Level Up: Advanced 5E, the project I’ve been working on for a year, is now live on Kickstarter! (Funded in 18 minutes!) Go back it immediately!

Let me tell you about my contributions to each of the 3(?!) core books.

The Monstrous Menagerie

The Monstrous Menagerie is closest to my heart. I’m the lead writer and designer on this one. In this book, I’ve worked over every stat block in core D&D (except the dozen Wizards IP monsters: mind flayers, gith, displacer beasts, and so on). This is a straight up upgrade of the Monster Manual. There’s really no reason not to get the Monstrous Menagerie.

As I mentioned, I’m the guy writing the D&D 5E conversion of Roll for Combat’s Battlezoo Bestiary, a monster book in your choice of Pathfinder 2 or D&D 5E. It has four days left of its Kickstarter as of today and it’s already collected more than $200k.

I want to talk about what I’m doing on the book, and share a sample monster, the butcher booth.

The butcher booth is basically a large mimic – but it’s the Sweeney Todd of mimics. It infiltrates market squares and poses as a booth or building. It mimics the sounds and smells of an inviting business, such as the sharpening of barber razors or maybe the smell of delicious meat pies. When people come in to engage in commerce, the demon barbershop seizes them in its jaws and flies away. Truly you’re never safe in the world of D&D, even during a shopping session!

Here’s the original Pathfinder 2 monster. Click to expand

I took the Pathfinder monster and converted it to 5E. Despite PF2 and 5e’s shared lineage, there are quite a few conversion considerations.

The #1 issue is space. Pathfinder 2 is terse and keyword-based, while 5E uses natural language. For instance, it’s easy to give the Pathfinder butcher booth the ability to swallow creatures whole:

Swallow Whole (1 action) (attack) Huge, 3d6+8 bludgeoning, Rupture 23

The Pathfinder GM knows that Swallow Whole is a keyword they can look up to find the half-page of Swallow Whole rules. The rest of the entry fills in details. For instance “Huge” means that the creature can swallow creatures of up to Huge size. “Rupture 23” means that if the monster takes 23 or more piercing or slashing damage, the engulfed creature cuts itself free. And so on. Many of the rules are offloaded onto core book, so the actual swallow attack is about 10 words long in the monster entry.

Compare that to the rules for swallowing a creature in 5E. Here’s the 5E behir’s Swallow:

Swallow. The behir makes one bite attack against a Medium or smaller target it is grappling. If the attack hits, the target is also swallowed, and the grapple ends. While swallowed, the target is blinded and restrained, it has total cover against attacks and other effects outside the behir, and it takes 21 (6d6) acid damage at the start of each of the behir’s turns. A behir can have only one creature swallowed at a time.

If the behir takes 30 damage or more on a single turn from the swallowed creature, the behir must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution saving throw at the end of that turn or regurgitate the creature, which falls prone in a space within 10 feet of the behir. If the behir dies, a swallowed creature is no longer restrained by it and can escape from the corpse by using 15 feet of movement, exiting prone.

This approach means less page flipping but more stat-block real estate used. The behir Swallow attack is more than 150 words compared to PF2 Swallow Whole’s 10 words! A problem since the PF2 Butcher Booth stat block is already quite large. We don’t want the 5E version to be unmanageable in size.

For the 5e butcher booth, I actually removed the swallow action. I thought that I could accomplish a lot of the same thing with a bite attack that grapples and restrains and pulls the target inside the booth. At that point, the butcher booth can keep on chomping every turn, and can even fly away with hapless victims inside. I wrote a special bite action that can affect every creature inside its space, so it gets more dangerous as it imprisons more creatures.

This and similar considerations mean that, as I convert PF2 monsters, I’m making what you could consider a loose translation of the PF2 creature. I’m not in the business of re-implementing Pathfinder inside D&D. Whenever I can, I replace Pathfinderesque rules with something that works well in D&D, which is usually something simpler.

Another example: Pathfinder’s action economy is based on a character or monster having three actions. Every monster ability is listed with an action cost, and the GM can mix and match in different ways each turn. On the other hand, 5E monster action economy (excluding legendary monsters and low-level mooks) is based around the Multiattack action. A D&D monster may have many possible actions, but Multiattack usually specifies the way in which the monster can do the most things. Multiattack is sort of like a monster’s AI: it’s what a monster should probably be doing in combat if the DM doesn’t have a big spell or a rechargeable breath weapon on deck.

When I’m converting from the flexible PF2 action economy to the streamlined 5E one, I get to write the Multiattack, which means I codify the most fun collection of actions. That often means that I mix and match straight-damage attacks with fun, thematic powers that shake up the battle in an interesting way. The Butcher Booth’s multiattack is among the most complex multiattack I’ve written.

Multiattack. The butcher booth can use its Frightful Presence. It then attacks each creature in its space with its jaws, or attacks once with its jaws and uses Create Husk.

This strikes me as a fun attack routine. After a dragon-like Frightful Presence, it can bite everyone in its space (which could be everyone in the adventuring party if they all came in to browse for potions or whatever) or it can make a single bite – maybe pulling an external target inside for later digestion – and raise a previous victim as a zombie. Zombies pouring out of the general store should create some nice havoc in the marketplace, as well as being a rather heavy-handed criticism of capitalism.

The last thing I want to talk about is math. How do you convert a Pathfinder 2 AC of 30, or HP of 270, or a damage expression of 3d10+14, to D&D 5E?

