This is Osvaud. We once gave serious consideration to godhood. I think we were rare because we didn’t assume it was amazing. Unfortunately, most (un)holy books are propaganda puff pieces, so we went more direct to the sources. Basically, we murdered an awful lot of outsiders to learn a few vital secrets.
Oh, that reminds me of a fun fact: a bell doesn’t ring every time an angel loses their wings (that’s the saying, right?). It’s more of a crying/screaming sound.
Today’s topic: the gods, and why they suck.
Let’s say you recall a time before the universe existed, and you personally helped bring creation into being. You didn’t do it for any grand goal beyond alleviating eternity’s boredom (we can totally relate to that). You’ve then proceeded to spend a few brief eons screwing around with everything. You expect that eventually you’ll throw an apocalyptic temper tantrum, but nobody gets to make you feel guilty about it because you sometimes cryptically warn them about it if they take a bunch of drugs.
Different hypothetical scenario. You were born some epically awesome mortal superstar. Maybe you’ve got divine parentage or a mystical butterfly birthmark on your rear. The specifics aren’t important, but basically you get told a lot that you’re the greatest and bestest ever. Those preconceptions then get verified by you waltzing your way into godhood. You ascend to the Outer Planes, ready to accept your rightful place at the helm of creation.
Unfortunately, you run headlong into that first set of entrenched emotionally stunted fossils. The elder gods generally think you are an upstart idiot that needs to shut up while the adults are talking. Used to being at the top of every peer group, you react with understandable frustration. Since you’re a literal god though, this often means crusades, ill-conceived cosmic schemes, and overcompensatingly massive monuments.
Even if one of the newb gods ousts a bigwig, all they do is paint a giant target on their head. They’ve got the other ancients looking to make an example out of them, and their fellow amateur deities thinking they can slip into the vacated spot when the smoke clears. Worse, everybody fundamentally recognizes this, so the status quo almost never truly shifts. Gods seem like the players at the poker table of reality, but it is more like a bunch of doofuses cheating at solitaire.
In summary, the majority of gods are overentitled, unsatisfied, and worthless. Personally, I’d far rather be the bad guy than a plot device. However, that leaves us in an unfortunate position as significantly weaker than a whole bunch of frustrated, self-centered jerks. Luckily, we have a plan if a god ever really starts screwing with us.
You have an army of efreeti simulacrums stashed on a demiplane somewhere. They can simultaneously cast three wishes per day. That should be enough to level a few hundred temples, kill a few thousand clerics, and create the biggest permanent illusion of a skeletal middle finger the Outer Planes will ever see.
Huh. I guess if you ever accidentally ascend, you could totally make that your unholy symbol too.
Writing a Better Homebrew Campaign: When Your World Mirrors Ours – August 31, 2026
Music is everywhere. Our commercials, online ad spots, in our radios, courtyards, arenas, phones, record players, mp3 players, CD players, even our wax cylinders and greeting cards. We are saturated with it, and chances are, your world probably is too.
When Your World Mirrors Ours
If your homebrew is an Austen-era fantasy of manners or a near-future gritty cyberpunk, the music to write, read, and play to is just a few clicks away. For a world that focuses sharply on Georgian and Regency England, you’d be moving through music across the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras. If you’re looking at the years 1714-1820, it’s an understatement to say a lot was happening the world over. Does your world fall firmly in Romantic-era Germany? Erlkönig, Schubert’s musical throne for Goethe’s poem of the same name should go on your to-listen list.
Music says a lot about us and our culture in the moment it’s conceived. Just using Baroque, Classical, and Romantic, you can see sharp sections of inspiration and fierce pushback between these eras as aspects of theater are seen as too, well, baroque, or too sparse, etc.
While from the top down, a lot of what we talk about as “highbrow” art is consistently inaccessible to most in middle or lower incomes, these musical works filter out into dance halls, sketchy theaters, into places we don’t call highbrow. Opera can become pop music in these circumstances, albeit with modified (or entirely new) lyrics in these places. Popular music of the time may be used to tell bawdy spins on Greek tragedy. Music is an art form that is difficult to control.
Change the World, Change the Music
Should your world mirror ours but with extreme historic change, that will change the music in your world. Is Queen Victoria assassinated only a few years into her reign? Do the Crusades end early? Or never happen? Who discovers the heliocentric universe, atomic science, germ theory? Your world’s music can turn on a pin of historic changes, great or small.
Near-world homebrews, where cyberpunk technologies we don’t have yet and the mind-numbing entertainment exploits once confined to the pages of Fahrenheit 451 come out to play don’t play as heavily on themes of musical separation in the same way as past eras. There’s still separations by type of person and music (some men who are fans of female pop singers may not feel comfortable going to their concerts, into a space seen as feminine), by financial difference (music festivals quickly outstrip their original audience in terms of scope, size, corporate participation, and subsequent price hikes), and via the digital divide (not everyone has ready access to digital devices, that access may be uneven in terms of generation of device, where they get their music, etc). In near-world, present or 10 minutes in the future settings, we’re familiar with how divides of demographic influence consumption, the music we seek out, and how we encounter music.
