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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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Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant's Eye is a 2025 Stern table. With every game you pick you character and deal with enemies like Sammaster the lich, Xanathar the beholder, and a bunch of others. The game also features callouts from a pretty huge voice cast for a pinball game, including Michael Dorn, Brendon Small, Matt Mercer, etc.

In this particular run I got a really quick dragon multi-ball and a massive town celebration jackpot, then proceeded to get basically every multiball I know of (gelatinous cube, the goblin portal one, a second dragon multiball) and completed a few different modes. I was a few hundred thousand from hitting the high scores on this particular machine, sadly. If you ever get a chance to play it it's a pretty good game, though some of the shots can be really frustrating.

This is my most recent piece but I'll be honest, I went with a more "random" approach for this one than many of my others. Not that I pre-plan them or anything (which I really should) but I generally go in with a core theme in mind. For this one I was really just aiming to work on variants, since I know a lot of people like that with their maps, and it's definitely a weak point of mine.

So this is just kind of what came to me. I tend to just "wing it" when I DM games and will sometimes just handwave in and out certain things rather than try to find a specific spell / item ect to make things happen. To that effect, I would likely have some kind of necromancy magic that is continuously animating regular skeletons from within the belly of that serpent.

The higher level the party, the better, and the more skeletons that could be summoned with each wave. As for the boss itself, something in the water might be cool. It's fairly easy to say that those pools are actually quite deep, and connect to each other via a network of underwater caves, so something like an Aboleth could be an exciting twist.

I feel like those are more often found deep within a cave / temple underwater, or way out in the sea. Fighting one with this much open terrain to navigate, as well as those waves and waves of skellies might make for a pretty awesome boss fight :)

How about you? What do you think you would run here?

What are some of yall's dm horror stories? i've been interested in dming and looking for either any tips or examples on what not to do as a dm. thanks :)

A recent bit of work I did for my lovely regular! This is Roboutes the artificer and his partner, Vistina. These are a player character and an NPC from their campaign, and this is piece 1/3 of a bigger project we're schemeing on together. Roboutes is a classic inventor, who wants to make things to better the world through technology. His lady friend is a spy of sorts, working as a suave politico.

This was a skeb (surprise me) piece, so I was given some refs and told about the characters and then I did my thing! They didn't see any progress until the very end (which is how skeb works) and they were super excited to see the finished piece. I didn't need to do any revisions thankfully, and they are convinced I am psychic and read their mind haha. I really loved this, will be sharing the other pieces as I finish them! I hope you like it.

I just had a thought while looking at the new Sallowlands map for CR Age of Umbra. It reminded me of how much wonder and possibility a map could hold, and then I thought "Did GPS kill the the Exploration Pillar of D&D?"

As a child I remember the wonder and magic that maps held for me, even before I was introduced to D&D. I remember drawing treasure maps for toys I had buried in the backyard. If a book had a map in it, I would spend as much time with the map as the text. I would pour over AAA maps, World Atlases, and Hagstrom maps, track routes, imagining journeys of exploration, or imagining military tactics. When I played AD&D I was the party mapper.

And then came GPS, and we all have seemed to get away from thinking about anything other than entering point A to point B. We just listen for it to tell us where to turn.

And we do it now in D&D too. We hand-wave travel and exploration to points of light. We almost never bother with maps unless they are battlemaps for combat. We don't explore anymore, and players don't even expect it, but worst of all they don't seem to miss it or even realize that it should be there in the first place.

It feels like GPS has conditioned us out of the desire to explore. "Tell me the fastest way to get to the place to do the thing." In our games it is "something, something, next combat," or "we go from here to there to consult someone." It feels like we resolve an encounter and enter the next destination into DM GPS, and we end up there. To me, I am starting to realize that it is taking a lot of the wonder and amazement out of the game that I used to have when maps held sway over our lives.

In the campaign that I am wrapping up next week, for the past two years, the players have been having a running gag about which cleric gets to be the one to cast Guidance on other party members. Eventually, I casually told them, why not have both of you cast Guidance, and then the player rolling can roll two d4 and take whichever outcome they prefer.

Everyone thought this was a hilarious and great solution, and everyone started joking about how one cleric's diety favored players on this day or disliked that player, etc. Little do they know, I have been keeping a tally of whose die rolls they have been taking, who has been making fun of which god(s) etc.

They are meeting the whole pantheon next week before their fight with the BBEG. I cannot wait.

For some background, my DM introduced me to D&D about five years ago. He’s friends with my cousin, whom I’m very close to. She introduced us, and over time, through D&D, the DM and I became friends.

As we played through Tomb of Annihilation, a custom campaign DM created, and now Rime of the Frostmaiden, I started noticing a pattern: my characters always seemed to suffer unusually bad luck. At first, I assumed that was just part of D&D, but eventually I realized the same things weren’t happening to the other players.

It wasn’t always major events. Sometimes it felt like the rules were bent so my character would lose important items, be forced to take the fall for the group, or bear the consequences of situations that others didn’t. I don’t mind playing a character who sacrifices for the party—in fact, I enjoy it—but when it happens over and over, it starts to feel like you’re being singled out.
In Rime of the Frostmaiden, my first character was a halfling warlock. There were six people in our party. During one encounter, a stampeding mammoth targeted only me, even though I was the farthest away. It willingly took multiple opportunity attacks from the party members surrounding it—who had already injured it because they rolled higher on initiative—just to reach my character. We were only around level 3, and the result was my warlock being trampled to death.

I rolled up a new character: my deceased warlock’s sister, who served the same patron. Not long afterward, she was petrified by a basilisk and then shattered into pieces by an evil NPC.

