TBD

Rod of Instant Outposts

Rod, rare

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This rod resembles a collapsed tentpole with an embossed banner wrapped around it. While holding it, you can use an action to speak its first command word to cause the rod to elongate and plant itself in the ground at your feet, standing upright as a tentpole. The pole is 10 feet tall and is planted at a point on the ground within 5 feet of you. When this happens, the pole recreates the effects of the alarm spell, which covers a 30-foot-radius area centered on it; you designate whether the alarm is mental or audible, as well as what creatures won't set off the alarm.

While touching the tentpole, you can speak the rod's second command word using an action to cause a magical tent to unfurl from its top that's 40 feet in diameter. The tent creates a series of expedition-ready stations inside it: a cartography station, cooking station, medical station, and navigation station. When this happens, you can designate yourself or another creature within 30 feet of you to be a master of each station; each station must have a different master. The tent is always a comfortable temperature inside.

𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙝𝙮 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. A set of cartographer's tools appears at this station. The master of the station can use these tools to magically create a map of the area in a 2-mile radius with 1 hour of uninterrupted work (which can be done over the course of a short rest), provided the master is within the station. The tools move on their own in the master's hands while within the station.

𝘾𝙤𝙤𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. A set of cooking utensils appears at this station, as well as a lit fire pit; the fire is harmless, produces no smoke, and consumes no oxygen. The master of the station can use these tools to create a magical meal with 1 hour of uninterrupted work (which can be done over the course of a short rest), provided the master is within the station. Up to ten creatures can partake of the meal, and it provides enough nourishment to sustain each creature for one day.

𝙈𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. A healer's kit appears at this station. The master of the station can expend one of its uses to restore 1d10 + 5 hit points to a creature within its reach with 1 hour of uninterrupted work (which can be done over the course of a short rest), provided the master is within the station. The master can also choose to end one of the following conditions on such a creature: blinded, deafened, or poisoned. Once a creature regains hit points in this way, it can't do so again until it finishes a long rest.

𝙉𝙖𝙫𝙞𝙜𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. A set of navigator's tools appears at this station. The master of the station can use these tools to magically tell which way is north and what the weather will be in the tent's current location for the next 24 hours. While within the station, the master can use an action to close their eyes and magically gain a bird's eye view of their current location, up to 100 feet in the air. While viewing their location in this way, they are deaf and blind with regard to their own senses. The master's senses return to normal at the start of their next turn, unless they use an action to continue using the bird's eye view.

A master of a station has advantage on any ability check it makes using a tool associated with its station while it's within 5 miles of the tent. The equipment disappears and these benefits end when the tent is collapsed into the rod. The equipment magically returns to its associated station if a creature other than the master holds it.

A creature touching the tentpole can use an action to speak the rod's third command word to collapse the pole (and any tent) into the normal rod. Once the rod is used to create a tent, it can't do so again until the next dawn.

Lionhearted Helm

Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)

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While wearing this helmet, you gain a +1 bonus to AC, and you have advantage on saving throws against being frightened. In addition, at the start of each of your turns, if you lost any temporary hit points since the end of your last turn, you regain 1d10 of them (to a maximum of the amount lost); you must still have at least 1 temporary hit point to regain any in this way.

The helmet has 5 charges for the following properties. It regains 1d4 + 1 expended charges daily at dawn. You must be wearing the helmet in order to use its various properties.

𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙍𝙤𝙖𝙧. Once on each of your turns when you take the Attack action, you can expend 1 of the helmet's charges and forgo one of your attacks to release a thundering roar, which is audible out to 120 feet. Each hostile creature that can hear you within 10 feet of you must make a DC 16 Constitution saving throw; this effect's range increases to 20 feet if you're in werelion form (see below). A creature has disadvantage on the saving throw if it's frightened. On a failed save, a creature takes 3d6 thunder damage and is frightened of you until the end of your next turn; a creature that fails the save by 5 or more is also knocked prone. On a successful save, a creature takes half as much thunder damage and isn't frightened.

