#dnd-4e — Public Fediverse posts

Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Foh-lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd

There is a timeline of empires on Bidestra. There was the First Elves’ attempts to own it; there was the Tiefling Empire, if you believe in it. There was the empire of Fuszaint, the most recent one, in its miserable decline. But before Fuszaint, there was the first great Human Empire, the empire of the creatures known now as Ogres, Ogre-Magi, Hags and their ilk; it was the Empire of the Urd. What it was, though, is not as important as what remains of its greatest seat, its capital, its palaces; for they are gone now, torn apart by nature itself, stripped of its identity, and returned in safe pieces to the loam that they once polluted. This is what remains. This is the land that outlasts empires, the trees that do not need anyone to speak for them, and the great regrowing that must be done to restore the scarred land. This is Foh-Lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd.

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How To Be: Rimuru Tempest (in 4e D&D)

Isekai is an overcrowded genre of media in which a few works stand tall. Some of them are just enduring classics of the form, things like Escaflowne and El Hazard, works that served to crystallise a genre. Some have been successful beyond all reasonable ken, like Sword Art Online. Resultant from that has been a whole diversifying ecosystem of isekai stories that expand on the narrative wishes of their increasingly specific wants. As an example, the want to not go to work, and suddenly being hot enough to be voiced by Miho Okasaki.

That’s right, it’s…

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Honaj

https://cobrinseil.invincible.ink/nations-of-cobrinseil-honaj/

Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Honaj

Let me take you afar to a wonderous placeOf sunshine and flowers and sands,Where the land has a scar cut deep in its faceIt was broken, and yet it standsWhere water is bitterAnd honey is sweet,And the blade of the prince gleams brightDock your boat, come ashore,Have a drink, have one more!And begin your Honaji new life~!

Basic Island, by Mark Poole (Source)

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4e Druid Stuff (That I Just Made Up)

I make no secret that one of my favourite character classes in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (the best edition) is the druid. After a 3rd edition period where I feel that bringing a druid to the table and using it to its utmost is basically a kind of social cruelty, what with how powerful they are, the druid of 4th edition had a lot to live up to, and it couldn’t. Instead of trying to replicate 3rd edition’s quite frankly ridiculous panoply of powers, the 4th edition Druid instead is designed to be an interesting class about as powerful as the other classes which can do interesting things in its own right.

You know that thing about how when you’ve been the recipient of overwhelming privilege, any cessation of that privilege feels like oppression? That. Wizards and Clerics got it too, but fuck them. I like Druids so I’m talking about Druids this time.

The Druid of 4th edition stripped the concept back to its studs. A druid in 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is a nature-themed spellcaster who can turn into an animal-like form, and each form is equally capable of doing things to fulfill a role on a team. The druid can be seen as a binary of in and out of wild shape, and out of wild shape, they’re basically a spellcaster. In wild shape, they are a secondary role, which is usually something like an off-defender or an off-striker. This made some people unreasonably mad, because multiclassing to add healing to a druid was an affront to their moral senses I guess.

I get pretty defensive about the 4th edition Druid, but that’s not to pretend it’s perfect by any means. In the effort to take care of things and ensure that the Druid doesn’t start climbing up the tower of its previous power, the writers glowered at it and showered it with options that were just… a little… sour.

I think that the 4th edition Druid, as much as it’s a class I love and works fine, could do with a little help in choice support, and maybe some of the options available to it are a bit crap.

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4e: Technical Seams

Every single time I hear people describing the wording of a 5th edition magical spell or a 5th edition character ability I feel like I’m listening to the fall of an empire and it’s because there was something that the game had solved and was good at that 5th edition seems to have wanted to throw the hell away. That is technically written rules.

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How to Be: Frieren (in 4e D&D)

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an anime about what happens after an adventure is over and the player character with all of their level 20 powers wanders the world keeping their brains from being pickled by the feelings of losing all your friends. It’s a well-regarded, critically acclaimed series, and it’s clearly resonating with a lot of people. It’s a story about grieving and loss and finding your own purpose, as well as a story about connecting to your own emotions, and recognising the way your own life can pass by you.

It is also a story about a petite smug elf who turns into animated gifs really well.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Winaleon (and Aazum)

It’s always a lovely day in Winaleon. The bees are buzzing, the fields are growing, the coin is flowing. Winaleon, Winaleon, beautiful Winaleon, with its golden days and its golden words. Winaleon is the safest place in the world, a land of gentle slopes and careful lawns, all tended and cared for, so that the children of Winaleon have so safe an upbringing that not even night itself dares touch them.

Winaleon is a land so perfect that the sun never sets on Winaleon.

Ever.

