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D&D giants

Carving a Place in the World | Giantborn – New Player Race for 5E D&D

Giantkin are a longstanding tradition in fantasy fiction and folklore. Whether it’s Jack and the Beanstalk or Attack on Titan it seems the notion of being smaller than another person is one of our most intrinsic fears. However, in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons monsters and other frights are manifest staples of everyday life, and sooner or later people will fall in love or otherwise reproduce. That’s where the giantborn (offspring of human and giant relations) come into play! The idea for giantborn first occurred to me as belonging in my homebrew campaign setting, based on my own published novel The Mis-Adventurers: An (Almost) Epic Tale. However, this race could just as easily fit into any setting.

Get Tangled Up in Hairible Ideas for D&D

Salutations, nerds! Things are about to get a little hairy in April. All right, that was almost a bald faced lie. Things are about to get a lot hairy. That’s right, we’re revisiting Beardomancy. And if you liked the beardomancer, get ready, because you’ll be in for a good time with the Hairible Ideas supplement for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Last April’s Beardomancy was so popular with players (and us!) that we couldn’t bear to part ways with the strange world of the Beard Dimension. This time around it’s not only wizards who’re having a good hair day, with beardomantic energy affecting five other classes, new magic items and spells, and literally every creature in the entire game.

Challenging Epic Heroes — High Level 5E Monster Design from Monster Mastermind Ryan Servis

Hey there readers! Ryan from 2CGaming here, and I’m an expert in Tier 3 & 4 play for fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a tough area of the game to play in. The players are likely wielding characters of obscene power and your monsters are struggling to keep pace. Everything is more complicated and the hours you just spent carefully constructing your arch-lich villain got smashed to smithereens by a paladin scoring a lucky critical hit on turn one. These problems are hard to overcome and are omnipresent in high level 5E. But fear not, for these obstacles are not insurmountable. It’s totally worth the effort too, as high-level games are uniquely spectacular when run well. I’m here to share with you a process by which we make Tier 3 & 4 games some of the most exciting experiences at your game table by showcasing how we at 2CGaming approach monster design.

Top 10 5E D&D Summoning Spells by a Factor of Three

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted carefully conjure some conversation about summoning spells and effects in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. There’s 17 spells with the summoning tag in official 5E D&D sources according to D&D Beyond and of course untold numbers of homebrew and third party creations. Looking at homebrew summoning spells at DDB there’s currently 818 spells with the power to conjure things into existence. Unlike the analysis of illusion spells, this time we won’t limit the list to wizards. Spells that add more creatures into the mix can be challenging to manage for players and Dungeon Masters alike. But it’s also fun to play a conjurer or summoner. I played a character focused on summoning in an earlier edition and I had a great time organizing info and collecting miniatures for the various creatures they could conjure. There’s definitely a few homebrew summoning spells I discovered while writing this I would have enjoyed casting back then. So let’s look at the homebrew summoning spells at D&D Beyond and see what sorts of strange conjurations a spellcaster can call forth.

Join the Fight for Freedom at the Planar Zoo!

“Welcome to the Balip — Nop Pop. Trust me, it sounds more terrifying if you spoke my native language. Here we are freedom fighters, naturalists and, well, if I may be so bold, heroes! I am sure by now you have seen or at least heard of the Planar Zoo. Ran-Kitra has been taking creatures from their homes and putting them on display. Humans, orcs and other intelligent species are taken from their families and shoved into unfamiliar surroundings to be watched by those who purchase tickets. It is up to us to rescue them and return them to their native homes.” — Excerpt from a recruitment speech for Balip — Nop Pop

Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Magic Items for Exploration by a Factor of Three

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted carefully analyze the best magic items for a exploration in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. This is another unusual conversation topic, like the one on magic items for 5E D&D rogues. Players rarely get an opportunity to choose their character’s magic items. But it’s worthwhile to keep an eye out for particular magic items during the course of adventures. There’s two other situations I can think of when players have control over their characters’ magic items. In Adventurers League play items can be traded on a one-for-one basis for items with the same rarity. Making a trade costs each player involved 15 downtime days unless they’re playing at the same table. The other scenario is games beginning beyond 1st level. In our own monthly fan one shots we give players an option to choose magic item(s) for their characters this way, and I’ve played in many games with the same guidelines. Protip: for a tier 1 adventure or campaign try letting players choose one rare magic item to start and see what happens. So let’s get into it and look at homebrew magic items for exploration from D&D Beyond.

