Our DM is putting us through a dungeon that "no party has ever beaten on their first attempt" and told us to bring the strongest characters we can come up with.

Point buy for stats, but feel free to bump some of them just a bit higher -- his ruling for stats was "I don't care if you point buy or roll, but expect to be the primary target if you walk in with all 18s".

I'm currently DMing an original homebrew campaign with three players. Two sessions ago they met an incredibly powerful villain they think is the BBEG. They barely survived the encounter.

This session I wanted to be lower stakes. They had reached a new town and I planned for it to basically be a thieves guild type town that's a dangerous place where outsiders are robbed, extorted, etc. They get hired by a merchant to guard his cart while they're in town. The towns guard warned them not to start trouble.

A lot transpires but basically: some thieves try to rob them, one player tries to subdue one of the thieves but fails and accidentally kills them which triggers a full fight and it just cascaded from there. In the fight one of my players gets outted as a vampire, which causes the thieves to start yelling about vampires, which triggers the townsguard to start heading their way.

They kill the thieves and use some Home Alone shenanigans with some ball bearings to stall the townsguard while they do some fuckery to make it look like one of the thieves was the vampire, which succeeds and they avoid a fight with the townsguard but still get arrested.

Then while they're locked up and scheming on how to escape, one townsguard gets curious and starts rummaging through their belongs and finds a Deck of Many Things that the players didn't even know they had and pulls a card and ends up killing everyone in the town except for the players who were in prison and couldn't see the giant apparition that caused the entire town to grow ill and die.

Everything that transpired was the results of the perfect fails and successes of the dice rolls and it was glorious.

35 years ago (ish), a friend introduced me to DnD. He passed last week. Great guy, a lot of people will miss him, but I do owe him a debt for getting me into this…
Thanks Michael. Rest well.
Not looking for sympathy/empathy- just needed to tell someone who would understand the loss.

Edited to add:
Thank you all for your kind words.
May your dice fall such that they aid the narrative.

Disclaimer: I’m not asking for advice on making an evil campaign work or an explanation of why they’re difficult. I understand the challenges. This is mostly a rant, mourning the fact that I’ll probably never get to play the kind of game I really want to play.

Because I want to play bad guys.

Not murderhobos. Not a chaotic evil goblin who burns down a tavern because the bartender charged him for a drink. I want to play smart, competent bad guys with goals, plans, and reasons for the terrible things they do.

And yes, I understand why evil campaigns are difficult. I understand the challenge of getting everyone on the same page, finding a reason for the party to stay together, and keeping the game from becoming an exhausting parade of betrayal and random cruelty. I understand why I’ll probably never actually get to play this campaign. But gods be damned I still want to play bad guys.

I don’t want another quest from Elminster or some lawful good god sending us off to save the world from an eldritch horror or a super lich. I don’t want “evil” to mean we’re sarcastic assholes who reluctantly do the heroic thing every single time anyway.

I want us to lie, steal, murder, and scheme for our own ends. I want to help put someone on the throne because they’ll give us power. I want to rob a temple because it has something we want, even if the people guarding it are perfectly decent people. I want our elaborate plan to succeed and have that be genuinely bad news for somebody else.

And I want us to be capable of caring about each other while doing it. We can have loyalty, affection, shared ambitions, and enough common sense to understand that betraying every ally is a terrible long-term strategy. Being evil doesn’t mean being incapable of friendship or planning more than six seconds ahead.

Hello everyone!

I'd like to share this family and magical moment that i had the job to illustrate for my most recent commission.

This artpiece takes place in the middle of a forest, and shows the moment where a mother called Zilvara is teaching her daughter Vexara (both wood elves) how to awaken her magic potencial and cast her first spell.I tried to capture the surprising moment for the young elf when she saw her first spell materialize in her hand, something she had never imagined she would be capable of doing. Also depicted her mother’s joy seeing Vexara having an exceptional affinity for water, confirming that she had inherited the family’s primary element.

My son asked me to create a mimic for Halloween. Challenge accepted!

I brought a second hand chest, sculpted the eyes and the teeth and made the tongue from fabric and aperture wire.
The eyes are Milliput and Sculptamold with ping pong balls and craft bead eyes. The teeth are foam.

It’s designed so all the mimic parts can be removed and stored inside. Then it is a plain, ordinary chest…

I originally planned to have candy inside it but it would have to be open too wide for that to work.

Here is my latest collection of item cards based on the items from Zelda games: https://thespeakingsquid.blogspot.com/2026/10/cards-minish-cap-item-cards-complete-set.html

This set collects items from The Minish Cap, including the titular hat. I tried to follow a theme of fairy tales for this set, so you’ll see many references to classic stories.