Art by Jeremy Paillotin, Shire Terrace (MTG)

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4e: The Paladin’s Engagement

Ah, the Paladin. Derived from the term, originally, of palantine, it’s interesting how these days it’s used to refer to a virtuous and usually, religiously empowered knight in heavy armour. Interesting given that its origin point was from a term for palace guards, the people closest to the king and inevitably, the kind of people you have to route around in a dramatic conclusion to a story when you’re storming the castle to interrupt a wedding at the last possible moment (but hopefully it’s the kind of story where it all works out in the end).

Perhaps I’m thinking about weddings, though, because I’m thinking about the Paladin outlined in the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. They are, after all, the kind of character that first and most thoroughly introduced the idea of maintaining an engagement. Thanks to their power, Divine Challenge, they were, in a way, the most romantic of the Player’s Handbook 1 Classes.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Xwera

Are you free?

I ask you this, I ask again, are you free?

If you live under a king, if you live for coin, if you live for a church, then are you ever truly free? You can be free to taste the boot above you, but are you free?

Can you take your weapon and your wits and walk into the wilds and make your own way, know your own self, and share in your spoils without anyone demanding or commanding how it should be done? Can you call yourself free when your own death isn’t even something you can trust, and where you might just fall because a guard or a thug or a brute took a liking to hurting you? Don’t you want the purity, the honesty, of knowing your death comes from the quarry you hunt, that you did something wrong, you slipped at the wrong time, that you weren’t as good as you thought you were, and that your death is something you deserve and that you chose?

Come to Xwera.

Be truly free.

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How To be: Sherlock Holmes (In 4e D&D)

In this project, there’s always a challenge presented by every character. Even when the character straight up ports from a piece of media based on Dungeons & Dragons there’s always going to be something that comes in the translation that has challenges going back. Usually, the problem is one of specificity, where the character is represented in a particular form that can be very clear, with fine detail — a high resolution image, as it were. If a character can leap twice their height and do a diving bomb attack with their weapon, and they do that all the time, any build is going to have to represent that meaningfully or it won’t feel like the character.

The other, rarer problem, perhaps only encountered once before with Robin Hood, is when I’m talking about a character with such vast cultural presence that there’s almost anything they could do.

The game is afoot.

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Alpha Strikes in 4th Edition D&D

It’s a new year, so why don’t we start off our discussion of 4th Edition with a bang?

A concern in the design of 4th Edition — That is, a thing that people complain about on the internet, in this case assuming good faith from people who can come up with a third topic after “it’s good but it’s not Dungeons & Dragons,” and “it’s just like an MMO,” style big-thonk thinkers — is that in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, too much importance is placed on the capacity of players to do an alpha strike that allows them to trivialise combat, assuming they win initiative and aren’t therefore, immediately folded by equally alpha-strikey enemies.

The notion is that if combat is extremely deadly because players are extremely powerful, then the turns that orient around when players do stuff are the most important. Players can kill things more efficiently, which means you wind up with fights that shrink and shrink, resolved in fewer and fewer turns as players level up. This concern is expressed in the form of what’s referred to as an alpha strike — a term I believe that gaming in general got from Battletech, and they got it from somewhere else, I have no doubt.

Alpha striking is the notional idea that if you spend all of your resources up front in the most decisive action possible, then it doesn’t matter that you don’t have resources to last any longer.

You have, after all, won.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Fuszaint

Bidestra is a cradle and grave both of empires. Some are completely collapsed, gone beyond all signs or showing, like the Urd, or the First Elves, or the Tieflings. They stood tall and proud and asserted themselves rulers of the whole continent — but now, they are nothing but ancient statues in lost glades and the broken histories of deranged libraries. Only one Empire, in the history of Bidestra, has conquered the continent, and then, with wisdom and care, chose to withdraw, to become just another nation, and to maintain its place as first amongst equals, after bringing language, roads, medicine and currency to all corners of the continent, and only that Empire, the mighty Fuszainti Empire, can thank their current king for his choices two centuries past that led to this current glory.

Glory, glory, glory, to Fuszaint, and its ever-living, eternal Knights and King!

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Dev Pile: Vampiric Update

Two weeks ago I wrote about how the Vampire class in 4th edition D&D sucks. That was an exercise in demonstrating the boundaries of a design goal, in which I laid out that I wanted a design that fit with the function of the existing Vampire and could operate in a way that doesn’t displace existing design. I then, because that article was already 1500 words, figured that I should tackle what that actually looks like later.

