Sean Does Games

Here's another gnome NPC to use in your campaigns. Enjoy! Sourwind Hedskor (sour-WIND HEAD-score) “Separately, any one of these components could strip the skin off your face in a heartbeat. Combine them in exact proportions and you get a bracing beverage that will tickle your nose and make you the life of any party. Wait! Did I already add the toe-wort?" Sourwind (NG) is an awkward, 52-year-old, female rock gnome who channels the energy that most gnomes spend on socializing, eating, and pranking into alchemical research and experimentation instead. She runs a cluttered alchemist’s shop called Potions Plus where she concocts a variety of intoxicants, restoratives, fragrances, and other alchemical curiosities. Some are effective. Some are hokum. A small number are quite popular and always in demand. Almost all were accidental discoveries. Sourwind and her siblings all suffer from silent but particularly foul flatulence, the unfortunate result of an unwise prank he...

Image credit: Joel Thomas, Races of Stone , Copyright Wizards of the Coast (2004) I really enjoy the D&D 5e combat system. It’s streamlined, easy, and quick. Perhaps more importantly, a character has a host of options at his/her disposal for actions to take. It’s only drawback is that play time can be taken up waiting for players (myself included) to decide what they’re going to do next. The same can be said of the magic system (though some classes, for me at least, seem more complicated than others). Having played through numerous fight sequences, there is one glaring shortcoming that I can’t get past. All of those options really are isolated to a single character engaged in a single action that they take by themselves on their own turn. There is very little available in the way of character cooperation during combat. Sure, there’s Pack Tactics, Sneak Attack, and a few other features available to some creatures and classes but these are mechanics that offer passive bon...

I know I'm usually all about gnomes, but I'm trying something a little bit different with this post (while still being semi-related to gnomes). This is a goblin bard. She's an NPC I've used in my campaigns and with me now playing a goblin bard in another game I felt it was time to breathe some more life into this character. So, I hope you enjoy this one. Shoor Purdi ( SURE per-dee ) "The rhythm is gonna get you, one way or another.” Shoor Purdi (CN) is a frenetic, 24-year-old female goblin whose visceral drum performances inspire goblin forces and intimidate goblin foes. Purdi was born into the Lashers caste of her tribe where she quickly took to the drums used to communicate orders during combat. That talent was battle tested when a gnome horde blitzed the tribe in a vicious attempt to wipe it from existence. On that day, the stress of combat, her desire to save her tribe, and her hatred for the gnomes who were slaughtering her people awakened a wellspri...

The following is a table of random events that I use in my Skyfell campaign to build a little more depth into the setting. The table includes five different areas: city, town, village, rural, and wilderness. I do not have a “kingdom” category because, ultimately, any event occurring inside a kingdom will happen in one of these five locations. City, town, and village are per the description in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Rural is a sparsely populated area with no centralized settlement or governing body to speak of. There might be a location where the locals gather, such as an isolated temple or tavern, but otherwise the few folks living there remain mostly to themselves. Wilderness is not settled and is perhaps even unexplored territory. It’s where truly heroic adventures are found. I generally treat these as in-game, monthly events where one event takes place in each area that either affects the player characters or that the player characters care about. For example...