D&D Mechanics Inspired by Heroes of Might and Magic 3

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.

Creature Upgrades

Heroes III is unique among the other games in the series in that pretty much every single creature in the game has an upgraded form. The upgraded form of a creature generally (1) costs more, (2) has improved stats, (3) looks cooler, and (4) sometimes has additional abilities over the standard form.

D&D operates on the same mythological sources that Heroes III does with the monsters it offers in the Monster Manual: everything from demons and angels to griff[i]ns, manticores, pegasi, and dragons have stat blocks; and from what I've heard about D&D 5.5e, the 2025 Monster Manual will have more "groups" of similar creatures of varying power levels. But in the meantime, here is a simple guide to making monsters in your groups stand out:

1. Costs More. Make upgraded versions of creatures rarer than their normal forms. One easy way to do this is to have a group of standard creatures and one upgraded one attack the players. This will make the upgraded one stand out. In higher levels, the players may encounter entire groups of upgraded ones, and the change in the characters' growing power will be evident. And by then, you can just add another upgrade level!
2. 
   Has Improved Stats. Adding a simple +1 or +2 to some or all d20 Tests and damage rolls the creature performs is a simple way to add power to a creature. You might also consider increasing its DCs and/or AC by +2, and if you really want the creature to stand out, add another damage die to its attacks or give it Multiattack. Also, maximize or double its hit points instead of taking the average.
3. Looks Cooler. Possibly most important is to describe the creature as looking bigger, more fearsome, more majestic, more armored, or just more confident than the creatures it's leading around it. A silver-feathered griffin leading some duller-plumaged bronze griffins will stand out for sure.
4. Has Special Abilities. This is the most fun part, and below are some examples taken directly from Heroes III. The important thing for this is to have the abilities be simple and significant, and to make sure that they're used at least once during the battle with the player characters (even if you have to fudge it to keep them alive another round). You can also play around with sim
   ply adding or changing armor or other equipment.

Upgraded Creature Ideas:

• Royal Griffin. A silver-feathered griffon that can use its reaction when struck by a melee attack to make one Beak or Claw attack against the attacker.
• Dendroid Soldier. A gnarled-looking treant that, when it hits with a melee attack, causes roots to erupt from the ground and make the target's speed 0 until the dendroid moves or dies.
• Harpy Hag. A harpy with an ugly face and long gray hair with the Flyby ability.
• Minotaur King. A minotaur with golden plate armor (AC 18) and advantage on Wisdom saving throws.
• Wolf Raider. A goblin boss riding a Medium-size black-furred dire wolf, fighting alongside regular goblins riding gray wolves.
• Ogre Mage. An ogre holding a bone staff and wearing tribal jewelry who can cast bless, bane, and thunderclap.
• Scorpiocore. A red-furred manticore with jagged teeth and milky eyes. Its sting attack deals poison damage and has a chance of paralyzing it targets.
• Storm Elemental. An air elemental with immunity to lightning and thunder damage that deals thunder damage with each melee hit and has a ranged lightning attack.
• Sharpshooter. One wood elf archer among many that has the Sharpshooter feat.
• Skeleton Warrior. A skeleton wearing half-plate armor and wielding a shield (AC 19) and a +1 longsword. 

Combination Artifacts

There are lots of interesting artifacts in Heroes III, but the most interesting ones are combination artifacts. These artifacts are made up of a series of other artifacts in the game, and when one hero collects all of the components together, you can combine them and enjoy a new, usually extremely powerful effect. This new effect is beyond the synergy of the individual items together. 

I think this would be a great way to empower items in D&D in a new way, especially with the limit of three attunement slots. The closest thing 5e has to this is the Hammer of Thunderbolts which, like Thor's hammer Mjolnir in Norse Mythology, only functions with a magic belt and magic gloves (in this case, Gauntlets of Ogre Power and Belt of Giant Strength). You don't need to attune to all three; you just need to be wearing the belt and gloves to attune to the hammer. To me that seems like an elegant way to balance a combination artifact: It only uses one attunement slot, but it uses up several of your item slots, like hands, armor, cloak, etc., preventing you from using them with other items.

It'd be really fun to design some homebrew combination artifacts, but for the purposes of this thought exercise, let's work backward and see how you could use items in the normal DMG to craft a Robe of the Archmagi. Heck, you could make it so that you could craft other rarities of magic items, but combining lesser ones was the only way to get legendary items like this one!