Pathfinder is more mathematically rigorous than 5e and easier to math out. It provides monster creation guidelines that are more accurate than the 5e ones – in fact, without something like 5e’s bounded accuracy, you may break your Pathfinder monster if you venture too far afield from the guidelines. So all I need to do is take a look at the story being told by a Pathfinder monster’s numeric stats and tell the same story in 5e.

For instance: The Pathfinder butcher booth has a somewhat low AC and high HP for a level 12 PF monster. So to come up with 5e stats, I want to fire up my 5e Monster Manual on a Business Card and come up with somewhat low AC and high HP for a CR 12 5E monster. (I landed on AC 15 and HP 217 respectively.)

Here’s the final 5e Butcher Booth. Click to expand

If you want, say 100+ more 5e monsters like this, plus lots more stuff, go back the Kickstarter.

I want to show you the biggest, toughest monster in the Advanced 5E Monstrous Menagerie: the tarrasque.

The original 5E (O5E) tarrasque is – maybe not a pushover – but vulnerable against fairly low-level parties, especially compared to the tarrasque of earlier editions. For instance, since it has no regeneration and no ranged attack, it can be soloed by a level 1 aarakocra cleric with Sacred Flame. Silly exploits aside, I just don’t think it has a chance of standing up to an optimized level 20 party… and if the tarrasque can’t, no one can.

Enter the Monstrous Menagerie tarrasque.

I’m hoping this is the definitive 5e tarrasque.

The MoMe tarrasque is elite, which is a mythic-like class of monster in the MoMe which is as hard to defeat as two monsters of its Challenge Rating – in other words, as tough as two standard O5e tarrasques. According to my much more ambitious encounter calculations (which are also in the Monstrous Menagerie), this is just at the edge of what a level 20 party can accomplish. If you can trivially beat this tarrasque at lower level, I’d like to hear about it!

This tarrasque is designed to be a two-stage fight – where the second stage is optional.

Stage one is fairly similar to fighting the original tarrasque. It’s a bit tougher than the original – for instance, it has a recharge 5-6 Godzilla-like breath weapon that can drop many characters in one hit (though that’s not usually a problem at level 20), and it has an ability that allows it to knock flying creatures in a 300-foot radius out of the sky, including that pesky level 1 aarakocra cleric.

Once you’ve dealt around 600 points of damage – around the same as the O5E tarrasque’s hit points – the tarrasque has had enough. It turns around and retreats. You’ve saved the city and won the day!

Here’s where you can choose to make things harder on yourself. If you try to finish off the tarrasque while it’s wounded, you enter Stage 2 of the battle. And remember, you brought this on yourself.

In stage 2:
-It has another 600 hit points.
-It regenerates 50 points a round.
-That breath weapon that the tarrasque could use instead of its regular attacks, if it rolled a 5-6? It can now do every turn, along with its other attacks.
-It can only be killed by the use of a wish spell while it’s at 0 hit points.

In other words, defeating a tarrasque is still within the realm of possibility for, say, a well-equipped group of 16th level characters. Killing the beast is very much a stretch goal.

Speaking of stretch goals: You can get the Monstrous Menagerie via the A5e Kickstarter! Sign up for it now.

The Battlezoo Bestiary is a big D&D Kickstarter that’s going on RIGHT NOW: it’s at $130,000+ as I write this. For $39, you can get a big hardcover of new monsters, in either PF2 or 5e format. And that’s where I come in.

I’m working on the 5e versions of the monsters along with star editor William Fischer. Naturally the Battlezoo monsters will be fully business-card-ified, with meaningful and calibrated CRs, and incorporating the lessons that William and I have learned from working on the Monstrous Menagerie together. The Monstrous Menagerie plus the Battlezoo Bestiary will make a nice set: a leveled-up book of standard monsters plus a book of original, out-there monsters to surprise and delight.

There’s some amazing monsters in here! I can’t wait for you to unleash them on your unsuspecting players.

I haven’t been posting much here, but I’ve been writing D&D every day – and wishing I could share it with you. Soon, you will be able to get ALL the “Paul Writes DND” content you could possibly want.

This is the Kickstarter for enworld publishing’s upcoming 5e reboot, Level Up: Advanced 5e – their biggest project to date. I’ve written and contributed to a ton of pieces of the core book! The treasure tables! The backgrounds! Spellcasting! Rebalanced spells! Rare spells! The rogue class! Stuff to spend money on once you’re high level! New and improved encounter guidelines! We’re really proud of how this project came out: it adds lots of neat things that 5e has been needing.

AND… that’s my name on the cover of the Monstrous Menagerie.

The MoMe’s going to be HUGE – more than 500 pages. A big team of designers worked on the Monstrous Menagerie, including Anthony Alipio, J R Zambrano, Jocelyn Gray, Josh Gentry, Mike Myler, Morrigan Robbins, Peter Coffey, Peter N Martin, Russ Morrissey, Sarah Breyfogle, Sarah Madsen, Shane Stacks, Will Fischer, Will Gawned, and Yvonne Hsiao, along with 80 pages of dragon wrangling by Cassandra Macdonald and Andrew Engelbrite, and spectacular work by editor Will Fischer.

This is the monster book I’ve been wanting to write. I think it’s going to be the best monster book ever.

The MoMe has 95% of the monsters in the Monster Manual (minus some, like the mind flayer, which are WOTC IP) and then adds 250 more monsters, variants, and templates – enough for a second manual. I’ve carefully rebalanced every monster’s math, and I’ve created new, highly playtested encounter guidelines that provide challenges at high level. I’ve created dozens of “elite” monsters – improved legendaries that can, I believe, provide a solo challenge to high-level parties. (They said it couldn’t be done! I think it can! We’ll see when you get your hands on the book!)

And there’s so much adventure fuel in here. You can flip open the book to any entry and generate everything you need for a full encounter – including monster motivations, names, treasure, and future adventure hooks, all with a few dice rolls, without looking anything up.

Here’s an example entry, the mimic:

Sign up to be notified when the kickstarter launches!

I haven’t posted for a while, but rest assured I have been busy on D&D stuff that I think you’ll like.

I’m a lead developer on enworld’s upcoming Level Up RPG, which is a crunchy version of 5e written with the benefit of 7 years with the system, written by a huge cast of talented designers.

and, what’s really been keeping me busy, I’m the lead writer on Level Up’s bestiary, the Monstrous Menagerie.

The core game book and the bestiary are launching next year, and right now I’m knee deep in monsters.

What will the bestiary look like? Imagine a fully-compatible reboot of the Monster Manual with the math fixed a la monster manual on a business card; with added tactical options for monsters; with hundreds of new variant monsters, including a lot more high-level opponents; with an expanded NPC section; and with lots of encounter prompts built into each monster – combat tactics, example monster groups and treasure for parties of different levels, name lists, tables of random behaviors and environments; and new encounter-construction guidelines that are easier to use and provide a more consistent challenge than the official ones. I’m getting my complete wishlist of what I want in a bestiary. And it’ll be released under the SRD, so you’ll be able to play with it and expand it however you want.

A couple of example monsters have been posted over at enworld, including this ancient green dragon.

I’m proud of how it’s coming out and I can’t wait to finish writing it so I can get my hands on a copy and start using it!

With all that monster construction taking up every second of free time, I’m delayed on some new toys that I’ve been meaning to get you. RSN I plan to get you folks the following:

-Within days or weeks: Version 1 of the long-promised Blog of Holding improved treasure tables! (I’m also doing the treasure tables for Level Up, so you can expect equally mathematically rigorous treasure tables in the Level Up core book next year.)

-Within weeks: another distributor of the Dungeon Generator poster! With Inktale gone, I’m looking for another service with high enough print quality to do justice to all those tiny little details.

And finally – I haven’t looked into how to get old flash games working. If someone figures it out, let me know and I’ll post the instructions so we can continue to play Dungeon Robber.

You know that MyHeritage service that creepily animates your photo of your great grandma using AI?

It will happily animate D&D paintings too. Here’s Alias from Clyde Caldwell’s great Curse of the Azure Bonds cover. Have you ever wondered what she would look like if she were looking slightly to the left?

Sure, deepfake technology is a menace will will further devalue truth, empower liars and charlatans, and open the door to unconscionable harassment and invasions of privacy. Let’s use it for its one noble use, eerily animating Dragon Magazine and D&D novel covers, and then delete all the source code. Drop any other AI D&D videos in the comments!

EDIT: How about this suuuper-creepy version of Dragon #136 by Ken Widing.

She looks like she’s just realizing she’s inside a Dragon Magazine cover. Watch her mental journey as she looks for a way out, which she finds in the last terrifying split-second of the video when she notices you. (Warning: everyone who has watched this video all the way through has disappeared 2 weeks later)

(Looking through old Dragon Magazine covers, I’m realizing for the first time that they are 50% ladies with teased hair and 50% gentlemen who are skeletons. God I hope I can deepfake one of the skeletons)

EDIT EDIT: How about everyone’s favorite vampire, Strahd von Zarovich by Ben Oliver.

The deepfake animation gives Strahd a creepy, artificial semblance of life that works insanely well for Strahd. If they ever do a Ravenloft movie, Strahd should be completely deepfaked.*

*except they will have deleted the source code by then

I have a new side hustle: I’m one of the lead designers on Level Up, a new 5e-compatible tabletop RPG being developed by the folks at enworld. My guess is they must have seen my article about ewers in D&D and thought, “We want the ewer guy.”

Some of my stuff is up on enworld if you want to read it. I posted a chart-heavy article about damage by character class. You can also download the first levelup playtest packet: I wrote the backgrounds section.

Level Up is the game’s development code name; we haven’t decided the final game’s name yet. My vote is “Ewers and Dragons.”

I’m writing a new 5e-compatible treasure generator and releasing it under the Open Game License. That means that I won’t be able to include the magic items which aren’t included in the open-content System Resource Document (SRD).

How much of a problem is this?

Of the nearly 400 magic items in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, nearly all are in SRD. There are fewer than 30 non-SRD magic items. Let’s examine each one. I’ll assign each item a simple rating: WON’T MISS IT, WILL MISS IT, or WILL MISS IT A LOT. For the items that I’ll miss a lot, I’ll consider OGL-compatible alternatives.

Alchemy jug: The alchemy jug creates liquids.

You may look at the list of liquids the alchemy jug can create and wonder, why mayonnaise? There’s a charming story about that.

