Hello there!
I only make posts for important releases, so you might have missed some of the smaller bits of content from this month – so here they are, in one short, easy-to-digest post:
1 – Simple Mass Combat
In the past, I’ve talked a bit about how I like to run mass combat in D&D, which is:
- Rarely (maybe once or twice per campaign, tops)
- without having to digest 300 pages of rules (because I don’t want an entire book for something I’m going to do once or twice per campaign)
Using swarms of humanoids is a pretty popular solution: this allows the player characters to contribute meaningfully to the battle, all while keeping things simple. It’s usually something inspired by games like Total War.
This is my take on it. Rather than having one stat block be named “undead infantry”, another “human infantry”, another “elven infantry”, etc…, you have one stat block named “infantry”, and then a list of potential bonus traits that you can add to the stat block to get across the aesthetic of the one particular army featured in your story.
You can find Simple Mass Combat here: https://trekiros.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/simple-mass-combat.pdf
2 – Darel’s Wager
This spell takes a different, more exciting (?) approach to magic missile, which should be perfect for wild magic sorcerers, divination wizards, and Gambit cosplayers.
The idea is, you can choose for this spell to deal low damage reliably, or deal high damage unreliably. How greedy do you want to be? That’s entirely up to you.
Due to this involving an ability check, things such as guidance, bardic inspiration, enhance ability, etc… Can all be leveraged to increase the spell’s damage output.
3 – Battlemaps!
I have added a new section to the website: battlemaps! Right now, the section contains three maps which I had already published on other platforms, but it will receive new entries every now and then:
- The Golden Parrot, a pirate tavern made from a landlocked ship
- The Shark’s Finest, a pirate tavern (again?) build into a cliff face
- The Red Rocket, a post-apocalyptic diner and scav hideout from Fallout
4 – Unearthed Arcane
Arcane is cool, which should be news to absolutely nobody at this point, and even if you don’t run a game in Runeterra (I certainly don’t), we all know that DMing is just stealing from so many stories the players aren’t able to tell anymore. The characters from this show are at once emotionally complex and aesthetically grokkable, which makes each and every single one of them prime BBEG material for your own campaign, provided you change a few names here and there. So I turned the main cast into D&D stat blocks.
Note that these stat blocks do not attempt to reproduce the mechanics from the game (which I haven’t played since 2012 myself, heh), but rather, to be good/usable stat blocks in and of themselves… All while sneaking in a few cool references (try to see if you can find them all!)
Each character’s intended role:
- Jinx: glass cannon. She will get downed within a round or two, but will take down everything and everyone you hold dear in the process.
- Vi: tanky bruiser. You cannot keep her down, and whatever punishment she takes, she gives it back at the first opportunity.
- Caitlyn: sniper/turtle. She’ll start combat 300 feet away from you, and you’ll probably die before you reach her.
- Jayce: warlord. A leader in battle, who controls the battlefield and boosts allies.
- Ekko: fighter with time-magic. Ekko seems to break all the rules, but somehow everything fits right into place… Like clockwork?
You can find Unearthed Arcane here: https://trekiros.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/unearthed-arcane-by-trekiros.pdf
5 – Atom20
Last, but certainly not least, this might be a design blog specialized in D&D 5e, but I am also a dev and I also toy with other systems every now and then.
Atom20 is a Chrome extension (yep, you read that right), which lets you bind Roll20 to a character sheet or a bestiary you’ve made on Roll20. If you’re familiar with the Beyond20 extension, same thing, but replace DnDBeyond with Google Sheets.
Now why would you want this? Well, it boils down to the fact that a spreadsheet is an extremely versatile format. You could make a character sheet for virtually any TTRPG system ever. And even if you stick with D&D 5e, if you want to introduce new mechanics such as a “martial” skill or a “luck” ability score, this might just be the easiest way to do it.
Modules are the main reason people cite when they talk about why they’ve moved from Roll20 to FoundryVTT – hopefully, something like this can tip the scales in the other direction and save you $50!
You can find a demo of the extension here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDxu5V5PWr8
And you can get the extension over here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/atom20/bgnbdhlpicccdnhhpihcpccejngaionp
If you do end up using this extension, please make sure to throw some feedback my way so I can improve it in future updates!
What comes next?
As you might have noticed, the heist one shot I had announced would come as a bi-weekly release has been delayed a bit, due to various factors (I got sick for two weeks, it was a bigger project than I thought it would be, and then Super Crooks on Netflix made me re-evaluate the plot because it was that cool at being a heist anime…)
It is still coming, but I will only release of the three heist one shots. Good news though, that means the level of polish for this thing will be off the charts, as I will be able to put all of the cool ideas I had for the three plots, and put them all into one.
Besides this, if you stick around, you can expect:
- More free content, similar to what is listed above, every single week!
- Home-Field Advantage, a 200-page compendium of lair actions for over 320 existing D&D monsters! (later this year, January 2022 maximum)
- CharActor Studio, a web-based 3D character creation tool, with VTuber technology to apply a face-tracking and a hand-tracking algorithm to your D&D character (coming on Kickstarter Q1 2022)
Content wrap ups from previous months:
Trekiros 