While the blanket of “techno” lies over all music we hear in cyberpunk movies and television, that description is like “classical music” or “Kleenex.” It’s used to represent its original object (techno genre, the classical era, Kleenex brand tissues) and wraps up everything possible that it can in its arms and squeezes them to death. We say “techno,” but we could be more specific by saying electronic music, a general purpose descriptor that isn’t erroneous.
As you look for music genres that convey your world, keep your eye on how it influences and changes across cities, countries, and globally. In a digital age, our music can change in moments. If your players are, say, mercenaries freeing a pop star from his contract because he wants to go darkwave and the label will ice him over it, genre/subgenre differences matter.
Many of us have a scene (or scenes) in our heads of cyberpunk worlds. Mass transit. Sketchy (maybe floating) cabs. Neon and holo everything. Looking for information in a night club. Hacking computers. Hacking phones. A kidnapping from a rave. Falling in love at a luminescent pop concert. That sense of place and world is often built primarily in visuals, but the music matters too. As a creator, it gives you something to follow, like a neon logline. That music will be useful for your players as well, an EDM thread to follow through the labyrinth of your world.
Stars Beyond Our Own
But not every homebrew world does (or should) share our reality. Instead of considering how mundane or preternatural changes shape your world’s music, major and minor can be meters for you to toggle. Music in major key is familiar to many of us. It’s the scales of Western music, it may sound “bright” to us, and minor key may sound “dark.” When a “happy” song sounds sad, creepy, or downright gothic in a cover, you’re likely listening to major-key music being covered in minor key. The reverse can be done, taking “sad” songs and making them “happy.” In a world you’re building from scratch, ask yourself if those keys would serve you well as you write. Is this a place where Western scales make sense and major or minor conveys a sense of mood and embodies what this place is like? Is it, like the covers example, a place where beauty is expressed with sinister overtones, or is it a place where joyful music hides terror?
For even more insights on on how to run your game, check out the many wonderful voices inKobold Guide to Gamemastering.
This is Osvaud. After thousands of years of murdering teams of well-outfitted adventurers, we’ve amassed quite the stockpile of junk. I am pretty sure we’ve got a closet somewhere so precariously stacked with portable holes and bags of holding that it unintentionally qualifies as a magical trap. At this point, anything we stumble into that’s less than a minor artifact isn’t really worth an identify spell, and that darn divination doesn’t even work on them in the first place.
Which brings us to today’s topic: gear. Undead aren’t immune to analysis paralysis.
I know it can be tempting to carefully evaluate what specific rings to wear and staff to carry or which shade of black best compliments the glowing red of our eyes. Don’t let your gear define you. Always remember that you are far more than the sum of your magic items.
You are also a big stinking pile of 9th-level spell slots and the ability to murder people with a high-five.
I bet you can’t even remember the last time you had to optimize yourself. Do you need to carry a staff of power? What are you going to do with it exactly? We both know you basically only want one so you can see the look on a wizard’s face just before blowing him up with ridiculously expensive treasure.
Anyway, the whole concept of you optimizing yourself is silly. There’s a reason you don’t see red dragons wearing cloaks, vests, and armbands. It generally shows a lack of confidence in their basic awe-inspiring power—and clashes with the wings. Heck, it is a bit hilarious having nothing of real value on your person. That way if someone manages to take you out, they don’t even get the pleasure of looting your corpse. However, if we (for some reason) need to impress a bunch of dumb archmages, use this relatively simple outfit. I’m sure we’ve still got a few sets of this crap lying around somewhere.
Few things beat the reliability of a ring of freedom of movement or the versatility of a ring of three wishes. Getting locked down sucks, and if crap hits a fan out of nowhere, it’s nice to be able to alter the nature of reality. Then, a robe of the archmagi (in black or that sweet custom pink number we hemmed) rounds out a lot of the basic protective things. Of course, grab a staff of power. At that point, just throw on whatever random wondrous items are within reach and coordinate with your robe.
That’s enough magic items that you won’t look underdressed in a room full of epicly evil wizards. I swear most fell towers of eternal darkness might as well have a freaking dress code. While every single one of those gatherings is an incredible waste of our valuable time, we attend for that beautiful inevitable day when a dozen trigger-happy narcissists all retributive strike their staves of power at the same time and blow the universe a new black hole.
You just know it’d happen at the one meeting we miss.
