Homebrew Mechanic: A Carver's Guide to Monster Parts

As long as I've been playing d&d my players have been wanting to salvage trophies or crafting components from slain foes and with Monsterhunter currently taking the internet by storm these requests have only increased. Knowing the core rules were never going to be of help I decided to take a look into the 3rd party space, and while plenty of people HAD created some very thought out systems they weren't quite what I was looking for, though the results were often too specific (only dealing with monsters in a specific book, useless for anything not listed) or too fiddly (requiring lookig up multiple tables and doing lots of math, potentially taking as long as the fight itself)

What I knew I needed was a fast and lightweight system that my party could opt into whenever they felled a great foe that wouldn't require anyone at the table to keep track of the individual value of various monsterbits. As such, I (quite appropriately) salvaged what I could of all the systems I read and supplemented them with my own ideas to get something I think works quite well:

After combat with a monster, the party may attempt to salvage valuable components from their prey by making a carving roll

When carving, the character in question may choose one of the following options:

These rules may also be applied to looting groups of enemies, rifling through their pockets and packs for salvage and supplies.

Dungeon: The Spine of Ol'Syd

Artsource

Laid low by the sacrifice of a great hero of the past age, the bones of the dragon Sydragul have become a monument to the vibrancy and prosperity that can follow after hopeless and calamity.

Such is the case for the nearby village of Flamesfallow, which presides over a stretch of territory that was turned to an ashbarren by the dragon's breath and has since become very fertile farmland. There's a small cottage industry of Flamesfallow of recounting of the hero's deeds and death, to say nothing of guiding tourists to see the fearsome landmark and offering polished rocks "shards of dragonbone" at a fair price.

Adventure Hooks:

Adventure: Over the River, Through the Woods

Caravans always need guards, and those travelling across the province of Drigvira these days seem heaped with trouble in addition to the usual olive oil and apricot wine.  Security along the roads through the realm is usually the domain of the Kaelvalon Lancers, a group of veteran mounted soldiers under the auspices of the province’s Marquess, who are charged with dealing with beasts and bandits that might trouble travellers or outlying settlements. The current commander of the lancers is looking to squeeze the caravan heads for kickbacks, and is deliberately having her men slack in their duties, letting the roads become dangerous and leading the caravaneers to seek out their own solutions.

Adventure Hooks:

D&D 5E | Players: Gnoll Character Ideas

Ever since starting to work on my Gnoll Player Race option (thanks again @dailyadventureprompts for the inspiration!), I've wanted to play as one in a campaign (maybe once my other games wrap up). I've come up with a few ideas for that eventuality, which might help you out with some ideas of your own.

And yes, the Rogue just might have a tragic backstory.

Art Source. Gnoll Tavern, by TheBeardlyBen

This is a continuation of my Gnoll post. Hopefully it adds some inspiration for your own characters!

One of the most common ways you preserve pork without refrigeration is keeping it in really salty water. This makes the pork borderline inedible because it’s so salty. What you don’t see in medieval fantasy is people soaking their meat in water for a bit before they cook it.

That’s also a reason to boil your meat though. Like yeah meat tastes better if you sear it first but sometimes you’ve gotta get that salt out.

You can also smoke your meats and make them into jerky basically. It’s not as juicy as pickling them though.

Also medieval peasants had more meat than you’d think because of these preservation methods. You can feed a pig scraps for the whole year and then butcher it at the start of winter and preserve the meat. Because of this they also often had access to lard.

Medieval peasants also didn’t eat chicken very often. That’s a source of eggs. If you’re lucky enough to own a cow it’s also unlikely you’d eat it unless it’s on its way out anyways. That’s a good source of milk. It’s more advantageous to keep a cow or chicken alive than to eat them.

These days chicken is usually the cheapest form of meat available. If someone is eating a chicken in a medieval setting though it’s either because they didn’t need that chicken anymore or because they’re rich enough to have chickens for eating.

If we’re talking mutton, European sheep are more often kept for wool or milk while middle eastern or African sheep are more often kept for eating. Europeans would of course eat sheep sometimes but it’s another one of those cases where it makes more sense to keep the animal alive rather than eating it.

Fat from a fat tailed sheep makes for good cooking fat if your setting is more middle eastern or North African inspired. European settings would prefer butter, lard, or olive oil depending on where exactly they are.