5E D&D druid spells magic druid's wave

Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Druid Circles by a Factor of Three

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted circle back to the basics and discuss the druid class for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. In the video they look at all of the 5E D&D books with druid content. There are subclasses in the Player’s Handbook, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica and Dave and Ted look over the character class as a whole plus weigh in with their personal gaming experiences. Outside of official sources there are countless Circles created by players all over the world. We’ve created at least one ourselves and there’s more from the D&D design team included in Unearthed Arcana playtest documents as well as terrific third party products containing new options for druid players. Over at Dungeon Master’s Guild there’s currently 625 products tagged as 5E D&D character options with druid content too. But there is another source of homebrew content I’m looking at today — D&D Beyond, where people have used the homebrew tools there to create 291 Circles for druids. Let’s get into it and look at the best ones from three different perspectives.

D&D arcane Cyborg with magical cyber wolf

Enhance Your 5E D&D Character — Join the Vargarian Collective Today!

In the annals of Nerdarchy’s content creation vaults for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons I recently discovered a document Nerdarchist Ted created about two years ago called Warforged Components. Originally created to swell ranks with steel soldiers, since the days of the Last War these creatures of wood, metal and magic became recognized as a new species who now seek their purpose beyond fighting in others’ conflicts. Warforged as a fan favorite character race and in 5E D&D the definitive official version appears in Eberron: Rising from the Last War. In Nerdarchy’s own campaign setting a similar but very different species pursues a much more concrete goal — total domination of the multiverse. Vargarians are a bio-organic species and like the warforged they are created, except the Collective fashions their kind by subjugating populations and absorbing individuals, grafting arcanomechanical parts and subsuming their minds. But why should they get all the wonderful toys?

New 5E D&D Roguish Archetype — The Enforcer

Recently while talking, we at Nerdarchy realized fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons rogues just haven’t gotten as much love and attention from all of us as we would like, especially in the realm of homebrew content and subclasses. That’s a real shame too, because the rogue is one of the staple classes of the fantasy genre on the whole. As a class, I find it interesting that rogues are sort of disenfranchised. Even the definition for the word rogue implies someone who doesn’t travel the beaten path. Rogues are usually the tricksters, those who argue for pragmatism, usually devoid of morality and other such inconveniences. I’ve often wondered why there was never an enforcer rogue. We’re familiar with stories of criminals employing some muscle to intimidate their enemies. Why isn’t that a thing we can do in 5E D&D? Well, now we can… as an Enforcer Roguish Archetype.

Two New 5E D&D Feats for Grung

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted hop into One Grung Above to examine the grung as a playable race for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. D&D players from all over (myself included) fell in love with these small humanoid frogs who made their 5E D&D debut in Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Despite their monster entry showing grung as neutral evil slavers, the accompanying art portrays them as cute and the One Grung Above one shot from 2017’s Stream of Annihilation showcased how fun a party of grung adventurers can be. The stats and features for grung player characters have been around for a couple of years through the Dungeon Master’s Guild and were recently added to D&D Beyond to the delight of an army of grung aficionados, with all monies Wizards of the Coast would receive from sales of the product donated to Extra Life. But all that is only prologue to what I’m interested in exploring — creating some special grung feats for 5E D&D characters. So let’s get into it.

Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Illusion Spells by a Factor of Three

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted dive into the School of Illusion magic for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. More than any other school of magic, illusions in 5E D&D rely heavily on the Dungeon Master. There are 33 illusion spells across the official sources of 5E D&D and of course countless homebrew and third party creations. Browsing through the homebrew illusion spells at D&D Beyond I see there’s currently 1,433 of them! If we limit these lists to illusion spells for wizards we only lose 1 official spell (silence) but a whole bunch of homebrew ones, bringing the number down to 904. Since the nature of illusions in 5E D&D depends largely on how the DM reacts to them, it’s up to you and your group to determine how much versatility and power (or lack thereof) illusion magic holds. So let’s instead look at the homebrew illusion spells for wizards at D&D Beyond the way we looked at homebrew magic items for rogues and see what mystifying magic we discover.