I like the alchemy jug well enough. My problem with it is it doesn’t go far enough. Each day it dispenses one of 10 liquids, in quantities ranging from 12 gallons (salt water) to 1/2 ounce (poison). But it’s a once-a-day item: if you used it to get a gallon of honey, or a dose of the surprisingly useless basic poison (DC 10 check to avoid 1d4 damage), you can’t use it get 2 gallons of mayonnaise until tomorrow. Compare that to the decanter of endless water, also an uncommon item, which can produce truly prodigious quantities of water, allowing players to defeat weighing puzzles and drown dungeons and allowing DMs to explain how colonies of monsters survive in the dungeon. The decanter of endless water is like carrying the sea in your back pocket; the alchemy jug is like carrying around a large jar. With reduced power comes reduced possibilities for creativity and hilarity. It would be more inspiring if all of the quantities were multiplied by, say, 10. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Cap of water breathing and mariner’s armor: I’m going to do these two similar aquatic items together. The cap of water breathing (uncommon) lets you breathe underwater. The mariner’s armor (uncommon) gives you a swim speed equal to your walking speed. Compare these to the ring of swimming (also uncommon, and in the SRD) which gives you a swim speed of 40, and the cloak of the manta ray (also uncommon, and in the SRD) which lets you breathe underwater AND gives you a swim speed.

Apart from the possible benefit of using a different item slot, the cap is strictly worse than the cloak of the manta ray. The mariner’s armor is not too different from the ring of swimming, but I’d rather have the ring, because it doesn’t lock me into otherwise ordinary armor.

Mariner’s armor also floats you towards the surface when you hit 0 hp, which is unique and somewhat useful. That raises this item’s value a bit. Still, if this armor didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t invent it. Rating: WILL NOT MISS EITHER

Cloak of invisibility. The cloak of invisibility has the exact same power and rarity as the ring of invisibility. It’s impossible to miss one while the other is in the game.

Instead of having two functionally-identical items in the DMG, I’d prefer it if every magic item had a few different variations listed: maybe a cursed version, a few that are different objects, a few with limitations or bonus powers. This would hugely increase the number of magic items without adding a lot more design and balance work. For example, what if the listing for the Ring of Invisibility looked like this:

Ring of invisibility
Ring, legendary

While wearing this ring, you can turn invisible as an action. Anything you are wearing or carrying is invisible with you. You remain invisible until the ring is removed, until you attack or cast a spell, or until you use a bonus action to become visible again.

Variations (roll 1d10)
1-5: normal
6: curse: though it’s not immediately apparent, the wearer is visible to undead
7: variant: cloak
8: variant: cap
9: inconvenient variant: eyeless black mask. The wearer is blind while invisible
10: bonus ability: while invisible, the wearer can see invisible creatures and objects as if they were visible

That’s the kind of thing I’m doing for every magic item in the Inspiration app. This makes a super-similar item like the Cloak of Invisibility unnecessary, as well as, I hope, doling out more wonder to jaded players. That said, it’s too big a project for my two-page random magic item replacement. For now, we can just cut the Cloak of Invisibility. The frequency of the Ring can increase slightly to cover for it. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Driftglobe. I think I don’t fully understand the driftglobe. What is it for? On the surface it seems like a nice, flavorful alternative to the Light cantrip: a little ball that hovers near you and sheds light on command. However, that’s not what it actually does! It doesn’t float near you at all: it follows 60 feet behind you. That’s weird because the Light spell has a radius of 40 feet, so the driftglobe doesn’t actually illuminate you most of the time.

The driftglobe can also cast Daylight once a day, which sheds bright light for 60 feet and dim light for another 60, which would actually let you peer forward in dim light, which is nice I guess.

What is the driftglobe for? Is it strictly for looking for pursuers? Or for setting up a decoy for an ambush? I’m giving it a provisional grade of WILL NOT MISS until someone explains what it’s meant to be.

Efreeti chain. +3 AC! Fire damage immunity! Walk on lava!

Fire immunity is nice. It’s easy to get resistance to anything, but hard to get immunity to a dragon breath damage type. Except poison. It’s a wonder there are any green dragons left, poor dears.

This is a pretty solid legendary item, though not the most showy. Its main problem is that it’s attached to chain mail, a weak type of armor. +3 chain is functionally equivalent to +1 plate armor. Still, it’s not bad. Rating: WILL MISS

Elixir of health. Elixir of Health is the Lesser Restoration spell in a bottle: it cures poison, diseases, and the blinded, deafened, and paralyzed conditions. Which is useful, I guess… after all, some parties don’t have clerics. But it’s a rare item. Compare it to Keoghtom’s Ointment (called Restorative Ointment in the SRD: character names are intellectual property, maybe Ed Greenwood will write a novel about Keoghtom someday), an Uncommon item, which cures poison and disease, PLUS 2d8+2 hit points, AND comes in 1d4+1 doses. I’d rather have that. All you get from the elixir of health is the blindness, deafness, and paralysis cures: in 5e these are generally short-term effects, sometimes “repeat the saving throw at the end of each of your turn” effects. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Gloves of thievery. All this is is a garment that gives a +5 bonus to a skill. I could come up with these all day long: Cloak of survival. Pointy hat of arcana. Mayor’s sash of diplomacy.

But despite their simplicity, I think the gloves make story space for themselves. They’re the best magic item for pure thieves. I assume every npc master thief probably has a pair of gloves of thievery – do you think they steal them from each other as a rite of passage? – and as a DM I’ve equipped them on a few NPCs. Rating: WILL MISS

Instrument of the bards: The bardic instruments are interesting: they’re not the “+1 to spell attacks” typical to the big spellcaster implements. Instead, each instrument grants seven daily spells.

Storywise, a magical instrument seems like a must-have for a bard, and beyond these instruments, there’s not too much available. Every bard can’t be playing pipes of the sewers. Without these items, there’s no bardic capstone item. Rating: WILL MISS A LOT

Potion of fire breath. This is a great little low-level potion. It gives you a nicely balanced attack: 4d6 or save for half, usable 3 times – and it’s a vivid image: take a swig and then breathe fire, like a carney or like Xena in the credits of her show. It also fills a need. There are not a lot of consumables that let a non-spellcaster do big damage.