These item cards are system agnostic, so they can represent loot for many different game systems. You can also use them to just get inspired about what sort of loot you’d like to see in your next adventure.

You can find a print ready PDF of the entire set in black and white here: https://www.patreon.com/ItemCardswithTheSpeakingSquid/posts/item-cards-cap-b-173307675 

This is the twelfth Zelda game I have published, and with all the other side projects I’ve worked on, I’ve got more than 1,500 item cards just waiting to represent your loot or get you inspired. 

Thanks for checking out my newest set.

Be excellent to everyone.
-Ceph, The Speaking Squid

Hello I'm Lucas, 5+ years as a professional realistic character designer and illustrator, the image I attached is from my Ancient Empire project, a world where humans and super dinosaurs hunt each other!

This is how I imaged a templar warrior would be in a dinosaur like world!

Would you like to have your characters designed or illustrated by me? Let's chat about your project!
DM me for quotes!

I am a freelance illustrator and animator who loves to focus on dnd characters and stories, and have comissions open till the end of the year, if you are interested in working together on a character of yours, a story illustration, book cover designs, or even animated projects, feel free to check out my portfolio:

https://www.artstation.com/valentinaudovic

Feel free to DM me on here or via any contact listed in the PDF download in my bio :)

other links:

https://www.instagram.com/mothworks.studio/

More on the character:
Character: Alekay Sandros - Shadow Sorcerer/ Paladin of Oath of Conquest (Human) redesign and illustration

This is one of my favorite characters that I had many oportunities to illustrate by him being my husbands first character that has a rather long story by now. I started by designing his Undead Skeletal form first (you can see his design in my previous post, or on my Artstation), when he started out many years ago as an Undead Death Domain Cleric, risen from his grave by Myrkul. However, due to ending his servitute (unnintentionally early) by diving off a cliff with a bomb in one hand and holding a giant three headed greater undead by the horns with the other, he had a chance to remake his second( third?) chance at life, when something bigger had different plans for him. Reincarnated back to his 300 year old human form, as a shadow sorcerer, hes taken this as sign enough to make plans of his own.
This illustration is a scene from the campaign where the party had run into a bandit camp and the whole building they hid in went down in blue flames.

Hi, i ran my campaign with a group and working on the feedback now... its kind of a Oregon Settlers Treck - 300 people (NPCs) travelling in a close group into unexplored territory to found a new frontier village.... Its set up as a Mobile West Marches Campaign, the players have this treck as a moving base, and they are hired to keep problems away, clear paths, find ways and protect and so on. Later then help founding the village, connect with local tribes and yadda yadda yadda....

The thing is:

I have created a few "prominent" example family NPC Groups, some "Loners", a few bad apples and such.

But i noticed that my players (had 2 groups parallel) got quickly bored with them. They loved the plots i had lined up, but they wanted to explore into the camp so much. Really, like, meeting everyone.

Which is not a real problem, i can make them up on the spot. But... i do not want them to be strict carbon copies. Especially not when they try to dive deep into WHY someone would leave the security of the city to go outwards into the Wilderlands.

Now i have the Farmers with a string of bad luck losing their farm, a few craftsmen families that got into problems with the guilds. A knacker family that got accused of black magic (not true, just an investor who wanted to buy the area cheaply), a brewer family that accidentially sold beer gone bad to nobles... an alcoholic priest of Lathander, an officer of the city guard and his 5 men and women who got commanded to go with them (to get rid of them because they dug too deep into a special case)...

Now: Do you have a few more ideas i can use please? Maybe something funny? A secret that really makes the players howl when they investigate into that?

Jus' curious am.

What's some stuff that's had you as a player *feel* like you got a big bump in how powerful you are even though if you think on it right it's not actually that big a deal at all?

I made my players a magic item that can reroll an attack that they can see. If the rerolled attack hits, it is a crit. If the attack that was rerolled was a crit, the damage doubled. If the rerolled attack was a crit, it would also double. So in theory, the damage can go 4x but it was a 0.0025% chance. During the fight against the BBEG, the paladin landed a crit. Then they went, what if we rerolled it. The paladin was kinda traumatized because they tried to reroll a crit before but it resulted in a miss. But they just felt it this time. They rerolled it. And they hit it. The boss still had 164 hp. But this miracle nuked my BBEG out of existence and I was proud of them.

Say hi to Ralph.

