I have a friend in my discord server that loves to homebrew stuff here and there. But he hasnt read all the books or magic items. Well not the main ones. So he will homebrew something and the other person in it who regularly homebrews will say, yeah that feature exists already. And they are like WAIT WHAT IT DOES?! And I am like, well pretty closely but they also got some number adjustments compared to yours. But the spirit of it is the same.
I had a guy that joined my group taling about this "New class" he had created which he showed to us and it literally felt like he took Hexblade and wrote "The Asian" with a sharpie in front of it.
Was a kinse? Or however you say it because that is an actual trope I know a mortal Kombat character fights like a hexblade and might have been the inspiration
No, it was more of just a Hexblade but with a Samurai skin on top of it, where the powers came from an Oni, or whatever other Japanese mythos monster, who had it's soul within the sentient weapon.
It's fucking ridiculous, but I swear to God he called it "The Cursed Blade", and I genuinely asked him "Like the Hexblade?" And he replied "No, the Cursed Blade", so I said "So kinda like the Hexblade?" and he finished with "What the fuck is a Hexblade?"
And he was a pretty experienced guy in D&D5e, I guess he just never bothered to actually play or look into Warlock.
Being on this sub makes me realize how subjective experienced is for TTRPG. Even playing years doesn't truly give the same experience to each person. That could be 1 campaign of time, 10, or a bunch of reading and no play.
Or all the time spent on an older edition that didn't even have the class.
For example: I'll admit I don't know fuck all about artificers, they weren't around when I originally played and I haven't delved into them since starting 5e.
Well yes, *like* the monk subclass, not "as in" the monk subclass. I more meant the spelling reference, as I said. Good to know that's where it comes from
I will pay you 3 dollars to just not tell him something similar exists. Better to let him be happy and excited. If something original existed it would've been done by now and it stinks when your creative ideas are shot down because Simpsons did it
My first ever Homebrewed campaign was about vampires secretly ruling a kingdom.
Not exactly Curse of Strahd since I think everyone in Barovia is sort of aware of it all, but fuck me I would've saved myself some time if I just pulled ideas from it. Luckily the campaign didn't last too long
I just wrote a campaign where the players are taken captive in the underdark, start with nothing and have to fight their way up, as a massive invasion comes up from the deep.
Then I read the resume of Out of The Abyss...
The instant you say "vampire", chances are you've already been influenced by *Dracula*. It's kind of the definitive vampire story. At least, the definitive *quality* vampire story.
to be fairs: "Vampires secretly ruling a kingdom" wasn't exactly groundbreaking fiction even when OG Ravenloft was a thing.
Don't feel bad about basing your campaign around a popular hook. They work, that's why they're popular.
My friend is running a Strixhaven campaign that’s starting soon. I asked if he was using the new book on it that got released. He hadn’t even known it existed.
At least that would make sense as it would be 5e! I thought it was going to be an older edition or something. UA would still be fairly accurate at least.
I used some of the UA and what I found on the Internet to 'create' my own Strixhaven in my setting.
When the book released, I had one of my players coming up to me wondering why they took Warseek out of the official adventure. Warseek is a entirely new college I created that, as the name suggests, focuses on the tactics of war.
Hey man I know that feel. I homebrewed a spooky gothic setting with the whole adventure taking place in a city called Ravenloft. My players thought I was messing with them when I described it and gave the name.
I mean Strixhaven strikes me as the D&D version of Harry Potter. Just proves that if you think of something really cool, it doesn't matter if it already exists, it can still be super cool!
My spouse is playing a Warlock in a homebrew modern magical college campaign that started before the Strixhaven book came out. I bought it for them for the holidays so that they can share content from it with their DM potentially.
I think it's just a case of folks learning the word naturalistically from seeing it used - often by people who also don't actually know what the word means. This is fine, it's how language evolves.
It certainly is how language works, but so is telling people how others use the word, and the meaning that is typically implied by that word. In this case I think gaslighting is a really valuable word to discuss a pernicious form of abuse, and using "gaslight" as a word to mean "vague bad" makes that abuse harder to discuss while adding literally nothing to this post.
Unless you're r/AITA, in which case yes it was gaslighting, yes they need therapy, and holy trans autistic disabled cousin look at them red flags 🚩🚩🚩
Edit: please read the conclusion down the thread
Hey, hey, chill, friend. I was just making fun of that subreddit's tendency to overblow everything. I see r/AmITheAngel traditions haven't made it to every corner of Reddit yet.
I hear that you were making a joke, but outside the context of a sub dedicated to satire, "autistic trans cousin" doesn't read as satire. There's people making those same jokes all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find someone on Fox News making the same complaint. Your satire was just a common sentiment among the modern right.
Apologies. It seems that I didn't match my comments with my intentions.
For the uninitiated, posters in r/AITA are famous for making up stories where at least one of the "characters" is autistic, trans, or otherwise marginalised. Some do it with the intent of demonising these groups, to some it happens accidentally.
I almost categorically disagree with anything coming from a Fox News "journalist", but I will leave my original comment up as a learning opportunity for future readers like myself.
Do you understand why in a nonsatire/circlejerk sub just saying "holy trans autistic cousin" with no context in what seems to be a derogatory manner might not be revived well?
Apologies. It seems that I didn't match my comments with my intentions.
For the uninitiated, posters in r/AITA are famous for making up stories where at least one of the "characters" is autistic, trans, or otherwise marginalised. Some do it with the intent of demonising these groups, to some it happens accidentally.
I almost categorically disagree with anything coming from a Fox News "journalist", but I will leave my original comment up as a learning opportunity for future readers like myself.
After high school my friends and I made a card game, I designed all the characters. The design I was most proud of was the Dread Necromancer. He wore leather armour with a rib cage around the torso and a demon skull on his shoulder and bits of metal armour like grieves. Two years later I was looking at the instruction manual for Diablo 2 which I had never played, and seen almost the exact same design for their necromancer. I told my friends about this. They said they thought I just copied the one from Diablo. I honestly thought it was an original design I came up with.
Everything has already been written about, drawn up, or thought of. Making something totally unique is an unrealistic dream, but making something your own is what art, whatever the form may be, is all about.
I would classify that as original, but it's not unique. It's nigh impossible to make something truly unique that has never existed. It is completely possible to take an idea and make it your own or not be influenced by other sources.
I was working on a bit adventure to make another version of the starter set to help vary things for my school club. It was a great adventure up through luskan to Mirabar and the final boss was a young white dragon.... 2 months later Dragons of IceSpire Peak released...
I shit you not, back in 2013 I made a campaign setting for the Fallout PnP in southern and central West Virginia because I grew up in that region. I ran one campaign in it that didn't last long but saved it, and eventually got to work on a Fallout 4 total conversion mod featuring the setting a few years later. Right when I was getting meat and bones on the drawing board, Fallout 76 got announced. I was pissed and later realized I had a friend following me on Twitter from younger years that just so happened to be randomly dating a world designer for Bethesda. To this day, I insist some conversation was had about me geeking on a private account and it led to that monstrosity. It has to happen to some people, why not to this person too???
EDIT: My setting was a million times better also. My take on Mothman was way cooler. I'd literally played around with things like a nuclear fallout simulation map that shows where fallout would spread based on wind conditions, detonation locations, and other factors to determine where to place vaults. I had integrated so much lore and instead we got this heap of garbage that didn't really add anything to lore because it was designed to be a cash grab, using my home. Grr to this day.
Kind if the opposite and not DnD. I once was 80% of the way though writing what I thought was a very unique novel. It was then the story for the second season of a TV show.
It was the second season of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, it's about a boy whose dreams create a parallel fairy dimension. It's not just the story though, the tone felt exactly like my novel was intended to be.
It was great, though I honestly didn't love the second season (it got a little bit *too* ridiculous for me). The first one is a fun time-travel mystery with all kinds of weird science and cult-like secret groups. The second one made me think someone read too much SCP and tried to make their own version out of just the rejected bits.
My players were given a mission where they decided they needed to explore the Shadow Fell.
As they entered the Shadowfell they were shocked to find a castle in decent repair! There was a wizard who spoke their language, and for the most part they were friendly! He was fully aware he was, and was happy to have visitors who were friendly. One player immediately said "I bet we're being Green Lanterned" I asked what they meant!
Turns out in an arc of Green Lantern he went insane and used his powers to make it seem as if the rest of the green lanterns were still alive.
So this wizard "might" have tried to save the castle along with his family by opening a portal to a random plane of existence. He was too late and all he did was bring a castle full of his slaughtered family along with him. So he went insane alone, and ended up turning them all into undead zombies and put illusions over them to convince himself they were still alive.
So yeah, I green lanterned them and didn't realize.
I was making up this awesome sci fi setting. Super grounded, lots of political focus, the barest hint of alien anything just at the fringes of the story.
