The Pantheon Domain - A 5E Cleric Subclass Homebrew. For The Cleric Whose Faith Is As Fickle As The Gods

Image source This was the first subclass I ever made and I'm stilllll tinkering with the thing - it's, fittingly, stuck in a time loop of rewrites.

Have a great week!

do you have any resources or guides for worldbuilding and reimagining the feywild? not looking for adventure prompts or npcs just your thoughts on setting and how to make the feywild feel dangerous and mystical

Planescape: The Feywild

I won’t lie,  the introduction if the feywild is one of the best additions to the default d&d cosmology in a while, not only from a thematic perspective, but gameplay aswell, as it allows any podunk patch of land to act as a doorway to wild adventure. That said, too often this wonderland is treated as a place where things are just wacky, without real attention paid to the narrative possibilities introducing the feywild into a story can have. 

To that end, I’m going propose a few different aspects of the feywild, different visions of how things could be drawn from different mythologies and storytelling conventions:

The feywild has no geography: like the notes of a song or the lines of a play, the reality of faerie is reinterpreted with every visitation, Coloring itself based on the expectations and emotions of those exploring it. This is why a child can stumble into a mushroom ring and have themselves a whimsical romp full of talking animal friends and life lessons, whereas adults tend to find themselves ensnared by echoes of their deepest desires and why adventurers ALWAYS find something to fight.  If you want to go anywhere in the feywild you don’t need a map, you need a thematic structure that will carry you to your destination: whether that be staying on a yellow brick road through a number of distractions and tribulations, or winning a game of riddles against a talking bird who’ll swear to drop you off at your destination. 

The feywild is a place of stories:  When a peasant family leaves out milk and performs small acts of thanks for the brownie, they are unwittingly inviting the primal energies of the feywild to fill the space they have made for it, creating a creature that had always been there, looking out for them. Likewise, when folk tell of wonderous places just beyond the edge of the map, the feywild becomes those places, taking solidity from repeated tellings of the tale and incorporating different interpretations to give themselves depth. This is not to say that the translation is perfect, as one can’t simply make up a story, tell it to an audience, and expect it to suddenly become true as it takes a powerful and engrained sort of lies, embelishment, or folktales to give shape to the otherworld.  When populating your local fairy-realm or those areas near enough to it, consider what sort of stories people tell about that place, whether it be about monsters that gobble up wayward children or treasure hidden there by bandits long ago. 

The feywild responds to your emotions: When your party takes a rest, ask them how they think their characters are feeling. Consider whether they are frightened or foolheardy, adventurous or avricious, and then sketch out some random encounter to spice in along the way as the realm of whimsy responds to the vibes they’re putting out.   A party that’s feeling hungry may encounter a friendly fey teaparty or a dangerous lure disguised as a snack, a group that’s feeling pressed for time may hear the horn of a savage hunter stalking them, or a parable about stopping to help others can actually speed you along your own path.  In this way, the fairyland is in diolog with the party’s desire to press their narrative forward, and will test or reward them according to its whim. 

The feywild is everywhere: one of the underutilized aspects of having the feywild in our games is that a portal to the “shallower” areas of the otherworld can pop up anywhere overtaken by nature, allowing fey beings and other oddities to cross over in a way that creates all manner of adventure hooks. If I’m building a dungeon in the wilderness, I’m personally fond of having a mounting fey presence the deeper in you get, replacing the normal ruin dwelling hazards with troops of hobgoblins, odd enchantments, and various tricksters. For smaller dungeons, the closed off fey portal can be an adventure hook for later, encouraging them to come back when they need to delve into whimsy, whereas for the larger dungeons,  a non contiguous fey realm connecting multiple points can serve as a combination of fast travel AND bonus stage. Even for non dungeon locations, consider how much fun of an adventure it’d be if someone discovered that their cellar had been replaced with a fairy’s larder, or that the vine-covered lot where neighborhood kids play during the day transforms into a vast battlefield for sprites during the night. 