𝙒𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙁𝙤𝙧𝙢. You can use a bonus action to expend 2 of the helmet's charges to physically change your form to resemble a werelion in hybrid form. You immediately gain 30 temporary hit points, which last for up to 1 hour or until you're no longer in this form. While in this form, you have advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks, and you can make unarmed strikes with your teeth and claws, dealing piercing or slashing damage, respectively, instead of bludgeoning; these unarmed strikes use a d6 damage die, unless it's already higher. Your statistics are otherwise unchanged. You remain in this form until you have no temporary hit points remaining or until you end it early as a bonus action.

Wondrous item, common

Requires attunement

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When you make an ability check using a skill with which you aren't proficient while wearing this amulet, you can reroll the check if you roll a 1 or 2 on the d20. You must use the new roll. Once this property has been used, it can't be used again until the next dawn.

From The Griffin's Saddlebag

Concept Explanation The image illustrates the layered architectural and engineering strategies used in historical defensive fortifications, specifically focusing on palisade structures and earthworks. It breaks down the system into three distinct stages or configurations, showing how vertical barriers (fences), horizontal platforms (fighting decks), and ground-level obstacles (ditches and slanted screens) work in tandem to create a tactical advantage for defenders. The diagrams emphasize the "attacker's perspective" to demonstrate how the physical layout forces an enemy into vulnerable positions while providing the defense with height, cover, and controlled access points.

Key Components & Features Ditch & Wall (Earthworks): The foundation of the defense, where a trench is excavated to create a "ditch" and the soil is piled to form a "wall" or rampart. This forces attackers to climb up a steep incline after navigating a drop.

Palisade Fence: A vertical barrier made of sharpened wooden stakes, providing a primary line of defense that is difficult to scale and offers cover from projectiles.

Defenders' Fighting Platform: A raised wooden deck situated behind the palisade. This allows defenders to see over the fence and engage attackers from a superior height.

Slanted Defense Screen: A secondary row of sharpened stakes angled toward the ditch. This creates a lethal "picket" barrier that prevents attackers from easily reaching the main wall.

Main Entry Screen Complex: A sophisticated gateway design featuring "Entrance 1" and "Entrance 2." This creates a "palisaded lane," effectively a kill zone where attackers are channeled into a narrow path overlooked by a fighting platform and double gates.

Design Summary The system demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of spatial defense and force multiplication. By combining natural topography with timber construction, the design maximizes the "high ground" advantage. The most complex element is the gateway system, which uses architectural bottlenecking to neutralize superior numbers, turning a potential weak point (the entrance) into the most heavily defended part of the structure.

Barbed Bowstring

Wondrous item, rare

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You can string a nonmagical bow with this item over the course of one minute to transform the bow into a magical one. When you hit a creature with a ranged attack using the bow, that creature suffers from a magical barb. A creature with a barb that willingly moves before the start of your next turn takes 2d4 piercing damage as the barb cuts into it; until the end of the turn, the creature's speed is reduced by a cumulative 5 feet for each 4 you roll on the dice.

A creature can only be affected by one barb at a time. A barb created in this way disappears at the start of each of your turns or when it deals damage to a creature that moves. Removing the bowstring from the bow makes the bow nonmagical once more.

Item created by "The Griffin's saddlebag." I like the idea of these Bangles, but personally I'd lower the rarity slightly and remove the spells, gravity crush, and move field. Even at legendary, these things are very overpowered otherwise.

Drift Bangles

Wondrous item, legendary (requires attunement)

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This pair of gravity-defying bangles hang effortlessly in the air around your wrists. While wearing them, you emit a field of strange gravity, which extends outward from you in a 10-foot radius. While in the field, you and creatures of your choice are always under the effects of the feather fall and jump spells; affected creatures also gain a +2 bonus to AC against ranged weapon attacks, as the gravity surrounding you alters the path of incoming projectiles.

The bangles have the following properties, which you can use while wearing them.

𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨. The bangles have 10 charges and regain 1d6 + 4 expended charges daily at dawn. You can use an action to expend 1 or more of their charges to cast one of the following spells from them (save DC 17): "flaming sphere" (2 charges), "floating disk" (1 charge), "levitate" (2 charges), "reverse gravity" (5 charges).

𝙂𝙧𝙖𝙫𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝘾𝙧𝙪𝙨𝙝. As an action, you can force each creature within the bangles' field to make a DC 17 Strength saving throw. On a failed save, a creature takes 4d6 force damage and is knocked prone. If the bangles' "flaming sphere" is within the field's area, the sphere glows like a small star until the end of your next turn; for the duration, a creature's speed is also halved when it fails the saving throw against the sphere's fire damage.

𝙃𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜. You have a flying speed of 30 feet and can hover. This form of flight doesn’t allow you to move more than 10 feet off the ground. If you fall from a greater height and aren’t incapacitated, your fall ends 10 feet above the ground, where you resume hovering, taking no falling damage.

Monstrous Repository: Gorgadrith — The Purple Worm

Gorgadrith is the disaster at the heart of the Gnawed Deeps: a colossal purple worm that has swallowed vaults, fortresses, and temples whole. She follows the densest vibrations—marching armies, active mines, heavily worked stone—and treats fortified structures as gourmet meals. Her passing explains missing strongholds and tooth-scored caverns where maps abruptly stop making sense.

Perfect for: A campaign-shaping catastrophe—an epic boss, a timed survival set-piece, or the living explanation for why that “impregnable” bastion now has a worm-shaped hole through it.

Role in Its Society:

Gorgadrith is less a creature and more a moving catastrophe, a purple worm whose path through the deep rock has swallowed mines, temples, and entire Underdark fortresses. To dwarves, duergar, and drow alike, she is a whispered calamity—a name invoked alongside cave-ins and earthquakes. Sometimes, desperate or deranged leaders try to weaponize her, luring enemies into her wake or staging battles above her feeding grounds. These schemes almost always end in chaos: Gorgadrith does not distinguish between friend, foe, or bystander—only rock, and what’s inside it. Her presence has carved a swathe of unstable territory known simply as the Gnawed Deeps, where maps are suggestions and yesterday’s tunnel may be today’s bottomless shaft.

Appearance Description:

Gorgadrith is titanic. Her body is a living tunnel of muscle and chitin, easily ten feet thick and hundreds of feet long. Her hide is banded in deep violet and bruised indigo, slick with stone dust and faintly iridescent where bioluminescent fungi smear across her plates. Her head is a blunt, armored wedge dominated by a vast circular maw. That mouth is ringed with concentric bands of jagged, grinding teeth, each tooth chipped and stained with stone and old blood. Inside, rows of smaller, rasping spikes create a grinding spiral designed to chew stone, metal, and flesh into slurry. Along her flanks, stiff barbs and spines rake the rock as she moves, leaving smooth, glassy scoring in her wake. Segmented plates flex as she tunnels, shedding flakes of stone and chitin. When she emerges into an open cavern, her sheer size warps perspective—she doesn’t slither so much as redefine what “wall” and “floor” mean while she is present. The only “delicate” parts of Gorgadrith are the clusters of pale sensory nodules along her head and first few segments, quivering as they taste vibrations through stone.

Backstory:

Gorgadrith’s first meal in this world was a dwarven treasure vault, though she remembers none of the details, only the intoxicating mix of metal, gem, and carved stone. Something—perhaps a miscast spell, perhaps a natural weakening—opened a microscopic fault between her deep lair and the vault’s foundation. She followed the richest “flavor” of worked rock and ore, erupting through the vault floor in a storm of teeth and stone. Survivors spoke of a purple “mountain” that ate the ceiling and half the clan’s ancestral relics before plunging back into the depths. From that day, Gorgadrith learned a simple truth: worked stone tastes better. Mortared walls, carved corridors, reinforced shafts—their density and mixed materials are gourmet compared to raw bedrock. She began following the telltale tremors of civilization: the regular beat of picks, the thud of marching boots, the distant booms of blasting powder.

