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. 

Implementing Party Loot in FoundryVTT

 

Group loot has been a thing since the first days of D&D.  Back then, a single player might be charged with keeping a paper tally of the groups transactions and occasionally paying for items or making distributionsto the party.  Of course, that player would occasionally lose the paper record causing the DM to loose hair (again) and generally upsetting any semblance of an economy in the game.

With advancing technology, that paper list has typically moved to digital form.  My most recent implementation has been with a shared googles sheets file.  That eliminates the lost paper problem, but leaves the inventory disjoint from the game, especially when using a VTT such as Foundry.