D&D Classes Sources of magic

Wizards: College degree.

Bards: Pretty Privilege

Sorcerers: Results of pretty privilege.

Clerics: ~Jesus is a friend of mine!~

Warlocks: Discord Daddy's Sugar Kitten

Paladins: Weaponized Autism

"No." The King gawked. "No? Why? I am offering you the Hand of my daughter to slay the Dragon that roams the Lands! A man would kill for such an opportunity!" "Because I will not hurt an innocent animal that just follows his migratory pattern. And I am already married."

I don't think fantasy writers play enough with the concept of the different fantasy races having distinct ethnicities. Like imagine a group of mixed peoples, where the dwarves are all roasting each other like dwarves do, and one of them remarks that when he first saw one of the other dwarves in the group, he mistook her for a man. The other dwarves in the group blink in surprise - the closest that dwarves will go to an audible gasp of shock - and she pulls out a knife and tries to stab him.

Once the dwarves have been separated from each other and the situation has calmed, one of the humans asks another dwarf what that incident was about. Naturally a human woman would have been insulted too, but dwarves are so jovial about insulting each other, why was this matter different?

And the dwarf who was asked explains that there are things you can brutally insult another dwarf about, and there are things you simply do not touch. The dwarf-woman in question is from a completely different region of The Great Underground as the others, and her people have different norms about what kind of patterns men and women braid into their beards. The dwarf insulting her wasn't only insulting her appearance, he was being racist.

The human is surprised to learn that dwarves have different peoples, and the dwarf looks at them like at an idiot. Of course they do, they even look completely different from each other. And the human listens as the dwarf lists off various distinguishing clothing details too nuanced for a human to notice, and then how dwarves coming from different corners of the world have different physical traits, according to what kind of conditions their local stone types dictate.

The human spots a connection and goes oh! We have that too, though ours are not about rock types and tunnel air, but the weather aboveground. Humans' facial features vary by how hot, cold, arid or windy their ancestors' homelands were, and our skin tone varies by how much the sun shines in their native region.

The dwarf frowns at the last part, going "I thought you people just paint your skin and dye your hair for fun", and the human admits that yeah, we do that too, but not all the time, and not the whole skin. The dwarf asks, what of that tall woman the colour of dravite, her palms and the soles of her feet were lighter than the rest of her. Does that mean she paints herself dark to be more beautiful?

The human says no, that just happens naturally. Maybe it's because one's palms and feet aren't exposed to the sun as much, so they are paler.

The dwarf nods, still unsure whether this is actually legit or just the human habit of lying for fun, and proceeds to ask about the wild northman of their party. He is as pale as an olm, but the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet are dark. Are they painted, or naturally that way?

No, the human answers. That guy just doesn't bathe.

I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.

I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.

There's a PDF to download in the link

Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.

100% atk and 0% dmg baby goat

ᴋɪʟʟɪɴɢ ᴀɴᴅ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴋɪʟʟɪɴɢ ᴀɴᴅ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ. ᴋɪʟʟɪɴɢ & ᴋɪʟʟɪɴɢ & ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ

The goat a gnome warlord would ride into battle

Wizards are not naturally immortal, in fact creating their own form of immortality is their graduate thesis.

“I have created a perpetual healing spell.”

“A classic. Congratulations.”

“If my soul leaves my body, this spell will keep it around and lucid enough to magic myself back together.”

“Effective. Next?”

“My spell feeds off the life force of microscopic things! When bacteria die near me, it adds to my total. Wiping down the sink with antibacterial cleaner gives me SUCH a buzz; I think I may have to dial it down a bit.”

“…I would be very curious to see your notes about this spell.”

Breaking News: Wizard Grad Student causes major religious schism by casting drain soul on microorganisms, accidentally proving Animism

“I tied my body’s physical shape to my self-image. As long as I feel young, I won’t age.”

“I see it also gave you… ah…”

“Massive dobonhonkeroos?”

“I was trying to find a more diplomatic way to bring it up.”

“An unexpected side effect, but not an unwelcome one.”

“Shall I assume it’s she/her from here on out, then?”

“Oh yes.”

what if vampires are like mosquitoes and only the ladies drink blood

Pretty sure that would mean the fellas drink tree sap or something. Imagine running from a vampire thru the woods and passing her husband who’s biting a tree real hard

Maple syrup vampire husband

Encounter: Maple syrup vampire husband drinking sap in the woods, also trying to lure you to his literally bloodthirsty wife.

The wife has the classic Villain Of The Night aesthetic, all black, flowing cape, everything, and her husband is wearing red flannel, overalls, a beard, and is welding a log-splitting axe

This person gets it! Classic vampire lady and her lumberjack husband!

I regret nothing

steps into a big pot of bubbling oil and sits there like its a hot tub and i snile at you so nicely that you step in after me and youre immediately boiled til theres nothing left

well you see,

the sniler

All of my pocket creatures in one place.

