#optional rules

The player with the most people pointing to them goes first and so on. Ties are settled by Dex score, with the higher score going first. If Dex scores tie in a tied initiative, the players have ten seconds to punch the other in the shoulder, first to land a punch wins and if neither can in ten seconds both of their characters become evil radishes. If no one pointed at a player, that player's character becomes an evil radish until the end of combat. Players may not coordinate pointing targets before initiative. Both hands may be used simultaneously to point.

Evil radishes have an armor class of 25 and 1 hit point and regain 1 hit point at the beginning of each round unless eaten. As an action evil radishes can cast fireball centered on themselves. Every time an evil radish gains a hit point--including any hit points it would regain beyond its hit point maximum--it can move 5 feet in any direction, including through difficult terrain, water, or through the air (hovering). Evil radishes must cause as much chaos as possible or their character dies permanently at the end of combat. If an evil radish is eaten, it is neutralized until the end of combat.

At the end of combat, evil radishes (including neutralized evil radishes) return to their original form if they were originally player characters (if one was consumed it appears in the nearest open space to the creature that consumed it). If an evil radish was not a player character and remains un-neutralized at the end of combat it becomes a jolly good turnip for the next 24 hours, after which point in returns to its original form. If a non-plater character becomes an evil radish and is eaten, it dies permanently at the end of combat unless the creature that ate it regurgitates it before the end of combat.

Got a fun one for y'all today! As has been the case for like 90% of my work lately, this is another commission from one of my lovely patrons. Bit of a story with this one. So basically the client is an author and in their books they have their own sort of version of D&D. Within that game, the GM has a homebrew system called legacies where characters can have a super powerful thing at character creation but it will cost them dearly to use it. So that's what I've got here, a full writeup of my own interpretation of what those rules might look like but, ya know, for 5e.

Anyway, bit smaller than my usual brews but that's ok. Overall pretty happy with how it turned out. This is another one that I ended up doing in GM Binder. Found a theme for it there that I think worked really well for the vibe I had in mind. Went for an old-school 3rd edition feel, something dark and what I imagine the game's "player's handbook" might look like. Sadly I couldn't find any appropriate artwork so I left it bare but it's by no means visually boring. Plus it neatly fits on 2 pages almost exactly so I didn't want to ruin the formatting with ill-fitting art. Hope you all like it, and points to anyone who knows what book this is from.

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If you're a fan of the combat aesthetics in shows like Castlevania or The Witcher, or love the kill animations in games like God of War, Sekiro, and Shadows of Mordor, then Injuries & Vile Deeds will be the perfect addition to your game.

This supplement for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is filled to the brim with nearly 200 new feats, items, spells, subclasses, villainous NPCs, and terrifying monsters. Each new character option and enemy ties in to the Injury systems, making it easy for you to apply cinematic descriptions to thoroughly tactical combat.

A party of adventurers fight a tense battle against a nightmare soul sorcerer and his summoned blood elemental amidst a haunted forest of the sorcerer's creation. Cover art by Todd Ulrich

Gone are the days of nondescript attack and damage rolls. Injuries & Vile Deeds restores excitement to combat, providing rules for cinematic, tactical encounters. PC Injuries create narrative tension, keeping the party on its toes as they weigh the risks of pressing on or allowing their enemies to get a step ahead. Meanwhile, players can now add mechanical effects to descriptive combat, inflicting Injuries on their enemies and causing negative status effects with every action.

Page spread for Alta'ira Vex, Crime Lord of Palvada, a major villain with detailed personality, description, stat block, and plot hooks to engage your party.

Additionally, villains come fully prepared for use in your game, complete with plot hooks, organizational ties, personalities, background lore, and stats - all easily altered to suit the exact needs of your adventure and engage your players. Similarly, all monsters in the book come with lore to help you fit them into your world, along with tactics to help you run them in combat regardless your prep time. I've even created a new class of spells, Lair Magic, which are powerful, long-lasting spells that amplify or enchant the environment around a villain's lair.

Dara the Cleric of Slaughter wants to inflict an Injury on the troll she faces. She declares she is targeting its Attacks, and casts Inflict Wounds at 4th level. The damage is compared against the troll's Injury thresholds, and it suffers a deep necrotic wound to its arm, giving it a penalty to attack rolls. On her ally's turn, they once again attempt to injure the troll's attacks, and get a critical hit, dealing a large amount of damage and inflicting an even more severe Injury, lopping the troll's arm clean off!

A swordsman severs the arm of a storm giant mage, disrupting their spell and leaving lighting crackling along the blade. Art by Dylan Safford

Injury systems provide tables of Injuries sustainable by PCs, and lists of Injuries for players to choose from when inflicting them on their enemies. Simple tables of Injury damage thresholds allow players and GMs to easily look up the appropriate threshold for their character or monster before combat and keep it recorded in their notes, avoiding the need to constantly reference rules. Monsters and villains in the book will have their thresholds included in the stat block for easy reference.

