The Bug Bear! A Curious Kodiak Blundered Into An Alchemist Shop And Guzzled Down The First Flask He Found!

The Bug Bear! A curious Kodiak blundered into an alchemist shop and guzzled down the first flask he found! Now he's the horrendous and accurately named Bug Bear! With insect-like abilities and a mantis aided maul, this ursa is now the weirdest in all the woods!

Thrash's party befriended a small kenku child (who they saved from a nightmare monster). She might think he's some kind of giant talking dog, but chasing sticks is better picking bits of dead squirrel out of your teeth. Sketch by @werelocke.

🎁 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁!⁠ [4/14] This content has been generously donated by @kthomebrew to be shared while The Griffon’s Saddlebag takes a vacation! Please support these creators and their excellent content!⁠ ⁠ Related downloads are available *for free* through the link in my Vacation highlighted story! ⁠ ___⁠ ⁠ KibblesTasty is a super talented game designer whose clever insights and community I admire. His famous Inventor class is what I’d play if asked to play an Artificer. If you’ve playtested any of the subclasses from the Saddlebag on Discord, you’re familiar with the series of feedback questions I ask: those are based on questions Kibbles asks his patrons, and they do a great job of developing the content further.⁠ ⁠ You can get this subclass, plus TONS more, in Kibbles’ Compendium of Legends and Legacies! A massive book of martial might and magical mayhem for D&D 5e - 4 epic new classes, 30+ new subclasses, 30+ feats, and over 240 spells! I’ve got mine preordered, and I can’t wait for it! ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for less than $10 a month!

Dm Tip: Playing the Villain/ Guidelines for “Evil” Campaigns

I’ve never liked the idea of running an evil game, despite how often I’ve had people in my inbox asking how I’d go about it. I’m all about that zero-to-hero heroic fantasy not only because I’m a goodie twoshoes IRL but because the narrative-gameplay premise that d&d is built around falls apart if the party is a bunch of killhappy murder hobos. Not only would I get bored narrating such a game and indulging the sort of players who demands the freedom to kill and torture at will (I’ve had those before and they don’t get invited back to my table), but the whole conceit of a party falls through when the obviously villainous player characters face their first real decision point and attempt to kill eachother because cooperation is a thing that goodguys do.

Then I realized I was going about it all wrong.

The problem was I had started out playing d&d with assholes, those “murder and torture” clowns who wanted to play grand-theft-auto in the worlds I’d created and ignore the story in favour of seeing how much unchallenged chaos they could create. They set my expectations for what an evil campaign was, and I spent the rest of my time developing as a dungeonmaster thinking “ I Don’t want any part of that”

But what would an evil campaign look like for my playgroup of emotionally healthy friends who understand character nuance? What would I need to change about the fundamental conceit of d&d adventures to refocus the game on the badguys while still following a similar enough narrative-gameplay premise to a hero game? How do we make that sort of game relatable? What sort of power/play fantasy can we indulge in without going off the deepend?

TLDR: In an evil campaign your players aren’t playing the villains, they’re the MINIONS, they’re mooks, henchmen, goons, lackeys. They’re the disposable underlings of uncaring overseers who have nothing but ill intent towards them and the world at large.

Where as in a hero game the party is given the freedom to challenge and overthrow corrupt systems, in an evil game the party is suck as part of that corrupt system, forced to bend and compromise and sacrifice in order to survive. The fantasy is one of escaping that corrupt system, of biding your time just long enough to find an opening, find the right leverage, then tossing a molitov behind you on the way out.

Fundamentally it’s the fantasy of escaping a shitty job by bringing the whole company down and punching your asshole boss in the face for good measure.

Below the cut I’m going to get into more nuance about how to build these kinds of narratives, also feel free to check out my evil party tag for campaigns and adventures that fit with the theme.

Keep reading

Lunar Eclipse