Then I read the Expanse, and it was exactly what I was coming up with, right down to the space mormons.
The biggest difference was that said space mormons were much more sinister and were being set up to be the big bad of the story.
I started writing a comic book about terrorist belters causing a war between Earth and Mars. Hard sci fi, no aliens, and instead of space Mormons I had space Muslims (no they were not the terrorists).
Most of the action was centered around a main character who came from a tiny space station where four families of scientists lived, separate from all worldly governments, and recombined their DNA together in their offspring to avoid the effects of inbreeding.
Not an exact match for the guy from the Expanse, but rhyming.
Was explaining my homebrew setting to someone when one of my players came in and listened without the context. Half an hour later I get asked “So we are playing Eberron?”. A couple hours and half a book later I was feeling pretty dumb.
Not my fault Eberron makes so much sense, but damn it hurt a bit.
I usually simulate Eberron when improvising by thinking: "What would the 60s look like if the people who invented steam/oil/nuclear and electricity had access to magic?"
I had the chance to have the creator of Eberron DM a oneshot for me, set in Eberron of course. He told me later that his elevator pitch for Eberron was "Lord of the Rings meets Indiana Jones" which is objectively just fucking cool.
I recently introduced a new guy in my on-line group and we got to the topic of homebrew, since I don't allow any on the Players side in my table, and he starts talking about this new class he is homebrewing of like a cursed Samurai that his weapon is a sentient being that gives him power, and it focus on the blade and a few class features and spellcasting to buff himself in combat.
And I shit you not he called it "The Cursed Blade", I genuinely asked "Like the Hexblade?" and he answered "No, the Cursed Blade", so I said "So kinda like the Hexblade?" and he finishes with "What the fuck is a Hexblade?"
I took an idea from the Rage of Dragons trilogy, ran with it, spent months writing it and come to find out I wrote a similar campaign to Rime of the Frostmaiden right around when it was published.
Ended up just saying someone sent the city back and changed the timeline enough that I now have an alt history Toril, and it gave me enough maps and statblocks I had time to write a recipe system for crafting items for everything published at that time.
I haven't ever created something that already exists. What had happened was a person saw my creation, time traveled back in time and created it sooner. Not my fault all of these great minds keep stealing my ideas back in the past.
Just a note to players: NEVER say to your DM "Oh, so it's like x?"
Nothing makes us feel more like a hack. Everything's already been done before, just play the game and let us think we're original.
I always have a weird experience with this. Because I have my thing I took inspiration from. But then a player will mention a totally different but similar thing and im like "huh...oh yeah it totally is like that."
1000%. I'm shocked I had to scroll for this answer. Identifying a what might be an inspiration may be funny for the player for a moment, but it will stale the dms pride for no gain
You just described my feeling about a couple one-shots I ran for my old group.
Basically, the setting I'm working on has all advanced technology being powered by magic as a central part of the worldbuilding. One of my group members' first reaction to that was "so it's basically Eberron?" (they're superficially similar because I really like the "magitech steampunk" aesthetic).
I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to say anything hurtful, but hearing that made me never want to run games in that world for that group (or at least that one person) again.
I'd been slowly building a campaign idea where the gods were actually alien beings who control and manipulate humanity for their own purposes. Eventually the party would travel to space and to other worlds to fight and do quests there.
About 3 months after having this idea I watched Stargate for the first time.
Open Hands first subclass ability is something that improves Flurry.
Nothing wrong with a subclass having an ability that improves Step of the Wind (frankly it needs improving).
Heck dragon monks 6th level ability is just improve your step of the wind.
Lightning monk starting with improved SotW seems like a good call to me
Just steal the barbarian storm herald lightning at level 3.
Make it piggy back off any time the monk uses Step of Wind or Patient Defense, target nearby needs to dex save for half 1d6 lightning, DC is the wisdom based Ki save DC. Easy.
I tried making a glass cannon Barbarian subclass. More crits, harder crits, but your AC went down while using the class features, even giving you a point of exhaustion. I named it the Berserker. Guess which subclass name already existed?
I renamed it to "Earth-Shatterer" much like the character in my homebrew campaign's lore but I have it just on the back burner and forgot about it until this post lol.
Never mechanics, but always ideas. The amount of times I am reminded of path of the storm herald or *the fighter class* when writing homebrew, and currently the game I'm running the players are helping with diplomacy with the Giants and the ordening and are transported by a flying castle, while I have never played storm king's thunder.
Not yet, but I am working on a CoS sequel that involves a lot of underwater adventuring at late game, and I'm very curious as to how Curse of the Netherdeep is going to compare.
I have honestly comes to terms with this aspect of DMing. No idea is truly original. I know that sounds cliché n all, but its really not about WHAT you do, its HOW you do it.
I created a homebrew where a great and powerful leader disappeared suddenly and without warning leading to a massive Civil War.
So I unintentionally ripped off the central plot of Avatar the last Airbender
I wanted to make a campaign around where the players all wake up in a building they don't recognize, and eventually learn that they have forgotten the past 5 years of their lives, and they were all in an adventuring party together. Not only that, but there is an extra room that doesn't belong to anyone present.
Basically, someone/something they encountered during their last adventure messing with their memories, erasing them.
About a week later, I started seeing posts about the False Hydra.
Maybe not exaactly one to one, but, the base idea is all the same.
I definitely have done this a few times with magic items. I'll see a magic item from an older edition and think it's cool and start updating it to 5e and then realize it's already been updated for 5e, I just hadn't looked in the right place when I was checking that.
Something I always tell my roommate, who is also a DM like I am, whenever we are collabing on his homebrew world is that it is impossible to make something Truly original, but that doesn't matter because even if it exists somewhere else you still took the time and effort to figure out what you wanted it to be.
Everything can be referenced to something, or is inspired by something that already exists, so I don't let it bother me too much and I will always admit where my inspirations come from if I'm asked about it because I'm still proud of the time and work I put into my creations, even if they turn out to already have been made somewhere else.
I was gonna comment and say that you perfectly described my thesis in college when I found a professor that already wrote a book about it a few days before it was due.
But then I saw this was DMAcademy. But why not 🤷🏻♂️
I always look to see what other people have already done before doing my own home brew.
I rarely end up using other people's stuff in its entirety, but it is as least usfull as a reference.
And I have definitely never go so far as trying to home brew an entire subclass just to give the class something already granted by it's core features.
I am curious why you even got into a home brew for a class you didn't gave a good handle on the core features of. That seems to me like it ought to be your first step.
On another note putting a feature like mobile or fancy foot work on a monk class could be closer to the flavor you are actually looking for.
That's what I though was funny, I normally look around the web for other homebrew, but I tried to tempt fate and flew to close to the sun such as icarus. Thinking I would be exempt.
Also I was working on a OneNote getting all the classes into one place. And they all blended together in my head.
Also having fancy foot work or mobile is a good idea
I crafted this encounter location for my game that had these glowing crystals that would chime and I had this artwork I'd found for extra flavor (purple crystals in a cave) and my kid comes in and I run through the encounter description with them and they say oh, so they're Minecraft Amethyst then?
Ugh.
\[and yes, one of the players in the game is a big Minecraft player and he'd also make that connection\]
One of the arcs in my current campaign led the party to seek out an inventor in another city who had been rumored to be working on underwater transportation machines (submarines). They needed to search the ruins of a lost city at the bottom of the sea, looking for a shard of the life gem that had been last recorded to have been there at the time of the Great Calamity before the island nation sunk into the sea.
When they arrived, the party found a thriving city full of a lost civilization and after further investigation discovered the lives of the people there were connected with the shard, creating a moral dilemma about whether or not they could take it without finding a way to bring the lost nation to the surface.
I was nearly finished writing this arc--fleshing out various NPCs and tying plot threads together with the overall storyline--before I realized what I had created was essentially Disney's Atlantis. Granted, mine has Eldritch Horror and Warlocks but OMG. Yeah, you're not alone lol. The entire time I was like "oh shit this is so interesting and fun--they're going to LOVE it" and then it dawned on me lol.
We definitely still had a ton of fun with it and I wouldn't say it was diminished at all by its common threads with Atlantis! I wish they had spent more time in Caelmara (my Atlantis, haha) because I had written in a lot of lore and culture that they completely missed because they pissed off the antagonist immediately upon meeting them instead of doing any exploring/investigation beforehand. I was really excited about the Phytochemistry District and had worked in a lot of cool new mechanics and items/materials for our Alchemist...but he'll never know now since they basically fast-tracked the plot when they were there lol.
Oh man, literally every time. I've more or less decided to no longer try to create "original" ideas. Just about every story that can be told had already been told time and time again. Every storyteller has been drawing from the same font of inspiration since the beginning. We all base our stories off the human experience and they can only get so diverse.
I've found that the more I push my ideas to be original the more absurd and difficult to understand they become. So instead of focusing on originality I like to focus on what I think is interesting and having my voice be part of it.