                                                         *Mockup

Injuries for PCs are semi-random, scaling in severity with each Injury suffered while remaining narratively intuitive, and less randomly punishing for players than classic Injury tables.

Enemies like the Angel of Blood make use of these new mechanics, capable of inflicting bleeding wounds with their serrated greatswords. Meanwhile, others, like Xafirex the Lord of the Fallen, feed on the pain inflicted on them yet are nearly impossible to defeat without being rendered vulnerable to a Death Blow after numerous Injuries.

                          The Angel of Blood. Art by Todd Ulrich

Of course, in addition to the lore, stat blocks, and character options, no supplement could be complete without high-quality illustrations by talented artists. Amazing artwork is inspirational, and I will include as much as I can in the final product.

Xafirex, Lord of the Fallen. An ancient and scarred red dragon whose breath scars the minds and souls of its victims. Art by Todd Ulrich

That means full-color illustrations for monsters, such as the Angel of Blood and Xafirex (above), NPCs like the crime lord Alta'ira Vex (below), items, and scenes of combat, like The Giant Slayer (further above), rest and recovery, and other relevant scenarios.

               Alta'ira Vex, Crime Lord of Palvada. Art by Todd Ulrich.

As the project gains funding, the list will expand to include subclasses, additional monsters and NPCs, magic items, and perhaps even spells.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, June 30 2022 7:30 PM BST

Some monsters are bigger than others. To represent size, a creature's token on a battlemap is a certain number of squares wide and tall. Tiny, Small, and Medium creatures are 1 square, Large creatures are 2x2, Huge are 3x3, and Gargantuan are 4x4. This means that all Gargantuan creatures take up a space that's roughly 20 feet by 20 feet.

But what if we want to go a wee bit... bigger?

[Image ID: Steve Buscemi in Spy Kids 2. End ID.]

What's the worst that could happen?

It's not an optional rule to make creatures bigger than 4x4. It says as much in the Dungeon Master's Guide that Gargantuan creatures can be bigger than that if you want. However, I don't think this is quite enough. An 8x8 creature would be twice as big as a normal Gargantuan creature but would have the exact same size of hit die (d20). That doesn't seem quite right to me. Even if we wanted to, there are no bigger dice for us to use for the hit die. Well, we could use d100s but I think that would get messy quickly.

Therefore, I propose that Colossal creatures make a comeback with this optional rule: for each square a Colossal creature is bigger than Gargantuan (i.e. a 6x6 is two squares bigger than a 4x4), it gains a colossus level (so a 6x6 is a 2nd-level colossus). For each Colossus level, it gains 5 points of flat damage reduction. This means that a 2nd-level colossus ignores the first 10 points of damage it takes from any one source, which means that if you deal 32 damage to one you actually only deal 22.

Obviously, casting reduce on a colossus reduces its colossus level by 1 and therefore the damage reduction also decreases by 5. And vice versa!

For the sake of example, I've might add a “Colossal” trait to a roc's stat block and changed its creature type from "Gargantuan Monstrosity" to "2nd-level Colossal Monstrosity".

Colossal. The roc is a 2nd-level colossus. It ignores the first 10 points of damage (after applying vulnerabilities or resistances) from any one source of damage, taking the rest as normal.

Optional Optional Rule: Weak Spots

Just for fun, you might want to say it's possible to ignore a colossus' damage reduction if you use a specific damage type (or types) against a specific part (or parts) of its body. For example, a roc's weakness might be bludgeoning damage applied to its beak! In these cases, the weak spot would be treated a bit like an object with its own AC that the attacker must be in range of to hit. The AC equals the creature's plus its colossus level (the above roc's beak would have an AC of 17). The trait might look like this:

Weak Point. The roc’s beak is a Medium weak point with AC 17. A creature that deals bludgeoning damage to the beak ignores the roc’s Colossal trait and deals the same amount of damage to the roc.

How big is too big?

[Image ID: a diagram showing a set of tokens on a grid that shows how big a colossal creature can get: 9x9 squares. End ID.]

New 5e Homebrew doc on DMsGuild for $2.50

Technically speaking, your character has a passive skill check for each of their skills. There isn't room to keep track of all of these passives on your character sheet, and keeping track of them on a virtual sheet or other digital tool is still a pain. Moreover, the usefulness of passive ability scores beyond passive perception (the most commonly used passive score) is incredibly minimal—so why bother having those passives at all?

This document attempts to find a use for passive skill checks beyond passive perception checks. In summary, the optional rules in this document change normal passive skill checks into specific routine passive skill checks. These routine passives are the things that a character does over and over again—checking for traps, reading the titles on a bookshelf for hints, observing NPC reactions, etc. Having routine passives means you are limited to what passive checks you can make, but your passive checks become more impactful. They aren't limited to the base skills either; routine passives can be any of the base skills OR any tool, language, or instrument. There are caveats and limitations, and not all routine passive skill choices are good choices for every game.

In addition to rules for routine passive scores, this document includes optional rules for additional skills. These skills include customizable lore skills, luck, honor, and breath. These optional skills can work independently of routine passives but shine when used together.