Trapmaster: Spike-Eating Pit Trap – August 26, 2026
Spike-Eating Pit Trap
Brushing the flakes of rust from her hands, Mira reached into her pouch and withdrew a wooden spike. Glad now that she had paid the druids of the grove to enchant it, the young rogue carefully tapped it into the seam of the pit trap ahead, ignoring the statues of horrific creatures awaiting her at the end of the corridor…
At the far end of the 10-ft-wide corridor, six stone monsters flank a door, the heads of each of the fantastic creatures regarding the door. Their eyes, fashioned from precious gems, sparkle in the presence of the smallest amount of light. The lower half of each statue appears rotted away. Pitted and crumbing stone hide gives way to likewise corrupted stone muscle and bone. An oversized hourglass dangles from the vaulted ceiling, 12 feet above the stone floor.
At the threshold of the passage, an inscription above the archway reads:
Their eyes turned toward the onward way, they did not see time’s swift decay.
The near end of the corridor has also suffered at time’s hand. The flagstones have lifted and set like poorly maintained cobbles. This damage reveals what might once have been a cunningly disguised pit trap: the seam in the floor is clearly visible.
Close examination of the seam reveals ancient flakes of rust. An aura of strong necromancy radiates from the monstrous statues, focused on the decayed nether regions of the statues and connected to the black sand in the hourglass.
The decor and aura serves as misdirection, seeking to draw multiple creatures into the hallway before the trap triggers. The pit trap is easily spiked, but such spikes pierce the tough hide of an alchemically preserved rust monster corpse. Metal rusts away in 4 rounds, the decay hidden until the last moment: only careful observation provides any warning. As the spikes crumble into flakes of rust, the pit trap springs.
The hourglass pivots in a bracket, draining sand into the lower chamber when the locks on the far door are tampered with. Examination of the timepiece (even before the pivot triggers) reveals that if held parallel to the floor, the sand will not drain into either chamber. A medium or small creature standing on the shoulders of a medium creature can reach the device; using a pole or other object to “disarm” the pivot requires a steady hand.
Spike-Eating Pit Trap
Trap (Mechanical)
10-foot by 40-foot pit trap is obvious, and spiking the trap is easily done. The real trap lies beneath.
Trigger: A successful DC 15 Intelligence (Investigation) check allows a creature to make a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check. On a successful check, the creature identifies the nature and consequences of the rust monster membrane.
Effects: The pit is 60 feet deep, dealing 6d6 bludgeoning damage. On a successful DC 15 DEX save, victims take half as much damage.
Resolution: Climbing out of the pit requires a successful DC 10 STR (Athletics) check. The pit itself takes up most of the room, so avoiding it requires a creature to traverse the walls around it or cross the gap without walking on the floor.
Writing a Better Homebrew Campaign: Linear and Nonlinear Worlds – August 24, 2026
So you want to create your own campaign for your players? You want to craft adventures with thrilling action, compelling characters, and rich plot hooks? With cliffhangers and twists, treachery and redemption, complexity and surprises around every corner? A living, breathing world to explore with your friends? We want to help you do just that.
Linear and Nonlinear Worlds
An understanding of linear narrative structure is something many of us start to internalize as children. A story, regardless of the medium used to tell it, has a beginning, middle, and an end. We start at one point and move forward chronologically until we get to the end. (There’s a pithy quote in Alice in Wonderland about that, when the King tells Alice how you tell a story.)
I could say Three Act Structure is the one ring to rule them all, but I don’t think that’s true. Linear structure, sure. Three Act, ehhh. We can have as many acts as we want! (Assuming we use them right; there’s no points for having eyes bigger than our design stomachs. Wow, that sounded less creepy in my head.)
How Does This Relate to Homebrewing Though?
I don’t think it’s uncommon for us to sit down at a table and expect linear worlds. The world came into being, stuff evolves or is placed there, a species we’d say is on our level come around, and some time after that we’re off to the races. But what if your world suffered a cataclysmic event, and segments of history are lost? The history skips, leaving silent blips or conflicting evidence behind, like half erased hard drives or the testimony of unreliable narrators.
Like the movie Memento, if your world is fragmented, out of order, full of unreliable narrators, it’s still possible to tell a complete story. You just have to violate your internalized rules for what a story (or a world) looks like. This becomes more complex if something like time travel is available, particularly if you use a branching model of time and decisions, instead of a closed loop.
In real life, we typically approach history as a linear narrative, changing our opinions and theories about history as new or additional compelling evidence about events and eras surface—mainly through archaeology and the discovery of new writing or images in archives or private collections. Or in the case of the Cairo Genizah, in a place where texts are stored before their burial.
The discovery of a massive number of graves (insofar as 1855–1935 is recent) during UMMC construction in Mississippi is sourced to the asylum that was once on the site. This sort of event can fit well into a linear narrative (past and present with the past only being interacted with in a passive way) as well as a nonlinear narrative (if player characters discover a mass grave unconnected to known events, their interaction with it becomes fraught and steeped with tension as they try to determine the when, why, and how these bodies came to be, potentially rewriting the history of their world as a new data point surfaces like a beacon in history otherwise branded as lost).