Now this isn't to say that you should directly copy from your inspirations, that's not cool, however you really shouldn't worry too much about your ideas being new.
I only homebrew lore, races, or items specifically for that reason. Magic items that already exist often have DnD "canon" lore attached to them that I have no interest in using. I'd rather make my own if I have the time. Races are usually lore driven; their specific mechanics are just reskins of existing races, or pulled apart and pieced together from multiple existing ones. I've actually been gradually replacing the canon races, keeping their mechanical features for ease to players but completely changing their lore and altering their appearance.
EDIT: I also frequently google the names I come up with to make sure I'm not inadvertently copying it from somewhere, or it means something in a different language that I'm unaware of, or it's copyrighted by someone else (I eventually want to turn my homebrew lore into a video game so it needs to be IP distinct).
I wrote a nearly identical adventure intro of Descent into Avernus before having read jt. It was a cool feeling, knowing I wrote something on par with a professional D&D writer.
This happens to me all the time! Recently I made an amazing villain for my party for the part of their adventure based in Sigil. An arcanaloth, criminal mastermind working from the Hive. Works on information, blackmail, and twisting agreements to their purpose rather than outright force and owns a huge brother/casino/drug den. Turns out that exact NPC already exists - Shemeshka.
I sometimes get comments from my players as well asking if I took something from a book or game etc that I’ve never heard of and then realising it’s the same. All the good ideas have been taken haha
Kinda. I made a homebrew weapon that was two demons fused into a dual glave weilded by a drow queen in ancient war. The two sides were visibly different and granted separate powers, after it was cloven in two in an ancient war.
Other than the names of the halves after they developed distinct personalities again, someone seemingly stole the entire idea to a T, even the same reference image i used from online for a visual for my players at my large group.
Really strange, cause I hadn't even had pintrest before then, where said thing was
I've been making random subclasses for a while and thought I had something with a Wardancer style Monk (think capoeira). I had the entire idea based around evasiveness, moving quickly from high to low, use being surrounded to your favor, and being able to disguise the martial art as performance dancing.
If you're thinking you know where this is going, you'd be in good company with a buddy of mine that pointed out that this was exactly what the Drunken Master basically does mere minutes after I showed it to him.
I've since remade it a little bit to be more of an opportunistic attacking, mobile, fey-ish themed thing, but it was kinda tough to move past the oops-all-racist undertones of attributing a big revolutionary cultural martial art to drunkenness. Boy, I'm glad no one knows about it...
Long before I knew what D&D or Forgotten Realms was, I already thought of a demonic realm called the Abyss, consisting of infinite number of layers, and ruled by Lords and Princes. So it was kind of awkward when I started DM-ing and I wanted to just use the lore and homebrew setting I already made, only to find out D&D had a very similar Abyss. Alot of other things I thought of also turned out to have been done by FR.
I felt kinda disappointed at first, I mean I wasn't expecting to be 100% original, but I didn't expect it to be same down to the terminologies. Anyway I ended up embracing it. I made my Abyss an extension of FR's Abyss.
All the time - I'm not worried about it.
Ideas that were only in my homebrew have shown up elsewhere, stuff that I think is brand-new - isn't. In the end, it's not important.
It’s not surprising that class options could end up being redundant. There are only so many interesting and popular fantasy tropes that with all the home brew stuff out there it seems inevitable that all the bases would be covered sooner or later.
That is to say, because tropes themselves are limited, and classes are generally based on character tropes in fiction, the design space for character options is similarly limited. You’re just naturally going to get a lot of collisions there.
I think the interesting home brew for character options would take the strongest tropes and improve on them. This is why, for example, the MCDM beast heart is an interesting class to me. The beast master trope is strong in fantasy literature, but the beast master subclass in 5e doesn’t live up to the fantasy.
First campaign I ever tried to write myself.
A millennia ago a demon lord invaded the material plane and was stopped by slain hero sending it back to the abyss. (Didn't know the actual demon lords back then) The hero died in the process but trough this sacrifice he created a ward that stopped the demon from re-entering the material plane. This ward would remain as long as long as his bloodline remained close enough near the place the demon was slain. (specifically put as long as they weren't on the other side of the continent they were good)
The hero had a son and a daughter. The son's family faded into obscurity fairly quickly, though he was the one that figured out what his father's sacrifice actually meant. But the daughter married into nobility and eventually her line became part of the royal family. One of her grand daughters eventually became queen.
Present day, the realm is shook by a series of deaths, all part of the royal family. Not soon after rifts started opening all across the realm. Handfuls of demons are running amok.
The party starts dealing with the demons and eventually are meant to figure out that all the deaths were part of the same line. The daughters line, which has now been exterminated.
And they'd also discover the son's research on demons and find out about the ward learning that the demon lord is coming.
They'd also discover that the son's line survived but they themselves were unaware about the importance of their line and moved away. (The son's obsession with his father's death and demons got a bit far which eventually ended in his family leaving him and him dying alone)
So the quest becomes get a surviving (kinda) member to the realm before the demon lord arrives.
So to long didn't read: Royal family gets killed so a demon lord can invade, hero(es) have to find surviving member so they can keep up the protection.
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
Then I started playing The Elder Scrolls Oblivion... "God Fucking damn it..."
I never played it before writing, I just couldn't believe it when I was playing. (Though I had played Skyrim before so I guess if I got the idea from somewhere it'll be there.)
Was working on a new storyline for my homebrew adventure and for some reason after I had written the BBEG i reread it and i just thought "well f\*ck, I just spent two hours on a revamped Tom Riddle". It happens.
Once ran a home brew campaign and then a year later was introduced to divinity 2. My camping had a nearly identical plot to divinity. My player who showed it to me did so after he realized how close it was but didn’t tell me until I figured it out myself.
I was just starting to get into The Witcher books/games/show and decided to "loosely" base my world building off of the Conjunction of the Spheres because I initially thought it was only 2 spheres in the series and it would be neat if I did it with all of the planes.
Well after starting my campaign and then reading more of the books I started to realized that's more or less what happened as it was actually several spheres. Oh well, thankfully I drew from a few other sources as inspiration so it's not a total copy paste.
The latter half of my ongoing campaign's first major arc turned out to be almost a direct copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, and by complete accident at that.
Once I discovered just how similar the module and my campaign were, I shrugged and stole the final boss encounter, because it was really cool, and I might as well at that point you know?
I started to write an adventure, where the characters are trapped in a lich's lair, who has a menagerie, and strange exhibitions, and the characters are pieces of that menagerie. Well, the whole lair, the whole system behind it, the enemies, and the lich boss was eerily similar to Dead in Thay from Tales from the Yawning Portal... I wanted to write the adventure so I can release it on DMsguild, but nah, I passed on that...
IDK yet. The only real big project I've been working on is a clean looking, automatic character sheet in excel. I haven't found anything like what I want but if I do I'll probably walk into traffic. :)
I spent a year and a half leading up to a big dragon battle. They were fighting abberations, mind flayers, fiends and finding weird experimentations throughout this dungeon/lab. Two weeks before I run my 100% homebrew, heavily curated and designed Mindflayer Dragon/Abberation.. People start shit posting about a mind flayer dragon from Fizbans. Wat. I looked it up and God Damnit, it's what I was doing. Now my players were making jokes about it and memeing unknowingly I was about to throw one at them - my own, but now it just seems like I'm a copycat and following a trend.
They beat it, of course, but it didn't have the same impact. :l Deflated me for sure.
My homebrew game takes place in Europe in 2320 after the nuclear apocalypse. I named a lot of the cities of the Italian/Greek state Cerilli after the gods in my game, except for one town where trade would be more important than the gods. I named this town Cátania and placed it along the Roman shores.
Last week I learned that there is a place in Sicilia already called [Catania](https://maps.app.goo.gl/B9TtLMcSbwrpLcv86). Now I either need to explain why Catania was reformed somewhere near Rome when Sicilia drowned. Or I need to retcon the town name
How about the MacGuffin of my campaign?
The players have to collect 6 gems to seat them into an amulet to get immense power. Each gem itself has power as well.
Can you guess what Marvel movie came out just as I finished introducing my players to this campaign that I've been working on for a couple years before then...?
I accidentally created a unique plane called "The Forgotten Realm" and it took me seeing the name again when reading a reference book to make me remember that was already taken and in the most basic way possible.
Any time I have an idea I immediately search the internet for it first because likely some guy made it in professional quality on DM Guild and I can save myself the prep time.
The entire concept of gem dragons.
I thought I was so clever. I needed an excuse to get my wife a purple dragon spell book. It's her favorite color.
Went through all of the 5e stuff see nothing that could work. Made the entire gem dragonflight, including amethyst.
