#RPGaDAY2020 Day 14 – Banner

When I think about banners, I think about heraldic standards that would have been carried into battle. What better way to represent this idea as a magic item for fighters and paladins?

I really like the feel of this item. Clarion call can be a very powerful ability in the right circumstances, especially if you’re fighting multiple opponents that all have abilities that can inflict negative status conditions for rounds at a time and gives the affected PCs an interesting choice of attempting the bonus save immediately or spending their next turn still affected to get advantage on the roll. The ability to take damage for an ally is also super thematic for this kind of character. And I just love the compelled duel spell, so I needed to include it into this item. The fact that using charges from the item requires you to hold it also presents an interesting tactical situation for the user – do they sheathe their weapon to use it? Do they forego their shield? What if their fighting style uses two-handed weapons?

Created with GMBinder

We’re two weeks in and almost at the halfway point of this year! I hope you’ve been liking the material I’ve been putting out. If you have please consider heading over to my Ko-Fi and throwing a donation my way! Every single one goes towards making more content for this hobby that we all love. Thank you so much for your support and we’ll see you all back here tomorrow.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 13 – Rest

We’ve all been there. You’ve fought your way through the dungeon and you’re spent. You know the cultists conducting the world ending ritual are behind the next door, but you need that extra edge to ensure victory. But you don’t have hours for a short rest.

What do you do?

Xanathar’s Guide to Everything has you covered. Today we’re going to take a look at a spell that I think is slept on by a lot of players out there – the 3rd-level enchantment spell catnap*. 

Original credit unknown

 This spell is available to bards, sorcerers, and wizards (and by extension arcane trickster rogues). It allows you to target up to three willing creatures and put them into an unconscious state for 10 minutes. If you need to, you can wake them up early with no ill effects, but if they complete that full 10 minute duration, they wake up having gained the benefits of completing a short rest. A character can only benefit from the effects of this spell once per long rest. So if you’ve got a well-defended area and 20 minutes that you can spare, a couple of castings of this spell can get your party up to snuff in a fraction of the time that a short rest would take. Perfect if you’re pressed for time.

And the fact that this is a 3rd-level spell means that the rarity of the spell scroll version of this is only uncommon. It’s a scroll that the party should have at least a couple copies of at all times just in case of an emergency.

*Pun completely and fully intended.

No original material today. I decided to take a cue from the prompt and give myself a rest in that regard. We’ll be back tomorrow with more stuff from the new prompt. We’ll see you at the top of round 14.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 12 – Message

Nothing to fancy with today’s prompt – being able to contact people who live far away has always proven to be something of an issue in fantasy fiction. Now, 5th Edition does have a way around that with the sending stones magical item, but that’s only good for one use per day and requires you to be able to speak for the sending spell. This just requires that you are able to write and has no limit to the length of the message. Options are good. Players like options.

Created with GMBinder

We’re rapidly approaching the halfway point of August. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for day 13.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 11 – Stack

This week sees some strange prompts that have really made me think and stretch my thinking more than a little bit. However, I have been pleased with several of the things that I have come up with for them.

Today we go back to spell creation and draw some inspiration from Mutants and Masterminds and the ability to improve a reroll via spending Hero Points. I struggled a little bit with figuring out what level this spell should be. Given how flat the math is for this game, dropping 50% of the die results is a powerful ability to have, even for just a single roll and so I decided 3rd-level is not a bad place to start testing this spell.

This spell is available to bards, clerics, sorcerers, and wizards.

Created with GMBinder

We’ll see you back here tomorrow for day 12! There’s still plenty of time to jump in and be a part of this experiment.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 10 – Want

I have no defense for myself. I ended up creating the magical equivalent of a “thirst trap” with this prompt.

This spell is NOT for every table or even for every game. It relies a lot on the player and DM having a mutual understanding and respect for the game and each other. It also requires a lot of DM fiat in regards to what the PC’s illusory appearance actually looks like to each person they interact with and it could be easy to cheat them even without meaning to. I would absolutely not recommend putting this spell into your game unless you have that bond and that trust around the table. But at the right table, I think this could be a lot of fun in the hands of a creative player.

