D&D Ideas — Vision & Light
Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is vision and light, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy Live to talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of visions when a ghostly isle draws adventurers into Eternal Night they may persuade the spirits to let them leave but a haunting tale leaves them with visions of a parent in despair. See how flexible these topical terms can be? You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.
Nerdy News
The phantom of the week that was returns to haunt you! Survive the horrors of a sci-fi future, tinker with strange new magical artifice and walk a fine line between life and death plus a new live chats rounds out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.
And if you wanna capture spirits for later use consider striking a bargain with The Forgotten Goddess in your next game!
Delving Dave’s Dungeon
Vision and light are terms in the fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook from Chapter 8: Adventuring and this week’s topic. Vision and light are also tools of the Dungeon Master in 5E D&D. Let’s look at vision first before we move into light.
Vision can be interpreted in different ways. We can use it as it is intended in the PHB but this isn’t all. First consider it in the prophetic sense. A vision could be a glimpse at something or somewhere from the past, present or future. These could come from one of the gods, a celestial, a demon or devil, the inherent magic of a place or item or from ancestors reaching through the veil of life and death to give insights to the living. This is a great way for a DM to add plot hooks into an adventure. Visions can come to a single character or the group could have a shared vision. The vision could be static and the characters watch it unfold before them. Alternately the vision could be interactive and the characters take part. You could rally run an adventure this way, with the whole thing taking place within a vision or dream like some kind of simulation.
The 5E D&D PHB describes vision as one of the five senses your character uses to interact with the world. It is the DM’s job to bring the world alive for the players and what their characters see is a big part of this. In my experience it is the sense DMs rely on the heaviest when describing scenes to the players.
Remember — when using sight you can also invoke touch and taste in your descriptions before those senses get experienced. Your descriptions can tease those other senses and then give a contrast after they come into play. Something could look dry, wet, soft, rough or it might look delicious, greasy, burnt, half-cooked or spicy. Does it feel the way it looks? Maybe food looks really good but your taste buds tell something different. Play with these contrasts. It could mean something different from the game itself. A meal that looks and smells yummy but tastes rotten raises some questions. Is the food tainted? Is the meal under an illusion?
Light can be the bane of DMs everywhere. There is something primal about the fear of the dark. Using light to set a mood can be a real downer when immediately after the DM uses it as one of their tools everyone in the party exclaims, “I’ve got darkvision!”
No worries — there are ways for us to use this as well. Color coded puzzles might trip up your party until someone realizes they need to examine it with a light source. Darkvision is only in black and white.
You could also steal a trick from the 5E D&D Gloomstalker Ranger Archetype. Their Umbral Sight feature makes them invisible to darkvision. Imagine the adventuring party who thinks they are under attack by invisible creatures only to realize they just need to look at them using normal sight and not darkvision. If some characters have darkvision and others carry light sources it could be a lot of fun to describe the monsters coming in and out of the light. When they go beyond the radius they become invisible to everyone.
From Ted’s Head
Light sources and vision issues have been a part of D&D for as long as I have been playing. It is something you can highlight and make a major obstacle or simply ignore.
Having played RPG for so long I have seen and encountered so many things my vision is obscured to many of these issues. But I will say a very fun session for me as a DM was when characters were in a place immune to any light source, which made everyone effectively blind. If you have ever tried to walk through your own home at night with no light it can be a real challenge. In a place you are completely unfamiliar with it might be terrifying.
Going further with this idea there are a few class or subclass features allowing characters to see in magical darkness but what I did superseded this. Vision just was not possible for starters. I marveled at how many features and spells rely on a target you can see. Combat was a chore when everything without blindsight had disadvantage. Scaled down encounters where now difficult. If they were creatures able to navigate the darkness without a problem because they were native to this place then all the better.
This is a great way if you are using any character who draws power from shadow or darkness. Way of Shadow monks or Shadow Magic sorcerers immediately jump to mind but I am sure you can think of others as well. The shadow touched feat then works for anyone who leaves this area too.
