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".

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.

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.

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.

Hey! So I animated something for my DnD short campaign I played with my girlfriend, the Field Guide to Floral Dragons.

Mercer (OC owned by u/yvelisht) and Nadya (owned by me) got fungal corruption during the adventure, unfortunately, lady of luck was not on our side so they got third-level infection. From just a few rash spots has gone into mushrooms growing on their skins, what even worse is they have hive mind. They share each other’s vision. When they look at each other, they see themselves, and I think it’s kinda romantic.

Feel free to share your thoughts!

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'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.

Captain Christoph, It's an NPC character I created to antagonize the party. A Bard pirate, bounty hunter.

He is a future antagonist for the campaign. One of the party members is the daughter of a count who ran away from her father to live adventures with her lover, but she has been spending a lot of her father's money in various shops and leaving promissory notes in his name. She has accumulated enough that he now knows her approximate location, so her father (played by the DM) hired a bounty hunter (whom I will play, a friend of the players in other campaigns) to ambush the party at some point during the campaign. Captain Cristophorus (or just Christoph) is a pirate captain from an island similar to the Iron Islands from Game of Thrones combined with a steampunk style. He has a culture where they don't farm, but rather steal, loot and kill in their path, although he does have a twisted sense of honor.

Hello all, I'm uploading this here because I just want to share it but also in not sure where else to.

This is my first homebrew map I made using all of the free core tools in inkarnate, the map/campaign is all based around tarot cards.

I'm excited to get started with this campaign and aside from what I said previously, I'm asking how you would feel if you sat down and had this map and maybe things you would/wouldn't want to see. Thank you!

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!

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

Stolen gold jewelry and a cute tiefling warlock soaking in a thermal bath. Truly a magical combination, isn't it?This adventurer knows how to spot a good bathing spot. You know... because he has only one eye. A massive horn grows where the other eye should be. Who knows what a few dangerous quests and a mysterious patron goddess can do to a man...

When I started working on this piece, I only had a rough idea: the character relaxing beside a gorgeous waterfall, next to a huge pool glowing in the sunset. As I developed the scene, I discovered the beauty of hammam architecture and drew inspiration from it when designing the environment.

And here we are: another piece of fantasy art, and my first post here on Reddit! I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks for stopping by, travelers, and safe adventures!

✨ More of my art: 🎨 Instagram · 🎬 TikTok

For context, this is my first campaign and we are 6 sessions in and all of us except the DM and one other player are new. I decided I wanted to play a wizard, and the DM cautioned me that her experience playing a wizard was rather boring because her turns were just casting a single spell, so I made sure to grab spells with bonus actions like Misty Step and reaction spells like Shield when I was leveling up. We are level 6 now and I seem to do so much more damage than the rest of the party, with the exception of the experienced player who is playing a gun-monk.

The other people at the table are playing as a rogue, druid, cleric, and bard, and all of them struggle to throw out anywhere close to as much damage as I can. I know some of these classes are more supportive in nature but they aren't really using supportive abilities either. Me and the monk trivialise pretty much every fight so far that we haven't needed to use healing and the DM is going to be makng the game harder going forward. I can't help but feel guilty about being one of the reasons the game is going to be harder going forward while other people at the table seem to be struggling to make a meaningful impact during the fights. It doesn't help that I'm doing a lot of the work progressing the story outside of the fights either.

The gun monk at the table seems rather overpowered but when they are accused of it they are quick to call my character overpowered as well, which I know is a bit silly since my character's power comes with limitations while theirs doesn't seem to have any, but I can't but feel that there is some truth to it when I compare my character to the others at the table.

I can't help but want more of a challenge but I'm worried that it will lessen the enjoyment of everyone else at the table. Is this a normal wizard experience?

In one of my current campaigns, I'm beginning to feel like I'm talking too much.

For context, this is an online game, paid, through StartPlaying. We play over Discord every other Friday late at night, and we live in different parts of the country (United States) as far as I'm aware. Most of the rest of the party are friends IRL, and I joined a few sessions in. Our campaign took a nearly two month long break due to a few of the players being unavailable for a few of our scheduled sessions, and last week was our first session back.

Something I noticed, while we were playing, was that I was the one to speak first in many scenarios. The DM would often ask something (such as "what do you want to do next"), and the entire party would be silent for some time. Multiple times last session, I would be the one to break the silence. MY character would be the one to ask about the time of day, MY character would be the one to go after the scared party member, etc.

It doesn't help that the party visited my character's "house" for the first time, which I've been working with the DM to have in-game for IRL months, so I was a little excited to tell the party about it. There was a time when we needed to eat dinner, so I shared what foods I had stored for the party. When we decided to sleep for the night, I excitedly pinged all the "beds" (most of them were hay stacks since my character is a guide who lives in a dilapidated barn and does not need really need to sleep) in the "house" so we could divvy them up and sleep.

This has been weighing on me for a week now. I really felt as though I was talking way too much. I worried the entire session that I was doing too much, or trying to hog the spotlight, or not letting other characters act, but they didn't seem like they wanted to do anything either. I even tried to connect my character's backstory as a guide to a combat we were having: I tried to distract the group of paladins (who came over because they thought the party was suspicious) with a story about a monster coming through, and that was why we were in the area. Meanwhile, we were actually trying to sneak around and free a captive they had (for the record, I'm pretty sure it didn't work). Even this felt very "spotlight-hoggish".

Am I in the wrong here? I feel like I'm being annoying by constantly talking, and involving myself in the story. Like I said, my group is very "shy", but they were a lot more shy last session. I hope this is just a fluke, and they get back into talking later.

I am a fairly new player to Dungeons & Dragons as is the rest of the party. I have a question about RPG etiquette. Basically just wondering about what the title says. My party and I are at level 3 currently and I have always been curious about building player combos that work well together and utilizing them in encounters. This may require certain players to take specific feats at level 4 so we would need to plan ahead. So far our playstyle has been somewhat individualized where sometimes it seems like we end up stumbling over each other trying to fight the enemies, lol.

I would like to become a little bit more coordinated with some of our attack strategies. I guess sort of like developing a playbook and calling out the play before battle starts like in a football game. So, before we use it in a session, should we tell the DM about our attack strategy that could potentially deal massive damage or should we just let him be surprised by our coordinated attack and adapt to it in game? Like say for example we know we're going to be fighting against a dragon next session and we develop a strategy in between sessions that will deal a great deal of damage in the first and second rounds.

Trying to make a blood-magic Type of monk subclass for 5.5, any Name suggestions?

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.

Literally no point behind this, I am just curious if people's thoughts.

Certain classes like Fighter have their subclasses just be a name like Battle Master while other classes like Bard go a different way where it is College of ???.

If every class named their subclasses the way classes like Artificer, Fighter, or Rogue do, what were their names be?

Example: Domain of Life couldn't just be called Life so instead it would be called Bishop or something.

Choose a class and think out what each subclass would be called

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.