All that aside, this spell is available to bards and sorcerers. I might even consider letting a Cleric of the Trickery domain substitute this spell for pass without trace if they wanted it as a domain spell depending on the character.

Created with GMBinder

We’re into the weeds with some weird prompts this week. Let’s see what I can come up with. We’ll see you here tomorrow for day 11! As always, the list of prompts is below if you want to join in.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 9 – Light

It occurred to me while thinking about this prompt that the 5e Players Handbook is missing a lot of common alchemical items from past editions like thunderstones and tanglefoot bags. It then occurred to me that the rules for common magical items are actually perfect for these kinds of one shot items – add in the provision that items like these can be created during downtime by someone with proficiency with Alchemist’s Tools and they can be made in a handful of days for a small amount of gold at low levels. This item came into being as a likely companion to the thunderstone, so that you could have the equivalent of a flashbang by pairing the two of them.

Created with GMBinder

And there’s day 9! We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the next prompt. And as always, here are the prompts if you want to jump in and participate for yourself.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 8 – Shade

It’s already the second week of August! So far this has been a very fun and affirming experience and really helped to get the creative gears turning and began to develop material that I’ve never considered before like creating new spells. I’m hoping I can continue to ride this momentum after August.

That said, I couldn’t help myself with this particular prompt. I thought about creating an item that created pockets of darkness, but once I had this idea I knew I couldn’t do anything else. This is basically an upgraded version of both vicious mockery and dissonant whispers with the failed save condition being commensurately harsher for a higher level spell slot (but not as harsh as the 2nd-level spell blindness/deafness).

This spell is available only to the bard.

Created with GMBinder

We’ll see you back here tomorrow for day 9! As always, here’s the list of prompts if you’re following along at home.

 

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 7 – Couple

I might be dating myself here, but does anyone else remember those “friendship necklaces” that were a heart or some other shape broken down the middle that revealed a message like “best friends” when they were put together? Well, this is the common magic item equivalent. This is actually an idea that I had a few weeks back but never sat down to finalize. And then when I saw today’s prompt I knew I had to finish it up. It was too perfect. I’m not 100% happy with the language on the once a day ability, but I couldn’t think of a better way to explain it. So that might get cleaned up in the future. We’ll see.

And that’s week one in the books! We’ll see you here tomorrow for day eight and the beginning of week two.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 6 – Forest

We haven’t done a weapon yet for this, so I decided to create a battleaxe that would be of use to any number of fighters, rangers, or paladins (especially those who follow the Oath of the Ancients). This is a relatively simple item all things considered, and plants aren’t all that common in most games, but this could be a very cool and useful item in the right hands and right campaign.

Created with GMBinder

You guessed it – we’ll see you here tomorrow for day six of this experiment. Prompts included below if you want to play along or see what’s coming up next.

#RPGaDAY2020 Day 5 – Tribute

I struggled more than a little bit with this one, but I think I came up with a really neat item out of it. Material components are not something that 5th Edition tracks all that much, instead assuming that casters have the basics they need to cast most of their spells. However, some particularly powerful spells call for specific material components, such as resurrection and glyph of warding. And since it’s not necessarily common for parties to carry around thousands of gp in gems or diamond dust, these can prove to be problematic in the field at times. And so, I bring to you the Rod of Offering.

Created with GMBinder

I had played around with the idea of not allowing the item to regain its charges, but after talking with several other gamer friends, I opted for the slow recharge rate. It’s a potent effect, but not exactly game breaking, especially for a character of 11+ level. You’re also not going to be able to use it to power any massive abilities – the most you can get from a fully charged rod is 5000 gp – enough to get a single gate spell which would then exhaust the rod and turn it to dust. But at the same time, it’s powerful enough where you don’t want a PC armed with a fully recharged rod every day.

And that’s day five! We’ll see you here tomorrow for day six. As always, I’ve included the list of prompts below if you want to play along.