(Part 2) Top products from r/DnDBehindTheScreen

One of the best uses of this was in the old Forgotten Realms books, especially those for 2nd-edition AD&D. They had a whole section in the FR hardcover book on alternate currencies and their effective values. It also had several pages of tables for coming up with gemstones, artistic objects, and non-gem stone as treasure.

(By 'non-gem stone' I mean things like marble. A half-ton block of marble might be incredibly unwieldy, but worth a nice chunk of coin to a sculptor.)

The coinage included cultural notes that gave some glimpses into various countries. Things like the 'bela', from when Sembia tried their hand at making paper currency. They printed too many and devalued it to the point where a 1-bela note is worth only 1 cp. Same goes for the steelpence, made as an alternative to gold but overproduced. It mentions the term "Buying steelpence with bela" meaning financial stupidity.

Waterdeep has an unusual-shaped coin made of electrum. It has very little value outside the city -- something like 2 sp -- but is worth something like 10 gp in the city. Cormyr's coins have notable kings stamped on them.

I think the book's worth using if you have a Realms game, regardless of edition. Here's the Amazon listing.

Not OP, but check out the board game Massive Darkness.

It's almost always on sale (I saw it for $75 once), and comes with 75 minis. $1 per mini is a good price.

The game comes with enough goblins, orcs, and dwarves (which I painted as Duergar) to play quite a few low-level adventures, and comes with some neat unique monsters and heroes.

And you get a board game too! It's probably the best value I've found, so give it a look to get an instant collection.

My campaign is a sandbox so I'm just building a world, creating conflicts, and dropping the players in to let them pursue what they want. The major inspirations from Ghibli are the conflicts and world building flavor:

• Nature vs Science: Half my world is civilized, half is wilderness. The civilized world looks like Howl's Moving Castle - Victorian, steampunk flavor. Instead of steam, machines and tech are powered by magic and wands are used as arcane focuses. High magic setting, & I added the Lightning Rail from Eberron. I included the homebrew classes Gunslinger, Artificer, and Pugilist to lend to the Victorian vibe. The Wastes in Howl's would be The Wilds in my world, filled with mystical magic and nature spirits feared by city folk. Princess Mononoke's whole plot could be dropped in at the border between the city and the wilds if my players choose to go there.
  
• Spirits vs Technology: My classic dnd monsters & pantheon are all replaced by the blanket term "Spirits". Good and evil spirits draw from Japanese mythology and Shintoism. Totoro is great source for friendly spirits, Bourdain's "Hungry Ghosts" inspired me for evil ones. Or simply use the monster manual. Anything needed beyond that, Monsters of the Orient is perfect. It's easy to repurpose just about every dnd monster & god to this end. Some folks seek power from the Spirits (paladins, clerics, warlocks), some are touched by the Spirits (sorcerers, druids, etc), some can only access magic through study and technological advancement (wizards, artificers, etc).
  
• Good vs Evil: In Miyazaki's films, good and evil are often not so black and white. I'm designing villains like Lady Eboshi - sure she's destroying the forest, but she's doing it because she believes it is for the greater good. It's up to the players to choose their moral standing and "pick a side" - however that decision may not be as clean cut as they imagine.
  
  I love world building and map making, so I'm having a blast populating the world in painful detail. There is QUITE a lot more to it than this, but if you take those core conflicts and sprinkle in some of the plot hooks from OP, you should be good to go have a grand adventure in Ghibli land.

I love the idea about birthdays, I'm definitely gonna steal that.

I've always had a similar thought about made-up calendars. They are often complicated with a bunch of names and dates that need to be remembered. For my current campaign, I decided to literally just use a real-life calendar. I bought a cheap mini-calendar from amazon and have been marking off the days as they pass in-game. This way I can also tell the players "It's February 23rd" and they know exactly what kind of weather to expect, how much time has passed since January 2nd, stuff like that.

I was also very happy with the calendar that I found because the title of it is "Unlikely Friendships", which could pretty much be the name of every campaign I've ever played in.

• Wizards of the Coast disagrees.
  
• Pathfinder disagrees.(I play pathfinder, but all of this is convertable, so I really enjoy this subreddit)
  
• When you read any GM guide and it says "Welcome to a collection of advice and inspiration, tools and rules, designed for a game like none other: your own." So if he wants to use D&D rules to make scifi world, I see nothing wrong with that.

I don't mean to one-up OP here but I thought I'd mention Grimtooth's traps again. A big collection of traps and short encounters that are extremely deadly and unpleasant (as in your party will almost definitely die to them) but are VERY good for inspiration. They were written in the 80s so it's back when D&D was a bit more deadly and characters considered more expendable so they WILL need tweaking. But the traps are described in quite a bit of detail including triggering mechanisms and diagrams for the more complicated ones. They also only rely on very basic spells or are purely mechanical so you can fit them in anywhere. Quite a lot of them are just about fooling the player into killing themselves, which is always fun :D.

I've yet to find a better resource for traps than those books so I thought I'd share :).

This immediately made me think of the fantastic novel by Susanna Clarke Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell wiki
I don't want to go into detail because spoilers. I think I can get away with saying that someone is half-given to a faerie who transports the person magically every night - they end up sleep deprived and no-one can understand why they are so tired and lose all strength to live with. You could certainly spin it around some similarly dark invisible drawback.
I HIGHLY recommend the book. It's also available in a well regarded TV series
Perhaps the pixie might even pass on her 'ownership' as a gift to a higher ranking and more powerful fae Lord or Lady?