Tools to Help You Track It
For nonlinear narratives, Scapple or Scrivener can be useful to create trees of information for your reference. If you can’t resist old school, ridiculous, but still fun methodology, I frequently use cork boards, 3 × 5 cards, and string. If you want to get granular, you can use different colors of string to code known, unknown, and false information as those points of data branch off of given events in your world histories.
Games like Microscope and Timeline can also get your creative thoughts flowing as you consider how we order historical narratives. If the draw of linear and nonlinear/unreliable world building is hard to choose between, the genre of your world may help make those decisions easier for you (dystopias, and their prerequisite control of information are tailor made for layers of nonlinear and unreliable information when contrasted with the history they’ve erased).
Movies where narrative isn’t a perfect punch of start → middle → end, like The Usual Suspects, Run Lola Run, the aforementioned Memento, and Suicide Kings, are all places to identify what (if any) elements of other narrative structuring you like and how you might apply that to a “bigger” story (like your world).
It’s not a coincidence that crime and mystery are part of those examples. In a mystery, there’s frequently competition between narratives and invested parties, in a way we don’t get in a dystopia. (In a mystery, we frequently see a tightly focused, small story at the heart: a single crime that births others, a single antagonist being picked away at.)
Because of the extreme nature of control and repression in dystopia, most of our dystopias are incarnated as science fiction. If you want to run a homebrew world that’s basically East Germany on a space station in 2070, you can dig into real life history to learn about the claustrophobic omnipresence of that time period. But if you’re leaning more Soylent Green with your dystopic world, you may instead pursue what that world looks like, what it feels like.
By aesthetic decisions that you describe or otherwise convey to players, you put into place what this world feels like to inhabit. The power of fashion history to help aid you in your world building decisions cannot be understated. Find a film whose fashion feels how you want this world to feel, then find the costume designer for it. Follow that designer’s work across other movies, unlocking increasing levels of complexity in the form of visual statements given in costuming.
Our narrative choices are not only about order of events but about the sound and sights and strictures of our world. Those things combined tell us what our world looks like as a Wonderland story, a surveillance state, or a slow-burn noir where nothing is as it seems.
For even more insights on on how to run your game, check out the many wonderful voices inKobold Guide to Gamemastering.
This is Osvaud. What’s the first thing every wannabe dark lord does? Why, amass themselves a big ole nightmare army.
Today we are going to talk about why they are stupid.
Whether it’s a bunch of immoral orcs or crumbling skeletal legions, armies, for some reason, always seems to be step one of everyone’s three-part plan for world domination. Step two is usually marching the dread legions on the last spark of hope and light. Step three then usually gets interrupted by some hand-waved plot twist that probably only makes sense if you’ve been following the viewpoint of a half-dozen unwashed idiot protagonists. It’s like every hopeful bad guy hires the same crappy self-help guru instead of opening a freaking book.
I get the appeal. Who doesn’t want that moment where you walk out onto a balcony and a horde of terrifying minions chants your name? Plus, they seem economical on the face of it. Life is cheap in comparison to wands of fireball, and usually you get a lot of gimmicky discounts when you buy in bulk. You know, like, “Two free trolls with each hundred hobgoblins purchased!” The problem gets to be when you go overboard with it, and everyone always does because bigger sure does seem better.
Oh sure, I know what you are thinking (’cause I’m you, doofus). Undead! Just get a bunch of zombies and skeletons! Heck, then you can always raise the dead from among your enemies! Double army, woo!
Unfortunately, that is simply not how undead work. Zombie hordes are the rotting meat on the bones of clerics and necromancers who gotta keep the mindless morons in line. Plus, let’s face hard facts… everyone always knows to aim for the cackling jackasses in black robes surrounded by fell power.
Then giant armies also always lead to overconfidence, which means bad tactics. Oh sure, you outnumber the goody-two-shoes bastion 10 to 1, so why wait for a year to starve them out… when you can just take massive losses climbing sheer walls while getting shot by elves. So what! It saved time, and it is not like you actually care about the health and morale of a bunch of goblins.
It’s the same issue gamblers run into when they can’t stop tossing coins at a spinning wheel. They’ve already given up so much… so are sure to win. Unfortunately, one big battle doesn’t go your way, and suddenly your epic legion of shadow demons becomes a fond memory. Good luck taking them to the Abyss for a refund.
It’s not like the good guys are going to take prisoners or accept peace negotiations. Nope. They are going to march their pure and shiny butts to the front door of your volcano lair and slap you around.
Finally, having an army means you actually want to march around with them. Worse, in order to maintain your epic villain cred to the point where they don’t desert, you basically need to surround your black-robed cackling tailbone with fell power 24-7. As we’ve covered previously, everyone seems to get a lucky shot in 5% of the time. So even if you’re fighting an army composed of a bunch of venerable commoners with the blinded condition, you are still getting dropped in six seconds flat.