Web Spinner Conclave: Ranger

Time to become your local neighbourhood, web-swinging hero.

[G Drive Link]

05.11 - Lakeside Visit

Second, do you have any good fantasy RPGs set in a non-european focused or at least not medieval-European world? It can be based off of a real-world culture or something brand new

THEME: Non-Western Fantasy

Hello friend! For this recommendation, I wanted to highlight games made about non-western fantasy by authors who hail from the cultures that inspire the games. For that purpose I really want to shout-out to rpgsea and rpglatam, two community/movements that have made it much easier for creators from Southeast Asian and Latin American cultures to advertise and publish their games. Not all of my recommendations come from these communities, but they’re a great jumping-off point to find more games with unique settings, fresh ideas, and beautiful, beautiful art.

Nahual, by Miguel Angel Espinoza.

Nahual is a tabletop roleplaying game about brjos nahuales, humans of mestizo and indigenous ancestry that have the power to shapeshifter into an animal form. These nahuales hunt angels to make a living, running a changarro - a business - together to sell the products they make from the bodies of the angels they have killed. These are stories about underdogs, struggling to find their place in a Mexican world of fantastical and overwhelming forces.

Miguel Ángel Espinoza is a Mexican layout artist and game designer, and the head of Smoking Mirror Games. His ttrpg Nahual really picked up steam on Kickstarter, unlocking stretch goal after stretch goal. At its core, this game is PbtA game about underdogs going up against celestial parasites. Angel Dust is a potent drug, and angels are used by corporations, politicians, and the Church to lure in worshipers and make money. You play the labourers at the bottom of this pyramid, aching for freedom but trapped inside a concrete jungle. Your biggest asset? The special gifts you’ve inherited from your ancestors, watered down as you’ve lost your cultural memories. 

This game is more urban fantasy than anything else on this list, but if you want to explore a game about reclaiming something that you’ve almost lost, you should definitely check out Nahual.

ARC, by momatoes.

Ready Yourself. For Tonight, we save the world.

The RPG to slay the apocalypse. Capture your imagination with near-inescapable dooms that threaten infinite worlds. Be a hero or be the guide to facilitate a heart-racing story to remember.

ARC enables people wishing to run a game with limited experience. The Doom and its Omens help create tension and manage the story’s pacing. The rules are approachable so you can focus on helping make the best story for the table. Additionally, the last chapter of the full book is filled with tips for building a good experience for you and your friends. 

The creator, Momatoes (aka Bianca Canoza), is from the Philippines, and is the custodian of RPGSEA, as well as a Winner of the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award. Her game, ARC doesn’t have a lot of setting decided for you - instead, you decide elements of the setting yourself. There's even a license for creators who want to publish their own content! The biggest selling point of ARC is the Doom, a terrible event that the Heroes want to prevent at any cost. The GM will set up Omens, which are pieces of the story that advance the Doom - pieces the characters will need to investigate and interact with in order to resolve. Finally, the Doomsday clock is a tool that can be used to keep the sessions tight and focused: every moment on the Doomsday clock has the GM roll 1d6 per unresolved moment - the higher the roll, the closer you tick towards catastrophe! If you want a beginner-friendly game that allows maximum creativity, you should definitely check out ARC.

Arunika, by Anonymocha.

Darkness and gloom threaten to shroud the entirety of this world you call home. Or perhaps, it already had. However, there's hope.

You are a Light Bearer. This beacon of light you hold is the key to reviving the world's gleam and hope, through your own. You are bestowed with the pursuit of rekindling the world, forging bonds with its inhabitants along the path, and freeing it from the murk with what you can offer.

Arunika is a TTRPG of maintaining hope, sharing it with the world, and most importantly, caring for yourself while you're at it.