This post is not going to show you like, properly formatted 4th edition mechanical material, because that’s kinda wordy and it’s a pain in the arse to format and I don’t think it’s inherently interesting to you unless you’re actually here for Vampire material. Don’t worry, though, there will be a place for it soon™. Instead, this post is going to be about describing the kinds of things I actually have done and then a discussion of how to iterate on this kind of design with minimal playtesting.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-48-vampiric-update/

#DevPile2025 #DnD4e

Cobrin’Seil Heritage: The Cwmdyri

In building out the continent of Bidestra, I found numerous places where either historically I had already placed ‘merfolk’ or ‘sea elves,’ or new places where such creatures made sense. I already have a Cobrin’Seil race of creepy, deep-sea monster people, known as the Hadalan, and I love them dearly, but they’re meant to fulfill the role of a spooky monster people. They’re not the friendly neighbourhood fish-folk, those are the terrifying fish-folk for freaks.

I needed something new to fill this space.

Some explanations first though:

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How To Be: Captain America (in 4e D&D)

Doing this kind of exercise about real long-running characters can be an interesting challenge because so many of them, with enough time, try enough things in different ways that it’s challenging to really identify what makes the character the character to everyone.

And sometimes it’s really easy because Disney makes a billion dollars selling pictures of his butt.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-captain-america-in-4e-dd/

#dnd4e #howToBe

Dev Pile: Fangs For More

The Vampire sucks.

That’s kind of the point, but it’s also a problem for players who are interested in playing them.

I don’t mean Vampires in general, I mean the Vampire in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Before I start presenting changes, I want to explain how I make changes to things in games I run, and also why I bother to write about them in this way. This isn’t about how to play the game, but is instead about how to examine the mechanics of the game and how to make comparisons and alterations to a game that’s already strongly functional with well-defined mechanics.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-46-fangs-for-more/

#dnd4e

4e: The Worth of Artifacts

When I talk about 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, I do so with an air of authority — which, in many cases, is quite reasonable. I’ve probably read more of the books than you have, and I’m very well aware of how the game runs in in situ, as someone who’s been both a DM and a player for a long time.

Despite that, I think it’s important to lay my cards on the table and admit that there’s a bunch of stuff in 4th Edition I’m not familiar with. Even the stuff I do know, I tend to interact with as little as possible. I’ve talked about this before when describing how the mounted combat rules, as written in the first version, are absolute hogwash. House ruling, in my experience, has made those rules worth having and less annoying to adjudicate — but it does so by giving players a fairly important power edge.

In this case, I want to discuss something I have zero direct experience with. Everything I know about it is entirely theoretical, and I do so with the full understanding that I’m not confident about what I have to say here. But I feel like artifacts aren’t worth it.

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https://press.invincible.ink/4e-the-worth-of-artifacts/

#DnD4e

How To Be: Gideon Nav (in 4e D&D)

What a bozo!

First things first, before we go past the fold (as we normally do), I need to lay out a quick spoiler warning. I’m going to mention things about Gideon Nav, the protagonist of Gideon the Ninth and a factor in the subsequent stories Harrow the Ninth and Nona The Ninth.

What I’m going to discuss is what I consider establishing details; that is, it’s hardly really meaningful for me to tell you that Gideon Nav is a tall woman with red hair and a sword, even if, strictly speaking, those are things revealed in the later chapters of the book. I don’t intend to spoil anything meaningfully deep about why things are the way they are for Gideon, so you can read this if you want.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-gideon-nav-in-4e-dd/

#DnD4e #HowToBe

4e: Losing Control

You know what’s horrifying? THE ECONOMY! That’s right, and in 4th edition, there was a whole layer of the game dedicated to attacking it – the ACTION Economy, that is!

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https://press.invincible.ink/4e-losing-control/

#DnD4e

The #TTRPGs I would love to see at my table:

• Lancer
• Draw Steel
• D&D 4E
• Vampire the Masquerade (V20)
• Changeling the Dreaming
• Some type of cyberpunk game

The TTRPGS I think I have the time and energy to run:
• Lancer
• D&D 4E
? Draw Steel
? Vampire the Masquerade (V20)

#TTRPG #VampireTheMasquerade #VtM #DnD4E #LancerRPG #DrawSteel #ChangelingTheDreaming #CtD #Cyberpunk #V20 #C20

How To Be: Nobara Kugisaki from Jujutsu Kaisen (In 4e D&D)

I like Jujutsu Kaisen but I don’t like how it went. Not because the story is bad, per se, but because the things that it wanted to focus on weren’t as cool to me as the things they were doing before that focus happened. Nonetheless, it’s a banger of a show and it has some great character designs, such as today’s subject:

As a necessity this is going to include some spoilers. After all, Nobara is not in the first episode of the anime or the first issue of the manga, which means even her existence is a spoiler (geeze, look at that anime ending, spoilering such important things like ‘she exists’). Necessarily, though, I am going to mention some things about how this character’s story goes, and includes spoiling things from both an old season of anime and a manga story that’s four years old.