Story
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Out of the Frying Pan: Eyes of the Iron Spike – August 19, 2026
Encounters have consequences. Every slain bandit has friends who will want revenge, and every devil banished back to the Eleven Hells reports its failure to its Dark Lord. What happens when the PCs’ daring deeds come back to bite them?
The following encounter chains are more than just random encounters. Each conflict flows organically into the next, sometimes without even giving the PCs a chance to catch their collective breath. Each subsequent link in the chain ups the stakes, giving the PCs the sense of falling out of the frying pan… and into the fire.
Encounter 1: A Hunt Awry
Recommended Party Level: 2–4
The birches of the White Forest form a natural wall between five nations. Its sheltering boughs have become a safe haven for insurgents and political exiles from the Canton of Melana.
Melanian humans chafe under the rule of dwarven nationalists and warmongers while oppressed kobolds yearn for total revolution. Amid the chaos, a dwarf loyalist group called the Iron Spike has taken to quietly “disappearing” political dissidents. While traveling in the forest, a chance encounter embroils the PCs in this conflict.
Sunlight filters through the White Forest’s leafy canopy, dust from the well-marked trail shining in every beam. The midday tranquility is broken as a monster crashes through the undergrowth. Its serpentine body swipes saplings aside as its catlike paws propel it across the forest floor. The creature tears past in a streak of red fur before you can react, pursued by an elf on horseback. She calls back to you, “Strangers, draw your bows! Take this beast down!”
The elf veteran archer (Tome of Beasts) is named Xi Derina. The beast she’s hunting is a serpopard (Tome of Beasts) that recently attacked her camp. If they get the chance to talk during or after the fight, the elf explains that she is protecting a group of human rebels from Melana, and this monster must have been sent by their enemies.
Depending on the PC’s level, the combatants may already be wounded. If the PCs are 2nd level, neither combatant is wounded. If the PCs are 3rd level, Xi has 38 hit points. If the PCs are 4th level or higher, the serpopard’s attacks also deal an additional 2d6 necrotic damage.
The serpopard was captured from its marshy home deeper in the forest and corrupted by evil magic, as evidenced by its eerie, pure white eyes. It stops fleeing if a PC strikes it and—against its usual nature—turns to fight to death. It targets Xi first and then the nearest living creature.
Developments. Regardless of the serpopard’s survival, proceed to Encounter 2 at dawn of the next day. If Xi survives the encounter, she requests that they follow her back to camp; proceed to Encounter 2 at dawn of the next day. If Xi does not survive the encounter, she may tell them how to find the village with her last breath.
Encounter 2: Pursued by Shadows
The corrupted serpopard was the work of the Iron Spike, and the PCs who killed it are now considered accessories to rebellion. One day after Encounter 1, a team of Iron Spike killers come to put an end to their enemies once and for all.
If the PCs found their way to Xi’s camp, they find a small team of human and kobold revolutionaries, including one human veteran, one kobold alchemist and trapsmith (Tome of Beasts), and 10 guards.
Depending on the PCs’ level and their number of allies, the number of Iron Spike thugs varies. If the PCs are 2nd level, they encounter one dwarf cult fanatic and four thugs. At 3rd level, add one cult fanatic. At 4th level, also add one black knight commander (Tome of Beasts). If the PCs are in the camp, double all Iron Spike forces.
Developments. When the Iron Spike forces are reduced to half, someone shouts for a runner to be sent back to High Command. If the runner escapes, the Iron Spike’s leaders take interest in the PCs; proceed to Encounter 3 after some time. If the runner is captured, she pleads that she was “just following orders” and begs for mercy.
Encounter 3: Enemies in High Places
Recommended Party Level: 4–6
Even if the PCs meddle no further in Melanian politics, the Iron Spike considers them a threat to national stability. Two of their best agents, the human assassin Sofía—a suave, Bond-like professional—and the dwarf mage Thurl—a jovial gambler—hunt the PCs, using poison and necromancy to strike fast and escape.
Depending on the PCs’ level, the encountered assassins vary. If the PCs are 4th level, the dwarf mage Thurl attacks alone. If the PCs are 5th level, the human assassin Sofía strikes alone. If the PCs are 6th level, both killers work together.
Developments. If the PCs kill their assassins, the Iron Spike deems them too dangerous to pursue unless they return to Melana and cease their pursuit. If either assassin escapes, they are impressed with the PCs’ talent and begin shadowing them, perhaps to become an ally.
Writing a Better Homebrew Campaign: Different Ways to Tell Your Story – August 17, 2026
Photo by Miguel Rodríguez
So you want to create your own campaign for your players? You want to craft adventures with thrilling action, compelling characters, and rich plot hooks? With cliffhangers and twists, treachery and redemption, complexity and surprises around every corner? A living, breathing world to explore with your friends? We want to help you do just that.
Let’s look at how to tell your story.