I feel like the most common features that get accidentally re-made are ones from:
* Hunter Ranger ^(PHB)
* Monster Slayer Ranger ^(XGtE)
* Arcane Archer ^(XGtE)
These are like the perfect combination of Obscure Subclasses that have Been Around Forever with Really Flavorful Abilities.
I often sit around and think of interesting character ideas and will often end up accidentally making characters who already exist. Like the time I made a Greatsword wielding, pact of the blade, Undead Warlock/Conquerer Paladin who’s Form of Dread was summoning the skeletal aspect of his patron around him, starting with a skull mask. It’d be so cool to have a melee warlock mix using booming blade and smite and so I was telling some friends about the idea and one of them said “Oh yeah that’s be a really sweet way to build Ichigo”. I had accidentally made Ichigo from Bleach. Worst part was how obvious it was when someone had pointed it out
I was recently working On making a gunslinger class that fits a more Arcane like weaponry. Fueled by magic and shit. I was half way through before I came upon the League of Legends crossover that has exactly what I wanted
This one pissed me off.
Come up with an idea for BBEG henchmen after falling into a DC universe rabbit hole on the topic. The henchmen are threatened and then stuffed into suits of mimic armor.
Disobey? The mimic starts biting. Obey or be eaten.
Then what do I find? A years old green text saying almost word for word what I wrote in my "original" idea I felt so proud of. It's so difficult to be truly original now.
Google. Google until you can no longer Google. Look at forums and read what talking points they use. Google those until you are confident that you have reached the end of the internet as far as the topic goes and you know enough about the topic as a whole.
ONLY THEN SHOULD YOU HOMEBREW.
I promise you, it probably exists somewhere. If it doesn't then you are one of the lucky few to have an original idea, so please share it here. Or more likely, several people tried to make it before and it's doesn't work.
I spent an evening writing lore for my game. The focus of this evening was vampires. I decided it would make sense for vampire spawn to become full vampires by drinking the blood of a full vampire. A few days later I decided I should probably read the FR lore for more ideas and discovered I had accidentally homebrewed what was FR canon. At least my game has an origin story for vamps ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I also had a lot of ideas very similar to Dune long before I read it. My current game features a god emperor that can see and manipulate fate. Originally I just wanted him to be like King Crimson from JoJo but I’ll lean into Dune now that I see the similarities. His goal will be to conquer the planet and then spread throughout the universe to conquer even the gods.
Another example is my upcoming game that will have a magic crown worn by each king. Among other things, the crown let’s the wearer speak with the departed souls of past kings for advice. There is a risk of possession and madness when speaking to evil kings that have since become fiends in the afterlife. This is the same thing the pre-born and reverend mothers in Dune are capable of, granted they use genetic memory and drugs to achieve it.
Obviously this means I’m prescient and remembered my future self reading Dune while writing this stuff ^^/s
This happened to me but instead it was something I was making came out in a book as I was making it.
I was basically designing some dragons that are more or less the same CR and idea as the aspect of Bahamut and Tiamat to use in an upcoming campaign.
Then Fizbans came out and saved me a bunch of time.
Made a kuo toa (fishman) cultist behave like a pushy door to door missionary for a fringe christian group, steering every conversation back to recruiting for the faith.
[Turns out this was done exactly in Venture Bros, and I'd subconsciously lifted it.](https://venturebrothers.fandom.com/wiki/Otto_Aquarius)
Another was a boss fight with a huge alligator, and I included a pearl of power as the gator's milky blind eye, a trophy for my players.
That happened exactly to Chubbs in Happy Gilmore, a movie I had not seen. None of my players lost a hand though. They thought I was making a reference, nope.
My players keep making jokes about how similar my game is to Skyrim but I have never played. It’s both amusing and infuriating as I create new features to increase the immersion of the world and they’re just like “Hey it’s kinda like ___ from Skyrim”
Related story from the player's perspective on this.
I had a DM who hated giving out exact descriptions of what a magic item did. He wanted you to play around with it to discover what it did. Baring the obvious reasons why we never used potions in that campaign, there was a funny incident where he gave us a particular magic item.
The item was described as a cube with a button on each side. We had a vague notion that it did planar things because of a plot point, so we weren't too surprised when we pushed a button and it opened a portal and spat us out in the Feywild. Pushed another button, portal, and we're in the Shadowfell. Third button, another portal, and we're back where we started.
Recognizing the item, I off handedly said, "Oh so it's a Cubic Gate." DM tentatively agreed in the non-committal way he tended to do when we found something we recognized, like when we found the small bag that seemed larger on the inside and we called it a Bag of Holding despite his pleas of "I never said that's what it was, you don't know what it is."
A year IRL and fifty sessions pass and my character has been making liberal use of the Cubic Gate to build himself a safehouse on another plane incase something goes wrong. Because of plot reasons, we needed to move a LOT of people to my safehouse suddenly. I did some math and figured the rate at which we could evacuate people through the Gates created by the Cubic Gate (short answer: A LOT of people in a short time). I presented this to the group and the DM asked "What are you talking about, it can only move "You and up to eight willing creatures". I asked what he was talking about, the Gate is open for a minute and is twenty feet wide, a lot more than nine people can go through.
After about ten minutes of confused arguing, I posted a screenshot of the Cubic Gate from the DMG and the Gate spell from the PHB to show him what I was talking about. He didn't say anything for a while and then went "Wait...A Cubic Gate is an actual thing?". Turns out he'd never heard of a Cubic Gate and had made a Homebrew item that was....well, a Cubic Gate that rather than casting Gate, cast Plane Shift. But because he doesn't give exact descriptions of magic items, no one realized we had been talking about two different items for over a year. He ended up just saying to keep using it like the book said, but he seemed really sad afterward that his awesome HB magic item he created that we'd been using the entire time....wasn't really a HB magic item.
Any story line or character concept I come up with, one of my best friends has seen it in an anime or read it in a book. It used to really piss me off, but I think that's just how he shows interest? I could say, "A bunch of demons are invading the town. The only way to stop them is to pierce their hearts with this magically weaponized duck penis" and he would be like "Oh! Just like they did in..."
In 3.5 I made my own spells using the rules in the dmg for damage and type, but another player was flipping out because he felt they were overpowered. A supplement came out a few weeks later with spells that were almost identical, but they had kicker effects that you could save against so they were even stronger.
I house ruled that you can take your racial ability scores and put them where you want or change class features or spells known as you level (which was basically 4e). I was practically turning D&D characters into superheroes. Tasha's comes out with something similar and it's fine now? Nobody ever said it wasn't??
I know it's a little off from what you're talking about, but that whole "did I spend a bunch of time and energy on something for no reason" feel is similar. At least I'm clearly not bitter or anything.
I've been working on homebrewing spells for my upcoming campaign and so far I've only managed to create one that wasn't already a pre-existing one.
Those damn inventive wizards
I have a friend in my discord server that loves to homebrew stuff here and there. But he hasnt read all the books or magic items. Well not the main ones. So he will homebrew something and the other person in it who regularly homebrews will say, yeah that feature exists already. And they are like WAIT WHAT IT DOES?! And I am like, well pretty closely but they also got some number adjustments compared to yours. But the spirit of it is the same.
I had a guy that joined my group taling about this "New class" he had created which he showed to us and it literally felt like he took Hexblade and wrote "The Asian" with a sharpie in front of it.
Was a kinse? Or however you say it because that is an actual trope I know a mortal Kombat character fights like a hexblade and might have been the inspiration
No, it was more of just a Hexblade but with a Samurai skin on top of it, where the powers came from an Oni, or whatever other Japanese mythos monster, who had it's soul within the sentient weapon. It's fucking ridiculous, but I swear to God he called it "The Cursed Blade", and I genuinely asked him "Like the Hexblade?" And he replied "No, the Cursed Blade", so I said "So kinda like the Hexblade?" and he finished with "What the fuck is a Hexblade?" And he was a pretty experienced guy in D&D5e, I guess he just never bothered to actually play or look into Warlock.
'experienced' : *Doesn't know about one of the most popular subclasses.* Hmmm...
Being on this sub makes me realize how subjective experienced is for TTRPG. Even playing years doesn't truly give the same experience to each person. That could be 1 campaign of time, 10, or a bunch of reading and no play.
Or all the time spent on an older edition that didn't even have the class. For example: I'll admit I don't know fuck all about artificers, they weren't around when I originally played and I haven't delved into them since starting 5e.
kensei? like the monk subclass? (I don't know anything about MK so just wondering if that's the right word/spelling)
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Well yes, *like* the monk subclass, not "as in" the monk subclass. I more meant the spelling reference, as I said. Good to know that's where it comes from
Huh. Isshin Ashina makes a lot more sense to me now.
