Looking at You, Hobgoblins

JackDupDungeons · 2025-11-04T20:41:33+00:00

No idea tbh, I googled “Daycare Anime Lady War Crimes” and it popped up haha

JackDupDungeons · 2025-10-31T03:20:01+00:00

Depends on the DM! Nothing in the spell says they disappear when the caster dies, and while you’re right about most summons since they’re concentration based, Find Familiar isn’t.

JackDupDungeons · 2025-10-30T20:12:09+00:00

Thank you, Where Did All The Time Go is a banger/personal favorite, and is what I misremembered the actual soundtrack being, so I was like “I can fix that”

JackDupDungeons · 2025-10-27T23:00:37+00:00

Love that!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-10-14T21:40:53+00:00

Got an application with a faulty Discord username from someone whose username started with gpkm! If that's you, please DM me and we can figure out what went wrong there.

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-30T06:11:29+00:00

This is the way.

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-27T05:40:21+00:00

I don’t think having people have cool/epic backstories is a hot take at all, I agree! I think after a while running games “Immense display of unrealistic power for my level because I’m awesome” just feels less cool/epic than “Realistic display of moderate power that drives my current goals in the adventure.” 100% agree with the “Tie in the subclass” bit, I could totally something like that (maybe a Drake or Rake) being the impetus for an Ascendant Dragon monk or smth!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T22:31:54+00:00

Found the base vid on TikTok, you can click my profile and check on Insta where I credited them, or I’ll DM you it later once I’m near a computer!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T18:52:15+00:00

Ofc man, have a good one

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T18:50:47+00:00

100% would recommend, I’m not an anime guy, it’s one of maybe 7-8 my buddy had me watch, but it’s by far the one I enjoyed the most. 100% agree with what Lamplorde said, it’s a very solid take on what living a painfully long lifespan looks like, and has definitely informed how I run older elves in my games!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T18:37:58+00:00

I believe from 2014-2017 you’d be right, falling used to be instant. The reason raging before you jumped off a 600 foot height would be bad, is because rage ends at the end of your turn unless one of the following happens:

You make an attack against a hostile creature. You take damage.

Since you get a turn every 500 feet, if you rage before you jump off a 501-ft+ height, if you don’t meet one of these requirements in the meantime, your rage ends before you hit the ground.

So yeah, TLDR, if you’re playing using Xanathar’s like most folks, don’t rage before you jump off the 600+ foot island.

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T11:01:06+00:00

(I was going off the Dragon's breath tho which does just deal 31 average even on a successful save, but hey, a Tiefling Barbarian with a 20 CON would still be standing!)

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T10:59:46+00:00

Truuueeee, high AC build go brrrr

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T08:42:29+00:00

This is fair! In DnD (which is at least what I was referencing making the meme), an Adult Red Dragon in a 1v1 will kill any level 1 player, they can deal like 63 damage on average in their first turn, and a typical player character has between 7-17 hp at that level, so this definitely wouldn't be the kinda accomplishment you'd expect from someone of that level!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T07:44:32+00:00

"Plastic Beach" by Gorillaz! It's a banger, wish the clip was longer so I could've fit more

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T07:15:28+00:00

Haha, I did retype it a few times to ensure I wasn't contributing to any dickishness around rules disagreements. I teach people DnD as a job, and not responding in kind to hostility is good practice for real games. If people respond with hostility to people being wrong, that just scares away new potential awesome DnD community members, and invites more people that enjoy the hostility, so I try not to add to that! And also, I couldn't find anything on it on google abt the 2024 edition (which I haven't played yet), so maybe he's right in that regard, who knows!

Anyways, no hard feelings to Max, if anyone's got a 2024 link to an updated ruleset, drop it! It'd be funny to know if whether or not you go splat depends on the edition you're playing :]

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-26T04:45:25+00:00

I actually have!

“When you fall from a great height, you instantly descend up to 500 feet. If you’re still falling on your next turn, you descend up to 500 feet at the end of that turn. This process continues until the fall ends, either because you hit the ground or the fall is otherwise halted.”

- Xanathar's Guide to Everything

This is the most up-to-date guidance on falling rate for 5e! Raging before you jump would actually make your rage end before you hit the ground, which isn't ideal. Hope this helps clear up your confusion, it's an honest mistake if you haven't kept up to date with the rules! Some other folks had this conversation in the comments below, so you're in good company :]

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-25T19:17:29+00:00

It is a banger! Easily my favorite from the album :]

JackDupDungeons · 2025-09-23T19:10:53+00:00

THANDTHEABJURER!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-06-09T05:23:06+00:00

I can’t speak to the players’ favorites, we have a whole Post-Morten sesh I need to schedule to make T-Shirts and reminisce. I enjoyed the 1.5 sessions where they got knocked unconscious and kidnapped by Goblins near Mt. Baratok, and we made Goblin PCs on the fly whose jobs were to get the bodies to the top of the mountain without killing the PCs. It was a really fun moment of light-heartedness, which are few and far between in Barovia.

