I haven’t done any D&D spell design in… well, quite a lot longer than is normal for me, but I’m about to jump back into it for a paid project, so I thought you might enjoy seeing my warmup round. The fact is, though, 5e has an incredibly rich back […]
In the misty past of… exactly nine years ago… I wrote a Divine Trickster roguish archetype for a friend of mine to play in the Reborn campaign. That version is highly specialized toward that setting’s pantheon, but also – my grasp of subclass design has changed over the years. For […]
My last set of 4e spells converted to 5e was in October of last year, so I figured it was time to get back to that project. Even with the progress I’ve made, there are tons of cool ideas left to play with. Part One | Part Two | Part Three Essence […]
I was looking through my 4e megathread the other day and made a list of the spells and magic items from it that I still wanted to try bringing into 5e. There’s a lot of meat left on that bone. Part One | Part Two Cerulean Shield 3rd-level abjuration (cleric, […]
As most of you know, in 4e D&D there is a material called residuum, essentially the same as the various arcane dusts that enchanters create by disenchanting magic items in World of Warcraft. A variant form of residuum shows up in the Vox Machina campaign (Exandra shows a lot of […]
Ryan Shatford, otherwise known as Paper and Dice (@PaperandDice), offered to convert any monster from 4e to 5e for me, if he hadn’t already covered it. I picked the Secret of Vecna, which was presented as three separate monsters in 4e. I’m posting his excellent conversion work here so that […]
A couple of months ago, cherished reader Jonathan McGee asked me for my thoughts on the 1st-level spell compelled duel. At the time, my answer could be summed up as, “I’m not sure I’ve thought about it at all,” so I told him I would give it some work when […]
Of all the domains that have seen official support in 5e, there are a few ongoing, surprising gaps compared to the 3.5 list of domains and, for that matter, 4e builds. In this case – as if the title of the post didn’t give it away! – I’m talking about […]
In last year’s 4e megathread, I listed a bunch of awesome spell names and concepts that hadn’t been officially brought into 5e. In this post, I’m offering one possible way of converting four of them. This is likely to become an ongoing series. Summons of Khirad 3rd-level conjuration (warlock) Casting […]
Over in that Twitter thread, we were talking about the function of totems as 4e magic items. I suggested that they could be intended for druids, especially the Circle of the Moon, and might boost the stats of lower-CR Wild Shapes, so that if shapeshifting to a wolf or panther is […]