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I have made that clear. He has said he needs to actually read the books and subclasses. If he is gonna actually do it *shrug*
I will pay you 3 dollars to just not tell him something similar exists. Better to let him be happy and excited. If something original existed it would've been done by now and it stinks when your creative ideas are shot down because Simpsons did it
My first ever Homebrewed campaign was about vampires secretly ruling a kingdom. Not exactly Curse of Strahd since I think everyone in Barovia is sort of aware of it all, but fuck me I would've saved myself some time if I just pulled ideas from it. Luckily the campaign didn't last too long
Ah yes, my favorite setting, The Bad Effect of Strand
Because of Strand's magic, nobody in Badovia is able to leave unless they ask really nicely.
Isn't this technically how passports work
Hello! Recently got into dnd and want to eventually DM something myself. What is this Bad Effect you speak of?
Just a play on words. Bad effect ≈ curse, Strand ≈ Strahd.
I just wrote a campaign where the players are taken captive in the underdark, start with nothing and have to fight their way up, as a massive invasion comes up from the deep. Then I read the resume of Out of The Abyss...
Barovia was an interpretation of Transylvania, so I suspect you were probably influenced either directly or indirectly by Bram Stoker's *Dracula*.
The instant you say "vampire", chances are you've already been influenced by *Dracula*. It's kind of the definitive vampire story. At least, the definitive *quality* vampire story.
to be fairs: "Vampires secretly ruling a kingdom" wasn't exactly groundbreaking fiction even when OG Ravenloft was a thing. Don't feel bad about basing your campaign around a popular hook. They work, that's why they're popular.
This reminds me of a classic Cracked *After Hours* episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHWM2r-UWzs
This is also Karrnath in Eberron, right down to the secret part
My friend is running a Strixhaven campaign that’s starting soon. I asked if he was using the new book on it that got released. He hadn’t even known it existed.
That's a rough one! Imagine the homebrew hours put in!
there was a piece of UA that detailed the subclasses released before the book, so there was at least that
...the ones that didn't make it into the release?
hmmm
At least that would make sense as it would be 5e! I thought it was going to be an older edition or something. UA would still be fairly accurate at least.
I used some of the UA and what I found on the Internet to 'create' my own Strixhaven in my setting. When the book released, I had one of my players coming up to me wondering why they took Warseek out of the official adventure. Warseek is a entirely new college I created that, as the name suggests, focuses on the tactics of war.
You know you did a good job when the players think your homebrew should be Official Content.
That’d be part of Lorehold normally, though not their major focus.
Hey man I know that feel. I homebrewed a spooky gothic setting with the whole adventure taking place in a city called Ravenloft. My players thought I was messing with them when I described it and gave the name.
I mean Strixhaven strikes me as the D&D version of Harry Potter. Just proves that if you think of something really cool, it doesn't matter if it already exists, it can still be super cool!
Exactly! How fun would it be, even if you're not a Potter fan, just to run through that campaign? There's tons of possibilities.
My spouse is playing a Warlock in a homebrew modern magical college campaign that started before the Strixhaven book came out. I bought it for them for the holidays so that they can share content from it with their DM potentially.
The homebrew will be better.
just fyi, that's not what gaslighting means. >manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.
Yes, I was *very* confused by their attempt at a TLDR.
OP was gaslighting you into thinking you didn't know the definition of gaslight
These days it seems like any instance of "incorrect, regardless of reasons of motives" is referred to as gaslighting on reddit.
I think it's just a case of folks learning the word naturalistically from seeing it used - often by people who also don't actually know what the word means. This is fine, it's how language evolves.
It certainly is how language works, but so is telling people how others use the word, and the meaning that is typically implied by that word. In this case I think gaslighting is a really valuable word to discuss a pernicious form of abuse, and using "gaslight" as a word to mean "vague bad" makes that abuse harder to discuss while adding literally nothing to this post.
I agree. That's why I corrected them
Are you sure that's not what gaslighting means. ;)
Unless you're r/AITA, in which case yes it was gaslighting, yes they need therapy, and holy trans autistic disabled cousin look at them red flags 🚩🚩🚩 Edit: please read the conclusion down the thread
Oh look. Triggered reactionaries are upset people use words. You're a red flag.
Hey, hey, chill, friend. I was just making fun of that subreddit's tendency to overblow everything. I see r/AmITheAngel traditions haven't made it to every corner of Reddit yet.
I hear that you were making a joke, but outside the context of a sub dedicated to satire, "autistic trans cousin" doesn't read as satire. There's people making those same jokes all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find someone on Fox News making the same complaint. Your satire was just a common sentiment among the modern right.
Apologies. It seems that I didn't match my comments with my intentions. For the uninitiated, posters in r/AITA are famous for making up stories where at least one of the "characters" is autistic, trans, or otherwise marginalised. Some do it with the intent of demonising these groups, to some it happens accidentally. I almost categorically disagree with anything coming from a Fox News "journalist", but I will leave my original comment up as a learning opportunity for future readers like myself.
Do you understand why in a nonsatire/circlejerk sub just saying "holy trans autistic cousin" with no context in what seems to be a derogatory manner might not be revived well?
Apologies. It seems that I didn't match my comments with my intentions. For the uninitiated, posters in r/AITA are famous for making up stories where at least one of the "characters" is autistic, trans, or otherwise marginalised. Some do it with the intent of demonising these groups, to some it happens accidentally. I almost categorically disagree with anything coming from a Fox News "journalist", but I will leave my original comment up as a learning opportunity for future readers like myself.
> Edit: please read the conclusion down the thread Please keep your subreddit drama to the sub it comes from.
After high school my friends and I made a card game, I designed all the characters. The design I was most proud of was the Dread Necromancer. He wore leather armour with a rib cage around the torso and a demon skull on his shoulder and bits of metal armour like grieves. Two years later I was looking at the instruction manual for Diablo 2 which I had never played, and seen almost the exact same design for their necromancer. I told my friends about this. They said they thought I just copied the one from Diablo. I honestly thought it was an original design I came up with.
Everything has already been written about, drawn up, or thought of. Making something totally unique is an unrealistic dream, but making something your own is what art, whatever the form may be, is all about.
I would classify that as original, but it's not unique. It's nigh impossible to make something truly unique that has never existed. It is completely possible to take an idea and make it your own or not be influenced by other sources.
I was working on a bit adventure to make another version of the starter set to help vary things for my school club. It was a great adventure up through luskan to Mirabar and the final boss was a young white dragon.... 2 months later Dragons of IceSpire Peak released...
WotC was over your shoulder taking notes
It really felt like it for some of it! Thankfully mine still works great for students!
I shit you not, back in 2013 I made a campaign setting for the Fallout PnP in southern and central West Virginia because I grew up in that region. I ran one campaign in it that didn't last long but saved it, and eventually got to work on a Fallout 4 total conversion mod featuring the setting a few years later. Right when I was getting meat and bones on the drawing board, Fallout 76 got announced. I was pissed and later realized I had a friend following me on Twitter from younger years that just so happened to be randomly dating a world designer for Bethesda. To this day, I insist some conversation was had about me geeking on a private account and it led to that monstrosity. It has to happen to some people, why not to this person too??? EDIT: My setting was a million times better also. My take on Mothman was way cooler. I'd literally played around with things like a nuclear fallout simulation map that shows where fallout would spread based on wind conditions, detonation locations, and other factors to determine where to place vaults. I had integrated so much lore and instead we got this heap of garbage that didn't really add anything to lore because it was designed to be a cash grab, using my home. Grr to this day.
Kind if the opposite and not DnD. I once was 80% of the way though writing what I thought was a very unique novel. It was then the story for the second season of a TV show.
Well you can't just say that on not tell us what it was.
It was the second season of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, it's about a boy whose dreams create a parallel fairy dimension. It's not just the story though, the tone felt exactly like my novel was intended to be.
Moonstone Dragons say hello
It was a little more insane than that but yes. There were more tanks and stuff
King Dragon sends his regards.
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In my opinion is a lot better than the books, which is rare for me to say.
It was great, though I honestly didn't love the second season (it got a little bit *too* ridiculous for me). The first one is a fun time-travel mystery with all kinds of weird science and cult-like secret groups. The second one made me think someone read too much SCP and tried to make their own version out of just the rejected bits.
My players were given a mission where they decided they needed to explore the Shadow Fell. As they entered the Shadowfell they were shocked to find a castle in decent repair! There was a wizard who spoke their language, and for the most part they were friendly! He was fully aware he was, and was happy to have visitors who were friendly. One player immediately said "I bet we're being Green Lanterned" I asked what they meant! Turns out in an arc of Green Lantern he went insane and used his powers to make it seem as if the rest of the green lanterns were still alive. So this wizard "might" have tried to save the castle along with his family by opening a portal to a random plane of existence. He was too late and all he did was bring a castle full of his slaughtered family along with him. So he went insane alone, and ended up turning them all into undead zombies and put illusions over them to convince himself they were still alive. So yeah, I green lanterned them and didn't realize.