Personality:

- Primal Hunger: Driven by appetite more than cunning—but she knows good “feeding grounds” and returns to them.

- Pattern Follower: Recalls the feel of rich seam clusters and worked stone; she revisits areas where feasts were plentiful.

- Surface-Curious: Occasionally follows vibrations all the way to the surface, especially during wars when marching armies pound the ground.

- Pain-Aware: Remembers particularly nasty spells or siege weapons; may burrow away faster from similar sensations in the future.

Adventure Hooks:

- The Vault That Vanished: A dwarven clan’s sacred reliquary disappeared without a war. They want heroes to track Gorgadrith’s path, recover what artifacts they can from her tunnels, and ensure she never returns.

- Siege from Below: A surface city sits atop the Gnawed Deeps. An enemy warlord plans to provoke Gorgadrith into erupting under the walls by staging heavy marches and detonations above specific faults.

- Gnawed Deeps Cartographer: A madly optimistic deep gnome wants to map her tunnels as a “shortcut network.” The party is hired as protection while they follow fresh wormsign.

- Temple of the Hollowed Altar: A faith discovers their buried holy site was partially eaten. They need the altar’s surviving core recovered before a rival cult claims “proof” their god has fallen.

Roleplaying Tips:

- Indifferent Cataclysm: Gorgadrith is not evil or cruel. She barely notices individual creatures—only clusters of sensation. Portray her like a moving landslide.

- The World Talks First: Foreshadow her with environmental cues: tremors, ceiling dust, distant grinding roars, and sudden, unexplained drafts.

- Use Scale: When she arrives, emphasize how much of the battlefield she occupies and how small PCs are by comparison—describe her in segments, not as a whole.

- Sense of Direction: She doesn’t dart randomly; she “leans” toward the strongest vibrations or densest material. Let clever PCs predict her path.

Retrospecs
Wondrous item, very rare

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While wearing these rose-tinted glasses, whenever you make an ability check or saving throw against an effect that you failed the same check or save against on your previous turn for the first time, you gain a +2 bonus to the roll.

In addition, the glasses have a dial around their left lens, which is divided into 24 segments. Each segment represents 1 hour. You can use an action to rotate the dial counterclockwise by 1 or more hours. When you do, you can see the area around you as it appeared that number of hours ago through the glasses. Creatures that appear in the past in this way are blurred and indistinguishable.

You can use another action to rotate the dial clockwise, advancing it forward in time by 1 or more hours (to a maximum of returning it to the present). The dial returns to the present automatically 1 hour after it’s turned.

The dial can be turned twice to a time other than the present, after which it shouldn’t be turned in such a way again until the next dawn. Each time it’s turned to a time other than the present again before then, there’s a 25 percent chance that the glasses crack and become nonmagical.

Wand of Burning- Wand, rare (requires attunement by a spellcaster)

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This wand has 7 charges for the following properties. It regains 1d6 + 1 expended charges daily at dawn. The wand looks more and more burnt the fewer charges it has remaining. If you expend the wand’s last charge, roll a d6. You take an amount of fire damage equal to the number rolled on the d6, which can’t be reduced or prevented in any way. On a 2 or higher, the wand regains 1 charge. On a 1, the wand crumbles into ashes and is destroyed.

𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨. While holding the wand, you can use an action to expend 1 or more of its charges to cast one of the following spells from it (save DC 15, spell attack bonus +7): “burning hands” (2nd-level version; 1 charge), “produce flame” (0 charges), “scorching ray”(2 charges).

𝘽𝙪𝙧𝙣. Once on each of your turns when you deal fire damage to a creature with a spell cast from the wand, you can expend 1 of its charges to cause the target to ignite. Until a creature takes an action to douse the fire, the target takes 1d6 fire damage at the end of each of its turns. The target can also put out the fire by dropping prone and spending half of its movement on its turn to roll in place on the ground.