D&D character rogue

Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Magic Items for Rogues by a Factor of Three

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted carefully consider the best magic items for a rogue in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. In some respects this is an unusual conversation topic. Characters rarely get an opportunity to choose magic items. But it’s worthwhile to have goals and keep an eye out for particular magic items during the course of adventures. There’s two other situations I can think of when players have control over their characters’ magic items. In Adventurers League play items can be traded on a one-for-one basis for items with the same rarity. Making a trade costs each player involved 15 downtime days unless they’re playing at the same table. The other scenario is games beginning beyond 1st level. In our own monthly fan one shots we give players an option to choose magic item(s) for their characters this way, and I’ve played in many games with the same guidelines. Protip: for a tier 1 adventure or campaign try letting players choose one rare magic item to start and see what happens. For now, I had so much fun looking through homebrew Otherworldly Patrons on D&D Beyond that I’m going to do the same thing here and see what interesting magic items I can find for 5E D&D rogues.

5E D&D history skill check

Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Warlock Otherworldly Patrons by a Factor of Three

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted get back to basics and discuss the warlock class for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. In the video they look across all of the 5E D&D books with warlock content. There are warlock subclasses in the Player’s Handbook, Sword Coast Adventurers Guide and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Dave and Ted share an overview of the character class plus weigh in on their personal gaming experiences. Outside of official sources there are countless Otherworldly Patrons created by players all over the world. We’ve created quite a few ourselves in our products, newsletter and posts here on the website. There’s more from the D&D design team included in various Unearthed Arcana playtest documents, and lots of terrific third party products contain new options for warlock players. Over at Dungeon Master’s Guild there’s currently 840 products tagged as character options with warlock content too. But there is another source of homebrew content I’m looking at today — D&D Beyond, where people have used the homebrew tools there to create 755 Otherworldly Patrons for 5E D&D warlocks. Let’s get into it and take a closer look at some!

5e D&D find familiar

Wringing Special Abilities from the Find Familiar Spell in 5E D&D

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted help get you extra familiar with the find familiar spell for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Part of the video includes a breakdown and brief summary of a spellcaster’s different options for the spirit that takes an animal form you choose. The celestial, fey, or fiend can take the form of a bat, cat, crab, frog (toad), hawk, lizard, octopus, owl, poisonous snake, fish (quipper), rat, raven, sea horse, spider, or weasel. Warlocks who make a Pact of the Chain at 3rd level gain a few more options in the form of imp, pseudodragons, quasit or sprite. Some monsters like the gazer in Volo’s Guide to Monsters explicitly call out possibility for becoming a familiar and in fact any character can potentially gain the service of a familiar. In our Out of the Box book, Fibble’s Fantastic Familiars presents an opportunity for characters to acquire new and strange familiars too. Familiars come in very handy in so many situations in 5E D&D, but if I’m honest there’s something I miss from earlier editions of the find familiar spell, which at one point wasn’t a spell at all and granted special abilities to its master when the master and familiar are within 1 mile of each other.

5E D&D ranger spells Unearthed Arcana Class Feature Variants

Expanding the Spell Lists for 5E D&D Beast Master and Hunter Rangers

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted finish up the video series on go to spells for spellcasting classes for tiers 1 and 2 with the ranger for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. During this tier of play from 5th-10th level rangers gain access to 2nd and 3rd level spells. If you are playing a Gloom Stalker, Horizon Walker or Monster Slayer ranger one of your Ranger Archetype features is Magic, and you learn an additional spell when you reach certain levels in the class. The spell counts as a ranger spell for you, but it doesn’t count against the number of ranger spells you know. Features like these across different classes typically include spells not normally found on the class spell list, so in addition to having these additional spells in your repertoire, you get some nifty new options other rangers do not. But what about the original Ranger Archetypes? Let’s create Beast Master Magic and Hunter Magic features for those two Ranger Archetypes!