The rulebook reflects a world's journey towards revival from the characters who escalate it. It is made with the vision of a game that has a non-violent, narrative-first, and feelings-focused system which can be interpreted in many optimistic, creative, whimsical, melancholic, or introspective ways.

Mocha, the creator, is an Indonesian artist with a beautiful and unique art style, visible in the projects they create and contribute to. One person plays the Light Bearer, a character who holds the Light, a beacon that needs to be used to rekindle the world. Other players can play the Companions, friends and old foes that accompany the Light Bearer on their journey. This game can be run with just a GM and one player, with all of the Companions as NPCs. The stats of your character will fill or deplete depending on the events of the game, so Heart will increase when the party has a positive interaction, while Hurt will increase from suffering harm, or decrease when your character is comforted. If you want a game that is easy on the eyes, gives you the basic premise and lets you build your own world, you should check out Arunika. 

Hearts of Wulin, by Lowell Francis and Agatha Cheng.

Hearts of Wulin is a game of wuxia melodrama, Powered by the Apocalypse. Players take the role of skilled martial artists in a world of rival clans, conspiracies, and obligations. The game emulates films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese wuxia TV series like The Smiling Proud Wanderer and Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, and Chinese martial arts novels from the second half of the twentieth century. In these tales, romance is as dangerous as a blade. Everyone has ties to factions, loves they can’t quite express, and secrets which will shake them to their core. As in the source material, stories in Hearts of Wulin are driven by the characters’ duties, romantic desires, and entanglements with other characters.

You get everything you need to play the game in three different styles: Core, Courtly, and Fantastic. The core game is as described above: a game of wuxia melodrama featuring wandering wulin warriors. The courtly style of play sets the game in a world of politics and factional scheming. The fantastic game adds strong elements of the superrnatural to the story. Each style of play has its own playbooks and moves—it's like having three games in one! 

Agatha Cheng is a cultural consultant and a podcast host, on top of being a co-author of this wuxia-inspired game, in a genre she’s loved since childhood. Hearts of Wulin is an homage to melodramatic stories about protagonists, torn between equally treasured relationships. You may be in love with your teacher’s greatest rival, or perhaps your master and your father despise each-other. The PbtA system that Hearts is built on prioritizes emotional conflict and failure that moves the story forward, while slimming down the mechanics to simple 2d6 dice rolls. If what you’re looking for is story beats that rip your heart up and make you feel all of the feelings, you should check out this game.

Gubat Banwa, by makapatag.

Gubat Banwa is a game of rapid kinetic martial arts, violent sorcery, heartrending convictions and bouts of will. Warriors that channel gods face sorcerers that master black arts, martial artists who have unlocked a new form of cultivation clash swords with those that perfect the night alchemies.

Gubat Banwa is a  Southeast Asian fantasy martial arts Role-Playing Game, inspired by the refulgent cultures of Southeast Asia. Raise your spears, KADUNGGANAN, you elite warrior-braves and asura-knights who travel The Sword Isles to prove their conviction and dictate the fate of the world. Revel in larger-than-life war drama like in Asian Dramas, ballistic tactical martial arts grid gameplay in the vein of Lancer or Final Fantasy Tactics, and find glory beyond heaven. Wield the Thunderbolt of Liberation! Rejoice! In the Glory of Combat!

Makapatag, or Waks, is a Filipino creature who loves creating tactical ttrpgs. All of their games have strong Southeast Asian inspiration, but Gubat Banwa is what you’re looking for if you want good old fantasy. Rules-wise, the author credits Lancer, Pathfinder 2e, ICON, Ryuutama, Apocalypse World, and so many more iconic, well-loved games for their inspiration. This game is made to specifically centre Southeast Asian cultures, and the setting is not solely based in a specific historical setting, but is rather inspired by many cultures and stories of these cultures. I strongly recommend you read the Note On Intended Audience on page 4 if you get this book.

