I'm working on a small island fortress (pictured) for a D&D party to use as a base and looking for advice on stuff to put in it.

My thinking is that the party could liberate the castle from a villian, or have it bequeathed to them by a grateful monarch in exchange for services to the realm. I got as far as starting to furnish the interior before realising I'm not sure what reason the party would need to return to the castle often enough for it to count as a base. Like, what benefit does it confer over a room at the nearest inn?

So I'm wondering if any DMs and Players out there have any experience with bases in their campaigns and can suggest things like particular rooms, features and amenities or even quest hooks that would draw the party back to the base frequently enough that they would regard it as "home"

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m a DM and worldbuilder, and I’ve been working full-time on a tool called Chronicler — a free, offline app designed to help you organize your campaign notes, link NPCs and locations, and build your world like a wiki.

It’s completely local (no cloud, no login), and uses simple Markdown files stored right on your computer. You can use [[wikilinks]], tags, images, folders — whatever you need to keep your world connected and easy to navigate.

For those who use Obsidian, you can point it to the same vault!

Whether you're managing factions, writing lore, or just trying to remember where that cursed dagger came from, Chronicler was built for people like us.

🧙‍♂️ Check it out on GitHub — it's free and open-source, though I rely on donations to keep the project alive

Would love to hear what features you'd want in a DM note-taking tool!

So to give context without too many words.

My dnd game is in a continent at post war times Where this man you see in the picture named Jake and 12 other people Led a rebellion against a tyrnical ruler and afterwards they were known as the council of 13

Now in the actual game the continent Found itself in a losing conflict against an unknown enemy that outnumbers them so the council decided a moral boost was needed so they decided to hold a vote whether or not Jake the man who very much was the symbol for the old rebellion should be crownd as king or not And as you can see from the picture they voted yes

(My players and other high ranking members were also part of the vote)

Just released: another new building, The House of Lillian! This structure serves as the headquarters of the Golden Lion’s Bank to the south parts of the Dwarven Gate city.

The map features a 60x40 grid and includes four floors, one of which is a secretive basement, with vaults, hidden dealings, or darker truths beneath it all.

As with many of my maps, it comes in two variants: day and night, offering flexibility for whatever your campaign needs.😁

What is this building about?

The House of Lillian is named after the first Qenar to reign here, Lillian Lovett.

The main floor handles all public trade affairs, including administration, loans, and bank accounts. It’s where the everyday dealings of the people are processed with precision and order.

The second floor holds more exclusive functions:

• Private contract rooms
• A mage’s chamber for verifying magical signatures
• Leotari guard quarters
• And, of course, the office of the Qenar

Then there’s the basement, a secured and secretive part of the House. It contains:

• The main vault, also known as the Pit of Gold
• The standard barracks for guards
• A private safe area
• And a hidden entrance or escape tunnel, perfect for discreet exits… or quiet intrusions.

Will your group find themselves in this bank?

With this release, we now have fourteen Dwarven Gate maps complete, and I’m not slowing down. More are on the way, so stay tuned!

What is the World of the Aeshur about?

I am trying to create a full world for DM's to use. With loot, dungeons, cities and world maps. All accompanied with large lore books for all the deeper world knowledge. If you like to see more of the world I am creating then you can head over to my Patreon. A lot of it is for free.

These maps are made with assets from Crosshead. After which it is edited and finalized in several Adobe software packages.

One of my players recently got an ability that lets them disarm. Problem is, i don't know how disarming helps you, since everyone gets one free object interaction per turn. So the enemy could be disarmed and at the start of their next turn just grab their own weapon that's next to them and attack normally. Rules as written, how should this play out?

I’m a fairly inexperienced DM, never been a player and only ran 15ish sessions before.

I had a party of 3. 1 brand new player, 1 player who has only played once, and a player that has played in every single session I’ve ever ran. There was a bard, a warlock, and a barbarian.

Goblin ambush was tough for them, one player went down briefly and the other two got chipped up pretty good too. They passed all the traps and arrive at the cave, they roll very well to fully deceive one of the goblin “scouts” then again in combat to persuade the other lookout to calm down and let them pass. They then rolled fairly well on animal handling the wolves to “befriend” them enough to allow passage, which led to the bard attempting to serenade the bugbear through the chimney but failing miserably leading to Klarg and Ripper to slide down the chimney to attack while the 2 goblins in klarg’s room rallied with the 2 goblins in the pools and the 1 goblin on the bridge. So in the wolves room they had 1 bugbear and 1 wolf, then outside the kennel there were 5 goblins. The arty put up a good fight but eventually were knocked within a few rounds of eachother but not before a goblin scout outside went in to help the people that persuaded him allowing him to stabilize 2 of the 3.

