2022
Dungeons & Dragons
Homebrew Content
Enemies, encounters, and Items that I made for my players, here I will explain how they relate to my players and enhance their power fantasies.
The main setting was a homebrew world made by me, where my players took on the role of about-to-graduate students of a magic high school and their adventure to obtain their adventuring certificate.
Design Process
Most of the content here was made for players new to D&D and Table Top RPGs (TTRPG) in general, because of this, the campaign started at level 1 to allow them to get to know their character mechanics and how the game works.
Session - 1
The first session focused on teaching the players how roleplay and combat are handled in a TTRPG, and later introduced them to magic items as a reward (a magic torch that wouldn’t burn out).
Session - 2, 3 & 4
After a successful first session, we met again a week later for our second session, seeing them hooked up, I planned for a longer story.
The theme of this story was made around Slime monsters, one of the main enemies being a Modified Gelatinous Cube I made, I introduced them to a couple more combat mechanics like flanking, and resistances, status effects like paralyzed, and terrain modifiers like difficult terrain. at the end of all of this, they ended up facing off against an eldritch slime god who made them face off against their disciple, a warlock guilty of turning villagers into slimes, in an arena where I combined all of the mechanics I taught them, slimes kept appearing and filling the room with goo, gradually turning the floor into difficult terrain. At the end of this encounter, they got rewarded with thematic rewards, that helped fulfill each of their character’s power fantasies.
Enemy Design Process
Slimes - (Modified Gelatinous cube)
For the first homebrew enemy, I made for my players a modified Gelatinous Cube that took inspiration from a game all of us liked, Minecraft and its slimes, I took the usual Gelatinous cube Statblock and added the Split ability to it, making it turn into smaller, nerfed versions of itself. This allowed me to change the combat in the middle of the fight in case my players weren’t able to handle them or they were too powerful. The split ability also allowed me to change the dynamic of the combat, going from a mini “Raid boss” to a numbers game where players had to concentrate on not getting overwhelmed.
Item Design Process
These are thematic Items I designed with 2 Objectives:
1 - Keep a theme
2 - Help their character’s strengths and power fantasies
Necrotic Daggers
Rouge/Sorcerer Item. Meant to help them survive longer in melee range (their preferred combat style)
Necrotic Lyre
Bard Item. During one of the previous sessions the bard had expressed to me their disappointment that they were able to use their instrument only for supportive spells and they had to use bows or swords for damage, because of this I came up with the idea of turning an instrument into a weapon.
Slime Armor
Paladin Item. As a character made to tank, the interactions when getting hit felt weak and non-interactive, this armor was meant to improve the experience of getting attacked.
D&D Weapons Redesign
Martial characters are usually very straightforward and simple in D&D, although this is not always a bad thing, it can get stale over time. This redesign was meant to add more options for my martial players
This is a list I made on Google Sheets that I give to my players when creating their characters: Click Here
My favourite is the addition of Expert weapons, weapons that allow martial players to use AoE attacks where the enemies need to succeed on DEX saving throws against the Matials Strength. This gives Martial players more options when dealing with enemies with higher armor ratings or taking out multiple enemies close by in a single attack.