Alustriel’s Spells

Homebrewing 5R Versions

There used to be a number of spells included in D&D that are credited to Alustriel.  I’ve become interested in them as I am setting up to run an Edge of Ruin campaign.  I’ll be using these spells as “name drop” opportunities for the pre-game that one of our players is running for us (I get to play, yea!).

I found homebrew versions of each of the below spells on DnDBeyond.  All but the first can be traced to 2e sources.  I don’t know where the first came from. The spells and sources for the most recent official versions I could find are:

Spell Name	Lvl	School	Edition
Alustriel's Electric Strike	C	Evocation	Strictly home-brewed no canon source
Alustriel's Banner	1	Illusion	2e  Wizard's Spell Compendium Volume One
Turtle Soup	1	Evocation	2e Wizard's Spell Compendium Volume Four
Alustriel's Fang	2	Alteration	2e  Wizard's Spell Compendium Volume One
Alustriel's Mantle	4	Abjuration	2e  Wizard's Spell Compendium Volume One
Alustriel's Improved Mantle	7	Evocation	2e  Wizard's Spell Compendium Volume One
Alustriel's Sword of Stars	7	Evocation	2e  Wizard's Spell Compendium Volume One.
Alustriel’s Queenmantle	9	Abjuration	2e Dragon Annual #1, Gem of the North, pp. 59-60

Vecna: Eve of Ruin for my Group

 I now have the module, Vecna: Eve of Ruin, and have been skimming through it.  I want to share some of what I have learned as essentially a pre-session 0 info dump to set expectations and hope that it will appeal to all of us.

Overview

The module is 11 chapters, most of them set in different worlds drawn from the history of D&D.  A bunch of NPCs from D&D past adventures (not necessarily our adventures) are included which strikes me as an appropriate choice for a 50th anniversary adventure.

The game starts at nominally 10th level.  Each chapter grants a level at a milestone which takes the adventure to level 20!  That is pretty much amazing for a module.  I only know of one other module that reaches level 20 (Dungeon of the Mad Mage) which offered a simple(ish), though very lengthy dungeon crawl.  

Vecna is the advertised big bad who must be stopped.  That's a classic choice. 

D&D 5E: Druid Shape Shift and FoundryVTT

My games seem to always include at least one player as a Druid, who inevitably love their Wild Shape ability.  As we are now playing on FoundryVTT, understanding how wild shape can be made to work in this VTT is essential. 

The rules for this ability are available on DnDBeyond, Wild Shape, I'll save some bits and not reiterate them here.  There are also multiple guides out there on how to use wild shape, I'll link to one on D&DBeyond here: Druid 101: Wild Shape Guide.  

The challenge I am looking at is how I want to make the ability operate in my games.  That's what I will be diving into in this post. 

Occultist's Coven Familiar Bond in a Barovia FoundryVTT Game

 One of my players in my Curse of Strahd campaign just started a character based on KibblesTasty's homebrew Occultist v1.1.  We've moved it from Wisdom-based to Intelligence as the group has zero intelligence-centered characters and it feels right for someone to be smart in a group trying to survive in Barovia, and as a largely arcane caster it seems appropriate for the character to push intelligence. 

A more challenging portion of the character has been the Familiar Bond options available to the three coven's defined in the post of the class. Specifically, how to implement one of them in a FoundryVTT based campaign without making them annoying.  

In this post, I'm going to briefly consider each of the three and then dive deeper into what seems like the best-fit ability.