And what a book it is. 400 pages, with maps, roll-tables, an extensive dive into the lore and terms created for this book, and pages and pages of gorgeous gorgeous art. Character creation is heavily involved, incorporating the culture you hail from, the ideal you’re fighting for, major life events and debts, as well as different Disciplines, combat arts that each have their own styles, weapons, and techniques. Fighting in this game is not just a matter of survival - it is a science. If you want a game that gives you in-depth characters and hours and hours of material in a world in which every piece of lore has been carefully thought out, I heavily recommend Gubat Banwa.

Mangayaw, by goobernuts.

Mangayaw is an RPG for one facilitator (the Mangaawit) and at least one other player. Players act as Binmanwa, adventurers and survivors in an archipelago of bloodshed and goldlust. This game is inspired by Philippine legend, folklore, culture and history. The game and its setting is still a work-in-progress. Based on and inspired by Cairn, Into the Odd, Mausritter and numerous other games. 

Benj, the creator, is a member of RPGsea, and draws heavily from Philippine folklore and history for this game. This is absolutely for OSR fans, with delay fast combat, class-less and level-less characters, and a ton of equipment and magic items inspired by Philippines folklore.

Whereas many OSR games present the rules with the assumption that the GM knows what they’re doing, Mangayaw contains a page of principles for the Mangaawit, outlining narrative focus, the purpose of danger and treasure, and advice on how to present the characters with choices, NPC motivations, and the benefits of random generation. It also contains principles for the players, and principles of the World, providing guidance for folks who may be unfamiliar with the culture that inspires this setting. There’s suggestions for names, descriptions of unique items, and tables for magic and sorcery. If you love roll tables, you’ll love Mangayaw.

Brave Zenith, by Roll 4 Tarrasque.

Brave Zenith is a post-fantasy tabletop RPG, set in a world inspired by Brazilian culture and long summer nights playing JRPGs on a pirated PS1. With a set of simple interpretative rules, that focus on player creativity and imagination, explore the ruined world of pastpresent, meet colourful (and deadly) creatures, see the sights of the Second City, partake in delicious Monkey Oil and become an adventurer.

Roll 4 Tarrasque is a team of Latinx creators whose efforts won Game of the Year for 2022 at the Indie Groundbreaker Awards with this game. Brave Zenith is a game about fantasy odd-jobs, rather than epic quests - your characters are cleaning up houses, hunting ghosts, stealing from the rich, etc. The people and creatures of the world are unique and enchanting, from the friendly Jelly shopkeeper to the slippery butter construct, to little porcini goblins. 

Characters have 3 stats, gain abilities based off of their occupations. There are three suggested origins to help you determine what your character looks like, but you’re also welcome to create your own! There are typical hallmarks of dungeon delving here, such as loot tables, monsters to fight, and spells to cast. For the GMs, there’s a chapter full of advice on how to prepare for a session, quick NPC generation, and tables to help you write an adventure on the fly. Finally, the rulebook itself is bright, colourful, and fun - perfect for communicating the kinds of games it’s designed to run!

Lutong Banwa by Sinta Posadas (Diwata ng Manila).

We, the Tamawo, we have no concept of hunger, food, or of a nuclear family. We wandered aimlessly for a long time. Then, we met a Giant Grab. She took us in like her own children. Clothed and sheltered us like we were her kind. We call her Mama Kasag. She showed us more about the people that came before us. The ones she calls “Humans”. 

Lutong Banwa is a cooking game, where you set out to adventure and find ingredients from Spirits and recipes from old civilizations. Embark on this anti-canon storygame adventure with its own custom system and play to find out just what sort of zany adventures you can get up to in this weird, wild world. Do whatever you want.

Sin is a Filipino game designer who loves designing games that incorporate magic realism. Lutong Banwa is no different. You play Tamawo, who have bodies that appear similar to humans, but live in an age in which humans are long gone. Humans are strange beings of a past age, with unfamiliar customs, such as cooking. You’ve picked up cooking as something to explore, and thus go out on errands to find new ingredients for Mama Kasag. This game is charming and small, quick to learn and easy to play. It even includes recipes to get you in the cooking mood! If you like cozy games with low stakes and a charming setting, you should absolutely check out this game.

