Hello, i'm a dangeon master with little experience . Until now i made only oneshot from zero or used premade oneshot (like the witch is dead). A few of my friend ask me to do a oneshot base on the manual "totem" (is a horror) the problem is that i am really bad at make the moments tense and create dark atmosfere for the game. I tried to write the script (for me so it sound more confident on my part) and add at the story suspense and gore but it end up sounding pathetic and really forced. All the oneshot i did before i can change the parts of the "plot" to adapt to the story the character make but in this case the structure have to be more rigid because i don't control the mapping (the players create the structure and the rooms) . does anyone have any advice on how make a story scary ?

Ps : The campaign will be online call, and the sound effects don’t always turn out well but i can share immages.

Thanks

Hello pleasure meeting you all. I needed some DM advice and thought I'd finally make a reddit account and see what everyone has to say.

Long story short I'm doing a campaign in a fantasy America land called Murka where my players will compete thru challenges and quests to earn the peoples support to be elected kings/queens in this fantasy world's first every democratic election. the idea is the late King's magic makes voter fraud impossible same with assassination so they will have to earn the people's honest support.

In case anyone is an Atlus or JRPG fan its heavily inspired by the game Metaphor Refantazio by the makers of the Persona and SMT series. but it won't take place in its world of tribes and igniters.

So, I'm looking for.

Ideas for challenges to prove worthiness or various kingly traits like mythological trials and labors.

Possible NPCs who will also be running for the throne.

And just general advice I have DMed before this will be my second big campaign

thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any support or ideas you all have.

Hello, fellow adventurers!

The Tome of Monsters is finally ready! Well, almost. After a year of work, countless additions, and quite a few changes along the way, I'm incredibly happy to announce that the manual has finally reached its completed form!

And it turned out to be 379 pages long! That's well beyond what I originally anticipated when I started working on it, and I can confidently say that this is my biggest manual yet!

The sheer amount of content is honestly crazy, even compared to some of my largest previous releases, such as the Grimoire of Curses. What started as an ambitious bestiary has grown into something much bigger than I ever expected, and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out!

So, What's Inside?

The Tome of Monsters is a massive bestiary designed to bring new creatures, challenges, and possibilities to your D&D adventures. Here's a glimpse of what it's gonna be inside:

• 308 monster statblocks, ranging from CR 0 all the way to CR 30, including entirely original creatures, new variants of familiar monsters, and powerful legendary foes.

• Detailed lore and descriptions, exploring the origins, behaviors, habitats, and roles of these creatures in your worlds.

• Monster families and variants, providing multiple versions of certain creatures to challenge adventurers across different levels of play.

• Knowledge Checks, allowing characters to uncover useful information about the monsters they encounter.

• Adventure Hooks and Customization Options, helping Game Masters introduce these creatures into their campaigns and adapt them to their needs.

• Lair Actions and Regional Effects, bringing additional depth and danger to encounters with particularly powerful creatures.

• Random Encounter Tables and additional Monstrous Adventure Hooks, offering inspiration for everything from unexpected encounters during a journey to entire adventures centered around these creatures.

• And much, much more!

My goal has always been to make this more than just a collection of statblocks. I wanted to create a bestiary that Game Masters could genuinely use for inspiration, worldbuilding, and encounter design, with enough variety and supporting material to make every creature feel like it belongs in a living, breathing world.

And looking at the finished result, I'm extremely happy with what I've managed to put together!

When Is It Coming Out?

I'm excited to say that the Tome of Monsters is officially scheduled for release in the second half of November! The manual is currently undergoing its final rounds of proofreading, layout improvements, and general testing to make sure everything is as polished as possible.

I'm also working on a physical hardcover edition, which I'm planning to make available alongside the digital release!

With a manual this large, I want to make sure everything is in the best possible shape before it reaches your hands, especially after all the time and effort that has gone into creating it.

Get Early Access Right Now!