The Robe of the Archmagi has the following properties:

1. Armor class of 15 + Dex
2. Advantage on saving throws against spells
3. A +2 bonus to spell save DC and spell attack rolls

The Mantle of Spell Resistance covers the same effect as effect #2, and having an AC like that for a spellcaster character who normally doesn't wear armor is really close to Elven Chain. I guess it would make sense to just combine those two items into the Robe of the Archmagi, which would give you effect #3 as the bonus, but it would've been nice to have one more effect to work with.

I dunno. You get the idea. I will finally note that these artifacts aren't just with armor and weapons—there are a couple of utility artifacts that work pretty neat together, and if you combined existing "wondrous items" with similar themes into something new, you could have fun with it. For example, what might be created if you combine a Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals, an Elemental Emerald, and a Decanter of Endless Water?

Adventure Locations

This is less of a concept and more just a direct source of inspiration. Heroes III is all about exploring the overworld map and going to different adventure locations, which increase your power, give you resources, and provide adventures and experience for your hero. Here are a few adventure locations on Heroes III with their normal game effects (in italics) and how they could be adapted to D&D:

• Griffin Conservatory. Fight 50–200 Griffins to gain the services of 1–4 Angels. Local lore tells of an ancient cathedral in the forest completely taken over by wild griffins. When you rid the church of its infestation and clear out the nests, you find a deva who has been bound to the church for centuries. Now that the church is no longer desecrated, it can return to the Upper Planes. As a reward, the deva offers you a favor. You can cast planar ally once and gain the angel's services for 1 hour for free.
• 
  Shrine of Magic Thought. Teaches you a Level 3 spell. An order of mages offer a special training downtime activity: After 4 weeks of training, one spell of Level 3 or lower that you know can be permanently learned to be cast without somatic or verbal components.
• Abandoned Wagon. Has a chance of giving you 2–5 resources, a minor artifact, or nothing. You find an overturned wagon on the side of the road. Most of it has been looted, but you do find a random "pack" (explorer's pack, dungeoneer's pack, etc.) with all of its items still in it.
• Tree of Knowledge. Gives you a level up. Has a chance of charging 2,000 gold or 10 gems, or
  giving it for free. A tree with a face speaks to you when you're taking a short rest near it. It offers to offer the wisdom of the ages to you if you bury 1,000 GP worth of coins or gems beneath its roots. This wisdom could mimic the effect of the legend lore spell or give an important secret to the player.
• Redwood Observatory. Reveals the map in a 20-tile radius. A gigantic tree towers over the land with a hut visible at the top. If you endure the arduous climb to the top, you can look around and gain advantage on Survival checks to navigate to any location within 20 miles.

In my free time, I've actually made an entry for every single adventure location in Heroes III and II and used several of them in my own games. I still need to flesh out dungeons like the Griffin Conservatory above though.

Town Upgrades

A big part of Heroes III is managing resources and the growth and upgrading of towns. The different types of towns come with various buildings that help you in different ways, from a Portal of Summoning that lets you recruit creatures outside the town to Brimstone Stormclouds that increase your spell power during a siege. There's even a special structure called a Grail Structure that can only be built once per game on one town, and each town has their own special effect that comes with it.

Since this would be most useful for the new Bastion mechanic, I'll wait until I get the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide and see the final rules for those before I explore this mechanic. Stay tuned!

Special Terrains

One of the coolest things that came with the Shadow of Death expansion for Heroes III (I still remember the wonder of it when I bought it as a sixth grader!) was the addition of 9 different special terrains that maps could have. When battles were fought on these areas, new rules would apply, such as Rocklands that made all Earth spells be cast at the highest level, Cursed Ground that prevented the casting of spells higher than Level 1, and Holy Ground that increased the morale of good-aligned creatures and decreased that of evil ones.

I've been making use of special terrains in my current DM Quest campaign, and it's been a great way to keep my players on their toes! If they're on a certain type of soil, or if the floor in the dungeon has a particular pattern to it, they soon learn that they need to adapt their familiar strategy in different ways. This is a great way to challenge high-level players in particular, like mine, because at higher levels players are nigh invincible and routine attack patterns usually work perfectly well with no creativity. Here are some ideas for special terrains:

• The spells cast over the terrain cost a spell slot 1 level higher than normal.
• All spells of Level 2 have no effect when cast over the terrain and are wasted.
• While on the terrain, healing deals Radiant damage, and Radiant damage heals.
• The terrain causes spells to deal 1d4 Force damage to the caster per level of each spell they cast.
• Good creatures on the terrain are always under the effect of a bless spell.
• All creatures on the terrain have resistance to a particular damage type.

The possibilities are really limitless here, and for D&D inspiration, I would recommend checking out the existing rules that only apply on specific planes of existence in the Dungeon Master's Guide, as well as the "Supernatural Regions" in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.