I just finished CoS a few weeks ago... easily one of my favorite campaigns. I loved the old 2nd edition stuff and had all the supplements and all the novels. I loved all the little references to the characters and family lines I knew from the novel I, Strahd (which is a fabulous book to read if you haven't already; I, Strahd: The War Against Azalin is also worth it).

So! I didn't want to leave this place either. My players are returning soon with new characters 150 years after the events of the story involving their old characters. I want them to see the long-term changes their old characters made, like how they restructured the leadership of Vallaki. Across the realm, they new characters will explore the changed terrain while the players will be able to recognize the marks their old characters left behind.

You can easily go this route, but there's another option, too, if they're set on keeping these characters. Look up an event called The Grand Conjunction. My memory isn't perfect, but I'm sure there are plenty others in this sub and similar subs that can help you out. Basically, you had to stop the realm of Barovia from bleeding into the Forgotten Realms plane and unleashing its evil upon its inhabitants. The borders of the Ravenloft realms shuffle and open, and other realms like Nova Vaasa, Forlorn, and Borca, join Barovia to form the Demiplanes of Dread properly. There's a 6-book adventure set that culminates in Roots of Evil. This page can tell you more; scroll down to section II.

It's not 5E, but the Pathfinder supplement Dungeons of Golarion gives several themes for mega-dungeons. In particular, the last one, the ruins of a mine overrun by undead, is my favorite description and setup of a mega dungeon that I have ever seen.

The book doesn't detail ready to run dungeons, but instead has a chapter on each dungeon, giving a history/backstory, level descriptions or overviews and some unique monsters or magic-items that can be found in the dungeon. It should be readily usable for 5E or 4E. If you can get a copy it might be a decent source of inspiration.

If you haven’t read Parasite Rex, please do. Lots of beautiful horror inside, and it’s a fascinating read!

I recently started buying a few of these packs:
http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Master-Set-Dungeon/dp/0786955554
but since there are quite a lot of them I was wondering if some could share their experience with these tools and give some advice on which are worth their money and which should rather be avoided?
Thanks in advance!

The old school AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide has some great info in it.

https://www.amazon.com/Official-Advanced-Dungeons-Dragons-Wilderness/dp/0880382910

Pratchett's golems might serve as inspiration, http://www.amazon.com/Feet-Clay-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett/dp/0062275518

While it was written in 1968, Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook is easily convertible to a fantasy milieu. it's the strategy and tactics you want.

I'm unfamiliar with 5th edition and any changes they have done to any campaign settings, so I might say something pretty stupid here.

So, why not go for something that has already been done in the FR setting? You could use the Undermountain, located under the mountain range (and the city of) Waterdeep. There is a 3.5 supplement of Waterdeep, and a 3.5 supplement for the Undermountain (and there is also one for 4th edition, but I have no experience with that one). The waterdeep book is mostly flavor, and you can use the undermountain book for the same reason and simply convert whatever you find interesting to suit your 5e needs.

https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Darkness-Ravenloft-Module-RQ2/dp/1560763531

Sound like this might be what you are looking for or at least might give you some ideas.

> Dragonlance module DR8 "Dragons of War"

Do you mean this? https://www.amazon.com/Dragons-War-Dragonlance-module-DL8/dp/0880380977

Dave and Brett, get out of here.

Relatively new DM here - started last year. Here's my progression of hand-drawn maps. I introduce the maps to the players by selling them through an absent-minded but prolific cartographer. Here they are in chronological order, with descriptions below.

• Farralon, the northern province where the adventure began.
  
• From there I dumped the players into the Plane of Fire in the Azer city of Dar Khalid, where they were briefly stuck when their NPC-supplied transplanar transport device unexpectedly broke.
  
• Next they tracked the shady NPC who screwed them over to The Northemarch, where the crunchy druid and cleric of Eldath got to RP a little more while saving a forest sickened by a Gulthias tree.
  
• The players have yet to see the detailed city map for Frostcrag, the first town they encountered or the Kingdom of Pyr. I got the shape of the kingdom by loading up an old Civ V game and roughly copying the coastline.
  
  Forgive the weirdly truncated scans; I only have access to an 8.5" x 11" scanner, but these were drawn on 9" x 12" paper. These were all drawn on drawing or bristol paper with graphite, then inked. I borrowed a lot of the drawing style of later maps from Jared Blando's How to Draw Fantasy and RPG Maps, which I highly recommend checking out.

This is especially true when times are challenging. It's also self reinforcing.

So say you have two groups that live near each other and get along well. Then there is a famine and people are starving.

Group A starts looking out for their own because they empathize with them more, or they are more closely related, or whatever. They then start to fight over the resources to make sure their group is taken care of. Maybe they steal from the other group or maybe they think (real or not) the other group is stealing from them. You get people just wanting to "protect ourselves" and this idea of us vs. them really sets in. Toss in a few murders or maybe Group A riots and burns down an area dominated by Group B.

Now even after the hard times have passed things can't easily go back to the way things were before. Group B has legitimate reasons to be mad at Group A. They burned down their houses and killed a bunch of their people. Group A knows Group B hates them and is out to get them so they had better act first.

Group A maybe feels guilty about burning so many people alive but some rationalization will help with that. Did you know Group B actually set the fire in the first place and they are just trying to blame Group A? Did you know Group B are all thieves so they only got what's coming to them.

It's very easy for this to spiral out of control and very hard to pull back from it.

If you want to read a book that highlights how badly things can go I'd recommend, [We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda] (http://www.amazon.com/Wish-Inform-Tomorrow-Killed-Families/dp/0312243359)