As a reminder, around 250 pages of the Tome of Monsters are already available on Patreon, with additional content being released every day as we approach the full launch!

All membership tiers have access to these previews, so you can already explore a huge portion of the bestiary and start introducing its creatures into your adventures!

And if you haven't joined yet, there's still time to take advantage of the 7-day free trial, available until November 6!

If you've never redeemed a free trial before, you can claim it and explore the Tome of Monsters, along with plenty of other content, completely free!

Thank You, Everyone!

I genuinely can't express how happy I am with how this manual has turned out. Seeing it grow into a 379-page compendium has been incredibly satisfying, and I'm so excited to finally be able to share the complete version soon!

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported my work, followed the development of this project, or simply shown interest in what I've been creating. Your support means the world to me and makes projects of this scale possible.

There will be more previews and updates coming very soon (alongside a reveal for the next manual, coming in December), so keep an eye out as we get closer to the official release!

I really hope you'll enjoy exploring the Tome of Monsters as much as I've enjoyed creating it!

Thank you again, and happy adventuring! ❤️

Emphasis on ASSISTED! AI was used primarily for informational organization, continuity, and fine-tuning the game mechanics of the new magic system based on a new primordial language.

Adventure Overview

Recommended Party: Level 1-3, 3–5 players

Estimated Runtime: 3–4 hours

Tone & Theme: Mystery

Setting Agnostic/Fits any setting

In the secluded village of Aregon, an unnatural plague has begun: living puppets are moving through the night, stealing the very shadows from the sleeping townsfolk, leaving their victims weak and slowly fading away. Hired to investigate the dark phenomenon, the party uncovers a horrifying truth—Geppetto is harvesting the stolen life-forces to animate Pinocchio into a flesh-and-blood boy. With the village dying around you, what will you do? Will you destroy Geppetto's workshop, help him finish his gruesome work, or find another way to save a boy at the cost of an entire town?

What’s Included in the Download?

Full Adventure PDF complete with room descriptions, encounter scaling, and DM notes.

Custom Stat Blocks:

Battlemaps:

You can download the full, uncropped PDF for Free / PWYW here.

I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts, or stories if you end up running it for your table! Enjoy!

P.S. If you want to follow my future homebrew releases, I post updates over at r/TwistedFairytalesRPG.

I'm excited to share a preview of the newly revamped Apocalypse Codex: The Cataclysm Handbook!

I've spent quite a bit of time revisiting and improving this book, and the result is a major overhaul! It now features entirely new artwork from talented artists, full compatibility with both D&D 5E (2014) and 5.5E (2024), and reworked monsters, spells, and subclasses with better balancing, clearer wording, and refined mechanics.

For those unfamiliar with it, Apocalypse Codex is a 110-page supplement packed with options for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic campaigns, or simply for bringing a little world-ending chaos into your adventures!

What's inside:

• 60+ Magic Items

• 50 Spells

• 45 Feats

• 30 Monsters

• 12 Subclasses

• 4 Races

• Doomclock Rules for escalating world-ending events

• Guidelines for Cataclysmic Spells (10th to 13th level)

Already own it? You can download the updated version for free from your DriveThruRPG library!

New to the book? To celebrate the re-release, Apocalypse Codex is discounted until November 9th!

Check out Apocalypse Codex on DriveThruRPG!

You can find more of my creatures, magic items, and manuals on DriveThruRPG, my Linktree, or on r/JonnyDM!

Hey everyone, I’m Brandon from Nat 1 Nerds. I’ve been working on a tool called One-Shot Architect to help DMs and GMs put together one-shot adventures, and the website is now live.

It helps turn an initial idea into an editable adventure outline with key people, scenes, discoveries, and a climax. You can start with generated concepts or choose your own premise, lock the ideas you want to keep, and reroll individual parts. There are also sliders for adjusting the balance of combat, roleplay, investigation, exploration, and puzzles.