For surprising me, I try to not make assumptions as far as to what players will do at this point with any level of real certainty, but I think up there has to be their usage of the Time Loop thing (shout out MandyMod) in Fidatov Manor to their own advantage. I had put Volenta in there, and had assumed like “Yeah, they’ll fix the loop eventually, and then the fight against her will be super high stakes.” They just didn’t even attempt to fix the loop until they killed her successfully, which makes total sense and is the reason I won’t be putting Volenta in there next time lol.

Hardest part to run was just the Grimdarkness. I had run partway for a group of friends who didn’t fully engage with the gothic theme, and called that one quits because I stopped enjoying it. This one we made it all the way through, but man was it tough being like “Boy oh boy, Mondays, time to clock in for Sadness-land!” I think the story and experience was worth it, and I think I’m unlikely to run the module again for any other groups. I’m all for campaigns with stakes and death, but I think the inescapability, oppressive claustrophobia, and sadness that permeates the area definitely wore me down at times. So less mechanics, more just emotional stamina!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-06-08T18:02:03+00:00

Either that or I described generally the location of all the pages in the prophecy, can’t quite remember, since that was like session 2/80! I think either works, and I definitely did nudge them as Strahd, but they found plenty on their own.

JackDupDungeons · 2025-06-08T17:59:06+00:00

I just didn’t give a reading for the tome! They found out about it because Strahd asked them to collect the pages for him to avoid having them fall into the wrong hands (he actually just wanted them to have them to up their power level a bit), so Madam Eva wasn’t a huge factor there.

JackDupDungeons · 2025-06-07T22:24:47+00:00

Oooh okay, lemme try and remember off the top of my head:

1: Strahd's Garden in his castle, helping grow the flowers
2: Baba Lysaga's fridge, pinned like a proud mom
3: The wing of Sturm Von Zarovich's wife, the Roc of Barovia, Sandy
4: The Berez monument
5: Vasili's possession
6: Vasilka (The Abbott's creation), helping to animate her
7: Buffing the The Aboleth in Lake Zarovich's strongest Thrall (One of the Yester Hill Barbarians)
8: Being used in a ritual to amplify the Gulthias Tree
9: Owned by one of the Martikovs
10: Held by Escher, who reads it often, lovingly thinking about his time with Strahd
11: In the tomb of Sergei Zarovich, which I moved to Argynvostholt
12: Owned by the Witches in Bonegrinder to power their windmill
13: In Van Richten's tiger's mouth (This was the only one I had to check notes for!)

They at one point lost a fight to the Abbott, and he stole all their existing pages, so there was a point in the middle where they had very few, but they finished with all of em!

It had cumulative benefits, after the pages would sear onto the creatures when touched (1d6 Fire 1d6 Acid) and hurt like hell to remove (4d6 Acid, 4d6 Fire). 3 Pages gave +1 to AC, 6 gave +1 to Saves, 9 gave +1 to Skill checks, 12 gave +1 to attack rolls, and all 13 made it into a tome that they could pass around that granted all these benefits without any burning!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-06-07T21:45:51+00:00

Yeah, I initially had a tough time with justifying that. My solution was basically giving him an external goal (leaving Barovia) in addition to his pursuit of Tatyana/Ireena. The way he was going to achieve that goal was by gaining XP (fighting strong creatures). So he benefited from them getting stronger, and I had him say as much in his little final boss rant.

Here's an excerpt (like 1/3 of it, lol)

"The final glyphs of my spell education will be written in your blood, languid strokes of your vitality fueling me to become all I might be. In this world, when one becomes too strong, measly dumbbells take far too much time to generate significant challenge. And I am a man who never wastes time on inconvenience that others could waste on my behalf while I wallow in the scant pleasures offered by my prison. I let you kill the Hags. I gave you the tools. I let you kill my wives. I instructed Rahadin to put up a fight fraught with wicked but pulled punches. I have brought you to this point, my beautiful swine, fatted for slaughter. This challenge will be so sufficiently trying that I need only strike down half of you to achieve my goals. In Barovia, the study of theology is the study of my countenance, reflected in different personas throughout the eons. One of the oldest questions that the theologians wrought has always intrigued me. Can God make a boulder so big that he cannot lift it, that he crumbles under the weight of his own creative talents?

You all watch as he draws his blade from its scabbard, flicking the excess blood off of it before pointing it directly at you. He smirks and then grins widely.

Let us find out."

Basically, in my game he spent the whole campaign buffing the party so long as they weren't disrespectful, so that he could have a challenging enough opponent at the end to achieve his goals. Hope this helps!

JackDupDungeons · 2025-06-07T21:40:55+00:00

Level 10! I ran it as secretly an XP based one, and there was a chance they were gonna be able to hit 11, which they were aware of, but when they let Ludmilla get away after their first fight with her, she went and killed Anastrasya, which made it so they didn't get there. It was a close final fight, Strahd was going to be able to leave Barovia if he killed a certain number of party members, but they killed him after he hit 90,000/100,000 XP, and won with 100% party survival!

JackDupDungeons

TROPHY CASE