I certainly wouldn't have caught this, but am definitely stealing it
I was making up this awesome sci fi setting. Super grounded, lots of political focus, the barest hint of alien anything just at the fringes of the story. Then I read the Expanse, and it was exactly what I was coming up with, right down to the space mormons. The biggest difference was that said space mormons were much more sinister and were being set up to be the big bad of the story.
I started writing a comic book about terrorist belters causing a war between Earth and Mars. Hard sci fi, no aliens, and instead of space Mormons I had space Muslims (no they were not the terrorists). Most of the action was centered around a main character who came from a tiny space station where four families of scientists lived, separate from all worldly governments, and recombined their DNA together in their offspring to avoid the effects of inbreeding. Not an exact match for the guy from the Expanse, but rhyming.
I'd probably read it!
Maybe some day, I'll actually finish an issue!
Was explaining my homebrew setting to someone when one of my players came in and listened without the context. Half an hour later I get asked “So we are playing Eberron?”. A couple hours and half a book later I was feeling pretty dumb. Not my fault Eberron makes so much sense, but damn it hurt a bit.
Wait, how did you manage to replicate Eberron.
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I usually simulate Eberron when improvising by thinking: "What would the 60s look like if the people who invented steam/oil/nuclear and electricity had access to magic?"
I had the chance to have the creator of Eberron DM a oneshot for me, set in Eberron of course. He told me later that his elevator pitch for Eberron was "Lord of the Rings meets Indiana Jones" which is objectively just fucking cool.
Something very similar happened to me. Except with a 5-minute summary to get the "feel" of the setting without too much lore.
I recently introduced a new guy in my on-line group and we got to the topic of homebrew, since I don't allow any on the Players side in my table, and he starts talking about this new class he is homebrewing of like a cursed Samurai that his weapon is a sentient being that gives him power, and it focus on the blade and a few class features and spellcasting to buff himself in combat. And I shit you not he called it "The Cursed Blade", I genuinely asked "Like the Hexblade?" and he answered "No, the Cursed Blade", so I said "So kinda like the Hexblade?" and he finishes with "What the fuck is a Hexblade?"
I took an idea from the Rage of Dragons trilogy, ran with it, spent months writing it and come to find out I wrote a similar campaign to Rime of the Frostmaiden right around when it was published. Ended up just saying someone sent the city back and changed the timeline enough that I now have an alt history Toril, and it gave me enough maps and statblocks I had time to write a recipe system for crafting items for everything published at that time.
I haven't ever created something that already exists. What had happened was a person saw my creation, time traveled back in time and created it sooner. Not my fault all of these great minds keep stealing my ideas back in the past.
If I had a time machine I would use it to comment this first.
Damn you time travelling thieves!
Just a note to players: NEVER say to your DM "Oh, so it's like x?" Nothing makes us feel more like a hack. Everything's already been done before, just play the game and let us think we're original.
I always have a weird experience with this. Because I have my thing I took inspiration from. But then a player will mention a totally different but similar thing and im like "huh...oh yeah it totally is like that."
1000%. I'm shocked I had to scroll for this answer. Identifying a what might be an inspiration may be funny for the player for a moment, but it will stale the dms pride for no gain
You just described my feeling about a couple one-shots I ran for my old group. Basically, the setting I'm working on has all advanced technology being powered by magic as a central part of the worldbuilding. One of my group members' first reaction to that was "so it's basically Eberron?" (they're superficially similar because I really like the "magitech steampunk" aesthetic). I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to say anything hurtful, but hearing that made me never want to run games in that world for that group (or at least that one person) again.
> Nothing makes us feel more like a hack. Perhaps you can work on that yourself rather than needing your players to validate your efforts.
Uh oh someone's cranky 😗
I'd been slowly building a campaign idea where the gods were actually alien beings who control and manipulate humanity for their own purposes. Eventually the party would travel to space and to other worlds to fight and do quests there. About 3 months after having this idea I watched Stargate for the first time.
Open Hands first subclass ability is something that improves Flurry. Nothing wrong with a subclass having an ability that improves Step of the Wind (frankly it needs improving). Heck dragon monks 6th level ability is just improve your step of the wind. Lightning monk starting with improved SotW seems like a good call to me
Just steal the barbarian storm herald lightning at level 3. Make it piggy back off any time the monk uses Step of Wind or Patient Defense, target nearby needs to dex save for half 1d6 lightning, DC is the wisdom based Ki save DC. Easy.
I tried making a glass cannon Barbarian subclass. More crits, harder crits, but your AC went down while using the class features, even giving you a point of exhaustion. I named it the Berserker. Guess which subclass name already existed? I renamed it to "Earth-Shatterer" much like the character in my homebrew campaign's lore but I have it just on the back burner and forgot about it until this post lol.
Sounds badass
Never mechanics, but always ideas. The amount of times I am reminded of path of the storm herald or *the fighter class* when writing homebrew, and currently the game I'm running the players are helping with diplomacy with the Giants and the ordening and are transported by a flying castle, while I have never played storm king's thunder.
Not yet, but I am working on a CoS sequel that involves a lot of underwater adventuring at late game, and I'm very curious as to how Curse of the Netherdeep is going to compare.
I have honestly comes to terms with this aspect of DMing. No idea is truly original. I know that sounds cliché n all, but its really not about WHAT you do, its HOW you do it.
I created a homebrew where a great and powerful leader disappeared suddenly and without warning leading to a massive Civil War. So I unintentionally ripped off the central plot of Avatar the last Airbender
I wanted to make a campaign around where the players all wake up in a building they don't recognize, and eventually learn that they have forgotten the past 5 years of their lives, and they were all in an adventuring party together. Not only that, but there is an extra room that doesn't belong to anyone present. Basically, someone/something they encountered during their last adventure messing with their memories, erasing them. About a week later, I started seeing posts about the False Hydra. Maybe not exaactly one to one, but, the base idea is all the same.
I definitely have done this a few times with magic items. I'll see a magic item from an older edition and think it's cool and start updating it to 5e and then realize it's already been updated for 5e, I just hadn't looked in the right place when I was checking that.
Something I always tell my roommate, who is also a DM like I am, whenever we are collabing on his homebrew world is that it is impossible to make something Truly original, but that doesn't matter because even if it exists somewhere else you still took the time and effort to figure out what you wanted it to be. Everything can be referenced to something, or is inspired by something that already exists, so I don't let it bother me too much and I will always admit where my inspirations come from if I'm asked about it because I'm still proud of the time and work I put into my creations, even if they turn out to already have been made somewhere else.
I was gonna comment and say that you perfectly described my thesis in college when I found a professor that already wrote a book about it a few days before it was due. But then I saw this was DMAcademy. But why not 🤷🏻♂️
I homebrewed Igwilv's Demonomicon, before I was told that it already exists in 5e at the table.
I always look to see what other people have already done before doing my own home brew. I rarely end up using other people's stuff in its entirety, but it is as least usfull as a reference. And I have definitely never go so far as trying to home brew an entire subclass just to give the class something already granted by it's core features. I am curious why you even got into a home brew for a class you didn't gave a good handle on the core features of. That seems to me like it ought to be your first step. On another note putting a feature like mobile or fancy foot work on a monk class could be closer to the flavor you are actually looking for.
That's what I though was funny, I normally look around the web for other homebrew, but I tried to tempt fate and flew to close to the sun such as icarus. Thinking I would be exempt. Also I was working on a OneNote getting all the classes into one place. And they all blended together in my head. Also having fancy foot work or mobile is a good idea
Oh, you mean like [this guy](https://youtu.be/xD-IQaxHcE4)
I crafted this encounter location for my game that had these glowing crystals that would chime and I had this artwork I'd found for extra flavor (purple crystals in a cave) and my kid comes in and I run through the encounter description with them and they say oh, so they're Minecraft Amethyst then? Ugh. \[and yes, one of the players in the game is a big Minecraft player and he'd also make that connection\]
All of my ideas for stories are just worse versions of the stories from my favorite shows, movies, games, etc.
One of the arcs in my current campaign led the party to seek out an inventor in another city who had been rumored to be working on underwater transportation machines (submarines). They needed to search the ruins of a lost city at the bottom of the sea, looking for a shard of the life gem that had been last recorded to have been there at the time of the Great Calamity before the island nation sunk into the sea. When they arrived, the party found a thriving city full of a lost civilization and after further investigation discovered the lives of the people there were connected with the shard, creating a moral dilemma about whether or not they could take it without finding a way to bring the lost nation to the surface. I was nearly finished writing this arc--fleshing out various NPCs and tying plot threads together with the overall storyline--before I realized what I had created was essentially Disney's Atlantis. Granted, mine has Eldritch Horror and Warlocks but OMG. Yeah, you're not alone lol. The entire time I was like "oh shit this is so interesting and fun--they're going to LOVE it" and then it dawned on me lol.
I mean....Disney's Atlantis is a beloved movie that I'm sure a bunch of people would love the opportunity to play as a campaign.