Dutch Angle
A term that stuck in my head during college was “Dutch angle.” A Dutch angle is when a photographer or filmmaker tilts the camera, sometimes just a little bit, to change the angle of the shot.
If you’ve seen the movie 12 Monkeys, you already know what a Dutch angle looks like. James Cole (Bruce Willis) finds himself in a deeply unsettling situation. The camerawork underscores that throughout the film by shooting with a visual field of view comparable to tilting your head to the side.
You bust this out when you want to underscore that something isn’t right, to evoke a feeling of unease, and to play on the viewer’s suspicions. In a homebrewed world, when the story (your world, or the piece of it available right now in a game you run for players) turns to something that brings to mind thrillers, psychological dramas, intrigue or horror, a Dutch angle could help you out.
If you’ve ever given players handouts in your homebrew game, something as simple as a small artifact in a photo or a “throwaway line” in a briefing, you’ve covertly given them a Dutch angle to observe the world. That head tilt will stick with them, lodge in their mind. Something is wrong, their gut says.
But what is it? Are they reading into things, or did they pick up on something they weren’t supposed to know? Dutch angles tie a lot (to me) into the concept of unheimliche, which is one of those fantastic German words which loosely means “uncanny,” but has to do with a secret that should stay that way but didn’t. Things that make “home” into something unfamiliar, these hidden things becoming known and seen.
The Deep Ones in H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Shadow over Innsmouth are an uncanny thing that should be hidden but become known as the narrator learns about his true heritage. To the Deep Ones, Innsmouth is home, and it even has trappings of what we may call home. But for the narrator, the uncanniness of the situation starts outward (the town, the Deep Ones) and doesn’t stop when it gets to him (he will be as them, someday). There’d be some Dutch angles in that story if it played out as a movie.
But going back to earlier, Dutch angles don’t have to be restricted to horror. If you’re brewing a world where players will be spies, any revelations (or even hints) about their mission, agency, who or what the enemy is, the identity of a mole—when things catch on their gut instincts, you can give them that moment to tilt their head.
Hamartia
When it comes to pulling from literary tradition, hamartia could be a fertile narrative to pull from. In the writing of Aristotle, hamartia is a story we’re familiar with: a tragic flaw. As Aristotle describes this heroic figure, a man of distinction, wealth, nobility, we nod along. That guy sounds pretty cool. But his life soon takes a tragic turn—all because of something he did.
Now, we lean forward. This impeccable figure has been brought low by a mistake. An error, one that he made. In your world, that could be a person. A deity. A country, an agency. Hamartia is potent, because a tragedy has been put in motion by someone’s own actions. Their mistakes (at least in Greek tragedy) have enormous and deadly consequences.
Story Boarding
Going back to film, story boarding might be useful for you. When we write a novel, a short story, a comic book, linear narratives are common, containing a beginning, middle, and end. But you’re homebrewing a world, so the kind of outlining for linear story doesn’t work as well. Granted, movies can be linear too, but hear me out.
A story board, even with the most basic stick figures, adds a lot toward your sense of place and helps you decide—as a storyteller—on what’s visually important in this world. These snapshots you sketch out are a story you tell, but where it ends is the moment before your players enter. They’ll interact with the world in its present; their character backgrounds will spill into its past. Like a flood, their input will wash over and change it for the duration of their interaction with it.
But the original world you brought into being, the one that holds its breath right before players enter, it’s still here, in amber, until the next time players enter it. As you open this world to other people, you may go back to that amber, reaching in to rearrange things. And that’s not a bad thing. As we work with our worlds, play with our worlds, put them into other people’s hands, we have chances to revisit our choices. If we make new ones, it just means we saw a frame that wasn’t visible in our story board and decided it was time to pull it into view.
20 dwarven infused ales that might help you survive a dungeon – August 12, 2026
“Gah!”
“Master?”
“Another failure. My attempts to recreate the ancient recipes and techniques of dwarven infused ale have failed again.”
“Why do you attach such import to so small a thing master?”
“Because, mouldlet, I wish to learn. No, more than wish . . . need. The ancient art may be useful to me in my researches…”
The ancient and admirable art of infusing ale with special properties is one that has been practiced by dwarves for centuries. The combination of a (generally) tasty and pleasant drink with a tangible benefit pleases dwarves, who have never shared their secrets.
The ancient art is passed on by word of mouth. To become an ale infuser is a commitment to the art of brewing, and one that requires a special feat to master.
New Feat: Infuse Ale [General]
Through study and dedication, you can brew ale specially infused with unusual properties.
Prerequisite: Dwarf
Benefit: You can brew an infused ale that duplicates the effects of those on the attached list. Brewing an infused ale takes 1 day and requires a successful Profession (brewer) check (DC 25). When you infuse an ale, you must have a sufficient quantity of normal ale (any ale will do although, by tradition, dwarves frown on the use of non-dwarven ales) and have access to a special still which costs 25 gp and weighs 4 lb. Creating an infused ale uses up raw materials that cost 1/2 of the base price.
