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It's hard to believe it's been almost 5 years since I was playing Descent Into Avernus with a D&D group I'm not even in contact with anymore. I created these Infernal War Machine tokens as a way to make the machines easier to identify, fitted to a grid so that the player characters can man the helm and various weapons the machine has.
Merry Christmas! Here are the differences I found in Mickey's Christmas Carol:
You are awarded a Bastion when you reach 5th level. During downtime, you can invest gold into your Bastion to upgrade it with new facilities and services. At the end of a downtime, you can choose a number of available services equal to your proficiency bonus and gain their effects until the end of your next adventure. You can gain multiple uses of the same service unless otherwise stated. See the original post here.
The church is a place of worship, divine revelation, and spiritual protection where the faithful gather and miracles are performed. As an acolyte, you can use your Church to bless yourself and your allies with power from the Upper Planes.
Despite what the almighty Wizards of the Coast proclaim, and even though it's kind of backwards-compatible with 5e, the 2024 update to D&D is a new edition. Its changes are significant enough, and the phrase "the 2024 version" is clunky enough, that I'm just going to refer to it as 5.5e. Or "five-five."
Anyway, I got the 5.5e Player's Handbook for my half-birthday this year, and for the most part I'm very impressed. I'll save any further elaboration for the specific points below.
Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete is and will be one of my top 5 favorite PC games of all time. It's epic. It's timeless. Its music never gets old. It's like the best board game ever invented and put into computer game form. It has an awesome map editor.
I've been on a Heroes kick this past month, and as usual, D&D has been on my mind and has been looking for inspiration. Heroes of Might and Magic III has some great mechanics that could be inspiring for D&D ideas.
In 1997, Sierra released a PC game called Lords of Magic. It was really hard, had some awkward bugs, and in general was forgotten among most of the PC gaming community, but it was an amazing game! The setting was classic fantasy, divided into eight faiths: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Chaos, Order, Life, and Death. Each had a different primary race makeup and personality, and each was organized into champions (warriors, mages, and thieves), cavalry, infantry, ranged, scout, three levels of mythical creatures, and a legendary creature. I always loved the unique interactions between the barracks, the thieves guild, the mage tower, the capital, and the Great Temple of each race. Each race also had its own set of spells and artifacts, all of which fit their respective faith perfectly.
In the 2000s, several fansites were made for Lords of Magic, but the sites have since gone the way of all Geocities sites and are hard to access now. So I made my own!