Goats weren’t super popular in Europe during medieval and ancient times. Very common in the Middle East and North Africa though both for milk and for meat.

A cow or ewe must have a calf or lamb every year to produce milk. Half of those offspring will be male, and thus will not produce milk. Ergo they were eaten, because you only need one bull or ram for a much larger number of breeding females.

The limiting factor for livestock keeping in the medieval period was winter fodder--there was enough summer grazing for the spring births in fallow fields that they fertilized with their manure , but not enough hay and grazing to get them through the winter. So the lambs--all the males and some of the females--would be butchered in the fall. A bull calf might be butchered as veal (or "baby beef", depending on timing) its first fall or might be over-wintered and butchered as beef the following fall. A few of the older ewes would be butchered as mutton, replaced with female lambs from the spring births. A female calf would be traded, sold, or kept as a replacement.

Similarly, half of the chicks born would be male, destined for spring/early summer butchering. (Or caponed, castrated, though that's much more difficult with a bird.) Chicken is a lean meat, though, and rather tough in a free-range bird, so it was usually stewed rather than roasted. Capon was a bit of a luxury food due to the difficulty of castrating them. Geese were much more popular due to the fattier meat.

Pork was plentiful due in part to the large size of a sow's litter. Over-winter one sow, and you get eight piglets or so, much more than a cow's single calf or a ewe's one to four lambs. Even if you didn't keep your own sow, buying piglets to raise and fatten was common. Most medieval pigs would forage rather than being fed scraps--hence the ubiquity of swineherd as a humble occupation.

Settlement: Errishaan, where Inspiration Rises with the Tide

Though it boasts no mighty navy or renowned trading port, the harbour town of Errishaan has seen an unexpected surge in prosperity in recent years as it's become something of a hotspot for some of the most brillaint minds in the realm.

Tinkerers and scholars of all kinds have begun flocking to the cliffside settlement in droves, hoping to obtain the attention of its ruler, Countess Milsa Bonharte , who's become a famed patron of the inventive arts over the past decade and a half.

What began as an informal gathering of minds has breathed new life into Errishaan which now boasts numerous workshops, annual innovator's competitions, and a thriving trade in clockworks.

Adventure Hooks:

Settlement: Felstar's Faltering, A village overshadowed.

The wizard Felstar was a mighty mage, with a vast army at his command, pride beyond imagining, and power enough to strike fear into the hearts of all. That was before a questing hero happened by , handed the wizard his ass, and for good measure brought his towering spire crashing down to earth. In the centuries since, the remnants of the wizard's servants and soldiers have built a village for themselves in the ruins of their master's fortress, transforming it from arcane edifice to orcish clanhold

The folk of Faltering tend to keep to themselves, as many have not forgiven them for their forebear's actions under the wizard's command, despite the fact most of those same forebears allied with the hero to oust the mage that had enslaved them.

Still, if you're looking for a haven in the wilderness, or perhaps a chance to scavenge through old Felstar's secrets, there's no better destination.

Adventure Hooks:

The LICHES method of descriptive text

A while back a friend asked me to write up some pointers for how I write descriptive text. You know, for dungeons and such. I gave her the LICHES method, which I'm posting here now. The primary purpose of descriptive text is to clue players in to what they need to pay attention to. When you ask your players, "What do you do?" think of that as less of an open-ended question and more multiple choice. Your descriptive text gives your players the potential answers. (This is, of course, a broad statement. Players will always pull something out of left field.)

Good descriptive text includes any applicable lights, interactables, characters, hazards, egress, and senses—LICHES.

I was catching up on the ghostfire gaming podcast when this method was brought up and I IMMEDIATELY had to go hunting for it. Seriously friends, delightfully succinct and helpful advice here. Including this in my methodology immediately.

And, according to Children of the Nameless, Worldsouls can also be taken in by a person and potentially give them a planeswalker spark.

D&D 5E | DM Tips: Lockpicking

Today's post is a shout-out to another creator who I have followed for a long time - Bob World Builder. In particular, he developed a system to make picking locks a little more exciting than just a simple roll of the d20. It offers rules for different levels of locks and tips on how to ramp up the tension with especially difficult locks. Check it out here: Lockpickery on DriveThruRPG

Cover Art. Lockpickery, from Bob World Builder.

In a nutshell, roll 2d6 per difficulty level of the lock. If any 1's are rolled, your attempt to lockpick fails. There are additional considerations for if you have proficiency with lockpicking tools.

