Redesigning D&D 5th Edition - Starting with Classes!

 I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was a child, but I didn't really come to understand the mechanics and design of the game until I started DMing using the newly-released 5th Edition in 2015. That was when I started taking an interest in not only running the game, but changing it, making my own additions and modifications to the core in order to turn it into the experience I wanted it to be.

Since the release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (2020), I've been unimpressed or outright disappointed by most of the new releases for 5th Edition, including the outright revision of some existing mechanics, advertised as "optional", but taken as the default option going forward. Suffice to say, it got me thinking about what I actually wanted from the game, from its core options, and from its future. It got me to re-examine some of my assumptions about what worked and what didn't, and how I might change things to work more to my liking. I decided that, even if nothing more than a design challenge for myself, I wanted to redesign 5th Edition into something I was happy with. This series will be doing just that.

Infernalis - A Hierarchy of Demons

Though they may seem wild and chaotic (and in truth, they certainly are), Demons also have a hierarchy by which they operate. It is not a construct of society or logic, but an immutable part of their being, forcing them into an eternal contest of strength, wits, and the unrelenting drive to raise their own station at the expense of others. This organization is known as the Infernal Hierarchy, and a Demon's place in it determines their power.

When a Demon is spawned, it comes into being with a number. The higher a demon's number, the less powerul the Demon is, and the lower the number, the stronger the Demon. The only way a Demon can rise in power is to wholly consume the essence of a higher-ranking Demon - their body, memories, and even personality. In doing so, the Demon's number rises to that of their prey. However, they do not only inherit the power of their prey's former number, but also imprints and fragments of their memories and personality. In this way, higher-numbered Demons are almost immortal amongst their kind, as the higher the number and power of the Demon consumed, the more powerfully it will imprint upon its new host. The cruelty of the Infernal Hierarchy ensures that even when Demons of weaker numbers triumph, that victory is short-lived.

Infernalis - Devils That Dwell Among Us

 The Demons first arrived during an event that would come to be known as the Infernal Incursion. It is still unknown exactly what caused the Incursion event, though a number of high-ranking Demons are suspected as culprits. The exact motivation behind the triggering of the Incursion event is also unclear, though it is believed to be part of some larger infernal power play, introducing living mortal souls to mix as some form of trick or advantage in a grander scheme. Whatever the cause may have been, the results have been clear - a partial merging of the mortal and demonic planes, an overlap allowing Demons to escape the tortures of Hell and find greener pastures preying upon the living. Millions upon millions of Demons swept from their home and into ours, bringing with them chaos, destruction, and a total upheaval to the world as it existed before. To many religious types, this event was the prophesied end of days, the scouring of the sinful from the world. For a time, lots of people bought into that idea. Wars raged against supernatural creatures once thought to dwell only in heavy-handed morals and nightmares. Famines and disease killed nearly as many. 

Amercana - The Pentagon

No secret history of a magical otherworld existing alongside our own is complete without government meddling. After all, a government will seek to know all of the goings-on within its borders, and eventually, it will stumble across magical elements that the population doesn't know about. What that government will decide to do with its newfound access to the magical world depends heavily on the government in question - exploitation, experimentation, diplomacy, declarations of secret war, and so on.

The United States government never went through this process of discovery. It knew about the magical world well before it gained its independence from Britain in its revolution. Its founding fathers were members of secret orders, hidden lodges, and occultic brotherhoods which sought to understand the world that existed alongside our own. When the nation came into its own, and its government began to crystallize, it needed a bureau to handle supernatural (or thaumaturgical, as was the preferred term) matters. Thus, born in the fledgling America was the first instance of the Pentagon.

Amercana - The Secret World of Thaumaturgical America

 American history classes are really good at drilling the highlights of U.S. History into you - pilgrims, colonies, Revolutionary War, Civil War, emancipation, reconstruction, expansion, WWI and WWII, Cold War, and then now. But what if there was more happening behind the scenes (and I don't just mean the interesting parts of history that get glossed over in such classes). What if there was a thaumaturgical war for control over America, the soul of its people, and the power hidden in its land?

This is the premise of Amercana. The world isn't some far-removed fantasy land - it's America, the place you live (if you happen to live in the United States, that is). There's magic, sure, but its hidden, behind the scenes. It's in artifacts from the Golden Age, sought after by the wandering Hoboes and the Pentagon alike. It's in the culture, in the Vox Populi who draw their power from fandom and subculture alike. It's in the media, influenced by the bizarre, often unsettling broadcasts of the enigmatic Cryptogrammaton. It's in the government, with the Pentagon's spellbinders trying their best to keep magical threats to national security under control. And it's in the history, in the larger-than-life tall tales and myths, in the legendary figures immortalized in monuments like the heroes of old. If you know where to go looking, you can find the magic, waiting to be tapped.

The Dwarves of Saga

 Dwarves are one of my favorite races in fantasy literature. There's something about the common Dwarf that captures my heart - the beards, the beer, the mining chants, the tight-knit communities. Above all, I'm always taken by the fact that Dwarves, by and large, are the same across fantasy. There are so many different varieties of Elves (high elves, wood elves, dark elves, moon elves, sun elves, blood elves, sea elves, snow elves, and eladrin, just off the top of my head), but Dwarves are always, well, Dwarves. As consistently present and unchanging as the stone itself. So here are my Dwarves, or at least the Dwarves of a world named Saga. 

Welcome to Tin Rabbit Games!

 Hello there!

I'm Rabbit, a longtime DM and Game Designer. I have a bad habit of having too many ideas and not enough time to run and write all of them. Thus, this blog. This will mostly be a catalogue of the worlds, cultures, creatures, and other things that spring up in my waking and unwaking mind. I won't necessarily develop any of these ideas to any great extent, but I'll try to note when ideas build upon one another or are from the same setting.

So, in terms of actual content, what can you expect to see here? Well, a lot of posts will probably be text-heavy, ideas given form in the written word. Besides that, I do draw my own maps, as well as playing around with mapmaking tools like Wonderdraft, so maps will definitely make an appearance. While I am practicing my character drawing, I'm critical enough of my own art that I don't think I'll be posting it online any time soon. That being said, I'd like to think I'm pretty handy with Heroforge, my digital character creator of choice. If I post characters, they'll probably be one of those. Past that, anything else I post is a grab-bag: Magic Card designs, logos for cyberpunk corpos, attempts at conlanging and more.

Regardless, I hope that if you've stumbled upon this little corner of mine, you find at least some of my ideas interesting.

-Rabbit