A Thousand Thousand Islands.

This is not a game, but rather, a collection of system-agnostic zines for use in fantasy tabletop games. This collection is designed by a trio of Malaysian designers, and contains places such as Mr-Kr-Gr, a river kingdom ruled by crocodiles, Korvu, a maritime nation of tenant mercenaries, and Ngelalangka, a market inspired by Southeast Asian bazaars. If you have a game system that you’re already comfortable with and you want to explore fantastical places within that system, I heavily encourage you to check out these zines.

My latest Terrible* DnD Campaign idea:

Scaling Hard "Nuzlocke" Mode.

We're gonna take the entire XP mechanic and through it out the fucking window.

Everyone starts at level one, but they make a backup character at the next level. They play that first character at level one until shit gets too hard and they die. No rezzes. Next available opportunity, bring in the backup level two character. Player makes a new backup, at level three.

So on, so forth.

The only way to level up is to die. The core goals/challenges are:

be the lowest level character to make it to the end of the campaign

get to explore a whole lot more classes and characters than you would normally

conversely, deal with the gritty reality of how dangerous this life of adventure is as so many of your party keeps falling

meta-wise, built in scaling system for less skilled players: die a lot? wind up stronger and stronger more quickly to balance it out

something something Ship Of Theseus adventurers guild?

Here is a free pdf of the players handbook

Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything

Here is a free pdf to monsters manual

Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything

Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide

Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters

Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

For all your dnd purposes

GET BOOKT

A guide of books to gift the people in your life and yourself!

For the person who made a 200+ slide powerpoint about Neon Genesis Evangelion for a presentation party… Also for those who attend presentation parties…

The Archive Undying by @emcandon

For all former and current theater kids (affectionate)...

Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston

For the reader who prefers their off-the-wall science fiction tempered with social commentary, or enjoys social commentary in a space opera font…

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the friend with the SHUDDER account…

Piñata: A Novel by Leopoldo Gout

For the burned-out chosen one who’s so, so tired…

The Saint of Bright Doors by @adamantine

For the tumblr mutual that fell down the wuxia cdrama hole…

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the gamer who fondly remembers their confrontation with Rayquaza atop the Sky Pillar…

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

For the “smash first, questions later” friend in your life…

Ebony Gate by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

For a tragic superwholockian in dire need of restorative sapphic fiction…

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the reader who wished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was actually Jonathan Strange/Mr Norrell…

The Last Binding trilogy by @fahye, including: 

● A Marvellous Light

● A Restless Truth

● A Power Unbound

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

Not enough books? We agree. Check out our other GET BOOKT guide.

Variant Classes Pt. 1

With the continued expansion of 5e through new subclasses and races, the ability to create new unique characters continues to grow. Though, in my mind, one of the faults to this is that, every time you make a new subclass or such, it's just 1 more character archetype, which can sometimes feel a little lacking in terms of new possibilities.

Now of course, there's the option to just make a lot of content, which was the style of older editions, but that eventually lead to the issue of content bloat, with there just being too much content for a single person to reasonably deal with.

Though recently in my own homebrewing, I've found what I feel is a pretty good solution for such a thing: Multiplicative, rather than additive content.

This was the idea behind my Prestige Classes document, with each single prestige class being designed to be applicable to a wide number of classes at any time, meaning that with each PrC, each would add a new potential character option for each class it could interact with (or even 1 for each subclass).

So, long rambling on thought processes, Variant Classes. The idea for this is to, by adding one new class, add new character options equal to the number of subclasses a class already had, essentially being a x2.

