Not everything that approaches camp is trying to kill the characters. There are encounters that the character on watch may let their companions sleep through.
Roll on the table for your encounter in the night.
1) Pixie Mischief: A pixie sneaks into camp to paint one of the sleeping characters faces. Their magical pigments are permanent until the next new moon. The pixie does not try to hide from anyone on guard.
2) Flight of Light:A flight of migratory butterflies known as the starlight glisten overhead in the moonlight. Those that gaze upon it are filled with inspiration.
3) Satyr’s Lullaby: The person on guard hears a satyr playing its pan pipes before seeing it. The satyr is playing a comforting lullaby that seems to sooth those sleeping. The satyr encourages the person on guard to sleep too. It is willing to watch over them. THe next morning the satyr is gone, but a fresh breakfast has been made for them. They gain 10 temporary hit points from the relaxing sleep.
4) Hungy Bear: A sick and hungry brown bear lumbers quietly into camp looking for food. At any sign of danger it will flee. If the bear is treated with any level of sympathy it will become a loyal pet of the characters.
More poorly thought out yet incidentally useful enchantments:
A flying castle full of fabulous treasure. Unfortunately, the flying enchantment was calibrated to the precise weight of the treasure; any significant decrease in weight causes the whole building to go shooting off into the stratosphere, while any significant addition – like, say, the weight of the royal family – causes it to settle to the ground. The treasure has long since been removed to less finicky storage (and carefully replaced with rocks of equal mass), but the castle itself remains in use as a mobile observation platform.
A river that flows uphill. Somehow it never occurred to the enchanter that a backwards river necessarily originates in the sea; as a result, the water is saline, rendering it useless for drinking and irrigation and playing havoc with the riverside ecosystem. On the plus side, having rivers that go both directions has been a great boon for inland trade.
A forest whose trees bear flawless sapphires of enormous size as fruit. Though intended as a source of boundless treasure, owing to the abundance of the forest’s output and the impossibility of securing its borders, in practice it’s depressed the value of gem-grade sapphires throughout the region, to the point that they’re worth less than common quartz. The ready availability of large, high-quality sapphires has, however, led to enormous advancement in the science of optics in nearby kingdoms.
Having a river that flows uphill is also a massive source of power.
True, though It’s only a better power source than a regular river if the water comes back down again. As I’m picturing it, it doesn’t; the main course continues uphill until it reaches its “source” high in the mountains, where the water completes its inverted cycle by streaming up into the sky, shedding its mineral content in the process and leaving behind twisting spires of sea-salt dozens or hundreds of feet high.
(The salt-maze is a potentially lucrative target for adventurers, if they can survive the environment, as anything that’s been washed upstream eventually winds up there. Watch out for salt dragons!)
Then it’s an incredibly useful source of salt instead. All of that salt in one place, is enough to build an extremely prosperous city around.
Aaand here they are, my first shot at 2D character tokens! What do you think of this 32-piece test run? I had a lot of fun making them, so please let me know if you’d like to see more!
Ever heard of Phase Spiders? They’re a size large ethereal spider tucked away in the very back of the Monster Manual, with the beast statblocks. Why do I bring them up? Well, they have a 6 Int. As seen with Hook Horrors, a creature with an Int of 6 can in fact learn a language.
Why does that matter? It isn’t like an eight foot spider can hold a quill. And you’re right. It can’t. But what if they developed a rudimentary writing system by dipping their super skinny feet into berry juice (as ink) or used their venom as a sort of ink. It wouldn’t be too far fetched. Apes have a 6 Int and can learn sign and use tools.
“But Dryad,” you might be saying, “Why do I care about intelligent spiders?”
And to that I would say, “Sit down and listen, I have an idea.”
So we’ve established Phase Spiders can grasp some form of rudimentary language. Well, they can also see into the Ethereal Plane (because they’re constantly hopping between it and the Material). Let me set up a scenario for you.
A group of adventurers arrive in a town that’s paying monster hunters to slay “evil spirits” in the ruins in the woods. People have been vanishing. These ‘evil spirits’ are gigantic spiders, writing on the ruins. People can’t decipher their writing, and think it’s some kind of evil omen.
Someone kills the spiders. Either the party or another hired group. It isn’t easy. But people keep going missing. There were, in fact, evil spirits in the ruins (perhaps a banshee or a few malevolent ghosts). The spiders could see into the Ethereal, and tried writing messages to warn the townsfolk. The town thought it was the spiders and killed them off, and now they have a spirit problem to deal with.
Why would the spiders bother warning the town? Well, it’s possible they gain some food source or protection from other monsters, with the town around.
Anyways. Phase Spiders.
TL;DR Phase spiders can write and be mistaken for evil spirits.
This is a suite of PNGs to put together your own inn. I recommend mixing and matching with the other PNG kits I’ve put up on patreon, especially Build-Your-Own Inn #1.
I love making inns. There’s just something about creating a nice, warm, cozy spot of refuge amid the often dark and grim settings of a DnD campaign that makes me really happy.
The public release includes most of the PNG basics. My patrons get a few extras that I’ve added in the Adventurer pack, and Knights, as always, get access to my PSD documents for the above content.
I’ve wanted to expand on the Inn-Builder kit for awhile, and while working on the City Tavern map from last week, and designing an “innterior” I decided to expand my efforts into revising/adding to the BYO Inn kit. After all, not all inns look alike, and who says a human inn would look the same as that of a dwarf or a halfling or an elf? What about the difference between a small inn in the country compared to a lavish inn of a major city, or one in the deserts instead of the frigid North?
My goal is, as always, to create a library of resources for DMs that feel appropriate to their setting and theme, and I’ll keep working to expand on that.
Hipsterpotomu5 dnd 