here and painted.
At the same time I ordered another Minotaur skeleton by Wizkids. Which I didn’t realise was pre-painted.
A bit of a result that. Saves me the job of doing it.
But the amount of packaging was ridiculous. So much waste. Wizkids could easily have used half of the amount. It’s instantly gone in the recycling bin.
It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these random dungeon posts, and also a day or two since I’ve posted anything on here. For the later it’s only natural that there will be gaps between posts due to world events.
The worm tunnels and the disturbed burrows got me thinking this random dungeon is crying out for a purple worm as the big bad.
I see this mini dungeon something an adventuring party stumbles across as they ‘explore’ the sewers of some city. They enter through the ratstink sewer, where they discover a cult that worship the purple worm.
I think the dice generated an interesting party if you wanted to use them as the inspiration for characters to play.
But they also work as a supporting cast to help take on the purple worm. This could be a party of adventurers that entered via the cave entrance and hired to hunt down purple worms by a local dwarven community that had their mining activities ruined by purple worms, the death toll to them had been numerous.
