With our transition to a new campaign next week, I’m using this opportunity to announce another weekly D&D show: Crafting Annihilation! This will be a live streamed behind-the-scenes series where I go through my prep work for that week’s session of Tomb of Annihilation.
Next week is our Session 0 where we’ll introduce and create our new player characters. After that the normal routine will be Crafting Annihilation on Thursday mornings (tentatively) and Tomb of Annihilation on our usual Friday evenings.
I’ll also be launching a Patreon next week to help support all the extra video content I produce on my YouTube channel (and here on my website), including DMs Guild Reviews, Roll20 Reviews, RogueWatson Reviews (board games), and the new Crafting Annihilation series.
With your patronage I can increase my output of videos with a more consistent release schedule (such as a DMs Guild Review every Tuesday).
Leave comments here or on YouTube for suggestions on the kind of reward tiers or special perks you want to see on the Patreon page.
Help the church of Ilmater protect their people and their holy sites from their rivals in this 1st level adventure.
A review copy of “Sorrow’s Ruin” was provided by the publisher.
Designed by: Blaise Wigglesworth
First level Dungeons & Dragons just kind of sucks. Fifth Edition has improved it somewhat (no more Wizard with 2 hp dying to a single goblin), but it’s still very rough and limiting. Every official published adventure by Wizards of the Coast fast-tracks player characters out of the early levels as quickly as possible.
Designing meaningful adventures for 1st level PCs is thus quite the challenge, but “Sorrow’s Ruin” makes it look easy. “Sorrow’s Ruin” is designed as a one-shot adventure for 1st-level PCs, and portrays an intriguing story along with a variety of encounters and social opportunities. Continue reading “DMs Guild Review – Sorrow’s Ruin”
A short sourcebook featuring four playable undead races, designed for freshly killed PCs.
A review copy of “Undead Races” was provided for the purposes of this review.
Designed by: Matthew Gravelyn
In most D&D campaigns the undead serve as antagonists, either through the usual fodder of skeletons and zombies to cut through, or as big bad liches, vampires, and death knights.
Undead player characters aren’t unheard of, but they’re a tricky thing to balance, especially when it comes to healing. “Undead Races” provides four playable undead races: Bound Spirits, Vampires. Specters, and Soulless. They’re designed for existing player characters to transition into should they die, as an alternative means to resurrection.
“Undead Races” is a short, 10-page booklet that devotes about 1 page for lore, and 1 page for stat block to each race. Since most undead don’t really have their own culture, the lore sections explain how a PC could be transformed into their new undead incarnation, and how those creatures typically live out their questionable existence.
Some of the undead work better than others. The Bound Spirit is a nifty idea as your soul (or conscienceless) is put into a construct body, typically a suit of armor. You’re not quite as cool as a Helmed Horror but you do get resistance to piercing and slashing damage, as well as immunity to critical hits (!). That’s kind of bland but also incredibly powerful.
Healing also becomes tricky (a common theme for most undead) as you cannot be healed through resting or magic. Instead you have to be repaired, which equates to spending HD during a rest. It’s unclear if you still regain Hit Dice during a Long Rest, and if you can regain the same Hit Dice you just spent since you’ll be using them to heal.
Of the four, vampire is the easiest one to apply, both thematically and mechanically. For balance purposes PC vampires don’t have to fear the sun, though I find it weird that they aren’t at least saddled with the Drow Sunlight Sensitivity penalty.
Vampire healing is obviously tied to feeding on blood. There are two notes about healing that seemingly contradict each other: “All damage is healed if you consume enough blood” and two sentences later, “When you consume blood, spent Hit Dice as you would during a rest.” Like the Bound Spirit, there are no extra notes about when you can regain Hit Dice (vamps don’t rest!), making another race where I’m not a bit confused on the healing mechanics.
The Specter is the most bananas of the bunch. A ghost PC? As an action you can plane shift between the astral and material planes, and you’re completely incorporeal on the material plane. On top of that, as a bonus action you can become invisible! That sounds game-breakingly crazy.
The specters have a similar curse to vampires, only instead of bloodlust it’s a strong emotion, like rage or jealousy. This is completely tied to the player’s ability to effectively roleplay their new emotionally-crippled ghost.
Soulless is the most original of the races presented here. Soulless are basically the same as they were before, just, you know, without a soul. Thematically it makes them into bland sociopaths who begin to lose all emotion and purpose, which seems a tad delicate to role-play with others. Mechanically they gain the Deception and Performance skills, and immunity to mind control. By far the the least exciting but also the easiest to transition into.
Undead races are a difficult thing to manage. I appreciate the notes on the hows and whys a PC may transition into each of these forms. A lot of thought when into making their abilities and powers reflect their new forms, but the balance level is a bit questionable, and there could be a few more details about healing with the bound spirit and vampires.
Pros:
All four undead: Bound Spirit, Vampire, Specter, and Soulless are very different from each other, with their own thematic traits and abilities.
Each ‘race’ comes with a lore box on how and why a PC may transition into their new undead form.
Cons:
Healing for Bound Spirits and Vampires is vaguely worded and confusing.
Specters are literally ghosts capable of plane-shifting and invisibility at will. What!
The Verdict: Undead Races features four VARIED playable Undead for when You can’t let a Good PC Die.
A review copy of “Undead Races” was provided for the purposes of this review.
New races, spells, feats, class archetypes, and monsters, all with a clockwork theme.
A review copy of “Construct Compendium” was provided for the purposes of this review.
Designed by: Brandon Norris, Richie Root
While Dungeons & Dragons has always been firmly rooted in a fantasy setting, even the lowest of magic settings often include golems and rudimentary mechanical devices, like crossbows and spike traps.
A review copy of “Magic Potions & Ingredients” was provided for the purposes of this review.
Designed by: RPG Papercrafts
Magic potions are a mainstay of Dungeons & Dragons, yet both the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide are woefully bereft when it comes to alchemy and brewing.
I’m incredibly thankful and humbled by all the fans. YouTube has a dubious reputation when it comes to community but for the most part the comments and live stream chats have been nothing but positive and fun.
I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube for years, beginning with poorly streamed Let’s Plays of video games with cheap mics, bad audio, and choppy video quality. It wasn’t until 2015 when I began recording and streaming our Roll20 RPG sessions that we really began to find an audience.
Some of you have been with us since Storm King’s Thunder began, others with Lost Mine of Phandelver and even a few of you still make reference to our Shadowrun campaign. The in-universe jokes, from the Graham Cracker Crew to zombie Tims to Jake from State Farm always put a smile on my face.
A few of you have been asking how you can support the channel and my work. I’ve been looking into some options and researching what methods work best, whether its Amazon affiliate links, Patreon, Ko-fi, or a YouTube partnership.
Rest assured that I will never gate our primary RPG streams behind any kind of paywall. Any monetary support would be purely optional, and help me produce more higher quality videos at a steady pace, particularly extra content like my DMs Guild Reviews, Roll20 Reviews, and board game reviews.
This whole venture began as a labor of love and an effective creative outlet. It warms my heart to see so many of you enjoying it along with us. We have more exciting things planned for the future, including our next D&D campaign where I return to the DM’s chair.
Thank you so much for subscribing to my humble channel, for leaving positive (or constructive!) comments, and for chatting during our weekly live streams. Here’s to the next 1,000 fans!
Infiltrate a militant temple of Tyr to recover a magical artifact in this heist adventure for 11-16th level.
A review copy of The Theocracy was provided for the purposes of this review.
Designed by: JVC Parry
JVC Parry is one of my favorite creators on the DMs Guild. He’s produced many quality one-shot adventures with neat ideas and well-designed miniature dungeon crawls.
“The Theocracy” is Parry’s latest adventure, and while the actual title is hopelessly generic, it offers a substantially deeper, higher level dungeon crawl with a unique, richly detailed theme.
The twist is that the “dungeon” is actually a Temple of Tyr (the Forgotten Realms’ militant God of Justice), and the PCs are tasked with retrieving an important magical item – hopefully without declaring war on a bunch of paladins, priests, and a gods damn angel. Continue reading “DMs Guild Review: The Theocracy”
