Homebrew Rules

Following is a list of homebrew rules we'll be using for the west marches campaign. These are all rules you'll have to consider when making your characters and playing the game.

Adventure Logs

Specific to the West Marches, this will be a way for your characters to read up on what your fellow guild members are doing out on their adventures while you are not with them. This is considered a staple to the west marches type of play and will help your characters in achieving their goals. Through reading through the logs, you may discover that your fellow party members met someone from your backstory or found something you are looking for. The only thing is, I'm not the one writing them; you are.

At the end of each adventure, one of the adventurers must chronicle what took place, mentioning people you met, places you visited, things you discovered, and other relevant events. This will greatly help you in achieving all of your goals and piecing together the happenings of Galledall. The Requirements are as follows:

• Put the date of writing on the page. Dates will help others navigate the logs easier. If you don't know the dates, you may ask me for help.
• Write as your character would. If they would only write 3 sentences, then only write 3 sentences. If they want to go into pages of detail, then by all means do so. At the very least go over the high points.
• Do not include things your character doesn't know, even if you do. If one of your companions wandered off and talked to their demon patron, you may mention they did something privately for a bit but you may not metagame.
• While you may falsify some information, do not abuse it. That'd go against the whole point of doing this. You may muddle or bend the truth, but be careful about outright lying.
• Do not edit other people's logs. Doing so is not okay.

You should do this with the CyrusTheArcanaloth account, and that goes for just about all pages starting now. The password will be in the discord. As an incentive for doing this, any character that writes a log will recieve a 10% exp bonus. Doing this is voluntary, but if there are multiple people who wish to do it, I will try to prioritize those that are behind in levels or have not done it in a while.

Long and Short Rests

In this setting, a short rest is a night's sleep, while a long rest is a full week of resting. Keep that in mind as you adventure, as you will probably not get a long rest in very frequently. Certain abilities only regenerate on a long rest, and should you feel that something should regenerate on a short rest rather than a long rest, we'll examine that case by case. However, this will require you to be strategic and cautious in your adventuring, as blowing all your abilities and spells on the first encounter you reach will likely result in you being unable to complete your mission later down the line.

Now, there is a small caveat to this. If you have been out adventuring for a few days and you get back to the guild before a full 7 in game days has gone by, you get to immediately start the next week as if you had a long rest, even if you were back only for 1 - 2 days. This is so that for shorter adventures, you are able to continue to play the next week and are not stuck waiting around. However, if you are gone for more than a week, you will have to spend the entire week resting. During resting though, you may still pursue downtime activities.

Rolling a 1 on a Health Roll When leveling up

A rule I have been using is that if you roll a 1 when figuring out how many hit points you gain upon leveling up, you get to reroll. Instead, if you roll a 1 on your hit die, you take a 2 instead. This way leveling up isn't too dissapointing, but you still would have gotten more from taking the average roll.

The Silver Standard

For roleplaying and worldbuilding reasons, a silver piece in this setting is worth as much as a gold piece in other settings. So if the Player's Handbook says that you start out with 10 gp, you actually start with 10 sp in this setting, though its worth the same. This means that copper and silver are actually worth something and that gold and platinum are very valuable. A cloaked figure who accidently drops a gold piece may be more important than they look, and someone who discretely offers you a small pouch of 100 platinum pieces (would be worth 10,000 sp) is probably working for a very powerful and rich organization.

Languages

As a way to expand upon the massive world of Galledall and make other lands seems more foreign, this setting does not have the common language. Instead there are many different languages most of which are used to varying degrees in other nations. For the West Marches, your character's starting language is Daelish, which most in the New Elven Union know. In addition to your racial language (should you have one) you will also get to choose 1 additional language that is on the language page. This does not include any languages provided as benefits of certain races or backgrounds (i.e, you can choose your background languages plus your racial languages plus one more)

Item Durability

To add a layer of realism to this campaign, your items will detereorate over time. This shouldn't be too big of a deal, as there are already some effects that do this (such as the infamous black pudding) but this will incentivize you as guild members to invest in better items, making connections with a smith or even becoming a smith yourself. Rolling a natural 1 with a weapon now has the potential chance to damage it slightly. These can be repaired by paying someone else to repair it (such as an NPC blacksmith or other player who has the requisite skills) or taking up the hammer yourself to fix the blade. Armor may also be damaged should an enemy land a critical hit on you. Sufficiently damaged items will be broken. Magic items are resistant to these effects though not immune.

To compensate for these effects, those wearing armor get an additional type of reaction: the Block reaction. If an enemy is attacking you and you are aware of them, you may use your reaction to have your armor deflect the blow. If you have both a shield and armor you can choose which one you wish to take the blow. The damage you take from the attack is subtracted by 1d6 for light armors, 1d8 for medium armors, 1d10 for shields and 1d12 for heavy armors, down to a minimum of 1 damage. The number of dice increases to 2 at 5th level, 3 at 11th level, and 4 at 17th level. This immediately subtracts 1 durability from your armor, or 2 if the attack was a critical hit.

Grievous Wounds

To add an additional layer of realism, getting knocked to 0 hit points may result in a grevious wound that will make going down in combat a bit different. Whenever you get knocked unconscious you may have to roll on a grevious wound chart that will decide the effects of the blow you just took. These effects can include spraining your ankle, getting a concussion or even losing an eye. I will not use these too often to make sure they don't become too annoying, but they will pop up when serious damage is taken. Most of the effects are not permenant, and even those that are can be fixed with higher level magic.

Small people can use big weapons

One rule in the PHB I've always sort of hated is that small creatures can't use weapons with the heavy attribute. These include heavy crossbows, greatswords, and greataxes. While most of the time I'm partial to the official rules, I think this one is dumb because it limits creativity and doesn't provide for any interesting opportunities, either through roleplaying or mechanics. So anyone small or medium can use these weapons without being punished.

Encumberance (Optional)

This is an optional, highly experimental rule that you may opt into if you want to. To experiment with encumberance, I've decided to implement these rules to try and make encumberance possible without keeping track of individual pounds. Most items will be assigned a weight. Your character can only comfortably carry items that totalled up are less than or equal to your character's strength score.

• Ammunition: 1 per 10 pieces
• Shields: 3
• Light Armors: 3
• Medium Armors: 4
• Heavy Armors: 5

For weapons, take the maximum damage an ordinary version of that weapon can do (e.g, 1d4 = 4, 2d6 = 12, etc) and divide it by 3 rounded up. A this means a dagger would weigh 2, a battleaxe would weigh 4, as would a glaive.

So for instance, if you strength were 18, you could carry a Greatsword, two daggers, a longbow with 10 arrows and wear leather armor, totalling 15. This means you could take more items should you wish. Carrying more than your maximum carryweight for short periods of time is possible, but will result in exhaustion if done for long periods of time.

The point of this is to make you think carefully about what items to take with you on adventures. Instead of being walking arsenal you'll have to plan what you are most likely to use. It's also to give relevance to certain things such as bags of holding and the Goliath's racial feature. While I can't promise I can reward people for playing with this optional rule on, I won't promise that I won't. You can opt in/out of it at any time, and I'd encourage people to try it out at least a bit. No shame in deciding it's not for you though.