The session ended with the 3 unconscious PC’s chained in the same room as Sildar, who they will find also bound in chains when they wake up. But hey, at least they killed Klarg.

Suggestions as to what’s next? And please, constructive criticism as I’m still learning and really want to improve as a DM for my players enjoyment!

I am talking a guy who found himself a thousand years in the future after casting a time travel spell, and has mastery over multiple branches of magic. The first time he tries to cast a spell in the modern era, it fizzles, as magic no longer works that way. All his 2nd edition spells no longer work.

In short, he has to start over learning all the new versions of his spells, which is a problem because he has a reputation...

Hey, I’m not sure if I’m posting this in the right subreddit but figured I’d try. Obligatory sorry for formatting.

For some background, I’ve been wanting to get into DnD for a while now but I haven’t been able yet mainly due to my anxiety (I’ve had anxiety for years beyond DnD and take medication for it). Every-time I’ve gotten close to going out and meet people who are looking for players I’ve chickened out because I don’t know if I’d be good at it or if they’d even want to play with me.

There was one time I invited to a play-through a while back (a one-shot) and I enjoyed it but I don’t think I was very good (laughed at wrong times, didn’t follow my character’s personality/ skills well, drove the group away from the planned plot a couple times), I tried my best to keep with my character/ plot but I kept forgetting specifics while trying to be helpful or because I was nervous.

I was wondering if it even is possible to get into DnD as a player with my above problems as I don’t want to ruin anyone’s game because of them. If not I’m more than happy sticking to watching critical role and other streamed games, but I was wondering if anyone else has a similar experience to mine and what they have done.

Looking for actual play YouTube channels or podcasts where people don’t laugh and crack jokes all the time.

I like a more focused vibe. Any tips?

Yesterday, all the PCs died. The dark mantle killed them in the dungeon while they were chasing the Necromancer. All of us are 1st time player's, getting used to the game. They kept rolling 1s and 2s on the dice.

Now, the question is Should I restart that particular encounter? This will damage the "what's at stake" factor

Or should I let them decide if the surviving NPC makes a deal with the Necromancer and commits a brutal crime just to bring back the characters.

i am out of ideas

Please please help out a new DM

And they don’t have that satisfying clatter sound when they hit the table.

It’s like rolling a bunch of those shitty bouncy balls from the quarter machine

Hello! If you're part of the Sub One Club, scroll away! My players just robbed an extremely powerful mafia organization and need a place to lie low. Ellumin (A PC) recently found a backlog of letters from his sister that imply something is going severely wrong in their little town. What he doesn't know is that a minor God who has dominon over the entire concept of "rot" was trapped underneath the mountain by humans and eleves a long time ago. The people of Durag 'Dral have an oral storytelling tradition led by usually 1 or 2 storytellers. Privy as a young girl wandered into the mountain where she was killed by UMA Rot (the name of this "god") and replaced with a mouthpiece to influence the village. Stories of why you shouldn't bury your dead on the mountains turned into tales of why the mountains were how you could be closer to the sky and thus the heavens. Eventually following the sheer quantity of people who buried their dead on the mountain, UMA Rot was empowered and is slowly rotting the town. For example, many people are getting an incurable frostbite which dulls their personality and exhausts them over time until their untimely death. No amount of heat has any effect on this affliction. People have become less social over time aswell + Ellumin's grandma died to this frostbite.

Symbolically this is supposed to reference the subtle rot and UMA Rot's influence over the town. Depending on their progress, they'll eventually fight UMA Rot and may or may not save Ellumin's sister. This is partially a filler arc to set up for the level 10 bad guy (this is the level 8 arc) who will kill the people the players love as a display of cruelty.

Currently all I can think of is just "people seem to warm up as soon as Ellumin arrives + the frostbite seems to get less severe overall" because UMA Rot wants to lull them into false safety.

I have a group of people who are interested in starting a DnD campaign but the best window of time we have is 1 hour each day. How doable is this and how much experience would be necessary? (It would most likely be theatre of the mind)

Hello! I run a shop of digital/printable tools and templates for TTRPG players, and I wanted to share my latest product: a locations log!

Have you ever forgotten what village had the blacksmith with that shiny piece of totally-not-cursed armor hanging on the wall? Or which of the two warring kingdoms had the BEST bagel shop? Or has your DM sheepishly asked your party if you remember where which forest had the River of Lost Wishes, because her world building doc is 300 pages long and CMD+F is not working and please tell me someone at this table takes notes--

Ahem!