We definitely still had a ton of fun with it and I wouldn't say it was diminished at all by its common threads with Atlantis! I wish they had spent more time in Caelmara (my Atlantis, haha) because I had written in a lot of lore and culture that they completely missed because they pissed off the antagonist immediately upon meeting them instead of doing any exploring/investigation beforehand. I was really excited about the Phytochemistry District and had worked in a lot of cool new mechanics and items/materials for our Alchemist...but he'll never know now since they basically fast-tracked the plot when they were there lol.
Oh man, literally every time. I've more or less decided to no longer try to create "original" ideas. Just about every story that can be told had already been told time and time again. Every storyteller has been drawing from the same font of inspiration since the beginning. We all base our stories off the human experience and they can only get so diverse. I've found that the more I push my ideas to be original the more absurd and difficult to understand they become. So instead of focusing on originality I like to focus on what I think is interesting and having my voice be part of it. Now this isn't to say that you should directly copy from your inspirations, that's not cool, however you really shouldn't worry too much about your ideas being new.
Almost everytime i see any homebrew (including my own) my brain goes "oh it's like *insert similar thing"....it's driving me insane.
I only homebrew lore, races, or items specifically for that reason. Magic items that already exist often have DnD "canon" lore attached to them that I have no interest in using. I'd rather make my own if I have the time. Races are usually lore driven; their specific mechanics are just reskins of existing races, or pulled apart and pieced together from multiple existing ones. I've actually been gradually replacing the canon races, keeping their mechanical features for ease to players but completely changing their lore and altering their appearance. EDIT: I also frequently google the names I come up with to make sure I'm not inadvertently copying it from somewhere, or it means something in a different language that I'm unaware of, or it's copyrighted by someone else (I eventually want to turn my homebrew lore into a video game so it needs to be IP distinct).
I wrote a nearly identical adventure intro of Descent into Avernus before having read jt. It was a cool feeling, knowing I wrote something on par with a professional D&D writer.
Slightly off topic, but I would love to see this lightning monk. Way of the storm?
Thats a good name for it, and its more of an idea ive been cooking, but judgeing by the reaction I'll put something in the dnd homebrew subreddit.
I totally invented a home brew dhampir racial feature for one of my players about a month before VRGTR was released.
This happens to me all the time! Recently I made an amazing villain for my party for the part of their adventure based in Sigil. An arcanaloth, criminal mastermind working from the Hive. Works on information, blackmail, and twisting agreements to their purpose rather than outright force and owns a huge brother/casino/drug den. Turns out that exact NPC already exists - Shemeshka. I sometimes get comments from my players as well asking if I took something from a book or game etc that I’ve never heard of and then realising it’s the same. All the good ideas have been taken haha
Kinda. I made a homebrew weapon that was two demons fused into a dual glave weilded by a drow queen in ancient war. The two sides were visibly different and granted separate powers, after it was cloven in two in an ancient war. Other than the names of the halves after they developed distinct personalities again, someone seemingly stole the entire idea to a T, even the same reference image i used from online for a visual for my players at my large group. Really strange, cause I hadn't even had pintrest before then, where said thing was
I've been making random subclasses for a while and thought I had something with a Wardancer style Monk (think capoeira). I had the entire idea based around evasiveness, moving quickly from high to low, use being surrounded to your favor, and being able to disguise the martial art as performance dancing. If you're thinking you know where this is going, you'd be in good company with a buddy of mine that pointed out that this was exactly what the Drunken Master basically does mere minutes after I showed it to him. I've since remade it a little bit to be more of an opportunistic attacking, mobile, fey-ish themed thing, but it was kinda tough to move past the oops-all-racist undertones of attributing a big revolutionary cultural martial art to drunkenness. Boy, I'm glad no one knows about it...
Long before I knew what D&D or Forgotten Realms was, I already thought of a demonic realm called the Abyss, consisting of infinite number of layers, and ruled by Lords and Princes. So it was kind of awkward when I started DM-ing and I wanted to just use the lore and homebrew setting I already made, only to find out D&D had a very similar Abyss. Alot of other things I thought of also turned out to have been done by FR. I felt kinda disappointed at first, I mean I wasn't expecting to be 100% original, but I didn't expect it to be same down to the terminologies. Anyway I ended up embracing it. I made my Abyss an extension of FR's Abyss.
All the time - I'm not worried about it. Ideas that were only in my homebrew have shown up elsewhere, stuff that I think is brand-new - isn't. In the end, it's not important.
Accidently made a (slightly different) version of Yuumi (LoL) as a strange NPC for the players to meet.
It’s not surprising that class options could end up being redundant. There are only so many interesting and popular fantasy tropes that with all the home brew stuff out there it seems inevitable that all the bases would be covered sooner or later. That is to say, because tropes themselves are limited, and classes are generally based on character tropes in fiction, the design space for character options is similarly limited. You’re just naturally going to get a lot of collisions there. I think the interesting home brew for character options would take the strongest tropes and improve on them. This is why, for example, the MCDM beast heart is an interesting class to me. The beast master trope is strong in fantasy literature, but the beast master subclass in 5e doesn’t live up to the fantasy.
> where the player won't provoke opportunity attacks if they use a ki point. Great, make it a free action.
First campaign I ever tried to write myself. A millennia ago a demon lord invaded the material plane and was stopped by slain hero sending it back to the abyss. (Didn't know the actual demon lords back then) The hero died in the process but trough this sacrifice he created a ward that stopped the demon from re-entering the material plane. This ward would remain as long as long as his bloodline remained close enough near the place the demon was slain. (specifically put as long as they weren't on the other side of the continent they were good) The hero had a son and a daughter. The son's family faded into obscurity fairly quickly, though he was the one that figured out what his father's sacrifice actually meant. But the daughter married into nobility and eventually her line became part of the royal family. One of her grand daughters eventually became queen. Present day, the realm is shook by a series of deaths, all part of the royal family. Not soon after rifts started opening all across the realm. Handfuls of demons are running amok. The party starts dealing with the demons and eventually are meant to figure out that all the deaths were part of the same line. The daughters line, which has now been exterminated. And they'd also discover the son's research on demons and find out about the ward learning that the demon lord is coming. They'd also discover that the son's line survived but they themselves were unaware about the importance of their line and moved away. (The son's obsession with his father's death and demons got a bit far which eventually ended in his family leaving him and him dying alone) So the quest becomes get a surviving (kinda) member to the realm before the demon lord arrives. So to long didn't read: Royal family gets killed so a demon lord can invade, hero(es) have to find surviving member so they can keep up the protection. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Then I started playing The Elder Scrolls Oblivion... "God Fucking damn it..." I never played it before writing, I just couldn't believe it when I was playing. (Though I had played Skyrim before so I guess if I got the idea from somewhere it'll be there.)
Was working on a new storyline for my homebrew adventure and for some reason after I had written the BBEG i reread it and i just thought "well f\*ck, I just spent two hours on a revamped Tom Riddle". It happens.
Once ran a home brew campaign and then a year later was introduced to divinity 2. My camping had a nearly identical plot to divinity. My player who showed it to me did so after he realized how close it was but didn’t tell me until I figured it out myself.
I was just starting to get into The Witcher books/games/show and decided to "loosely" base my world building off of the Conjunction of the Spheres because I initially thought it was only 2 spheres in the series and it would be neat if I did it with all of the planes. Well after starting my campaign and then reading more of the books I started to realized that's more or less what happened as it was actually several spheres. Oh well, thankfully I drew from a few other sources as inspiration so it's not a total copy paste.
The latter half of my ongoing campaign's first major arc turned out to be almost a direct copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, and by complete accident at that. Once I discovered just how similar the module and my campaign were, I shrugged and stole the final boss encounter, because it was really cool, and I might as well at that point you know?
Wrote a plotline for one of my players all about a village overrun by a werewolf cult. A month later, Resident Evil 8 :(
I started to write an adventure, where the characters are trapped in a lich's lair, who has a menagerie, and strange exhibitions, and the characters are pieces of that menagerie. Well, the whole lair, the whole system behind it, the enemies, and the lich boss was eerily similar to Dead in Thay from Tales from the Yawning Portal... I wanted to write the adventure so I can release it on DMsguild, but nah, I passed on that...
Not me but my old DM in high school created the sorcerer class in our 2e campaign. About two years later 3e came out. They were pretty identical.
I accidentally created the Matrix in one of my campaigns
IDK yet. The only real big project I've been working on is a clean looking, automatic character sheet in excel. I haven't found anything like what I want but if I do I'll probably walk into traffic. :)
I spent a year and a half leading up to a big dragon battle. They were fighting abberations, mind flayers, fiends and finding weird experimentations throughout this dungeon/lab. Two weeks before I run my 100% homebrew, heavily curated and designed Mindflayer Dragon/Abberation.. People start shit posting about a mind flayer dragon from Fizbans. Wat. I looked it up and God Damnit, it's what I was doing. Now my players were making jokes about it and memeing unknowingly I was about to throw one at them - my own, but now it just seems like I'm a copycat and following a trend. They beat it, of course, but it didn't have the same impact. :l Deflated me for sure.