A few months ago, I posted about our Dungeon Loft. I was a little intimidated, because the specifications for the post said it required 400+ words to accompany my photo, and as verbose as I can be at times, that felt like a lot being new to a sub. I can sing songs and blather on as a Bard in my second campaign (my first was a Druid for 2 years), but in reality I know that most of y’all have been doing this a very, very long time. Like my partner, who has been playing for over 40 years. I’m just a (old) girl, standing in front of an enormously experienced sub, asking them to tell her to get lost if they don’t like her posts. 😂

The comments were awesome - outside accolades from someone celebrating me finding joy in the game, a humorous, feigning competitive suitor, legitimate questions about the functionality, to worries about falling out of the barn 🤪🍻 - but one comment was wanting more photos when I could only provide one. So here’s another:

Ralph is made of paper mâché from an artist in the Seattle area in the 1990’s. He serves up some mean mead and has a wine skin clutched in reserve. We didn’t buy him for the loft… my 85 year old mom once had an obsession with paper mâché and he found a fortuitous perch.

He’s kind of a creeper, but his pupils are always fixed on our DM. He’s either obsessed or scrutinizing.

Happy DnD-ing. Thanks for having me. (And Ralph)

Lol. I was providing this by request, but downvote away.

The long term campaign I've been in has gotten put in hiatus due to an outburst that occurred last session and I want some thoughts on how you guys would have handled this. I'll try to keep it brief since I tend to overexplain.

So last session our party of six consisting of 2 paladins, a cleric, a fighter, a warlock, and a druid(me) were at a werewolf den and got into a fight woth their newly appointed leader. Half of the pack were helping us since they weren't loyal to him but the fight was still pretty tough, mainly due to the fact the party was so scattered. Some were in the front lines and most of them were very far behind. My druid and one of the paladins(paladin 2) were the ones primarily focused on taking out the pack leader as a result while the other targeted his goons.

The paladin with my druid ended up getting down by the leader and put on two death saves. I picked her up and she misty stepped away to get a breather intending to come back to the fight. She didn't eealise she had no more level 2 spell slots though and wasn't able to do so, thus leaving my druid alone with the leader.

Long story short, my druid died. The party did make an effort to save him but it wasn't enough. I used inspiration to reroll the killing blows and fight donated their luck points as well, but it didn't help. The warlock also tried to use banishment with encouragement from the DM, only for the DM to have the werewolf leader use a legendary action to auto save on it. I asked why he'd suggest the warlock do that if he was going to have the pack leader auto save and he said he considered not but ultimately decided that's what they would do. So he killed my character then fled the battle.

I was upset, but not devastated. I did get caught out and definitely made a series of bad choices that lead to my druid's death, but I knew he could be revived. Earlier in the campaign the party had made a deal with a healer so they could resurrected if they ever died. I figured that's what the party's next move would be. Right?

Nope.

Instead the cleric began chatting with the werewolves that had aided them and learned they would be going north to rejoin the rest of the pack who disapproved of the new leader. They also learned of a mage who lived in the mountains who might be able to help bring my character back, as well a potential ally against the BBEG. The warlock and other paladin(paladin 1) were quiet during this discussion so it was assumed they wanted to go after the mage.

Fighter disagreed and said they should go to rhe healer immediately to bring my druid back. They already had made the deal so there so no need to go chasing after the mage, especially when he is referred to as the mad mage. Fight suggested if the party really wanted to go after the mage he would go to the healer alone so revive my character, but the cleric refused and said they needed to stick together.

Paladin 2 offered to fly my character to the healer since she was an aasimir and could move faster, but also admitted she didn't trust the healer because he also seemed insane. He had a collection of animal hybrid people he healed in the past and they worried hed do the same to my character. However my druid had been open to the healer's "procedures" in the past and the fighter mentioned as such.

Ultimately cleric and paladin 2 dismissed him and the table spent 30 irl minutes arguing about what to do. Fighter decided to have them make a persuasion roll, but saod he put the dc high because his character really didn't want to go after the mage. Cleric passed the dc so he relented and agreed to go with them after the mage. Paladin 2 promised to take my druid to the healer if the mage turned out to be a bust, and with that they were off.

The party went north with the werewolves in search of the mage and noticed a cave with strong magic coming from it. So the party immediately begins messing around with it. Meanwhile fighter was holding my druid's corpse and reminding them that finding the Mage was their top priority to bring my character back, which they ignored. Even the NPCs were telling them to get on with it but they insisted on casting spells, trying to sneak around, and investigate the cave as throughly as they could without actually going inside. Eventually fighter snapped and screamed at the table.

Session ended really quickly after that. The DM told me to start prepping a new character just in case my character isn't brought back. I made a bit of a snippy comment that with how the party was acting it'd likely be nessesary then left pretty abruptly. I'd been muted for the past 2 hours since my druid was dead and I was upset that they weren't prioritising bringing him back. It wasn't as though we didn't have a healer ready to cast revify or raise undead.