One change that could be made with the system is a way to make your DEX modifier matter. One thought that I've had is to change the dice rolled (Bob's system is to always use d6). This would change the probability of failure. Here's what I have:

Try this system for lockpicking out!

Giving a quick shout-out to a lockpicking system I came across a while ago which I think is pretty neat.

D&D 5E | Feat: Boon of the Rime Wind

Last week, I wrote up a feat inspired by the Charm of the Storm from Dragon of Icespire Peak. In Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, a player could similarly receive a gift of Auril's power. While gaining a level in a potentially new class is a great way story-wise to show a story moment (I myself am in a campaign in which I picked up a level in Warlock for similar reasons), I wanted to design a feat that could get the same message across while leaning more into the frosty side of the Frostmaiden's powers.

Art. Moritte of the Frost, by Eric Deschamps. Magic: the Gathering.

Boon of the Rime Wind

Prerequisite: None

Repeatable: None

You hold within yourself the cold might of ice: a gift of power from a frost giant, a god of winter, or maybe even a silver dragon. You gain the following benefits:

Another Homebrew Feat :)

Great combat advice! It's good to remember that all encounters (combat or otherwise) should have a story purpose to provide meaning to the campaign.

Adventure: The Subtle Art of Dragon Hunting

After a lowland kingdom is ravaged by a dragon looking to expand its territory the party sets out on a quest worthy of the heroes of old... only to discover that the epic songs recounting the deeds of those old heroes chose to leave out just how much hiking would be involved in such an epic undertaking.

Tracing witness accounts and the path of destruction leads our would be dragonslayers to the Bronscall Mountains, a rugged wilderness of deep valleys and icy peaks, but the trail goes cold before they have any clue to where their quarry might be lairing. This is the sort of adventure where the party needs to take their time, and is best brought to life using an exploration system such as the one I've developed here, or hexcrawling if you'd prefer.

The idea is to have the party fully experiance the Bronscall mountains before facing the dragon: living off the land, learning its secrets, discovering resources they might use or potential ambush sites.

Zones of interest:

D&D 5E | DM Tips: One-Shot Characters

Over the last year, I've had many chances to run some one-shots, often with people who have never played a Tabletop RPG before. Having pre-generated characters is good in many instances, but I felt that there could be an easy way for the players to still get a feel for making their characters. So I started to create something.

Then, the Daggerheart playtest came out and we got to see how, in that system, you build your character using a series of cards. I thought this was cool and incorporated some of those ideas into what I was working on.

In the past few weeks, we heard from Wizards that they have been working on something as well, using "tiles." So I wanted to share the current iteration of my system here.

Art. Adventure Awaits, by Billy Christian. Wizards of the Coast.

Latest post on my homebrew blog. While not necessarily homebrew, it's a system I've found to be pretty useful for quickly getting player characters ready for one-shots (with player input on their characters).

Encounter: Tossup on the Tollroad

Setup: The party are travelling either by themselves or as guards for some caravan, making their way along an old road widely known to have fallen into disrepair thanks to the local lord's mismanagement.

What a surprise then when the party approach an old fortified toll house and discover it garrisoned with troops in the lord's livery, who are now expecting them to pay exorbitant fees for the privilege of crossing into the lord's domain.

The toll collectors are beligerant and one or two even appear drunk. Not paying their toll ads days, maybe weeks to the party's journey, and crossing overland will not only be slow going, but dangerous, as monsters have been known to be creeping back into the region from the wilderness (again, due to the lord's mismanagement).

Challenges & Complications:

D&D 5E | Feat: Boon of the Storm Lord

Players often encounter the supernatural during the course of a campaign, whether that is through the interactions with a god, the machinations of a liche, or the shenanigans of a archfey. During these encounters, players might receive a boon or a curse, and Feats have become a favorite way to mechanically introduce these into the game.

In the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign (from the Essentials Kit), a player can receive the Charm of the Storm during one encounter. It's been fun for players at my table, and so I thought about how to transform it into a Feat: rebalancing it so that it could be used each day, while the player has the boon.

Art. Lightning Strike, by Marta Nael. Magic: the Gathering.

Boon of the Storm Lord

Prerequisite: None

Repeatable: None

You hold within yourself the roiling energy of a tempest: a gift of power from a storm giant, a bronze dragon, a djinni, or maybe even a god. You gain the following benefits: