LUPINS

 A D&D 5e player race

Official D&D Fifth Edition currently allows player characters to choose from two types of cat people, three types of bird people, four types of reptilian, plus fish, elephants, insects etc etc. But no canine races! Where's the love for man's best friend? There are Shifters, but they're more "people with a doggy theme" than proper dog people. 

Second Edition had a canine race called the Lupin, originating from the Mystara setting, so here's my version of them for 5e. 

From the Mystara Monstrous Compendium: 

Lupins are canine humanoids who, despite looking much like werewolves, despise these true lycanthropes. Despite this fearsome appearance, lupins generally act friendly towards humans and other races. 

A fine coat of fur, typically ranging from black to light tan, covers a lupin's body and its canine face. The extremely rare pure white lupins usually possess gifts of extraordinary powers (spells, psionics etc). A lupin has a nonprehensile tail.

Lupins builds villages made of wooden lodges, constructed of bark attached to wooden frames. The lodges centre around a fire called the bg'tyr, which serves as the tribe's socialising and meeting place. Most lodges house a single pack, while some large ones hold up to three or four packs. Nomadic lupins prefer comfortable caves and build bg'tyrs to mark their locations. Lupins avoid human cities, which seem too big and too dirty for their taste. 

An instinctive hatred of werewolves runs strong in lupins. They normally employ weapons such as lances with silver heads, silver swords, and silver-tipped flight arrows against these foes. Some lupin packs consider the week of the full moon the most important time of the month. When the full moon shines brightest these packs form hunting parties known as Ah'flir, with the specific purpose of tracking down and killing werewolves.

All lupins start with the following traits:

Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 2 and your Charisma score increases by 1.

Age. Lupins reach maturity around age 10 and rarely live past the age of 50. As they grow older, the hair on top of their head grows longer and whiter.

Size. Lupins are usually a similar size to humans, ranging from 5 to 6 ft in height, though some bloodlines are of a smaller stature. You size is Medium or Small.

Speed. You have a base walking speed of 30 feet.

Bite. You have a fanged maw that you can use to make unarmed strikes. When you hit with it, the strike deals 1d6 + your Strength modifier in piercing damage, instead of the bludgeoning damage normal for an unarmed strike.

Call of the Wild. As a bonus action while in combat, you let loose a howl that strengthens your pack's resolve. Any allies within 5 ft of you when you use this ability gain Advantage on attack rolls until the start of your next turn. You can use this ability a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

You cannot use this ability if you are unable to speak, for example under the effects of a Silence spell, and your allies cannot benefit from it if they have the deafened condition at the time you use it.

Keen Smell. Thanks to your sensitive nose, you have advantage on Wisdom (Perception), Wisdom (Survival), and Intelligence (Investigation) checks that involve smell.

Loyal. If a magical effect causing the charmed condition or a spell such as Command would make you do something to directly harm one of your allies, you can immediately make a new saving throw to dispel it. You can only do this once for each time you are charmed or controlled. It does not interfere with any normal saving throws you would make on your turn to end the effect.

Lycanphobe. Your innate antipathy for werewolves allows you to sense lycanthropy in people around you, by the way they make your hackles rise. As an action, you can make a Wisdom (Perception) roll to study all visible creatures within 30 ft of you with the following results.

• DC 5 You can sense a werewolf in its animal or hybrid form.
• DC 10 You can sense a werewolf in humanoid form.
• DC 15 You can sense any other type of lycanthrope in its animal or hybrid form.
• DC 20 You can sense any other type of lycanthrope in humanoid form.

The DM should automatically apply this to your Passive Perception score for any visible creatures within 10 ft of you.

When you use your sense of smell for a Wisdom (Investigation) check, a result of 10 or higher will tell you if any werewolves have been in the area you are investigating in the last 24 hours.

You are immune to the curse of lycanthropy, and cannot become a lycanthrope as a result of being wounded by one.

Languages. You can speak, read and write Common and Lupin.

Random 5e character for Levels 1-3

I started playing around with the random generator site perchance.org recently and was taken with the idea of making a generator for starter D&D 5e characters. This turned out to be quite a lot fiddlier than I imagined it would, but I did it!

https://perchance.org/5echaracter

With a click of a button it gives you a character suitable for levels 1-3, complete with (what should be) a correct set of stats, proficiencies, languages, starting gear, and a summary of class and race abilities. All options taken from the official WotC books.

The fiddliest part was making it so that profiencies etc didn't repeat when coming from different areas (background, class, subclass etc). And while the whole point of this is to lean into the randomness, I still wanted things like gear to make sense for the character (for example, if a character has Great Weapon Fighting then they should start with a two-handed weapon).

Some elements of the randomness left me a little unsure. A big one was alignment. As it stands, you have an equal chance of getting any alignment. So you're as likely to roll an evil character as a good one. That doesn't actually feel accurate to me in terms of what most people actually play. At the same time I don't want to put my thumb on the scale. I decided in the end to just keep it equally random, as obviously anyone using the generator could choose to just change the alignment if they wanted anyway.

I tried to stick with "official" names for the various races. For a lot of them that was easy, there's entire name lists in some of the books plus lots of example NPCs to draw from. For others it was trickier, I was forced to look back at products from earlier editions or D&D-adjacent stuff. For example for some of the races who originate in settins based on Magic the Gathering, I used examples taken from MtG cards. Some of the newer races forced to get a bit more... creative. For example with plasmoids, I didn't find many examples of names even in old Spelljammer stuff. But I did find out that plasmoids were based on an alien race called the dralasites from TSR's old scifi game Star Frontiers. So I just yoinked a list of dralasite names instead. Harengon were a problem as they're new, barely appear in any books and aren't given a name list. I ended up using a list of character names from Watership Down!

Anyway if anyone does happen to stumble upon this and use it, I'd love to hear what you think.

https://perchance.org/5echaracter

Align yr linguistics

One of the daffier ideas from 1st edition AD&D that people sometimes bring up is the concept of alignment languages. The rules stated that people of the same alignment actually had a special common language that they automatically knew, and only people of their alignment could speak. Apparently Gary Gygax originally intended it to be something like a ceremonial language used by religions, like Latin for Catholicism or Hebrew for Judaism, but as written it came across as a full language that anyone of a given alignment knew and somehow no one else could learn. The general consensus was this was Very Silly and they promptly disappeared in 2nd Edition, I'm pretty sure never to be seen again. In fact as each new edition of D&D comes out they seem to push alignment further and further into the background. You get the sense that a lot of people find it a bit embarrassing, when they don't ignore it entirely.

While alignment languages are odd, when you imagine people being able to speak something purely due to their moral outlook, I think there's an argument to them making sense in the classic D&D universe. After all, it's a world where alignments are a Real Thing. It's not just a person's moral code. It's an actual fundamental building block of the cosmos, that you can verify with magic. If certain magic items only work for people of specific alignments, why not languages?

A lot of fantasy settings have a Dark Speech, Demonic, Abyssal etc that evil creatures all use. The language itself isn't evil though (though invariably described as 'guttural', 'harsh' etc), it's just like a lingua franca for meanies. Lingua wanka?

I want to have alignments in my Dodex game, though a more simplified version to D&D. I'm going for Order, Chaos, Light and Dark. There's no Neutral, that's simply an absence of alignment. Most animals don't have an alignment, and not all people do either. It's assumed that player characters all do because they're Important People who have the potential for dire fates and grand destinies (even if half the time they end up dead in a pit trap). People are kind of aware of alignments in-game, they're seen as innate principles of life. Positive and negative forces, structure and entropy, like yin and yang. Depending on someone's belief system they may consider them to be literal pillars of existence, like gravity or magnetism, other people might see them more as metaphorical symbols for how things are.

Anyway I want to have alignment languages in Dodex! The common trade language in the game is called Tongue, which is accompanied by a physical sign language called Shape. There's also a secret(ish) one called Cant that's used by dodgy types, like a parallel trade language for the shadow economy. But then there's the alignment languages too. They're a type of magical communication, in a way, a bit like the one wizards use to scribble in their spellbooks. Something about the way they're constructed just feels wrong to people whose essence doesn't vibrate at that particular pitch. People of different alignments can still learn the language, but they struggle with it. Given time and effort they can translate things, but they'll never be truly fluent. As a result most people don't bother trying. In fact most people don't learn them anyway, it's not any easier to learn than any other language even if it is your alignment.

Aria is the language of Light. It is a tonal language where sentences rise and fall melodically, building to crescendos of meaning. It is not subtle... you can't whisper in Aria. It's also difficult to be sarcastic or insincere. You can be angry, or melancholy, or deceitful even, but the language forces you to do it in a declarative and heartfelt way. In its written form Aria looks like branches of swooping musical notation radiating out from a central point.

Ergo is the language of Order. Speakers sound like they're reading out a long set of equations, because essentially they are. Written down it looks like one of those giant chalkboards of sums you see in a film about mathematicians. Ergo is great at clarity, it's good for logistics. It is not good at nuance.

Gibberish is the language of Chaos. To non-speakers it sounds like a totally random series of made-up words and noises. They'll throw in a few barks and whistles too. No two speakers of Gibberish sound the same, but somehow they can always understand each other. There is no written form of the language.

Malison is the language of Dark. People expecting a grating, ugly form of speech are surprised at how pretty it can be. Its sing-song quality lends it to poetry and performance. But the flowery language hides its thorns. Malison has endless clauses and tenses, it twists on the tongue. It's impossible to pay a compliment without sounding snide, to speak of ideals without subverting them. It forces you to hold things back even when you try to tell the truth. The written form of Malison is like a palimpsest, patterns of sharp runic figures layered on top of each other.

DID SOMEONE SAY GUESS THE TTRPGS FROM THE EMOJIS QUIZ?!?!? 

1. 🏰⬇️🏰⬇️🐲🐲
 2. ⛪️👍
 3. 🧛‍♂️😷🛩🚨
 4. 🖋🐲
 5. 🚇🚇👹👹
 6. 🧙‍♂️🔝
 7. 📥🧘‍♂️📥🐴
 8. 👨‍👨‍👦
 9. 🚫🧾💲
 10. 😭😭🔥👸
 11. 🔼💚
 12. 💻👩‍🎤👀☑️
 13. 🧡🎲❌
 14. ⛓✉️
 15. ❓🐺🦍🆗👄
 16. 📞🐙
 17. Ⓜ️🔥🥀🚽
 18. 🌍🌅
 19. 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊⬅️
 20. 🌽👴👵8️⃣🤱
 21. 🛷 📥🧹🌳🌳
 22. 🧚🛎👨‍👩‍👦‍👦
 23. 🧻 ⛵️®️
 24. 🦶⭕⭕⭕⭕⭕
 25. 🏉🎣

 NO THEY DIDN'T BUT HERE IT IS ANYWAY

LERNAEANS

A D&D 5e player race

Lernaeans are a race of reptilian humanoids originating from swamps, mangroves and other places where the land and water merge. They are natural swimmers and their settlements usually combine buildings both above and below the surface of the water. A tribe stays in a particular area for generations and they rarely range far outside their territory, but are known to be extremely protective of that region against any outside threats. Lernaean tribes will fight to the last person against any would-be invaders, rather than give up their land.

Physically they resemble their cousins the lizardfolk, with scaly skin and long slim tails, but have a more snake-like appearance. Their race's most unique trait though is an amazing ability to recover from injury. Lernaeans heal much faster than most humanoids, and their healing is more thorough. A Lernaean who recovers from a cut will never scar, their bones always set correctly without aid. Even severed limbs will grow back.

What makes this ability even more extraordinary is that regenerating Lernaeans will often grow additional temporary body parts as they heal, as if in response to the danger of further attacks. Lernaeans treat this as perfectly normal, but other races are often disconcerted at the sight of a Lernaean with two heads holding a casual conversation with itself.

Most Lernaean tribes venerate a pantheon of powerful nature spirits that represent the elements of their territory, weather patterns and the animals they hunt. Above them all is the figure of Mother Hydra, a mercurial multi-headed draconic being who Lernaeans seek to placate with ritual offerings. Outsiders who observe that Mother Hydra seems remarkably similar to Tiamat are told that such details are merely coincidental.

All Lernaeans start with the following traits:

Ability Score Increase. A Lernaean character's Constitution score increases by 2 and their Dexterity increases by 1.

Age. Lernaeans reach maturity around age 14 and despite their regenerative abilities rarely live longer than 60 years.

Size. Lernaeans average a little taller than humans, but they have lithe, wiry frames. Their size is Medium.

Speed. Lernaeans have a base walking speed of 30 feet, and a swimming speed of 30 feet.

Bite. The Lernaean's fanged maw is a natural weapon, which they can use to make unarmed strikes. If they hit with it, they deal piercing damage equal to 1d4 + their Strength modifier, instead of the bludgeoning damage normal for an unarmed strike.

Venom Sacs. When a Lernaean successfully hits with a bite attack, they can choose to inject their target with venom which does an additional 1d4 poison damage. They are able to do this up to three times per long rest.

Hold Breath. Learnaeans can hold their breath for up to 30 minutes at a time.

Venomous Nature. All Lernaeans are resistant to poison damage.

Accelerated Healing. As an action, a Lernaean character can spend some of their Hit Dice to recover Hit Points as if they were taking a short rest. They can spend as many of their Hit Dice as they wish, but as with a short rest those Hit Dice are not recovered until the Lernaean takes a long rest.

Watery Rest. Lernaean characters taking a long rest recover all of their Hit Dice, rather than half of their total amount, provided they spend at least half of the rest time partially submerged in water.

Hydral Regeneration. When an injured Lernaean returns to their full Hit Point total, as a result of spending Hit Dice or being healed by some effect, their body often reacts by generating an additional body part. They do not generate body parts as a result of regaining Hit Points after a long rest.

Roll a D8 to see which type of body part is generated.

• 1: Head
• 2-4: Arm
• 5-6: Leg
• 7: Tail
• 8: None

 

• Lernaeans with an extra head may roll a second time on any Intelligence or Wisdom based ability checks, but must accept the second result if they do so.
• Lernaeans with an extra arm gain the ability to make an additional attack as a bonus action with that arm, using a one-handed weapon held in it or as an unarmed bludgeoning attack, with their normal damage modifier. This allows them to use a two-handed weapon in their normal two arms.
• Lernaeans with an extra leg add 5 feet to their walking speed.
• Lernaeans with an extra tail add 5 feet to their swimming speed, and gain advantage on Acrobatics skill checks.

When a Lernaean takes a long rest, these additional body parts wither away and fall off (and are often then consumed by the Lernaean as a breakfast snack). A Lernaean character may end up growing multiple body parts of the same type during the space of a day, but they do not gain additional benefits from the extra ones beyond the first of each type.

Languages. Lernaean characters can speak, read, and write Common and Draconic.

 

Role in the time of Cholera

So, prior to the lock-down, I was running an infrequent (sort-of-monthly) Dungeon World game and playing in a weekly D&D 5e game. I also ran a 5e game for a bit last year, that fell apart due to logistical travel problems.

Our weird new paradigm has forced me and my friends to finally give online RPing a go, mainly through a combo of Roll20 and Zoom. I'm running a weekly 5e game and playing in another weekly one. So I'm actually doing more gaming now than I have been in a while!

It's... clunky. Roll20 facilitates the mechanistic aspects of a fighty game like D&D, once you get used to using it. But I feel like it discourages players from doing as much character stuff, as much dialogue as IRL (even player meta-gaming chat). People tend to treat their characters more like computer game or board game tokens, shuffling them round a map at arm's length.

One solution could be to just get rid of the maps and do everything narratively. I've been playing 5e long enough now to feel comfortable running it, but the combat is too precise for me to feel like I could do a reasonable job doing it as theatre of the mind. I need that grid!

Maybe if this whole thing drags on even further into the foreseeable, I might look at starting another game with something with more abstract conflict (like Dungeon World). Just run it entirely through Zoom (other chat programmes are also available).

Elements on Parade

In my Dungeon World campaign, the gods created the world and then the five sentient races from the elemental forces of the cosmos - Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, and Metal.
 
Although the setting is, for the most part, the sort of standard pseudo-Europe you have in D&D, I decided to use Chinese elements rather than Western ones because... they're cooler?
 
There are only five intelligent races in the setting (not counting undead, magic constructs, outsiders like fae and demons etc), and each is linked to one of the elements.

 
Humans are linked to Fire.

• Prone to fiery passions
• Spread quickly
• Capable of captivating beauty
• ...but also mindless destruction
• Warm but dangerous
• Brief lives
• Ruddy or dark skin, yellow or red or ash-white hair, orange or red eyes 

Elves are linked to Wood.

• Long-lived
• Flexible but strong
• Think of themselves as part of nature
• Deep continuity to the past
• Never in a hurry, make generational plans 
• Brown or green skin, leaf coloured hair, green or amber eyes

Dwarves are linked to Earth.

• Very tough and hard to move
• Practically ageless
• Value foundation and structure before ornamentation
• Seem simple on the surface but have many hidden layers
• Grey or black skin, brown or grey hair, black or brown eyes

Goblins are linked to Water.

• Always on the move
• Find a niche and exploit it
• Seem weak individually, but relentless en masse
• Change their values to match the environment 
• Blue or sea-green skin, green or grey hair, aquamarine or clear eyes

Gnomes are linked to Metal.

• Sharp and bright
• Usually found embedded within other groups
• Great tool-makers
• Mix well with others
• Tend towards either shiny glamour or dull reliability
• Skin hair and eyes are all metallic colours - gold, silver, bronze etc 

You get the idea!

Elementalists tend to specialise in the element linked to their race but aren't necessarily limited to it. The diagram above shows how they interact. For example Dwarves would usually use Earth magic but they can potentially learn Wood or Metal magic. They can't use magic from the diametrically opposed element, Water. Elves usually use Wood magic, can opt for Earth or Water, can't use Metal. And so on.
 
Fire is the odd one out. It's greedy. Fire magic acts in opposition to all the other elements, so it can only be used by Humans. And Humans can only use Fire. This is part of the reason that Human communities have often encouraged the other races to live among them. One of an Elementalist's abilities is to create physical manifestations of their element - having regular access to "free" supplies of metals, lumber, stone, safe drinking water etc is a boon to any settlement.

Alignment Moves

I've been running a (sporadic) campaign of Dungeon World for almost a couple of years now. I love a lot of aspects of DW but run it in a way that I'm sure would aggravate "true fans", I don't use Fronts and Portents for a start. A lot of the time I let people use Moves more like skill rolls. I certainly don't make players choose their character's name from a list, but does anyone really do that?

One of my other heresies was allowing characters of any race to choose any class. I get that the playbooks' limitations are meant as a nod to the original D&D rules but... I've always found that limitation to be a bit boring and arbitrary.

As a result I needed to create new racial moves for each character class, to go along with the preexisting ones for those classes that did allow elves, dwarves etc. While I was at it I decided to also add the option for players to pick an alignment-related move.

Alignment feels a little tacked-on in DW to me (arguably less tacked-on that it feels in D&D 5e, to be fair). So I thought I'd just have that option there so that alignment could potentially have a further impact on character creation.

Chaotic characters
DOUBLE DOWN    Once per session you may choose to reroll any one roll, but at -1.

Evil characters
OUT OF SPITE    When you Hinder someone that you have a Bond with, they get a -3 penalty instead of -2.

Good characters
I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU    When you Aid someone that you have a Bond with, they get a bonus of +2 instead of +1.

Lawful characters
SAYER OF THE LAW    When you Spout Lore about the traditions and laws of your race or homeland, double your INT bonus to the roll.

Neutral characters
FINDING BALANCE    When you spend a day in contemplation, gain 1 preparation if you take action the next day.

Does success suck

So some of my initial thoughts about my game is that OF COURSE characters have the classic six attributes. These will potentially range in score from 6 to 20, depending on your character's race and what you roll during character creation.

The basic mechanic will be: have a Success Score that you are trying to get equal to or below on 2d12. Generally that Success Score is going to be a relevant ability score. Getting a double 1 is always a success, getting a double 12 is always a failure.

I'm going with the name 'Success Score' right now but I don't know if I like it. I don't want to use something like 'target' though because that feels counterintuitive to how the rolls work. I'd expect the higher a target number is, the harder something is to do. Whereas here the higher the number, the better your chances are of succeeding.

Something else I'm pondering is the idea of partial successes. I really like that element of Dungeon World, that the players often get to kind of get what they want but have to accept some sort of compromise or caveat. Obviously some systems revel in the characters being crap at stuff, but I think in general players like to be competent (just like the characters usually are in adventure fiction). But always succeeding is boring too. That's why I like having the additional layer of a partial success too. The obvious one being that in a fight, a success means you hit them and a fail means they hit you - but a partial success probably means you hit each other.

How to work that into my above plan for rolling under a Success Score though? I was wondering if it'd work to have a rule that if your total on 2d12 is above the Success Score (so normally a fail) but the individual numbers on both dice are below the Success Score, then it's a partial success.

I kind of like it, but then you have the problem that if the Success Score is 12 or higher then you're never going to fail (apart from the 1-in-144 times you manage a double 12). You'll always at least partially succeed, if not fully succeed. There's a good chance that most characters are going to have at least some attributes at 12 or higher (especially in attributes relevant to their class), so this could mean that a lot of characters rarely if ever totally fail at their core activities.

This could be mitigated somewhat by having some sort of difficulty "handicap" added to dice rolls, depending on the situation. That's how armour in combat could work for example. But is that then overcomplicating things. I like the simplicity of having people roll equal-to-or-under their attribute scores for most actions, but if I'm going to stick with that then I may have to give up on the idea of partial successes.

PENKU NAMES

Here's some tables for rolling up names for Penku characters.

 
ROYAL PENKU

1d8	Title	First half of name	Second half of name		First half of house	Second half of house
1	Baron/Baroness	Chaw-	Ark	of the	Argent	Catacombs
2	Count/Countess	Eehk-	Creel		Gleaming	Caverns
3	Duke/Duchess	Graw-	Dok		Glimmering	Grottoes
4	Earl/Chatelaine	Rik-	Eeree		Iridescent	Domes
5	Lord/Lady	Tuku-	Goot		Opaline	Sepulchers
6	Margrave/Margravine	Wahd-	Suu		Scintillating	Spires
7	Prince/Princess	Yeeg-	Renn		Shimmering	Towers
8	Viscount/Viscountess	Roll again and reverse the result	Roll again and reverse the result		Silvery	Vaults

Example: Rolling 2,5,3,7,8 would give you Countess Tuku-Dok of the Shimmering Vaults.
 

 
IMPERIAL PENKU

1d8	First half of name	Second half of name	Regnal number
1	Ark-	Chaw	Roll 2d8 and then record the number as Roman numerals, ie 7+9 = 16 = XVI
2	Creel-	Eehk
3	Dok-	Graw
4	Eeree-	Rik
5	Goot-	Tuku
6	Suu-	Wahd
7	Renn-	Yeeg
8	Roll again and reverse the result	Roll again and reverse the result

Example: Rolling 8,3,4,2,5 would give you Kod-Rik VII.
 

 
ALBINO PENKU

1d8	First part of name	Second part of name	Third part of name
1	Ath'	ael'	el
2	Azo'	eeeg'	ga
3	Gna'	ftag'	oth
4	Hed'	ooz'	tek
5	Ich'	shaa'	thuu
6	Khe'	thul'	toa
7	Ngo'	tuch'	urat
8	Roll again and reverse the result	Roll again and reverse the result	Roll again and reverse the result

Example: Rolling 5,1,8,4 would give you Ich'ael'ket.