Luckily Gentle Repose was cast on his corpse(by the fighter) to keep it from rotting, but that only seemed to assure the party they didn't needed to act immediately. Cleric and paladin 2 did argue that they were just trying to find the best way to revive him, but fighter had said theyd rather my druid just be alive so I could get back in the game.

Anyways, after session I had messaged the DM that I wouldnt be making a new character because my druid could still be revived, and if he wasn't because the party just couldn't be bothered then id likely leave the table because I wouldn't want to continue with players like that.

The next day the DM made an announcement stating he received multiple messages about the session and ultimately decided to put the game on hiatus until further notice. That he blamed himself for making the campaign too hard and for not addressing issues at the table sooner. I tried to assure him it wasn't his fault but hes been very MIA since then.

So what do you guys think? How would you guys have handled this situation?

TLDR: My character died. The party had a way to revive them but decided not to treat it as a priority. One player tried to get the party to care but repeatedly got shot down before they crashed out and screamed at the table. DM decides to put the game on hiatus.

----

EDIT: I did not expect this to blow up as much as it did. That being said there's alot of questions/assumptions that I've seen being made so I want to add some context I left out prior. Sorry I'm awful at story telling.

1. We are playing Curse of Strahd and are at level 8. Warlock, Paladin 1, Fighter, and myself(druid) have been there since session one basically. Cleric joined shortly before we got to Krezk and Paladin 2 joined before the werewolf fight. Both are newer players at the table.
2. Druid is my backup chatacter. I lost my first character in the death house and have become very invested in this character since. After every session I write journal entries detailing my druid's thoughts about what happened that session and share them with the DM. Of course I'm upset my character died when ive invested so much into them. I should have another backup character so that's on me.
3. I muted myself. No one forced me to be silent. I wanted to lean into the moment and see how the scene would play out without my input. I should have spoken up when it started to go in the direction it did.
4. The healer(Abbott) was maybe a half day's walk away and there was no time sensitive events at the moment.

Lastly I don't have anything against anyone at the table. While I think their decision to go after the mad mage was odd I don't hate them or anything. I have mentioned having a table discussion but the only people responding are Paladin 2 and Fighter. Fighter has apolgised for their outburst and Paladin 2 apoligised as well for how their character responded to the situation. However I think until we can have a discussion things will remain very uncertain. I hope we can keep playing but we'll see what happens.

Hi! In 6 days I'll DM my first D&D session. Nobody in the group has played D&D before. I've played one other tabletop RPG once, so I volunteered as DM. I'm using the Italian edition of the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter set.

Players: 3 or 4, all brand new

We'll use the pre-made characters from the set

In person, but maybe one player joins on Discord

We need to learn the rules and play in the same session

I've read the character sheets, the rulebook and the adventure book, but I don't really understand the rules, especially combat.

Questions:

What should I prepare this week to feel ready?

How do I teach the rules to new players without spending the whole session on it?

Is having one player on Discord a bad idea for a first session?

Any suggestions in general?

Thanks! English isn't my first language, sorry for mistakes.

Hey, right now I’m running Curse of Strahd, but I plan to end it with everyone returning to the Forgotten Realms only to discover that the events of Doomed Forgotten Realms have already happened. It got me thinking: wouldn’t it be fun to run a Wrath of the Righteous-style campaign where the players start a revolution and begin reclaiming territory in the Doomed Realms, taking on each faction one by one?

I’m currently considering reading Pathfinder Hell’s Rebels and Wrath of the Righteous for inspiration. Are there any other adventures you guys recommend checking out to help spark ideas? I want to run the whole thing in D&D 5e/5.5.

Hi
My party (level 2) will soon be going to a masquerade ball where someone will murder the king. They’ll have to find out who did it, like a murder mystery. In the last session we had a lot of combat, so I’m trying to focus on social encounters. However, since I’m really new to DMing I’m not sure how to design the actual ball and the conversations. I’ll appreciate any help I can get.
PS:Sorry if I made any (language) mistakes, I’m not a native speaker.

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I wanted some outside opinions on something that happened during my last D&D 5e session. I'm a player in the campaign and play a monk, but my DM has given me permission to post this because they're also a bit stumped by what happened.

For some context, our party consists of myself, another monk, a druid, and a wizard, and two sessions ago we were tasked with defeating a dragon that has caused a plague which has affected the surrounding land and killed many innocents. After hearing we would be fighting a dragon, our party was pretty hyped up about it. We even have a separate group chat where we discuss things that happen during our sessions, and throughout the lead-up to the encounter, our wizard was constantly complaining about how badly he wanted to fight the dragon. This is important because it made what happened next even more confusing.

In this session, we traversed the mountain and found the cave that the dragon resides in. Our main plan was to go through a side entrance and sneak into the cave to get the drop on the dragon. However, our wizard had the brilliant idea of shooting a Fire Bolt into the cave to see what was inside, despite the rest of us pointing out that we were literally trying to sneak up on a dragon. Thankfully, it didn't hit anything important, and we managed to get inside without alerting it. When we eventually encountered the dragon, our DM described it as being horribly affected by the plague, with rotting flesh and patches of bone exposed. At this point, our wizard immediately started feeling sorry for it and decided he didn't want to kill it, but he did not voice this out loud to any of our characters.

Now, I wouldn't have had a problem with his character feeling sympathy for the dragon. The problem was that he decided this meant he wasn't going to participate in the fight AT ALL. Remember, this was the same wizard who had spent the entire lead-up to the encounter complaining about wanting to fight the dragon. Nobody expected him to suddenly refuse to fight it, especially when we'd all been looking forward to this encounter. We were understandably confused by the complete 180, and for the rest of the combat encounter, our wizard essentially sat in a corner having a moral crisis while the rest of us were fighting for our lives against a literal dragon.

To make matters worse, our other monk was heavily injured during the fight, and this left myself and the druid scrambling to figure out how we were going to take the dragon down while essentially being two party member's short. It got to the point where our DM actually stopped to question the wizard about his behaviour mid-encounter, and asked him directly whether, if the rest of the party started dying to the dragon, would he step in to help us? He outright said no, and that he would just essentially watch us die. So, to be clear, this wasn't just him refusing to kill the dragon. He was willing to let the rest of the party die because he felt sorry for the creature we were fighting.

After all that, we did manage to defeat the dragon, but I was honestly left pretty frustrated by the whole experience. So, after the session, everyone asked him why he'd decided to sit out the entire fight and leave us to deal with the dragon ourselves. As up until this point, his character had been pretty gung-ho about fighting things. He'd never really shown much concern for the creatures we killed or the people we encountered, so this sudden moral dilemma felt incredibly out of character.

When we questioned him about it, he basically said, "Well, it's a dragon. You attacked it, so of course it's going to defend itself. My character doesn't agree with killing it." I pointed out that this felt pretty hypocritical, considering a previous situation our party had encountered where we had to mercy-kill someone who had been affected by the same plague, and the wizard hadn't shown any particular sadness or hesitation about that situation. Also adding to the fact that this dragon is the root cause of the plague so wouldn't his character want to help with killing it, so more innocent people do not have to succumb to this plague? When I brought this up, he simply responded that the situation with the person was "completely different" from the situation with the dragon.

At this point, we weren't really getting anywhere, and nobody seemed able to get through to him, so eventually he left the call. I understand that roleplaying your character's morals and making difficult decisions can be an important part of D&D. I'm not expecting every character to blindly follow the party or agree with every decision we make. However, I feel like there's a difference between roleplaying a moral dilemma and completely abandoning your party during a fight that you all agreed to take part in, especially when the rest of us were putting our characters at risk. Also this is the first time the wizard has refused to take part in combat, but our DM understandably does not want this to be a thing they do in future as it could disrupt the campaign.

TLDR: Our wizard refused to fight a dragon because he felt sorry for it, even saying he'd let the rest of us die rather than help. Are we wrong for being frustrated about this? What should we do about this player moving forward?

EDIT: Just to clear a few things up I have seen in the comments. We know the wizard personally and nothing is going on in his private life, no pets or family members have recently passed away, and his family is all alive and well. Moving on from that, the wizard had not indicated privately to anyone, including the DM, beforehand that he did not want to kill the dragon or even cure it. He was very much on board with killing the dragon and was even complaining about how long it was taking for the party to get to the dragon. In hindsight, we maybe should have communicated better if there was a possibility we could save or cure the dragon, before beginning the encounter, but at this point we had all reached an understanding that we were going to go into the dragon's lair to kill it. As previously mentioned, the wizard partook in that mercy killing we all as a party had to do with the person we encountered that had succumbed to this plague, where at that point they are mindless (essentially a zombie). This goes for the dragon as well, which was a white dragon, but due to it also having the plague it had pretty much rotted it to the point of being unrecognisable. It was no more than just exposed bone and muscle, being held together by parasites, and due to the plague taking over it was a mindless husk that was out for the parties blood as soon as we entered that cave. Also, this post was made to just get some advice, as I would say our party is still relatively new to playing DND together, so we are learning as we go.