You roll up to the Wizard Battle and your opponent takes out his spellbook but it’s just one of these

I'd leave. This is a sign that my opponent has the most fucked up unethical spells imaginable, and I am not about to be subject to Malchezar's Piercing Prostate Bomb or something

Small fantasy worldbuilding elements you might want to think about:

I’ve done about half of these myself in one WIP or another and a little detail here or there goes a long way in reminding the audience that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

I’ve started playing dnd again and the campaign I’m in has the pitch that we all must be characters from written works. The plot is we got thrown out of our own stories and must find our way back.

I am Hamlet, a warlock who made a pact with his Dad’s ghost (it’s absolutely his Dad’s ghost, he wasn’t tricked at all, ignore the fiend patron type) to get revenge on his Uncle. But this post isn’t about him.

Because our cleric, the one entrusted with keeping the party full of heals, the only person with healing magic, is House MD.

“Wait Iz!” You cry. “House MD is a television show, not written fiction.” You’d be correct. Which is why our cleric House is not from the television show.

He’s from a fan fiction.

It’s as funny as it sounds.

“Inuyasha, you have to seduce Mr. Darcy.” A real thing one of us said last session.

Some of the party highlights are as follows:

-me, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, warlock. Bonds: revenge. Alignment: revenge. Flaws: too much revenge. Magical item: talking skull named Yorick who is definitely a magical therapist sent by Hamlet’s ghost dad, totally legit.

-Beowulf, barbarian, stuck the longest, who uses the arm of Grendel as a weapon.

-House, cleric, who upon casting “toll the dead” makes a siren noise somehow with his mouth. He is deeply upset and put off by this.

-Inuyusha, fighter, who as previously stated, has to seduce Mr. Darcy

Okay so about the Mr. Darcy bit:

The party having learned they are 1. Fictional and 2. There are holes in their stories that they fell through and the universe is losing stability, decide to find the source of the issue. Worms aka bookworms are eating holes in stories leaving portals we can travel though. And so in our pursuit of fixing things, we travel though a portal and find ourselves in the British countryside, being yelled at by a girl who thinks she’s our sister.

The party arrives at the Bennett’s house and it becomes clear to the party that we’re in some sort of courtly romance and since portals open tend to open when the plot is resolved, the gang decides the solution here is one of us has to be the leading lady and therefore must seduce Mr. Darcy (who is clearly the romantic lead with all the talk about him)

The problem? House fails his dice roll for knowing shit about Pride and Prejudice except that it’s a romance. Which means we have no idea which one of us is supposed to seduce Mr. Darcy.

We’re able to rule out some candidates.It can’t be House who is Caroline as he’s “clearly here to be paired off with someone else.” Nor Katniss who is Mary. Beowulf isn’t it (who has been cast as Mr. Wickham and is confusing everyone by suddenly becoming a much more pleasant person to be around). Which leaves Hamlet (Jane) and Inuyasha (Lizzy)

Hamlet has a 20 charisma score. The party desperately hopes it’s Hamlet.

Then we get to the ball, Mr. Bingley walks up to Hamlet and everyone including Inuyasha goes “oh goddamn it.”

So some shenanigans arise and we end up positioning Inuyasha in front of Mr. Darcy, who then bends and snaps (House taught him), impressing the man. But he walks off to talk business with some guards instead of talking to Lizzy and all the sudden we realize something is up.

Now it’s been a long time since I read Pride and Prejudice but it did strike me as odd our DM kept mentioning that people owned guns. It wasn’t too odd, hunting is a thing, but I couldn’t remember this much mention of a military and chalked it up to being a minor detail I forgot. At least I did, until Mr. Darcy opened a jar of flies, followed them to a man who was standing slightly askew and promptly decapitated him.

We were not in Pride and Prejudice it turns out. We were in:

[Image ID: bookcover of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies /End ID]

that reminds me of the guy whose players thought they were playing an 80s cheesy teen summer romance movie

when in reality they were in a slasher film

absolutely PERFECT twist, your DM is a genius.

I ran a murder mystery one-shot entirely based off of "The Murder Of Sonic The Hedgehog" like, plot for plot.

I made all the character sheets, alibis and personalities for all the players.

They were all playing Sonic characters and they did not know until I revealed it at the end.

Absolutely the most fun ever ever had running a dnd session.

Fucked up how humanity discovered electricity and radiation and made machines and learned to make airplanes and cured diseases and our takeaway isnt that "Some Magic Is Real And Here's Why", but that magic is fake this is big boy science and it's totally not magical

Me upon being isekaid to a fantasy world: you say you dont have magic but you conjured up that frog the other day whats with that

Wizard who spent decades mastering his craft, understands how and why it works, and processes it entirely as a regular part of his day to day life: did you just call creature conjuring magic

Works the other way around too in isekais.

that wizard: and you said you don't have magic in your world but there are lights that come on, that do not use candles or flames or emit any heat at all, the moment that you walk into a room? you don't even have to say anything?

me, squirming uncomfortably: for a while there an earlier version ran off of two claps

the wizard: an earlier version of what? the spell? the spell you use to make the lights come on?

wait a minute..... these arent my memories

ughh. why does my head hurt