My third character was a gnome druid. To be fair, his first death was entirely my fault. He was a healer who tried to keep everyone’s spirits high, but beneath his cheerful personality he secretly believed the party would fail to end the eternal winter.

At one point, we encountered the BBEG much earlier than expected. We lost the fight and barely escaped. Afterward, she subjected us to a series of psychological trials designed to break our resolve. My druid handled them poorly. In the final trial, she offered him preservation and power if he would join her. Out of desperation and fear, he accepted.

He didn’t survive what happened next.

I was incredibly attached to that character and asked my DM if there was any possible way to bring him back. We ran a short private session where Auril revived him as one of her disciples. I agreed to those consequences. That death was on me, and I have no issue with it.

What bothered me happened later.

My druid had a snowy owl familiar that he was deeply attached to. He sent her to scout an unknown portal, but suddenly lost his connection to her. The party followed through the portal to investigate and discovered several hags had captured her in a cage. Combat broke out after they refused to release her.
During the fight, the wizard cast Fireball. My familiar was caught in the blast. Normally, a familiar simply disappears when reduced to 0 hit points and can be resummoned later. Instead, the DM described her as a burned, feathered corpse. It was honestly horrifying.
After the fight, I attempted to resummon her. The DM ruled that my familiar had permanently died and that the spell summoned an entirely different owl.

The reason this felt especially frustrating is because the DM already knew our plan before combat began. While my familiar was trapped in the cage, I tried dismissing her, but the DM ruled it didn’t work. The ranger then suggested that, if necessary, someone could kill the owl to free her from the cage, and I could simply resummon her afterward. My druid hated the idea, but it seemed like our only option. Before I had a chance to act, the wizard won initiative and cast Fireball. That’s why no one at the table thought it would permanently kill her.

As far as I know, there isn’t a rule stating that a familiar can permanently die this way. I still don’t understand why my character was treated differently.

At one point, another player at the table actually spoke up and said, “Please stop picking on him,” referring to me and my druid.

The DM just laughed it off as if it wasn’t a big deal.
For a little more context, my druid’s relationship with his snowy owl was a huge part of his character. She was with him constantly, and I role-played that bond whenever I could. Losing her permanently because of what felt like an arbitrary ruling genuinely sucked. I left that session feeling worse than when I sat down to play.

So I guess my question is:

Am I being singled out or am I just overreacting?

When I was spit balling on my last post, one person said she should be a valor bard and I fell in love with that idea.

With this, I imagine she's like.. a WWE wrestler. She comes out and her theme song plays. There's fireworks and pyrotechnics & everyday is WrestleMania LMFAO

She's totaly a poser and the muscles are... In a way just for show, but that's okay bc she can probably bench press you for fun

ADDITIONAL NOTE

I can't believe I have to say this but: No, I'm not giving her multiple sets of breasts she has a human chest not a cow chest why would she have udders. Please stop commenting about it

Marking this as 5e, but it applies to 5.5e as well.

One of the common refrains in the community is how martials are "resourceless", and that this gives them staying power throughout the adventuring day. In fact a common rebuttal to this is that they're not, because they have HP... but that's not what this post is about.

"Resourcelessness" in these arguments is coupled with being "reliably powerful", so to speak.

And I just wanted to point out - that's not true in the vast majority of cases.

Let me rephrase this issue in the form of an argument for "resourcelessness" to demonstrate my point.

"Spellcasters have a wide variety of powers a few times per day, while martials have a more narrow lost of powers that aren't limited by number of uses."

How many actual features and powers can we name that fit this description? Features or powers that are either always on, or can be used indefinitely?

Rogue has plenty, sure.

Monk has Diamond Soul at level 14 and unarmed bonus strikes.

Barbarian and Monk both have unarmored defense, but so do many spellcasters.

Fighter has... a fighting style.

...and all except Rogue get extra attack.

And this is really the only truly powerful "resourceless" power - extra attack. Anything else is really a drop in the ocean, not to mention spellcasters and half castera also getting similar features.

Meanwhile when it comes to powers that consume resources:

- Monks have Ki/Focus, which is basically their entire class.

- Barbarians have Rage, which is basically their entire class.

- Fighters have Action Surge, Second Wind, Indomitable, and most of their subclasses give limited resource powers.

The resource-based features far outweigh the resourceless ones.

If we want to pretend that martials are resourceless, they need to have stronger and more defining resourceless powers than "extra attack".

Conversely, if that's not supposed to be their identity, then their resources should be drastically expanded. Monk 2024 did that, and it made the class infinitely better.

Now, wanna see what a class with actually resourceless powers looks like? Look at Warlock. They literally do get infinite uses of a less varied subset of powers than spellcasters. And guess what? It works. And it's not overpowered.

So I don't see why "infinitely usable" powers are such a taboo when it comes to martials, or why we're supposed to be OK with their only claim to fame being "attacks twice".

Running a homebrew campaign where my players have just intercepted the current baddie carrying a Time Shard, a homebrew magic item that allows some wild magic-style time travel mechanics. Last session ended with them sneaking up on her camp and trying to steal the Time Shard, setting off a glyph of warding and rolling initiative. My plan for the baddie in combat is that she's going to try to get to the Time Shard at any cost and activate it, sending her back in time to the beginning of combat. If she's able to do this, I'll tell the players to reset their spell slots, HP, and other resources and combat will start over from the beginning, this time with two copies of the baddie: the original and the one who went back in time.

My goal is for it to feel like a two-phase combat, but having never run one I don't know if this will work. Also it will help increase the difficulty, since they survived a previous encounter with this baddie and have leveled up a couple times since then.

As a player, would you find this a fun and interesting encounter, or would restarting combat from the beginning just be annoying/frustrating/demoralizing? Is there anything that would make it swing one way or the other?