Variant Classes are new classes that modify an existing class to varying degrees, replacing some or many of their features with new ones, creating a whole new character option. It's sorta like a Tasha optional feature, but the optional feature messes with your entire class.

So above, there are the two Variant Classes of this post: The Archivist and the Eldritch Sage

The Archivist takes inspiration from a 3rd edition class of the same game. They are scholarly mages, though they focus on divine magic rather than arcane. As such, mechanically they are very similar to the wizard (Even having a spellbook equivalent in their 'Prayerbook'), but differing from them is their spell list: rather than the wizard list, they use the Cleric list.

In comparison to the Cleric, the way they interact with spells is a bit different. The Cleric has access to their entire spell list for free, alongside their domain spells. The Archivist however, needs to learn spells, only gaining 3 per level and needing to pay for more. To make up for this is their Domain Studies, in which they initially learn a set of Cleric domain spells of their choice. At later levels however, they can learn additional diving domains, and choose which set of domain spells to prepare from each day. Yet later they even gain the ability to prepare two domains at once.

As such, while a Cleric will often have to focus on a single theme when it comes to their spells, an Archivist is more a multi-tool, able to have a wide number of domains and prepare whichever they might need for a given day.

The Eldritch Sage is a researcher into the otherworldly. They like Wizards use their intellect to fuel their magic, but rather than from direct study of the arcane, their application of magic comes from the study of the extraplanar.

Mechanically, the eldritch Sage is a warlock, with their patron instead representing ehat type of otherworldly entity they focus their research upon. Unlike the regular warlock, they use Int instead of Cha. Most differently is that they use regular Spellcasting rather than the warlocks Pact Magic, making them more of a traditional long rest based caster.

The Eldritch Sage also interacts with Invocations differently. Rather than having a number of invocations at will they instead learn a number of invocations, and can prepare a few of them at the end of a long rest. This means that they will often have more total invocations, but less active invocations.

Woops yeah, lots of text today.

Ah, you may have noticed the Pt.1 at the top of the post! That's because I actually made 4 variant classes, it's just that the other 2 will be posted seperately (very much my own choice, totally not because tumblr didn't like me dropping 20 pages into here). So yeah, I guess look forward to seeing in maybe a few days time the Mentalist and the Mountebank.

Honestly imo they're more my favourite out of the bunch, being the more radical in their changes to their classes. (Or maybe it's bias, since I am in the process of playtesting both of them in campaigns I'm in x) )

Edit: oh hell I forgot to put in the art credits, since they were all part of the images originally, but they'd be on the last page of the second set. My bad

Art credits:

Archivist.

- Clever Distraction from Innistrad: Crimson Vow by Andrew Mar

- Conspiracy Theorist from Strixhaven by Svetlin Velinov

Eldritch Sage.

- Contact Other Plane from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms by Alix Branwyn

- Magus of the Moon MtG from Time Spiral Remastered by Milivoj Ceran

Edit: Part 2 is up, and can be found here

plot feeling a little empty in the middle? here’s some food for thought.

actions have consequences. things that your characters do inevitably can affect other people around them. what might they have done in the past that could come back and serve as an obstacle? or, maybe, what could they do now that could possibly raise the stakes just a little bit more?

subplots! be mindful of the subplots you’re adding - but sometimes it might be a good idea to include one if your plot is feeling a little bit empty. not only can it tie back into the overarching struggle, but it could also serve as a way to explore one of your characters or points further.

character exploration. get to know your characters a little bit better! let your readers find out something new. connecting and understanding the people within your story is important if you want your readers to grow attached to them.

world exploration. similar to the previous point, with the addition of creating a greater sense of familiarity of the circumstances that your story is taking place in. remember that nobody else knows the world of your wip as well as you do - illustrate it even further so everyone else can grasp it even better.

let your characters bond! maybe there’s a lull in the plot. if your characters have the chance to take a breather and get to know the people around them, let them! it might help flesh out or even realistically advance their relationships with each other.