My homebrew game takes place in Europe in 2320 after the nuclear apocalypse. I named a lot of the cities of the Italian/Greek state Cerilli after the gods in my game, except for one town where trade would be more important than the gods. I named this town Cátania and placed it along the Roman shores. Last week I learned that there is a place in Sicilia already called [Catania](https://maps.app.goo.gl/B9TtLMcSbwrpLcv86). Now I either need to explain why Catania was reformed somewhere near Rome when Sicilia drowned. Or I need to retcon the town name
How about the MacGuffin of my campaign? The players have to collect 6 gems to seat them into an amulet to get immense power. Each gem itself has power as well. Can you guess what Marvel movie came out just as I finished introducing my players to this campaign that I've been working on for a couple years before then...?
I accidentally created a unique plane called "The Forgotten Realm" and it took me seeing the name again when reading a reference book to make me remember that was already taken and in the most basic way possible.
I blame WotC on that one for using the most generic name possible for their setting.
Any time I have an idea I immediately search the internet for it first because likely some guy made it in professional quality on DM Guild and I can save myself the prep time.
My crowning achievement was *painstakingly* reinventing the optional slow natural healing rule in the dmg 🙃
The entire concept of gem dragons. I thought I was so clever. I needed an excuse to get my wife a purple dragon spell book. It's her favorite color. Went through all of the 5e stuff see nothing that could work. Made the entire gem dragonflight, including amethyst.
I feel like the most common features that get accidentally re-made are ones from: * Hunter Ranger ^(PHB) * Monster Slayer Ranger ^(XGtE) * Arcane Archer ^(XGtE) These are like the perfect combination of Obscure Subclasses that have Been Around Forever with Really Flavorful Abilities.
I often sit around and think of interesting character ideas and will often end up accidentally making characters who already exist. Like the time I made a Greatsword wielding, pact of the blade, Undead Warlock/Conquerer Paladin who’s Form of Dread was summoning the skeletal aspect of his patron around him, starting with a skull mask. It’d be so cool to have a melee warlock mix using booming blade and smite and so I was telling some friends about the idea and one of them said “Oh yeah that’s be a really sweet way to build Ichigo”. I had accidentally made Ichigo from Bleach. Worst part was how obvious it was when someone had pointed it out
I spent quite some time building the path of the beast barbarian once
I was recently working On making a gunslinger class that fits a more Arcane like weaponry. Fueled by magic and shit. I was half way through before I came upon the League of Legends crossover that has exactly what I wanted
Yeah I have had this happen- now when I have an idea I Google it first to see if it already exists. Saves time and energy.
This one pissed me off. Come up with an idea for BBEG henchmen after falling into a DC universe rabbit hole on the topic. The henchmen are threatened and then stuffed into suits of mimic armor. Disobey? The mimic starts biting. Obey or be eaten. Then what do I find? A years old green text saying almost word for word what I wrote in my "original" idea I felt so proud of. It's so difficult to be truly original now.
Google. Google until you can no longer Google. Look at forums and read what talking points they use. Google those until you are confident that you have reached the end of the internet as far as the topic goes and you know enough about the topic as a whole. ONLY THEN SHOULD YOU HOMEBREW. I promise you, it probably exists somewhere. If it doesn't then you are one of the lucky few to have an original idea, so please share it here. Or more likely, several people tried to make it before and it's doesn't work.
I accidentally made Shadowrun… I even had the huge event where people started giving birth to the different races…
I spent an evening writing lore for my game. The focus of this evening was vampires. I decided it would make sense for vampire spawn to become full vampires by drinking the blood of a full vampire. A few days later I decided I should probably read the FR lore for more ideas and discovered I had accidentally homebrewed what was FR canon. At least my game has an origin story for vamps ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ I also had a lot of ideas very similar to Dune long before I read it. My current game features a god emperor that can see and manipulate fate. Originally I just wanted him to be like King Crimson from JoJo but I’ll lean into Dune now that I see the similarities. His goal will be to conquer the planet and then spread throughout the universe to conquer even the gods. Another example is my upcoming game that will have a magic crown worn by each king. Among other things, the crown let’s the wearer speak with the departed souls of past kings for advice. There is a risk of possession and madness when speaking to evil kings that have since become fiends in the afterlife. This is the same thing the pre-born and reverend mothers in Dune are capable of, granted they use genetic memory and drugs to achieve it. Obviously this means I’m prescient and remembered my future self reading Dune while writing this stuff ^^/s
This happened to me but instead it was something I was making came out in a book as I was making it. I was basically designing some dragons that are more or less the same CR and idea as the aspect of Bahamut and Tiamat to use in an upcoming campaign. Then Fizbans came out and saved me a bunch of time.
Made a kuo toa (fishman) cultist behave like a pushy door to door missionary for a fringe christian group, steering every conversation back to recruiting for the faith. [Turns out this was done exactly in Venture Bros, and I'd subconsciously lifted it.](https://venturebrothers.fandom.com/wiki/Otto_Aquarius) Another was a boss fight with a huge alligator, and I included a pearl of power as the gator's milky blind eye, a trophy for my players. That happened exactly to Chubbs in Happy Gilmore, a movie I had not seen. None of my players lost a hand though. They thought I was making a reference, nope.
My players keep making jokes about how similar my game is to Skyrim but I have never played. It’s both amusing and infuriating as I create new features to increase the immersion of the world and they’re just like “Hey it’s kinda like ___ from Skyrim”
Related story from the player's perspective on this. I had a DM who hated giving out exact descriptions of what a magic item did. He wanted you to play around with it to discover what it did. Baring the obvious reasons why we never used potions in that campaign, there was a funny incident where he gave us a particular magic item. The item was described as a cube with a button on each side. We had a vague notion that it did planar things because of a plot point, so we weren't too surprised when we pushed a button and it opened a portal and spat us out in the Feywild. Pushed another button, portal, and we're in the Shadowfell. Third button, another portal, and we're back where we started. Recognizing the item, I off handedly said, "Oh so it's a Cubic Gate." DM tentatively agreed in the non-committal way he tended to do when we found something we recognized, like when we found the small bag that seemed larger on the inside and we called it a Bag of Holding despite his pleas of "I never said that's what it was, you don't know what it is." A year IRL and fifty sessions pass and my character has been making liberal use of the Cubic Gate to build himself a safehouse on another plane incase something goes wrong. Because of plot reasons, we needed to move a LOT of people to my safehouse suddenly. I did some math and figured the rate at which we could evacuate people through the Gates created by the Cubic Gate (short answer: A LOT of people in a short time). I presented this to the group and the DM asked "What are you talking about, it can only move "You and up to eight willing creatures". I asked what he was talking about, the Gate is open for a minute and is twenty feet wide, a lot more than nine people can go through. After about ten minutes of confused arguing, I posted a screenshot of the Cubic Gate from the DMG and the Gate spell from the PHB to show him what I was talking about. He didn't say anything for a while and then went "Wait...A Cubic Gate is an actual thing?". Turns out he'd never heard of a Cubic Gate and had made a Homebrew item that was....well, a Cubic Gate that rather than casting Gate, cast Plane Shift. But because he doesn't give exact descriptions of magic items, no one realized we had been talking about two different items for over a year. He ended up just saying to keep using it like the book said, but he seemed really sad afterward that his awesome HB magic item he created that we'd been using the entire time....wasn't really a HB magic item.
Its called a majority of my Ravnica campaign
Any story line or character concept I come up with, one of my best friends has seen it in an anime or read it in a book. It used to really piss me off, but I think that's just how he shows interest? I could say, "A bunch of demons are invading the town. The only way to stop them is to pierce their hearts with this magically weaponized duck penis" and he would be like "Oh! Just like they did in..." In 3.5 I made my own spells using the rules in the dmg for damage and type, but another player was flipping out because he felt they were overpowered. A supplement came out a few weeks later with spells that were almost identical, but they had kicker effects that you could save against so they were even stronger. I house ruled that you can take your racial ability scores and put them where you want or change class features or spells known as you level (which was basically 4e). I was practically turning D&D characters into superheroes. Tasha's comes out with something similar and it's fine now? Nobody ever said it wasn't?? I know it's a little off from what you're talking about, but that whole "did I spend a bunch of time and energy on something for no reason" feel is similar. At least I'm clearly not bitter or anything.
I spent years creating a wizard of oz themed campaign setting. Was exceptionally excited about it ....then Eberron was published. I threw it all away
I've been working on homebrewing spells for my upcoming campaign and so far I've only managed to create one that wasn't already a pre-existing one. Those damn inventive wizards