Infused ale is taken by the quart, and its effects last for 4 hours. Taking multiple doses of infused ale does not stack the effects (although dwarves often do so anyway).After a draught, you must make a CON save (DC as listed) or suffer an ability score penalty for 1 hour or until you finish a short or long rest.
Sample Infused Ales
All the ales listed below cost 5 gp/quart. This list is not exhaustive, nor does it take into account those master infused ales created by revered dwarf brewers and which are rumored to have considerably greater effects.
Infused ale effects are alchemical in nature, not magical.
Tolgruff’s Crag: A thick wheat ale with the aroma of pepper. You have advantage on STR (Athletics) checks. DC 8 (−1 Wis)
Mutter’s Stab: A dark ale with an aftertaste of chilies, You have advantage on CON saves against cold effects. DC 8 (−1d2 Wis)
Gogg’s Folly: A white ale whose taste is reminiscent of winter firesides. You have advantage on CHA (Performance) checks. DC 8 (−1d2 Wis)
Hort Humprutt’s Fighting Ale: A thick, almost viscous, dark ale that smells of iron. You smell like a fight. Treat any CHA (Intimidate) roll you make that is lower than 9 as though you had rolled a 9. DC 12 (−1d3 Dex)
Norg’s Liar: A light pale ale with the scent of apples. You have advantage on CHA (Deception) checks. DC 8 (−1 Dex)
Lompeter’s Courage: A thick ale with the scent of spices and a subtle taste of honey. you have advantage on CHA (Performance) checks when the audience has over 50 creatures in it. DC 10 (−1d2 Wis)
Koddly Sumplugg’s Worm of Misery: This is a watery ale that occasionally has a whole (dead) worm floating in it. Eating the worm is said to be especially lucky. You have advantage on STR (Athletics) checks related to swimming. DC 10 (−1d3 Wis)
Noddy’s Look: A barley ale with an unpleasant aftertaste of salt. You have advantage on WIS (Perception) checks related to taste. DC 8 (−1 Wis)
Dolgrins’ Darkness: A spicy ale that smells of nutmeg, it increases a dwarf’s darkvision (only) range to 80 ft. DC 12 (−1d3 Wis)
Agna’s Revenge: Fortified by this deep brown ale that smells vaguely of chestnuts, a dwarf (only) receives an enhanced bonus to stability, receiving advantage on checks to resist shove or trip attempts. DC 15 (−1d4 Wis)
Slodd’s Sour Syrup: This thick gray ale smells of old stone and damp. You have advantage on WIS (Perception) checks while underground. DC 8 (−1 Dex)
Kark’s Ruin: This curiously flat ale has a slight greenish tinge and tastes of celery. You have advantage on checks made to escape a grapple. DC 8 (−1d2 Wis)
Ludd’s Terror: This amber ale is very strong and has an unpleasantly earthy aftertaste. You have advantage on saves against fear while you can see or hear a goblinoid that is with 60 feet of you. DC 12 (−1d3 Wis)
Old Widow Friendly: This ginger spiced ale has a tendency to bring a smile to anyone’s lips (possibly due to its sourness). You have advantage on CHA (Persuasion) checks. DC 10 (−1d2 Wis)
Mockrim’s Old Crooked Spider: A dark ale with a thick head prone to sticking to imbiber’s beards, this ale also makes ones’ mouth numb and prone to a slight expansion of the lips.You have advantage on CHA (Deception) checks where someone can see your face for 1 hour. DC 8 (−1 Dex)
Ob: Legendary Ob ale is revered by dwarves and rarely encountered. An ale specifically brewed when there are dragons about. You have advantage on saves against a dragon’s Frightful Presence trait. DC 15 (−1d4 Cha)
Harsk Luttmudnam’s Silk Purse: This tan colored ale tastes of blackberries. As well as allegedly making hair on dwarves’ beards grow quicker, you gain double proficiency bonus on saves against poison. DC 12 (−1d2 Wis)
Very Dark: An ale so foul tasting, only a dwarf could stand it, this unpleasant beverage smells strongly of sugary sweat. This stench is particularly unpleasant to goblinoids. You have advantage on CHA (Intimidate) checks against goblinoids. DC 12 (−1d2 Dex)
Wenches’ Apron Strings: This reddish ale tastes initially of stale bread but is often used to cleanse the palate at banquets as the unpleasant taste quickly fades. Its cleansing qualities also make it easier to taste poison as it touches the imbiber’s lips. You have advantage on checks to detect imbibed poisons. DC 12 (−1d2 Cha)
Cairn Gorgest’s Crimson Pity: A legendarily strong ale, Crimson Pity was imbibed by the legendary dwarf fighter Cairn Gorgest as he ventured into the Poison Writhe, a dungeon infested with green dragons, with indescribably foul air. You add 2 rounds to your total amount of time when you hold your breath. DC 15 (−1d3 Dex).
