APRIL FOOLS - Expanded Elemental Bestiary Preview

O frabjous day!  Today marks d20 Despot's 2nd birthday, and its 100th* post!

*ignoring any contentless newsposts

To celebrate, I'm pleased to announce d20 Despot's first print book, available in your local gaming shop soon!  It is titled The d20 Despot Expanded Elemental Bestiary.  A few months ago, I was brainstorming ideas for a mini-bestiary to release as my first foray into the market, and I started thinking about elementals.  Most elemental-themed monsters focus on the big four - water, earth, wind, and fire - with a few delving into stuff like ice or electricity, and the odd one or two dealing with strange para-elemental forces like time or magnetism or gravity.  Then I realized that there are so many untapped elements to bring into the game!  Just as a sneak preview for you, my loyal readers, here's a peak at one of the monsters in this book: the Bismuth Behemoth!

That's some nice art, right?  Kent Hamilton has left us for bigger and better things, so I'm pleased to introduce to you d20 Despot's new artist in residence: Thunderaxe_6969!  I'm finally putting that patreon funding to good use!  Thunderaxe_6969 is an experienced artist, having painted detailed fantasy-themed murals on his fair share of vans.  Now he's a real pro, having done all 120 illustrations in the Expanded Elemental Bestiary - a task which took him weeks to complete.  The results speak for themselves.

Without any further ado, here's the bismuth behemoth!  Afterwards I'll talk a bit about some of the other monsters you can expect to see in the Expanded Elemental Bestiary

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

St. Patrick's Day Monster: Clurichaun - The Drunken Leprechaun

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone!  This is one of my favorite holidays, because I will take any opportunity to make and eat corned beef.  In the vein of past holiday monsters, thought I would share the holiday joy with you, my loyal readers, by creating this holiday-appropriate monster:

T.C. Croker via Wikimedia

Believe it or not, this is the best public-domain picture available for a clurichaun.

The clurichaun (or cluricaune, or clobhair-ceann, or lugirgadaune) is a leprechaun-like sprite from Irish folklore that just loves alcohol and mischief.  Here are some telling quotes from The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, by Patricia Monaghan (2004: Facts On File, Inc.):

Fond of tippling, the cluricaune would steal into wine cellars, especially those belonging to alcoholics, to steal a few bottles.  He was hard to exterminate, for if an owner tried to move, the cluricaune would simply travel along inside a cask.

One cluricaune named Little Wildbeam, who haunted a Quaker family in Cork, was most helpful if a servant left a bit of beer dripping from the cask; he shrank and wedged himself into the spigot so that not a drop was lost.  If the maids did not feed him well, the fairy came out at night and beat them senseless.  

I swear this is an actual piece of Irish folklore and not a 19th century racist caricature of an Irishman.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

Medieval Tournaments on the Tabletop

Spring Tournament at the Royal Armouries, Leeds - photo credit: me

Sometimes you fight people without trying to kill them.  Today, that's called 'sports', but in the Middle Ages it was called a tournament.  Imagine if the winning team in the Super Bowl was the one that kidnapped the most members of the opposing team, or if the winner of the Home Run Derby got a falcon and a sack of gold coins.  Tournaments were a form of mock-combat, ritualized and regulated into a violent and lucrative sporting competition.  So how do you put one of those in your D&D game?  Allow me, d20 Despot and Master of Medieval History, to be your guide to the world of the medieval tournament, including rules for running them at your gaming table.  

Advanced Character Sheet 3.0 for Pathfinder

Download it HERE!
Or if you don't need the Spellcaster or Animal pages, click here!

EDIT: Some people are having trouble accessing the downloads through Patreon, so I have created a public dropbox folder with all of my character sheets HERE.

It's that time of year again - the time I roll out a new and improved character sheet for use with the Pathfinder roleplaying game.*  This one marks a distinct break from previous iterations of the character sheet:

Keen eyed readers will note that this character sheet is sideways.  The idea behind the move from 'portrait' to 'landscape' is that the sheet won't project out onto the gaming surface as much, leaving more room for the battle map on cramped tables.  At the same time, I was able to fit even more stuff on each page!  Fans of my older character sheets will notice a lot of streamlining in design.  Let's dig into it page-by-page and check out all the unique and useful features this character sheet offers!

Monster Monday: Shadhavar - Evil Carnivorous Unicorn

Today's Monster Monday is the Shadhavar, an evil, twisted version of the unicorn.  Shadhavars have rough black hair, poisonous horns, the ability to magically disguise themselves, and a taste for the flesh of the innocent.

Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 764, Folio 10v : Unicornis, via Wikimedia
   

It's really hard to find a public domain picture of a black unicorn that 

doesn't look like a Lisa Frank folder, so enjoy this derpy Medieval unicorn instead.

You know what unicorns look like - just imagine it black and sinister looking.  

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Argonaut - Giant Ship-Killing Nautilus Used as a Living Submarine

Today's Monster Monday is the argonaut, a species of gargantuan nautilus that hunts the vast ocean depths, preying on whales, sea-serpents, and even ships.  Some aquatic races have even learned to control these mighty beasts, modifying the empty chambers of their shells and using the creatures as living submarines.

Photo: Manuae via Wikimedia

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

GotWK Campaign Part 3: Bored at the Board Meeting

This is an account of part 3 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.  

Top row: Face the paladin, Heather the witch, Bjorn the barbarian, Falco the acrobat
Front Row: Rusty the alchemist, Skip the warpriest, Dawne the sorceress, Ash the ranger

The party was understandably pretty horrified that the wizard Ixander Cleve and the railroad were massacring orcs, but there was little they could do against a man who could control what one party member described as 'machine gun golems' - larger versions of the gun sentry they had fought earlier, but armed with gatling guns.  In the end, all they could do was accept Cleve's offer to take the other rescued captives back to Fort Crawdon while the party set off with Deuclair Mining Company representative Hanc Growlon to investigate the Sunbeam Silver Mine.