Point is, you’ve had your time to catch up if you care a lot, but even then, I’m giving you a spoiler warning here if you want it.

Also, Content Warning: Jujutsu Kaisen is a horror action manga and I’m going to mention themes that could invoke self-harm.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-nobara-kugisaki-from-jujutsu-kaisen-in-4e-dd/

#DnD4e #HowToBe

4e: Expanding Themes

I position myself as something of an expert in 4th edition D&D, but that’s obviously a trick. I don’t remember everything in all books at all times; even if I did remember it, it doesn’t mean I can correlate the contents of my memory at all times. What I offer on this blog is regular writing about the topic of a closed game system where, largely, no new material is being produced. I may have homebrew material for the game (and do, you should check out the Square Fireballs compendium for a bunch of material Fox and I have made) but broadly speaking I don’t speak about 4th edition in terms of what you can add to the game and rather what you can do with the pieces that are already in place.

I do this because I want you, random stranger, to think that you have the same frame of reference to me, and that you don’t need to go do other research to find out what I mean. Even if that means looking up the sourcebooks you, statistically, don’t have any more, or maybe some online compendium or pdf elsewhere, the idea is that you should be able to treat 4th edition as a toybox with a limited range of pieces in it.

This is not the way I think we should engage with 4th edition. I think that there’s a lot of stuff in 4th edition that, through experience, we can refine in the name of giving players better experiences and to erode some of the biases the original game had in its design. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to make it so people thought of defenders as ‘big tough characters,’ but there’s an obvious bias and the only way to address the bias is to add things to the game that change that trend.

Particularly, a place where I feel there’s a problem is the shallowness of themes.

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https://press.invincible.ink/4e-expanding-themes/

#DnD4e

How To Be: The Elusive Samurai (in 4e D&D)

In 1333, in Japan, the Hojo clan fell. The Kamakura Shogunate was defeated by the forces of the Ashikaga. The Ashikaga clan – the eventual provenance of the future shogun Ashikaga Takauji – conquered Hojo territory and left almost nobody alive. Only Tokiyuki Hojo, whose life is a mysterious footnote in this spotty period of history, seemed to escape the situation, fleeing to friendly territory and engaging a war against the Ashikaga that was composed of so many retreats it’s literally the thing Hojo is known for. We don’t know when Tokiyuki was born, only when he died, and even that is from a period of historical records that are so unreliable it’s entirely possible that they’re making up the dates to cover their asses for the Shogunate’s records.

Yet the Hojo are not gone, and the Hojo family name remains. The history persists in story and folklore, and has been retold through statues and monuments and historians poring over old letters about the story. In 2021, a manga was started that decided to cast Tokiyuki Hojo as a twelve year old boy talented in avoiding problems, and it kicks ass. Today, I want to address the question, then, of how we make that Tokiyuki Hojo in 4th edition D&D, and then I’m going to be mad at myself for how hard I made this.

I am going to mention some of the real historical events and some events that come up in the manga, which constitutes something of a spoiler for the anime. Like, that shouldn’t really matter much? Because you know, history spoilers, everyone dies eventually, but if you are interested in reading the manga, that’s a good impulse to follow. I like it a lot, and there are these great sections at the end of each volume where the historian consultant provides interesting input.

Ready?

Okay let’s be basara.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-the-elusive-samurai-in-4e-dd/

#DnD4e #HowToBe

4e: The Basics On Stealth

I dread writing about this topic.

Okay, so, on the big whiteboard of plans and topics, it’s sitting there, in the Tricks Month listing, the first and most obvious example of something related to 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons that could fit in. The words: Sneaky Classes.

That’s not so hard, right? Just a little listicle, maybe five characters, talk about the characters who have some reason to attack from stealth or some ability to disappear,

But no, before I can talk to you about ways to be stealthy in 4th edition I have to talk to you about stealth in 4th edition, and that means I have to understand stealth in 4th edition. And make no mistake: I am confident in my ability as a GM in 4th edition, D&D. I do not sweat when someone plays ‘a sneaky character’ and suddenly the stealth rules turn me to ash.

But.

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https://press.invincible.ink/4e-the-basics-on-stealth/

#DnD4e

How To Be: A My Hero Academia Character (in 4e D&D)

What are we doing here today. I’m not feeling well, but the words need to be worded so how hard can it be. I plan this blog out in advance, I have a specific plan in mind for the rest of the year, all I really need to do is look at the plan and then map it out through a process I do understand really well. Let’s see what we have here, what treasures Past Me has set up so that Current Me can have an easier time.

‘A Hero Academia character.’

Well fudge.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-a-my-hero-academia-character-in-4e-dd/

#DnD4e #HowToBe