#Magic & Vallonde

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Nothing too big here, just a couple of random items. Castlevania-inspired whip and a create-your-own figurine of power. 

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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#dungeons & dragons #Dungeons and Dragons #dnd #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #magic items #homebrew equipment #Vallonde

[vallonde-laid-bare]

So, I made this a while back and I guess I never posted it? Well, here you go!

I’ve always liked the idea of allowing very minor spell-like abilities for non-spellcasting classes, and this is the most basic manifestation of that idea. I’ve created a more advanced form of this specifically for divine domains HERE, but this is something that’s supposed to be closer to basic equipment that a lot of people with the skill to make use of them will have, rather than highly coveted and exceedingly rare items which very few will ever have access to. This gives a tangible benefit to having proficiency in a skill, either arcana or religion in this case, and gives a boost to those specific skills while also granting access to a minor cantrip-like attack option that, while weaker than a full cantrip in almost every case, still opens up the potential for new ways to play the game. When creating anything, my goal is always to either reinforce an already existent style of play or to add a new one, and if both can be accomplished at the same time then all the better.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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#dungeons & dragons #Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5e #5th edition #homebrew #magic items #homebrew equipment #Vallonde

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I saw some talk by people wondering if you should keep track of food and torches and other things like that or if you should just rule it all away and I say poppycock! Let your lowbies struggle and let your more experienced players pass on the weak stuff with this non-magical bag of magically useful items.  Indestructible bedroll? Check. Infinite torch? Check. Food and water forever? Checkity-check. L O N G B O I rope? Do you even need to ask? When your players level up from the first tier of adventuring, acquiring things like this and bags of holding are like a right of passage. Let them feel like they’re making progress! Is it better as a player to have everything handwaved or to struggle through it and then get an item that lets your circumvent those problems? The answer is pretty clear to me. As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment

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LET ME tell you why I particularly like the design on this. FIRST, it’s interactive players love to role dice. TWO, its powerful and there’s no one single option that’s going to be the immediate choice, so it promotes proper usage. FINALLY, it promotes a new style of play by allowing a melee combatant to give their allies or themselves a shield of temporary hit points. All in all, this is something I’D want to use, and I always know something is good when I’d be interested in giving it a try. As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts! (Patreon)

#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #homebrew equipment #magic items

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Because I think the arcane archer martial archetype is a cheap copout which fails to do justice to a cool idea, I decided to make a spell which potentially lets every spellcaster get a piece of the pie. Wanna shoot a fireball with a bow? Go for it. Wanna launch a heal at a comrade across the battlefield with a sling? Sounds fun. As a balancing factor to keep this from becoming to most effective way to deliver touch spells, I decided to limit it to only imbuing ammunition to only being able to carry a spell at its base level, so no 6th level cure/inflict wounds CLERICS. I think it’s balanced enough not to break the game while at the same time presenting spellcasters with a fun way to use their spells or even let other people use their spells, so I think it’s a fine addition to the game.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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#dungeons & dragons #Dungeons and Dragons #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #Magic & Vallonde

[vallonde-laid-bare]

I TOLD YOU I HAD AN EVIL CARPET FOR YOU! YOU THOUGHT I WAS LYING BUT LOOK AT IT! (also look at this Aladdin havin ass art. I don’t apologize)  If you’ve ever wanted to spring a surprise on a party that feels like they’ve got all the answers, this is it. They’ll be really excited to get a new flying carpet until they try to make it carry one pound too much and it starts strangling them to death. There is literally no way this won’t provide you grade-A entertainment, I promise.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

(Patreon)

#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #because who *DOESN'T* want an evil carpet? #magic items #homebrew equipment

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We’re getting closer to Halloween but I’m not quite done with themed content just yet. While this itself isn’t too on-theme for halloween, it along with the HAT and CAULDRON I posted recently, forms a “set” of witchy items that can be used together to make any character or NPC just a little more seasonal. I also added a curse, not only because I’m cruel but because it completes the little mini-story told by the other items in the set. The downfall of a powerful witch could make for fun story fodder if you ask me, and if you’re putting off planning your halloween session until the day of then letting your players bring down an insane witch in possession of these items might just be a good, easy scenario to run.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

(Patreon)

#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #Halloween #homebrew #magic items #homebrew equipment #Vallonde

[vallonde-laid-bare]

I know I recently created another shield, but I wanted to make a big boi slab of a shield so I did. If you look closely, you can see that this is classed as a tower shield which is an item that I added to my weapon/armor table in THIS post, so it functions just a little differently from a normal shield (aside from the obvious differences, this being a powerful magic item and all). While making this I noticed that there are literally ZERO artifact shields listed in any of the official 5e source books, so if you need a badass shield for a high level character in your game, maybe give this one a go.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #Vallonde #homebrew #homebrew equipment #magic items

[vallonde-laid-bare]

Today I’ve got yet another witchy item to help you and your players feel the holiday spirit. Combined with the magical HAT I posted a few days ago, this will make your player into the witch they’ve always wanted to play particularly with the Bestow Curse interaction. 

