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View Full Version : D&D 3.x Other Homebrewish 3.5 Magical/Wondrous Item balancing, and blighter/druid smudging?



XxMetalxHeadxX
2016-08-21, 08:31 PM
So I'm working on this campaign right now. The setting is kinda badlands Barons controlling most of the territory with a strong central capital city. This is only a small part of the larger campaign I guess, but I'm struggling with making this faction make some sense.

Neldalla is the deity I'm having this faction worship. Theyre basically barbaric viking like raiders.

So I've been using a lot of druid avengers, but giving them sun domain for undead turning. Now I want to come up with a way, of making them blighters, while still having lots of undead at their disposal. Does anyone know if blighters would be able to retain their sun domain? Think I should just yolo and homebrew it? Or does anyone have any other good ideas for giving them a way to keep undead? I was thinking about doing quite a bit of magical item homebrewing to be honest, maybe someway of carving magical evil runes to control undead or something. Was thinking lots of skeleton stuff, blighters burning the flesh off of everything and raising what survived through the ashes kinda thing.


The reason why I picked a faction like this is because the world is based off my buddys last campaign which pretty much went to 20, with Nerull pulling strings in the background and no one really winning. Mainly cause we were going to continue the story into the next campaign which I'm kinda doing now, accept we are starting on a different continent in the same universe. Think WoW expansions. Anyways I wanted to tie in Vecna or some other spiteful evil Deity of Nerull into the plot somehow. I guess I could say Neldalla wants to stir up **** just because Nerull has been hanging out on the other side.

Honestly I was thinking about leading this campaign into dragon stuff, cause my buddy already set the precedence for Red Dragons manipulated by Nerul. So I was going to lead them into dealing with silverbrow humans led by a Counsel of Ancient Silver Dragons to pin them against the red dragons in the end and stop the coming of Nerul sort of thing, probably in the end by forging some holy super weapons of some sort with some ancient hybrid elven dwarven magical forge.

So Basically any ideas and advice on home brewing and semi balancing magical/wondrous items would be greatly appreciated.

quzar
2016-08-21, 09:06 PM
Are you using a homebrew mechanism for the druid to access a domain power? Neither published blighter nor Druidic Avenger gives that access as far as I can tell. Master of Radiance from Libris Mortis might give something like the flavor you want, especially if you consider it to provide the turning instead of just stacking. The abilities of Master of Radiance follow a similar style as that of blighter in that they are x/day su abilities.

What exactly are you looking for with Magical/Wondrous Item balancing? When I homebrew magic items I take the path of 'always underpowered'. Since it's homebrew, you can always adjust it up later, or have it 'grow' and expand its abilities in-game. It's much more difficult to scale down power without being unfair to players, and having to just eat the consequences of your original mistake.

XxMetalxHeadxX
2016-08-21, 09:47 PM
Are you using a homebrew mechanism for the druid to access a domain power? Neither published blighter nor Druidic Avenger gives that access as far as I can tell. Master of Radiance from Libris Mortis might give something like the flavor you want, especially if you consider it to provide the turning instead of just stacking. The abilities of Master of Radiance follow a similar style as that of blighter in that they are x/day su abilities.

What exactly are you looking for with Magical/Wondrous Item balancing? When I homebrew magic items I take the path of 'always underpowered'. Since it's homebrew, you can always adjust it up later, or have it 'grow' and expand its abilities in-game. It's much more difficult to scale down power without being unfair to players, and having to just eat the consequences of your original mistake.


There is a variant for Domain Druid, its even in the players handbook 1 or 2 if I recall, but in one of those weird side boxes, some sites list them alcyius.com/USRD/srd/classes/baseCore/druid.html#domain-druid

I'm trying to figure out if making these druid avengers blighters, make them lose there ability to rage and Sun Domain access since they obtained them through the Druid class, and if it would be unreasonable to smudge it and say they retain those two abilities. The faction also uses generic barbarians so I could just have a mix of things, but like the whole build up to that story line will be like a king **** Lich, and maybe several other lich's underneath him. I guess kinda elder scrollish in a sense, but I was going to leave out the whole dragon priests, but maybe that's actually a good idea, maybe I just make them getting puppeted or something by nerul and start throwing dragons in with the whole Fire blighter thing, idk gotta put more thought into that.

But anyways yeah I'm not quite sure about the few prestige/things you listed in that first paragraph I'll have to look into those tomorrow.

As for balancing, I guess yeah I just want to make random magic items to go with the red/silver dragon story and the dark druid story, the dark druid more being not wanting to make overwhelmingly power undead generators, which idk shouldnt be tooo hard to balance, just have them stop making undead or put a limit. But as for the Dwarven/elven forged magical weapons, I want them to have like super power like close to god level kinda stuff, I may even throw nerul at them, or some form of Nerul, and make them have to use the divine forged weapons to fend him off, so I want to come up with stuff for them to use, with out making it so they can one shot nerul or any super ancient Red dragons.