Fire is clearly the best element to breathe, but considering how monotonously often this potion comes up in treasure, I wouldn’t mind a little more variety. Exhaling a blast of cold or poison would certainly make sense and be cool. Rating: WILL MISS

Potions of greater healing, superior healing, supreme healing. I was surprised to see these weren’t in the SRD, because they’re very similar to items in the third edition SRD – potion of cure serious wounds, etc – and generally anything in the 3e SRD is in the 5e SRD. But yeah, they have different names. There’s a use for a high-powered potion to slug down in the heat of a hard combat. Rating: WILL MISS A LOT

Potion of invulnerability. This grants resistance against all damage for a minute. If you can control the pace of a battle against a boss, you essentially get double hit points (resistance to all damage). This is a nice item with a powerful, if not very cinematic, effect that rewards resource management – and possibly trivializes one encounter. Would I miss it? As a player, maybe. It’s always fun to breeze through the DM’s setpiece battle. But as a DM: WILL NOT MISS

Potion of longevity. Eternal youth… the dream of every NPC and completely irrelevant to every PC. Not a lot of PCs die of old age… at least onscreen. Although the potion of longevity is fun for worldbuilding, it doesn’t need to come up in treasure. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Potion of vitality. This potion is one of the only ways to remove exhaustion besides bed rest. In a game with plentiful magical and nonmagical healing, that makes it useful. Rating: WILL MISS

Rod of resurrection. The Rod of Resurrection is great because it lets a non-divine party have access to resu – wait, what’s this? Requires attunement by a cleric, druid, or paladin? Well, I guess it saves a diamond worth 1,000 GP. A neat thing about this item is it has a 1 in 20 chance of being destroyed each time it is used to cast Resurrection. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Rod of the pact keeper. I’m going to come out and say it. I hate this item. The rod of the pact keeper is a warlock-only item that’s a beefier version of the wand of the war mage (useable by any spellcaster). Both items add +1, 2, or 3 to spell attack rolls. The rod of the pact keeper ALSO adds its bonus to the warlock’s save DCs. This means, just to pick an example out of the air, that my party’s level 12 warlock with a +2 rod, spell DC 19, can trivially end fights against vaguely level-appropriate beasts like remorhaz, rocs, hydras, etc. with Hold Monster (90% success rate). (Yeah, one of my players did this to me. It was a behir. Rest in peace – you never got your chance to shine.)

Increasing DC is more harmful than increasing spell attack, because most monsters have a dump stat which you can target to lock them down. As a DM, I would not mind if all if all pact keeper rods turned into wands of the war mage. Rating: WILL DEFINITELY NOT MISS

Saddle of the cavalier. In a game with as little mounted combat as D&D, this is a very niche item. But I have a confession. In a SRD-only game, I’d actually miss it! I’ve had several characters with saddles of the cavalier. Sure, it’s not like getting unhorsed happens every day in d&d, but might be a life saver if you’re riding a hippogriff. And it’s a great item to give a dirtbag NPC in a joust. Rating: WILL MISS, BUT MAYBE THAT’S JUST ME

Scroll of protection. In 30 years of playing D&D, I’ve never encountered one of these. I’d love to hear your anecdotes about how they turned the tide of an adventure. Until then, I WILL NOT MISS

Sending stones. This is the item I’d miss most in a SRD-only campaign! Our party had a set of sending stones in the last game I played in as a character, and I liked everything about them. I liked how they enabled reconnaissance and splitting the party. I liked the fiddly details of deciding who got to carry one of the stones and who had to stay in touch by other means. Of all the magic items collected by our high-level party, the Stones got the most screen time. (The Rod of Security probably came next.) Rating: WILL MISS A LOT

Staff of the adder. This is a fun item: it does as much as 4d6 damage, and it has hit points so people can attack it and permanently destroy it. It’s significant enough to be exciting and it requires the player to take a risk. Plus it’s vivid. It says something about you if your main weapon is a snake staff that bites people. That said… it’s much easier to imagine in the hands of an evil NPC than as the main weapon of the typical party cleric. Plus, the SRD also contains the Staff of the Python, for all your sticks-to-snakes needs. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Sword of answering. For whatever reason, I never encountered the Swords of Answering before 5e, although they’ve been around since 1e. I’ve never used one as either a player or a DM. I think their names seem a little hokey and theosaurusy to me, at least in a group. A single sword named Last Quip might be OK, though I’m certain that nothing could redeem the name Replier.

The power of the sword is cool: use a reaction to make a riposte when attacked. It sounds like the type of item which makes everyone remember you have it, which is good: “You take 12 damage.” “I reply with Replier.” Might make up for the hokey name. Rating: I MEAN I WON’T MISS IT BECAUSE I’VE NEVER USED IT BUT IT SEEMS NICE ENOUGH, COULD BE FUN. BUT IF BACKED INTO A CORNER I… I… GUESS I WON’T MISS IT

Sword of vengeance. A cursed +1 sword that makes you attack the person who hit you. This is a tough one, since my criterion for these ratings was “would I miss it”. As a player, I obviously wouldn’t miss a cursed item. As a DM, I like the sword well enough. The curse isn’t debilitating most of the time – it makes the player do what they would probably do anyway most of the time – and there is a listed way to break the curse and end up with a nice magic item. I like that cursed item design.

Also, the sword fills a niche: there has to be a cursed sword in the game. (Is there only one cursed sword in 5e? That’s crazy. There should be more. There’s like 15 in my app.)