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

(Patreon)

#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment #Halloween

[vallonde-laid-bare]

There isn’t really a whole lot to say about this collection, but I’ll try to provide some insights into my design decisions here just in case anyone is actually interested in my thought process when going into builds with this many options. When creating items (or content in general), I generally try to achieve one of two things: Either enhance a style of play or create a new style of play. In the end, most character options can be boiled down to one of those two approaches. A good example of the first is the cleric’s Life domain. The life domain doesn’t revolutionize the cleric’s playstyle, it makes pre-existing gameplay stronger. A good example of the second is the fighter’s battle-master archetype. The battle-master’s maneuvers present a style of play that cannot be replicated without investing in that archetype. The primary way I attempted to create new ways for players to play with these options was by essentially creating cantrips that use the religion skill instead of attack rolls and tying them to these items instead of to spellcasting classes. In that way, a fighter that is proficient in the religion skill can suddenly gain a magical spell that could potentially impact the entire way their character plays. In my opinion, the more unique, interesting, and flavorful ways there are to play, the better. Concerning enhancing gameplay, lets look once again to the life domain. Each of these options corresponds to a divine domain, either official or one of my own creations, and the living lectionary specifically makes a life domain cleric’s gameplay loop more powerful. In tandem, making sure to widely hit both of these points creates options for all tastes: The focused character that wants to do one thing and do it as well as they can? For sure. Characters that want more varied options to cover as many potential situations as possible? Of course. There are few things quite as satisfying to me as being able to create exactly the character I want in video games or table top games, and so I want to facilitate that as much as possible for people playing in or running my setting.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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#Dungeons and Dragons #5th edition #Vallonde #homebrew #magic items #homebrew equipment

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Bonus post! One of my players was talking about a legacy for one of their characters that died three campaigns ago and this was my way of doing that. 

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#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment

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The days ‘til halloween keep counting down, so how about a witch’s hat to make your character look the part? Syballine may have a few other baubles to share with you in the coming days, so check back in again for more soon! As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

(Patreon)

#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment #Halloween

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My game got cancelled last minute, so I decided to still be productive and throw something together real quick. I’ve been thinking a bit about the vow of poverty from 3rd edition and I wanted to bring it into 5e somehow so this is the quick and dirty solution I came up with. Maybe I could even throw together a monastic tradition that follows the same theme and represents the one mentioned in the item’s description, because I really love doing world-building by marrying lore and mechanics.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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#dungeons & dragons #5th edition #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment

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This is an idea that I proposed a while back and made a couple of pages of options for, but until now it has never been what I would consider a complete idea. With this, however, it’s finally done and ready to add to the guide. Here were my thoughts on the original posts: “So, I’m currently brainstorming some ideas for little quality of life improvements for DMs (Read: Me) and, since I’ve always kind of felt like the magic items in 5e were a bit of an afterthought even though the last couple of editions were literally built around them, I wanted to take a look at doing something about it. The underdeveloped magic item creation systems makes sense for the main setting simply because magic is on the wane there at the moment, but kind of gimps other settings that don’t share that same issue. For that reason, I wanted to build something that would add some flavor and versatility to the system, and this is what I came up with.  My basic idea with this is to 1.) Allow magic items to be more versatile to a DM who is filling out loot tables, and 2.) to allow players to become involved in the process of making and personalizing magic items. Concerning the first point, there are a lot of items that are limited to only shields but not armor, only slashing but not piercing weapons, ect. when they don’t need to be. By adding these scrolls or items created using them to loot, you can effectively expand the loot pool to include more personalized or more varied rewards to encounters. The second point, and more important in my opinion, is getting the players involved in the creation process. This would allow someone to position themselves as the party’s enchanter (a role that doesn’t exist at the moment even though a lot of players love the idea), and would give players something to do once they return to town other than just sell their loot and move on. By spending time looking for specific ritual materials and then fulfilling the requirements of and eventually performing the rituals, players will be much more attached to the items they create. Also, this will allows players to become attached to certain weapons or armors that they can keep and continually upgrade as they go, eventually making something that is truly legendary and is worthy of the legacy of an experienced adventurer.” As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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#Dungeons and Dragons #5th edition #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment #Magic & Vallonde

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While writing the module I’m working on I’ve been toying around with various ideas for different systems that could make the experience more dynamic, and one of those ideas is essentially an MMO-style loot system. Different parties are going to be better/worse depending on the makeup of the party, the number of people playing, and the skill of those players, so it seems like a good idea to give the DM tools to play around with to increase/decrease the power/utility of the fight, and I feel like the party should be able to take advantage of that if they win the fight regardless of if the DM used it against them. Like, just because you’re playing with a bunch of new people that aren’t powergaming shouldn’t necessarily mean there’s less loot, right? By letting the players roll on a boss loot table to generate their own loot, you not only introduce interactivity into the process, but if someone happens to play through the same campaign again then the loot may be different and thus the experience of the campaign slightly different. Over the course of 8 boss battles the amount of loot variation could mean an entirely different campaign progression. Of course, this is just a thought and not necessarily something I’ll definitely be including, but it seems like it at least warrants testing.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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#dungeons & dragons #Dungeons and Dragons #dnd #d&d #5th edition #5e #homebrew #npc #Homebrew Monster #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment

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I always have loved cursed items and I always will, which makes it kinda strange that I’ve put so little effort into making more of them. The Casket of the Condemned was the last one I can even think of. Anyway, here’s a shield that eats people. That’s all, it just eats people and be’s a shield. tbh, does it really need to do more than that?

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#Dungeons and Dragons #D&D #5th edition #5e #homebrew #Vallonde #magic items #homebrew equipment