!Bangle Of The Arcane AssassinWondrous Item, Rare (requires Attunement By A Spellcaster)___

💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Bangle of the Arcane Assassin
Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement by a spellcaster) ___

Once per turn while wearing this bangle, you can deal an extra 3d6 damage to one creature you hit with a spell attack if you have advantage on the attack roll. The damage is of a type dealt by the spell attack. If you’re a rogue, you can choose for the amount of extra damage you deal to be equal to your Sneak Attack damage instead; you can still only deal Sneak Attack damage once per turn. If a spell would allow you to attack multiple times over the course of its duration, this extra damage can only be dealt on the turn the spell is cast.

In addition, you can ignore the verbal component required for any enchantment or illusion spell you cast while you’re in total darkness and wearing the bangle. ___

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Villain: Ardos, Pillager of the Lost Shore

The pirate walked down the seamless marble stair and held his prize to the light. Just like the city itself, the bauble was beautiful and delicate wirework, the product of generations of craftsmanship that bent and smudged at the touch of his ash covered hands. “Wait until the folks back home get a load of this” he thought, too enraptured by the glimmering of treasure to smell the scent of burning temple on the wind. 

Setup: A hapless smuggler all his life, Ardos lucked into becoming pirate of the century after guiding his ship through an ocean spanning storm and discovering an unknown continent full of riches to plunder. After filling his hold with riches stolen from a foreign land, he sailed home, recruited a small fleet of other seadogs to help him in his theft, and sailed back to the forgotten shore to plunder again. 

Heady off his successive contests, rich with holy artifacts wrested from foreign temples, and at the head of what might be the most well provisioned pirate fleet in history,  Ardos is looking to settle some old scores against the maritime nations that harried him during his humble beginnings. 

Adventure hooks: 

A vessel of Ardos’s fleet wrecks on a beach nearby the player’s home, scattering odd treasures and marooned pirates across the shore.  Apparently the pirates are driven into factions: The Captain is dead, the navigator and many others have become obsessed with the worship of an arcane idol, the quartermaster and her men are scavenging what they can to get a boat back in the water, and the rest of the crew is happy to maraud on dry land for a bit and wouldn’t mind pillaging the player’s village on the way. 

Just as peacetalks are underway between the home nation and its cheif seagoing rival, Ardos’s fleet rolls in with an offer to side with the highest bidder. The goverments of both sides are slow to overcome their grudges and oust this interloper, while agitators within both nations begin to court the pirate’s favor.  Should the offer sit on the table too long, Ardos will send out saboteurs and agitators of his own, hoping to push both factions to the brink of war once again in order to encourage them to deal. 

After making an enemy of the Pirate lord, the players will be approached by a towering figure who speaks little common but shares their emnity against Ardos. If they trust him, this goliath (Starcounter is his name) will lead them and their ship across the ocean to the lands the marauder plundered to fuel his assertion.  

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💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Bottled Will-o’-Wisp
Wondrous item, uncommon ___

This small bottle carries a will-o’-wisp inside it, as well as a trinket from its previous life. The wisp is magically tethered to the trinket as long as it stays within the bottle, keeping the wisp bound to the bottle and incapable of escape on its own.

While holding the bottle, you can use a bonus action to shake it, causing the wisp to glow brighter. The shaken wisp sheds bright light in a 10-foot radius and dim light for an additional 10 feet for up to 1 hour or until you end the effect early (no action required).

Alternatively, you can use an action to unstopper the bottle and unleash the wisp in a direction of your choice. The wisp then flies out at a target that you can see within 30 feet of you. Make a ranged spell attack for the wisp, using an attack bonus of +5. On a hit, the target takes 3d8 lightning damage. Hit or miss, the wisp immediately returns to the trinket in the bottle, which you then reseal.

If the wisp’s attack roll misses the target by 5 or more, there is a 50 percent chance that the wisp breaks its tether to the trinket and doesn’t return. When that happens, the wisp becomes hostile to you and your allies. If you’re holding the empty bottle, you can use an action to make a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check contested by a will-o’-wisp’s Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, provided that the wisp is within your reach. On a success, the wisp becomes trapped in the bottle, and a new trinket appears for it.

When a wisp becomes untethered from the trinket in the bottle or if the trinket is removed from it, the trinket immediately turns to ash. ___

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Bracers of Technique

Prerequisite: 1 level in monk

Wearing these gives you advanced skills in martial arts. Months of training given the moment they are equipped. While attuned, given a +2 on any unarmed attacks and gain 1d4 ki points that can be be expended from the bracers instead of your ki pool. Also get access to three new maneuvers:

Rush: whenever you perform furry of blows, you can choose to sacrifice your movement. If you do, you can choose a new target for each attack as long as they are between 30 feet of each other. You move in the most efficient path towards the next target, stopping at the last one.

Critical blow: after landing a hit, you can expend one ki point and launch an elbow into a targets weak spot. Target must pass a dc 16 constitution saving throw or suffer one status effect from this list of your choice: blinded, deafened, prone, frightened. On a crit, you can also choose between stunning or paralyzing the target.

Tetsuzanko: a shoulder tackle that creates space with an aggressive opponent. 1 ki point, On a reaction when a target misses an attack on you, set your feet and bash your shoulder again a target. They take 1d6 force damage and are pushed 10 feet away. Their movement speed becomes zero for the rest of the targets turn.

(Monk is one of my favorite classes so I decided to make an item that gives off the older fighting game vibes.

Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness

Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.

As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.

We can do better

TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.

While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:

It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.

Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.

Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.

Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.

Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.

The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.

There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.

Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.

Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.

THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now

Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time

THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.

Adventure Hooks:

The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)

Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.

The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.

Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.

Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.

Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.

Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.

Art

Gratuitously evil spells for villains to learn

Mordenkainen's Highly Problematic Political Opinions

Spell that causes someone to experience the entirety of The Big Bang Theory in 6 seconds

Spell that causes a needlessly painful death. It figures out the maximum amount of pain it's ethically permissible to inflict based on context and inflicts twice that much on purpose

Fireball but it expands the area of effect to specifically hit all your teammates.

Mildly Upset Person.

Disintegrate but it bestows any object it hits with full human sapience just before the ray hits.

Locate Object but every time you cast it, it kicks a random guy in the nuts for no good reason.

Hellish Rebuke but it hits anyone who isn't attacking you.

Ray of Deforestation

Transmute Food To Food That's Produced Unsustainably And Using Unethical Labor Practices

Nullify Union