My only criticism is that it requires you to make a saving throw whenever you take damage, which might be a lot of saving throws. Rating: WILL MISS

Tentacle rod: this is a super weird item. It acts sort of like a weapon, but it has fixed attack bonus and damage (3 attacks, +9, 1d6) so it’s a great thing to give a wizard or a non-melee cleric, which makes sense for a drow item. It also has a reach of 15, and if all 3 attacks hit, it slows down the target and denies them opportunity attacks and bonus actions – all great for a spellcaster trying to get away from attackers. This is the kind of item that makes me want to… do math.

How often will targets get dazed or racked with pain or whatever from this weapon? Depends on their AC and Constitution. A tough opponent like an adult red dragon (AC 19, Con 25) will be affected 6% of the time – comparable to the chances of a critical hit. A squishy target like an Archmage (AC 15, Con 12) will be affected 30% of the time.

This is a fairly cool and potent weapon, but I fear that it falls in a crack: no one with weapon skill will want to use it (since its damage is fairly low) and people without weapon skill are too fragile to use it much except in emergencies. I’ve not seen it used, and looks like the kind of cool thing that would lie fallow on a character sheet. What’s everyone else’s experience with it?

Rating: a provisional WILL NOT MISS

Tome of the Stilled Tongue. This item is brimming with story hooks – so many that I can’t summarize them all here, except that the book acts like Tom Marvolo Riddle’s diary.

The book’s main power is that, once a day, you can cast any spell as a bonus action. This is a nice breakage of the action economy that seems appropriate for a legendary item. I’m sure that a wizard will be able to find many game-breaking combinations.

It also fills a story place. it’s a sinister book that can be dangled in front of evil-curious player: kind of a junior Book of Vile Darkness.

It’s a cool package, wrapped up in a good story, and tied up with a tongue. Rating: WILL MISS

Weapon of warning and Sentinel Shield. Two more items I want to talk about together.

While the weapon of warning is on your person, you get a bunch of cool benefits like not being surprised. But you don’t get any benefit from actually using the weapon in combat: you could keep this +0 weapon in its sheath and get all its benefits. It might as well be a magic ring or hat. This is an example of what I think of as a “golf club weapon”: it’s something to caddy around for its niche use, not something to actually fight with.

Like the weapon of warning the Sentinel Shield gives you a bonus (to perception checks) not related to its function (shielding). It’s another golf club item: there’s an incentive to have it handy, but none to use it as a shield. It would be better off as a magic magnifying glass or monocle. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

So what will I miss?

Overall, the list of non-SRD items is not that strong: I rated more than half of the items WILL NOT MISS, and there are some items the game is better off without, like the Rod of the Pact Keeper.

The 7 WILL MISS items are things that are kind of neat but their absence doesn’t leave a hole in the game. They are:
efreeti chain
gloves of thievery
potion of fire breath
potion of vitality
saddle of the cavalier
sword of vengeance
tome of the stilled tongue
I’m ready to wave these items a teary-eyed farewell. Nevermore will I breathe fire while not falling out of my magic saddle.

The WILL MISS A LOT items are the big problems. These are the items that, to me, fill an important role in the game. Let’s go over each of these 3 items and see if we can live without them or if we need to come up with some sort of replacement.

instrument of the bards: Every class gets a signature magic implement that helps them do their job: fighter and rogue types get magic weapons, wizards and clerics get wands and staffs. Technically, as a full caster, a bard can use a wand or staff as their implement, but a bard’s implement really should be instrument-shaped. If the high level bard doesn’t have a magic lute, something has gone very wrong.

Are there other SRD items that can do the job? Pipes of the sewers and pipes of haunting, but not every player envisions their bard as a spooky rat-summoner.

With the instruments of the bards gone, we’ll need to add a new magic instrument. I’d really like to do something as simple and generic as possible – something like an instrument +1. But what would that even mean?

Could it be as simple as reflavoring the wand of the war mage as an instrument? +1 to spell attacks? It would be kind of underpowered, since bards get nearly no spells with spell attack rolls – most of their spells rely on saving throws. We could grant a bonus to their save DC, but then we’re in the same trouble we are with the bounded-accuracy-breaking Rod of the Pact Keeper. It could grant a skill bonus, but bards don’t really need a ton of help with skills.

We could also have it grant a few daily spells, but that’s basically what the Instrument of the Bards does. I want to be careful not just to ape a non-SRD item. That doesn’t seem kosher.

What if we work off of a bard class feature, like Bardic Inspiration? It’s a bit unconventional for a magic item to key off a class feature, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t. Let’s have it boost bardic inspiration, and we’ll also have it boost Perform checks. That makes sense: a magic instrument sounds better than a normal instrument.

Instrument +1, +2, +3:
Wondrous item, rarity varies (requires attunement by a bard)

Adds its bonus to ability checks to play the instrument, and to the die total whenever your bardic inspiration die is rolled.

This isn’t overwhelmingly powerful. Bardic Inspiration feeds into lots of subclass features, but is a limited resource. The instrument +1 is weaker than a sword +1, but I’d rather err on the side of too weak rather than break the game.

sending stones: Sending stones are nice because they remove many of the logistical issues associated with splitting the party, and allow a new tactical style of play. The spell equivalent, Sending, is a 3rd level spell and so can’t really facilitate conversations. The weaker version, Whisper, has a range of 120 feet.

