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The purpose of this thread is for artists to share their work with the intent of finding clients, and for other members of the community to find and commission artists for custom artwork.

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Hey r/DnD! 💜

I’m currently open for character commissions and would absolutely love to bring your adventurers to life!

I specialize in clean, stylized art, portraits, and bust perfect for capturing the personality and vibe of your DnD characters, whether they’re brave heroes, chaotic gremlins, or morally questionable icons 👀

Character portraits

Original characters & party members

Fantasy races, armor, and aesthetics

If you’ve ever wanted to see your character outside of your imagination, (or want a unique gift for your party), I’d be super excited to work with you!

You can find pricing info on my Reddit posts, pinned on my TikTok or just DM me directly if that’s easier!

For more examples of my work, feel free to check out my Behance or TikTok. My links are on my Reddit, up top near my bio. ✨

Thanks so much for taking a look!

For the DMs.

I’m not claiming credit for any of these. I’ve picked them up from various places over the years, seen them discussed in forums, tried them at my table, kept the ones that worked. Putting them all in one place because I keep having to explain them to other DMs and it’s easier to just write it out properly.

Some of these you’ve probably heard of. A couple might be new. I just wanted to share because they can amp up a BBEG encounter (any combat encounter really, but focusing on boss fights here).

1. The Countdown Die

Put a physical die on the table before initiative. A d4 or d6. Set it to its highest face and tick it down one at the end of every round. Say nothing about what happens when it hits zero.

Your players will stop focusing entirely on the boss. They will start watching the die, whispering to each other, second-guessing their action choices. When it hits zero, something bad happens. A ritual completes. Reinforcements arrive. Whatever fits your encounter. The key is you have to commit to the consequence or it never works again.

Costs you nothing to set up. Changes everything about the energy in the room.

1. Two Initiative Slots

Roll initiative for the boss twice. Write both numbers down. The boss acts on both turns. No extra HP, no new abilities, no explanation given.

Players who built their whole strategy around burning the boss’s action economy before it can act are suddenly reacting twice per round. The party that felt ahead is not ahead anymore. Simple and brutal.

1. Killing It Is Not The Objective

The boss is not the threat. A ritual is completing. A hostage is dying. An exit is sealing. The boss is just in the way.

When this works properly, your martials are still hitting things, but your whole party is suddenly engaging with the room. Positioning matters. Speed matters. The fighter who spent two turns grappling the boss has to decide whether that was worth it. Players stop going on their phones mid-combat when every turn is a decision problem.

1. Visualise Legendary Resistance

Legendary Resistance is one of the most mechanically useful tools in the game and one of the worst player experiences when it’s invisible. A save that should have ended the fight just doesn’t. Nothing changes. It feels like cheating.

Fix: every time the boss uses it, something visible happens. Write three descriptions before the session. A ward in the wall shatters on the first use. A second one cracks on the second. By the third, the creature is visibly straining to hold itself together. Players still lost their save. But they saw something happen. They know it’s finite. They feel like they’re winning even when they technically didn’t.

1. Change the Environment at Half HP

When the boss hits bloodied, the room changes. Walls rise from the floor. Lights go out. Exits seal. A section of floor drops. Whatever fits the encounter.

The tactical situation the players spent the first half of the fight building is now wrong. They are not fighting a stronger boss. They are fighting the same boss in a worse situation, and they did not see it coming. Player confidence resets without player progress resetting. The boss is still bloodied. They just have to earn the finish on new terms.

1. The Boss Did Its Homework

Before the encounter, establish that the boss has been watching. A scout reported back. A scrying pool caught the party arguing over camp. A letter the party never found was written about them.

Translate this into specific decisions on the first turn. It targets the healer with a condition, not the fighter it could more easily hit. It stays out of range of whoever it correctly identifies as the biggest threat. It has a counter ready for the thing your party does in every single fight.

Have the boss or one of its minions say something specific. “I was told you favour the high ground” directed at the rogue. That moment of recognition is worth more than any damage roll.

1. Minions With One Job Each

Replace a group of identical enemies with a small number of minions that each have a single obvious purpose. One locks down the fighter, not by dealing damage but by grappling and shoving and imposing disadvantage. One chases the healer. One tends to whatever secondary objective is active in the room.

None of them need elaborate stat blocks. What they need is a job the players can read in one turn. When every minion has one job, every minion is a problem the party has to assign someone to. That argument about who handles which minion is exactly where the boss gets its advantage back.

1. Tell Them the Weakness Early

Hide a clue about the boss before the fight. A mural in the dungeon showing the creature being driven back by a specific element. A journal entry from someone who survived once. A merchant with a scar who talks too much.

Players who find it feel clever and prepared. Players who miss it still win, just with more resource expenditure. Either outcome is fine. What the clue creates is the possibility of a reward for paying attention to your world. The best clues feel like world texture first and useful information second. If you would only include it because it’s a hint, it’s too obvious.

1. The Boss Changes Tactics Mid-Fight

At a set threshold, the boss stops doing what it’s been doing and does something completely different. The patient ranged spellcaster closes to melee and doesn’t retreat. The berserker goes very still and starts talking in a calm voice about a deal.

Whatever strategy the players built their approach around is now incorrect. The shift should feel like a decision the boss made in response to something, not a scripted phase transition. Players should be able to reconstruct the logic afterward even if they couldn’t predict it in the moment.

1. Build In One Moment For One Player

Before the session, look at your party and figure out which character could do something in this fight that no one else could. Then build that opening into the encounter.

The rogue can collapse the ritual circle if they can reach the base of it while the boss is occupied. The bard’s voice at the right moment causes the creature’s concentration to falter. The paladin’s deity is named on the altar at the back of the room and interacting with it does something unexpected.

The rest of the party still carries the fight. This moment does not win it alone. But one player, at one point in the fight, has something that was built for them. Those moments are what people describe when they tell someone who wasn’t there about the session.

I’ve put all of this into a PDF for easy reference at the table. It’s free.

Ive really wanted to get into dnd for a while, and after triyng and failing to set up a campaign due to scheduling issues, i went to try and find an online group. I used groupfinder, and found a group without the "paid game"tag, meaning it would be free to join. after talking to the dm they sent me the list of rules: there were 10 rules, all seemed pretty standard and fair, except for the 8th one: "Character design requirement every player must get their character designed by the campaign official artist to keep the look consistent and professional the artist will charge a fixed amount which players must pay". after asking a bunch more questions about that rule they told me the payment is usally around 40-50$ via paypal, and when i asked if the price was negotiable they said yes and gave me the artist user to talk to. they accepted my request but i havent talked to them yet. While i dont mean to devalue artists, and i do think that pricing can be fair given u own the art and can use it, i find the requirment to pay a specific one strange. they say this is because they want all the art to be by the same guy so its consistent and professional but i think if im required to pay 40$ to play ur campaign regardless of the reason it should carry the "paid games" tag. id assume they just make the design price part of the fee to start playing and pay theyre artist themselves- So my question is: Is this common? is it a scam? am i exaggerating? im new to this space so im not sure what to think. thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any advice!

Elyra keeps to the old sewers now. No guards, no questions, just rot, damp stone, and whatever the city forgets to bury. It’s not a place anyone wants to be, which is exactly why she chose it.

She practices the dark arts down here, where a steady supply of necrotic flesh and unclaimed corpses is never hard to find.

She works in the quiet. Repeats the same things over and over. Small spells, controlled, deliberate. No rush. No need to prove anything. The magic comes when it comes. Most days it’s just her, the dark, and the sound of water moving through tunnels.

It’s not where she thought she’d end up.

Painted in PS

Meet Kaeron, a Master Potter whose craft transcends mere clay. Hailing from a secluded artisan village, he comes from an ancient lineage that weaves magic into their pottery. By manipulating a magical slip, Kaeron can materialize floating, prehensile clay hands or even bigger constructs to assist him in both combat and his intricate craftsmanship.

His village holds a more mystical secret. Working alongside witches, master artisans like Kaeron have learned the mystical art of soul-binding. Through their craft, they can anchor the spirits of the deceased into the very ceramic vessels they shape, either to preserve ancient knowledge or to trap malevolent entities forever.

In a D&D campaign, I imagine Kaeron as an Artificer and he would be travelling with a witch to seal the soul of a local threat. What class and subclass do you think fits him best?

By the way, I'm a junior concept artist and I currently have a few commission slots open! If you have a D&D character you'd like to bring to life in this style, feel free to send me a DM :).

You can check out more of my work on my Artstation : https://www.artstation.com/enayar

The ski resort had an event where you could put on some costume. Me and my friend decided to go as our DnD characters. I was a wizard and he was a cleric.

The character was Waimea McFuggles, a reporter from Baldur’s Gate who uncovered a deep corruption in the city nobles. He released a manifest that revealed it all. Needless to say the nobles wanted him dead. The power hungry nobles were ready to give up everything and their patron planned similar things that happened to Elturel.

He headed to Icewind Dale and started a small tavern in there, Hearth and Stout. He started studying arcane to create small defensive runes for his tavern while trying to remain unseen for the old world he lived in. He remained under the radar for 20 years until the nobles started hunting him down. Stuff happened and he had to start adventuring. It was a good run until the very last parts of the campaign we had to travel across a huge frozen wasteland. He ended up freezing and dying of exhaustion. He was quite fragile old man.

Maybe he wasn’t dead, just resting and now bombing down the hills.

I got stopped by the ski patrol and I was certain that I’d get a fine for the cape or something. We ended up winning two free passes to rooftop spa.

Hi everyone!

Our Dazzling Dungeon Decks have just 3 days left on kickstarter!

So if having a few hundred different ttrpg cards with art by four different webcomic artists sounds like it might be fun for your table, please go check them out before it's too late :D

We have a deck of npcs, a deck of creatures, a deck of mildly useful magic items, and a deck of butt goblins 😆 which are goblins with big bottoms, and crucial for all ttrpgs, obviously 😂

Every npc comes with a little motivation, which work as great quest prompts. You can choose a few to scatter about a town, see who your players go for, and launch into a fun little side quest from there.

The creatures could work both as familiars or as foes (same with the butt goblins?), and the magical items could be loot found along the way or quest rewards 😃

That's almost everything you need for spontaneous adventuring :D Handy for when players go in unexpected directions or when we have little prep time :) Supporting this kickstarter also supports four different artists 😊 (who sunk hours and hours of illustration time into them. no AI used!).

And to more easily find my ttrpg comics, feel free to check out r/TableTopComic or my LinkTree :)

in my campaign, I've included lore that being trans in dwarven society is seen as sacred, and trans folk are often encouraged to join the clergy. A tool that is not serving the purpose you need is better reforged or made better than to throw it away for get a new one, and to remake your body to better serve you is seen as the pinnacle of the dwarven spirit. additionally dwarves are often matriarchal as pregnancy and giving birth are highly revered. Just wanted to share that as my players really love it.