For surviving this endeavor characters can be changed. Either choose or roll on the following table or use it as inspiration for coming up with your own ideas for each player.
Touched by Darkness (d8)
- Splotches of inky blackness move across your skin
- Your sunken eyes turn solid black.
- Your skin darkens permanently.
- Your hair changes to either jet black or stark white.
- Your voice has a whispered echo no matter where you are.
- Your eyes are visually all white.
- Your fingernails turn black and come to a point.
- A shadowy creature of unknown origin follows you around.
From the Nerditor’s Desk
Whenever we choose a topic for our D&D discussions I try to approach them from a different angle than they might suggest at face value. In the case of visions and light I focused mostly on the concept of visions as a DM tool during the live chat.
Insofar as these are both game terms with mechanical elements involved Nerdarchist Ted and I touched on those ideas as well. It’s also worth mentioning we’ve got a module series incorporating themes of both visions and light too! Dark Paths: The Shimmer comprises four scenarios along with a guide to help you mix and match for different story results.
For something different here I thought I’d share a magic item I created for my home game a few years ago. Since Wild Beyond the Witchlight is out now it’s even timely since this wondrous item carries a strong connection to fey creatures and the Dreaming World, which is what I call the Feywild in my games.
Fey Cloak of Displacement
Wondrous Item, rare (requires attunement)
While you wear this cloak, it projects an illusion that makes you appear to be standing in a place near your actual location, causing any creature to have disadvantage on attack rolls against you. If you take damage, the property ceases to function until the start of your next turn. This property is suppressed while you are incapacitated, restrained, or otherwise unable to move.
While attuned to this cloak, you are blinded. If you wear this cloak with the hood up, you can see fey creatures. If you are in the Feywild, you can see everything there normally. Any non-fey creatures in the Feywild are invisible to you.
Astute readers may notice this 5E D&D magic item is largely identical to the cloak of displacement with the very notable exception of the second paragraph. This is because I used this as a plot device and it worked like a charm!
The party set out to find a missing elven friend of theirs. Unbeknownst to the green adventurers who’d only recently arrived in town to begin their journey the elf was taken by some unsavory Unseelie and brought to the Dreaming World. A satchel of mystical herbs given to the party’s paladin altered his vision so he could perceive a glittering trail of light presumably leading to the missing friend.
When their quest brought them to the fringes of the Dreaming World a trio of animated cloaks began to harry their progress. (They were simply harpies with a visual change.) The group managed to defeat one of them and drive the other two away, quickly losing sight of them since the dazzling white cloaks essentially disappeared in the bright sunlight sky.
On a whim I decided to make the cloak a magic item. We’d played two or three sessions without anyone discovering any magic items and I thought this made a good opportunity. I rolled some dice to randomly determine what type of cloak it would be and wound up with the cloak of displacement — a rare item. Since they were only 2nd or 3rd level at the time I added a twist to give this powerful item a drawback.
Let me tell you this cloak became a major part of the story almost immediately! The paladin character attuned to it and we had tremendous fun playing around with his vision. Since they were already at the fringes of the Dreaming World the paladin became a sort of mystical guide to the rest of the group.
I was most impressed with how all the players went all in with the strangeness. They became very immersed and due to Memory Loss described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide not a single character remembered why they’d come to the Dreaming World or even that they were from the Waking World in the first place!
The campaign didn’t last too long but we had an absolute blast together. The group’s consensus to commit to some wild times in the Dreaming World made it one of the most memorable D&D experiences we shared together. Not too shabby for a spur of the moment idea to add an unusual quality to a magic item, right?
If you’re interested in adding the fey clock of displacement to your collection of 5E D&D magic items it’s part of the D&D Beyond homebrew collection and you’ll find it right here.
*Featured images — In Island in the Storm an imprisoned ghost pleads with the heroes to possess one of them in a bid to escape her island exile along with 54 other dynamic encounters ready to drop into your games with Out of the Box: Encounters for Fifth Edition. Check it out here. [Art by Kim Van Deun]
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