A Colossal Homebrew

While DMing the first campaign I ever ran, I probably had some form of homebrew mechanic for just about every session. This campaign began as the Princes of the Apocalypse module, but I swiftly realised that this wasn't what I wanted from my campaign, so bolted my own story onto the setting.

I think the above two sentences show pretty clearly my relationship with official DnD content. I fundamentally think DnD is a well designed game, and much of the official content that is created for it is pretty good and getting better. However, I enjoy making up my own stuff, both mechanics and stories, so I liberally mix official content with my own creations.

I’ve talked a bit already about my approach to making settings and stories, and I plan to write more about this. But I also love homebrewing mechanics, and I wanted to use this blog partially to share some of the homebrew creations I’ve made, and to share how I made them. My hope is that you might learn something about how to homebrew mechanics, or take what I’ve made and use it in your own game.

I’m going to start with the most ambitious thing I’ve ever created, because I’m quite proud of it and there’s a fun story attached to it. I made this for the finale of the campaign mentioned above. The players found themselves on a new plane of existence, with wild magic causing all kinds of chaos. It had been a long and epic campaign, and I wanted something suitably epic as a final fight. I decided to create a boss fight modelled after the video games Shadow of the Colossus.

The basic idea of this game is that the player traverses a series of Colossus’, finding their weak spots and destroying them in order to bring the Colossus down. Clearly, this doesn’t exist in DnD, so I had to make it up whole cloth.

You can find my attempt here.

My basic design philosophy here was to try to make every part of the Colossus feel different. Ultimately, if a fight in DnD devolves into everyone doing the same thing over and over again until they win, the game has become boring, so I wanted to present a series of choices and puzzles to the players. Each section of the Colossus is designed to feel distinct from the others, requiring players to puzzle out how to climb the creature, or requiring them to make strategic decisions about whether to go slow and easy or faster and harder. All the while, the Colossus will react differently depending on where on its body the players currently were.

The Colossus was created for a fight with three 9th level characters, which is why the Colossus only has one action and why the weak spots are so easy to destroy. With more players, the Colossus should probably have more actions and the weak spots more HP and/or a higher AC. It’s also worth noting that my players all had a magic item called wingwear from the Princes of the Apocalypse module, which allowed them to glide, meaning that the falling damage never really happened. I imagine it would pretty deadly if the falling damage was in play, but by 9th level, quite a lot of characters have some kind of flying ability, and if they don’t I recommend giving them access to some Potions of Featherfall or something!

My concern around falling damage, and my dislike of ‘save or die’ (I guess in this case ‘save or fall and probably die’ mechanics) led me to create a whole new condition for this fight. The idea behind Hanging Precariously was that it gave players a second chance if they failed one of the many saves and ability checks they would have to make, while still making the failure a problem that would have to be solved.

Overall, I’m really proud of how this turned out. I think it would make for an epic fight that I think would play out pretty differently with each group of players that tried to defeat it. Ultimately, it has been play tested exactly once, and this playtest revealed some problems that I’ve not tried to solve, but probably need to be fixed at some point! Here’s what happened when my players came across it.

As is to be expected, by this point in the campaign, the players had a large number of magic items, some of which were really quite powerful. A previous boss fight had been made utterly absurd through the use of a Horn of Valhalla and two Wondrous Lion Figurines spamming the battlefield with additional fighters, who totally overwhelmed my one high level magic user.

I tended to create tables of items which were suited to the particular dungeon the players had played through and let the players roll for items. This led to them having some pretty random stuff, most of which they had never used. I think this is a pretty universal experience for DnD campaigns, where players collect a load of magic items that they lug around, never actually using them. Eventually the players and the DM forget they even existed, until in a moment of inspiration, a player brings out an item they received months ago and breaks the game open. I have some thoughts on how to deal with this, but that’s a different blog!

The Warlock of the party had acquired at some point an item called a Balloon Pack. This basically gave her the use of the Levitate spell for 10 minutes. Now, fair enough, at level 9 having the levitate spell is not particularly odd - it’s a second level spell - but I knew she didn’t have it or anything similar. I don’t even think Warlocks get access to many flying spells, so I hadn’t thought about that while making the encounter. Then she pulled out this magic item that she had been carrying around for literally months (both in game and in real life) and deployed it to Mary Poppins her way around this Colossus, blasting the weak spots and killing the thing basically on her own.

The poor barbarian, who was used to being front a centre, obliterating enemies with his greatsword, didn’t get a hit on the Colossus. The ranger fired only a handful of arrows. The Warlock could have taken this thing on single handedly. It was epic, but not really in the way I had intended. The player in question felt a bit like she’d got one over on me, but honestly, I thought it was great. I gave her the damn Balloon Pack in the first place! We still talk about it to this day, despite being in the middle of a whole new campaign with totally new characters.

Ultimately, for all my meticulous planning, lots of the cool stuff I’d planned didn’t happen. The fight was fun, but I think the Colossus needs work. It’s somewhat weak to spell casters as it stands, and could end up with quite uneven fights. Still, I love the concept and I really enjoyed making it.

I learned a lot from the fight with the Colossus. I alluded to some of the lessons about magic items above, but I think the main lesson that it really drove home was that no plan, no matter how thorough and well thought-through, survives first contact with the players. After that campaign finished, I had a think about how I planned for DnD and made some pretty significant changes to the way I planned sessions and even whole campaigns. But that’s a topic for next time. In the meantime, please feel free to use the Colossus in your own campaign. Let me know how it went, and let me know what changes you would make or any that you did make and how those performed.