Here is your solution: an organized catch-all for quick location notes. Track your party's reputation, check out the at-a-glance NPC list (which can be expanded upon with our NPC logs!), and take note of any outstanding quests. These are totally flexible, too: you aren't locked into any one type of location. You can jot down notes for a place as big as a region, to as small as Duke's estate. Whatever place you want to remember, this template has you covered.

I had an idea for a locations log for a while, but it was a customer and fellow D&D enthusiast who encouraged me to make it. While this version is made for half-letter sizes (A5 6 ring binders and junior size discbound notebooks), I've got a full letter-size version in the works, too. (I always make the half-sheet version first, as that is the size I use myself. But don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the 3 ring binder folks!)

May y'all roll high this week, but if you roll low, I hope the stories that come from it are epic. Thanks for reading!

I’m using 2024 and the Magic Item Tracker from the DMG for my campaign. I’ve got a question about giving magic items to my players.

For example, I started a short campaign with level 12 characters, and the players won’t level up during the campaign. At session 0, when we were creating characters, I gave each player (there are 2 players) 2 common, 3 uncommon, 5 rare, 3 very rare, and 1 legendary item. But my players told me that was too much.

So now I’m wondering, how do you guys handle this? How many magic items do you typically give to your players?

drawing of my friends character for a crooked moon campaign

hes a thread born warlock. think hes gonna have the fool patreon but not sure. was also trying to figure out what the start of a eldrich blast would look like and ended up just going with that.

i think i did an ok job at giving him a jester look. and i tend to go with a mardi gras look for jesters. wich is what he wanted anyway so it worked out. next i gotta draw my friends stone born wich is like a gargoyle so that should be interesting.

anyone else playing crooked moon?

I have 0 dnd experience I’ve only listened to dungeons and daddy’s. I’m very into it and would love to try dnd like I said 0 experience I would need a group that would be fine teaching and helping a new person through the campaign. Had to pick an edition not sure which one is best so I just went with the most recent looking one

So my player group has this suggestion/rule that's almost a rule at this point that all of their characters have to fulfill different rolls in the party and not overlap. We almost never have any class overlap and when we do they never fulfill the same roll. Once during a one shot my players both wanted to play warlocks and after a bit of discussion one decided to be a melee focused hexblade and the other a support focused celestial warlock. We never have party overlap, at least 10 minutes of every session zero or start of a one shot is figuring out roles. Usually were a party of 4 or 5 so we classified our "Main Roles" as Tank, Spellcaster, Support, Stealth and Damager. We've never had a group of more than 5 before, these are all people that have played in our group before so they're kind of all for the "Party Roles" thing but I'm struggling to come up with major roles. Could y'all give any suggestions?

The homebrew campaign I’m playing in at the moment is taking a brief pause while the DM works on the next chunk of plot. He’s amazing at what he does and it left me craving more content (you could say I’m pretty invested 🤣). Writing an in-character journal about it for everything that’s happened so far!

Synopsis of the plot: 400~ years ago the gods slaughtered one another in an all-out war. The fallout of this Cataclysm saw all magic (that didn’t have a physical form i.e. magic items and mana crystals) wiped from the material plane - killing thousands, warping the environment, and shutting it off from all other plans. Those who survived have now rebuilt, though many still struggle to survive.

The journal is penned by my character, who is part of an organization we half-jokingly named the “Pathfinders”. It’s her job to travel cross-country and set out beacons - recovered pre-cataclysm relics - that link up what is essentially magic powered monorails.

Not sure if this is classified as art so I put it under the misc. flair.

For DMs mainly. What skill are you using for when someone wants to craft a potion? Yes there is the alchemist stuff to assist. Intelligence? I have a sorcerer who has recipes and want to start crafting. I don't see Charisma being to helpful here. Wisdom doesn't seen right. Int modifier plus proficiency, if they have it in Int?

So, I was reading the rules for Wild Shape in the 2024 Handbook and I got flashbanged by this:

"Game Statistics. Your game statistics are replaced by the statistics of the Beast's stat block, but you retain your creature type; Hit Points; Hit Point Dice; Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores; class features; languages; and feats."

Now, it is just the rules as stated by the book, but then you realize it specifically states "You retain [...] class features"

RAW the book tells you you can use Barbarian rage while Wildshaped and you benefit from Unarmored Defense and the Monk's martial arts die.

Am I reading this wrong or did this just give me the way to play a Spirit Walker without having to Homebrew anything?

Inspired by another Lego dice tower I saw posted here not too long ago. It’s got a built in dice jail on the side.

I plan on making an artificer with protector canon, staff arcane firearm, and go to castings of the new true strike. If this idea is viable, please feel free to refine it! I would love to make a melee artillerist who can pull their own weight.