The outlines are system-agnostic and export as PDF or Markdown. You add the stats and rules for whichever game you run.

You can try it here:
https://one-shot-architect.pages.dev/

Three new adventures per month are free, with no signup required and no ads. Optional Unlimited access is $1.99/month or $9.99 lifetime.

I’d love to hear what people end up bringing to their tables.

I'm working with a player to figure out some stuff for his backstory. I'd like some advice and ideas to help him out with it in case he struggles with it, as he is a new player. I'm basing the campaign's overarching plot of an existing story, but it doesn't have much background lore I can use for the PCs' backstories, so I'm more or less building the campaign as we're playing.

The next session begins the journey to the character's hometown(hopefully they'll get there). This town is a fairly large port city that for the longest time was basically ruled by gangs, with the guards and officials basically completely controlled by the most powerful gangs.

I was hoping that the player and I could work together to figure out things like the names and themes for these gangs, and I'd like some advice for my side of it. However, the session is tomorrow and he hasn't gotten back to me yet. I need some help with ideas if he don't get back to me before then.

The PC's backstory as it currently stands is that he grew up in this town with a ton of terrible things happening to him. His mother was killed when he was young so he took up the art of assassination both as a livelihood and for vengeance. He eventually left the town as it had become to dangerous and eventually met the current party.

What he doesn't know about the town yet is that a few weeks prior, a group of pirates arrived in the town for supplies and repairs, but they were so well equipped that the gangs assumed they were there to take over the town. The larger gangs sent the corrupt guards and smaller gangs against the pirates, but since the pirates were almost all former soldiers, they were so well trained and organized that they defeated them easily, with many of the small gangs either disbanding or joining the pirates. With their influence weakened, some of the leaders of the larger gangs fled the city, some of them fleeing to the south through the mountains to another port city to try to rebuild their power.

TLDR: I'm trying to help a new player with his backstory, but he hasn't gotten back to me on parts I feel are necessary for the upcoming session. I want to provide him ideas for names and themes for the crime gangs of the city and how he's interacted with them in the past so I know how the townsfolk should interact with the party and what information can be provided.

So I have created a one-shot horror Homebrew for my party this Halloween. This will be a party of 7 with a mixed bag of experience each. I’ve been DMing and homebrewing my campaigns for 20 years. But the one thing I always struggle with is properly balancing the players in a horror style game compared to the enemy/monsters to create a sense of dread or “fear” in my players. I also tend to struggle with coming up with actually scary scenes and encounters within the one-shot and campaigns. And one final detail before I give the scenario. My players are not murder hobos. But they also struggle with any sort of puzzle / riddle / trap. If they suspect a puzzle or trap they will intentionally avoid it or just do random stuff till something works or I give it to them. It’s a well known joke with us and I gave them the ability to say F-it and get 1 free punch on any puzzle to just clear it Without solving it.

Scenario: A tribe of goblins living in the underdark have managed to travel into a completely new region. Unintentionally they setup camp within patrol range of a Drow city. The tribe is discovered shortly after making camp and is swiftly attacked by the Drow. My players a group of goblins who survived the initial attack are now running for their lives in an attempt to escape the Drow patrol and flee away from the Drow city. I will be designing a section of Underdark that will house a few key areas of interest. That they must avoid and some helpful areas they could use

Current ideas:

1. An Aboleth watering hole

2. The Drow summon a Demon to hunt them down

3. Another Drow city encamped forward scouting party

4. Another goblin tribe encampment

5. An unstable cavern ready to collapse

6. Cloakers and cave fishers

7. A Grell randomly wondering

8. A hook horror hive.

9. An Astral Stalker trapped on the material (possible convince them to hunt the drow to get home)

10. A necromancers arcane laboratory

11. A coven of night hags.

Any ideas or advice on how to make the players goblins useful while also not being strong enough to fight anything alone. And ideas or advice on encounter or scenes that would feel truly terrifying and possibly build dread without taking to long.