Are there any other SRD magic items that can do the job? Crystal ball of telepathy, but that’s a Legendary item. Oddly, the Figurine of Wondrous Power (silver raven) kind of fits the bill. It’s Uncommon, and it allows you to use the Animal Messenger spell. Not as convenient as the Sending Stone, which is essentially a cellphone, but still fun.

It would be easy to make up paired items that communicate with each other as sending stones do. A pair of Tom Riddle-like journals: whatever you write in one appears in the other. Paired mirrors, each reflecting the images in view of the other. Paired swords: two people wielding them can communicate with each other telepathically. I could add one of these, but I think I’m going to try to make do with what’s already in the SRD. In my version of the magic item table, I’m going to make the Silver Raven figurine somewhat more common to cover for Sending Stones’ absence.

Potions of greater, etc. healing: Do we need more-powerful healing potions? I think we do. Just giving out oodles of healing potions at high level doesn’t have the same impact. If you’re really hurt during a fight at high level, you can’t spend four turns drinking healing potion after healing potion.

I could just make up new high-level potions that have similar names – Potion of Stupendous Healing, heals 7d4+7 damage! – but that’s such an obvious gloss for the Potion of Superior Healing that it feels like a cheat. Instead, I’m going to take a look at other magic items and spells.

The best SRD magic-item equivalent for a Greater Healing potion is the Restorative Ointment: as an action, you cure 2d8+2 hit points (similar to a potion of greater healing) plus you cure poison and disease. We can increase the frequency of Restorative Ointment on the magic item table to cover the lost potions. Since the ointment comes in lots of 1d4+1 (3.5) doses, we can replace every 3 or 4 appearances of Potion of Greater Healing with a single appearance of the Restorative Ointment.

That leaves us without a replacement for the potions of Superior and Supreme healing, which heal 28 and 45 hit points respectively. I think I’ll have to make up an item to replace these. One item should be enough to cover both.

I’ll take a look at high-level SRD spells. After all, a lot of potions are just spells in a bottle (mind reading, flying, speed). Are there other healing spells I can distill into liquid form?

Two spells spring to mind:
Heal. Heals 70 hit points. This spell also ends blindness, deafness, and any diseases affecting the target.
Regeneration. Heals 4d8 + 15 (33) hit points. For one hour, the target regains 1 hit point at the start of each of its turns (10 hit points each minute). And you regrow toes.

Each spell has a major problem.
-The Regeneration spell is a ton of bookkeeping, both out of combat (how many minutes has it been now?) and in combat (did I remember to heal my one hit point this turn?)
-The Heal spell is about 50% more effective than the Potion of Supreme Healing. Plus, there’s its name. What do you call the potion? Potion of Heal? “For 50 GP you can buy the Potion of Healing, or for 5000 gold you can buy the Potion of Heal.” Not confusing at all.

Despite its disadvantages, I’m drawn to the sheer simplicity of Heal. No bookkeeping, and no dice rolls. You just get 70 hit points. That’s a lot of hit points – enough to fully heal an 8th-level fighter. If we cut that in half, we’ll be right between the Superior and Supreme potions, and right on target. And we’ve got to do something about that name. What if we add “true” to it? That’s what D&D does when it wants to make a more powerful version of a spell (True Resurrection, True Polymorph).

Potion of True Healing
Potion, rare

When you drink this potion, you regain 35 hit points and are cured of blindness, deafness, and any disease affecting you.

conclusion

OK, so I think we’ll be able to play D&D without missing the non-SRD magic items too much. We’ll tweak our magic item list a bit (boost the frequency of Restorative Ointment and the Silver Raven figurine), and create two new magic items (instrument +1/+2+/+3 and Potion of True Healing). With those gaps filled (communication, bardic instruments, high-level healing) there’s nothing left that I’ll really miss.

I’ve been talking about building a D&D 5e random treasure generator on one page (sort of a companion to 5e Monster Manual on one page): a better, more granular version of the DMG treasure tables that assign coins, gems, and so on.

If you read my blog, though, you know that there’s one thing I love above all else, and that’s uncontrolled scope creep. As I’m working, I’m starting to feel that I’m leaving the job half-done. Random monetary treasure is well and good, but what about random magic items?

The DMG has 6 pages of tables to roll on to figure out what magic item you find. On the whole, these charts are pretty good. They’re not perfect – I’d adjust the frequency of many items, especially pesky common items like potions of giant strength and dust of dryness – but they’re usable, unlike the monetary charts. At this point in 5e, I bet a lot of you have given up on the treasure tables, but you might still be using the magic item tables.

Is it worthwhile to build a replacement for the magic item tables too?

I think it is. And there are three big reasons to do so: support for multiple game styles, rebalancing, and collective ownership.

Reason Number 1: Support for multiple game styles

In the lead-up to 5e, there was a lot of talk about how it would be the most customizable and modular of all editions. Want to play a grim-n-gritty game or a wuxia game? There would be various “knobs and sliders” (I think that was the analogy of the day) to give you the game you want. I’m almost positive that there were going to be sliders for low- or high- magic and treasure.

Those never materialized in the final game (unless I missed some page in the DMG?). We ended up with a fairly opaque treasure system. It’s not easy to tell how to adjust the magic-ness of your game on the fly – or even to tell how low- or high-magic 5e is by default.

So let’s figure that out now. With the DMG and Xanathar’s charts about expected treasure hoard rates, we can math all this out to determine the chance of any item falling into the hands of a typical adventuring party. Then you can decide whether you want a higher or lower magic setting.

A D&D party which does the by-the-book number of encounters, over 20 levels, will find about one permanent and four expendable magic items per level. Here’s some of what they get:

–10 potions of healing, and about 10 total of the other healing potions (greater healing, etc). About one potion per level to share among the party.