Writing a Better Homebrew Campaign: 4 places to get inspiration – August 10, 2026
So you want to create your own campaign for your players? You want to craft adventures with thrilling action, compelling characters, and rich plot hooks? With cliffhangers and twists, treachery and redemption, complexity and surprises around every corner? A living, breathing world to explore with your friends? We want to help you do just that.
First and foremost, finding your inspiration!
One of the most cited pieces of writing advice is that, to be a better writer, you have to read. It’s solid advice, and in this case, it’s advice you can use for homebrewing your own worlds.
Drifting History
Does your homebrewed world pull directly from real life human history? If so, then your options for books to read are much wider than just textbooks. Those options break down into two general categories: what I think of as “historic” and “contemporary.”
For those historical sources to pillage for ideas, you have surviving archives of newspapers and magazines, cookbooks, fiction published in your era of choice (or carved into stone, depending on era), sheet music, surviving art, diaries, recordings of music or film if applicable, and non-fiction from the era.
For contemporary sources, there’s historical literary fiction set in your era of choice, written by modern authors, academic journals, websites, documentaries, non-fiction books, movies, critiques and analysis texts of the art and people of the time.
Now, when looking at contemporary works, you’re getting a top-down look at the past from the present. It can be very useful, though it doesn’t always convey the language and feel of a previous era, whereas raiding historical sources gets you a more inside feel of that segment of human history. Even if you’re only winding back the clock to an era you yourself lived through, contemporary sources can give interesting food for thought. For the historic materials, your own closet or hard drive likely has a plethora of old movies, music, and notebooks to provoke your memory.
Write as much detail as you like, getting down what’s most important to you (for instance, does your version of San Francisco execute people for walking on the grass?), but be conscious of how much detail your players can take in. If you and they thrive on painstaking detail, then go wild with it. But if you love detail more than your players, present them (of the details you’ve put down) with the ones they’ll find the most useful and intriguing.
When it comes to homebrewed worlds that are clearly cousins to our own, we break history at some point, even if that break is something only PCs become aware of. Basically, by making a homebrew world based on our own, you’re a bit like a wizard. Wizards know the natural world before they go breaking the laws of physics, so as you brew your world that shares DNA with this one, buffing up a little on human history makes you like a wizard. You know history, which allows for you to break, drift, and rebuild it in new and meaningful ways.
One last source of inspiration for you: television, movies, and books set in alternate histories or “secret worlds.” (For this, I’d say a secret world could classify as much of urban fantasy, some fantasy, and some horror; a world where the impossible exists underneath the noses of real life humanity.) For instance, Dark Skies, a 60s-set show about UFOs and shadowy conspiracies, is arguably a secret world. There is a bevy of places to pluck and remake history from. The sources of the world are your oyster, so to speak.
Fiction
This is probably the easiest to tailor source material for inspiration. Our own bookshelves, those of our friends, the local library, and bookstores are good places to start. If you’re making a world of high adventure and epic fantasy, you probably know (and likely own) a number of books that snugly fit those genres. Reading in genre is an excellent first stepping stone.
While you read, note the things you love but also the things that didn’t work for you and why you think so. Did the monarchy make no sense? Was the magic forgettable? Do the elves feel like pointy-eared humans? You’re making a world for players to crawl inside, so anything that doesn’t work—whether breaking with genre conventions or disappointing expectations or something else—can break our suspension of disbelief. If can be helpful to define your own expectations for any given genre to help you make conscious, informed decisions on your execution of your homebrew.
Non-Fiction
Memoirs, how-to, “pop science”, retrospectives, photographic essays, coffee table books, trivia: the chances are, if you go through your home, a friend’s, a bookstore, you’ll recognize the iconic moments referenced in 20th-century coffee table books. Perhaps, you own a few guides to interesting hobbies. Inspiration is, as much as anything, what captures our interest and sparks our ideas. When you walk through a bookstore, what captures your attention on the shelf? Why? Taking a few of those intriguing moments where your attention was captured, you may have something potent on your hands. Perhaps, chemists and seamstresses in your world often share commercial space, or the men who pulled the Golden Gate cables pull through more than just air but aether. Just start with those two questions, what captured your eye and why, and the details may just write themselves.
Music and Theater
Reading everything else we’ve covered so far aren’t the only places to draw from to inspire and fuel your world. Music does incredible things to set the mood of a party, a movie, a montage. We’ve internalized things about how the story will go in the next few beats from music. With theater, we have a sense of what a three act (or more) performance will do in term of the arc of the tale. Ideas for creation myths, red light districts, or the recent politics of your world can be found in music and theater. Whether it’s the lyrics, the sound, the way Act II makes you breathless. There’s a reason a lot of people think of Shakespeare when they think of theater. His plays have become icons, the characters familiar.
For even more insights on on how to run your game, check out the many wonderful voices inKobold Guide to Gamemastering.