–About one spell scroll per spell level. Personally, this doesn’t feel super generous. Assuming that about half of spells are on the wizard spell list, a wizard is learning a new spell from a scroll maybe once every 4 character levels. It’s a bit disappointing to me because I love the idea of the knowledge-seeking wizard character who hunts down scrolls.

–4 magic weapons. On average, each character gets one magic weapon for their whole career.

–Very few AC-increasing items. Up until around level 17, the whole party finds about one AC-boosting item, such as a +1 shield or a ring of protection. At legendary tier, they maybe find a second one. The D&D team really put the brakes on runaway AC expansion – so much so that, while higher-CR monsters get more accurate, PCs don’t really get much harder to hit.

I’m curious about what you think. Does the D&D magic default seem right to you, or would you prefer more or less magic than this? What I learned from this exercise is: relative to 5e D&D expectations, I’m a high-magic DM! I probably give out twice as many permanent magic items as I would if I were guided just by the encounter frequency defaults and treasure tables.

Knowing my own inclinations tend towards high magic, I want to make sure to preserve the standard D&D default treasure payout for the people who like that style. However, I also want to include rules for running a higher or lower magic campaign.

So that’s one reason to build my own magic treasure generator: to build the sliders and knobs we never got.

Reason number 2: rebalancing.

Some things, like a relative scarcity of magic weapons, can be marked down to different playing styles: some things strike me as just plain wrong. I will make some adjustments to both the scarcity and the power level of certain items. For example:

The math validated my hunch that there are way too many giant strength potions given out. The average party, over 20 levels, gets 7 potions of giant strength. They may be useful for buffing the fighter in a big fight, but I’ve never found them that iconic or imagination-grabbing. I’d trade in a bunch of these for healing potions, please!

The average party gets 2 potions of climbing. I’m not sure that I’ve ever used any.

-The party has 60% chance at Universal Solvent, 15% chance at Sovereign Glue. What? If anything, these proportions should be reversed. Sovereign Glue on its own is a fun invitation to hijinks. Universal Solvent on its own is just nothing.

-The party gets a total of three pieces of magic ammunition (+1 arrows, etc). This one broke me. I tweeted about it and wrote a huge blog post which is maybe too in-the-weeds to post, even for me. The short version is this: a +1 magic arrow is a nearly insignificant resource. The fact that the whole party gets only one over 20 levels is, to me, insane. Insignificance plus hyper-rarity is a bizarre combination. In order to have a place in D&D, magic arrows either need to be a) much more common, or b) much more interesting. In my Inspiration app, I’ve got dozens of interesting magic ammunition variants: in my magic item table replacement, I’ll settle for making them a bit more common.

Sometimes I don’t just disagree with how common an item is; I disagree with what level characters it’s for.

For instance, the flame tongue sword is Rare. It does 2d6 (average 7) extra fire damage on every hit. That’s very powerful! It does more damage than the Very Rare Frost Brand.

The vicious weapon, like the Flame Tongue, is Rare. It does 7 extra damage on a natural 20. It’s about 1/20th as powerful as the Flame Tongue, but has the same rarity. It’s also significantly weaker than a +1 weapon (which has an Uncommon rarity).

I’ll be moving these and other items up and down the random tables to provide better balance. When you get one of your rare opportunities to earn a magic item, I don’t want it to be a dud or a game-breaker.

Reason number 3: collective ownership

The DMG random tables are not in the 5e SRD. In other words, they’re not open content usable by third-party publishers. 95% of the 5e magic items ARE in the SRD; the random tables are not.

This is important for a few reasons. For one, it means that you can’t legally make various helper apps (like my Inspiration app) that use the official tables to quickly roll up treasure. You can secretly use the official tables and hope you get away with it, but that’s not really honoring the terms of the Open Game License. So any third-party publication or software that randomly assigns treasure needs to come up with their own method for doing so.

Here’s another reason why the license issue is important. Lately, WOTC has made some shameful corporate decisions – from the way they treat and pay their freelancers of color, to the tepid disclaimer they added to past publications with racist tropes.

Now I expect that WOTC can do better in the future. But I also want to have options in my back pocket – specifically the option to play D&D without cracking open a WOTC book. 

So once I create my own random treasure-and-magic items generator, I’ll make it available under the OGL so everyone can use it for whatever they want it for.

the blogofholding treasure generator

So what am I signing myself up for? I’ve already promised to come up with a new, improved, one-page monetary treasure generator. I’m almost done with that – I just need to run a few more simulations to make sure it provides the results I expect. And it turned out, fitting it on one page is easy. I need a bigger challenge.

Here’s what I’m promising now: A complete 5e treasure generation system for wealth and magic items, replacing the 10 or so pages of charts in the DMG. It will have the following features:
-The monetary system will be overhauled, as I’ve detailed before.
-There will be rules for high and low-wealth campaigns and high and low-magic campaigns.
-It will rebalance magic items by rarity and power.
-It will scale by party size. The current system works well for four- and five-character parties, but can’t gracefully handle huge-party or solo play.
-It will be released under the Open Game License.
-All of it – the charts, the customization rules, the tables for assigning 300+ magic items (but not the OGL license) – will fit on a two page spread. You can roll treasure and assign magic items without any page flipping. This seems like a crazy goal, but I’ve been playing around with it, and I think it’s possible. Hope you like small print!

We’ll see what else I end up adding before it’s done. I have a few ideas for extra features that I’d like to jam in, space permitting.