The Bard Stones Part Two

 Welcome back to the Vault! In today's post I'm going to expand on the previous Bard Stones post, again inspired by my friend Chris's blog. We've homebrewed a spell and set of rules for allowing Bards to enchant crystals to store Inspiration dice, so it seems appropriate that there's a poem to help aspiring Bards remember the properties of the various gemstones. Perhaps this verse is the Verbal Component for the Stone Singing spell?

"Lapis blue and turquoise healing,

Amethyst and quartz revealing,

Onyx black will keep from harm,

Hematite to ground the charm,

Quartz of rose for friends and love,

Moonstone is The Lady up above.

Malachite will bring you wealth,

Bloodstone, Agate, Jade for health.

Jet and Amber our delight,

As we meet in darkest night,

Stones of Earth, stones of power,

Serve us in this magick hour…"

Bard Stones

 Welcome back to the Vault! I've been spending some hobby time painting base colours onto another Death Guard unit and I'm pretty sure you don't want to see *more* pictures of half finished 40k models, so today's post is something different.

My friend Chris has been posting some articles about various properties associated with different gemstones. I've been on a bit of a D&D campaign planning kick recently and the articles got me thinking about incorporating some of this information into D&D.

Gemstones have long established associations with magic in table top RPGs:

• As expensive components (e.g. diamonds and pearls) for powerful spells in D&D
• To power and store magic (Power Crystals and True Stone) in Runequest

These gemstones are rare and/or expensive (no doubt because of such uses!) and I'd like to explore something more "every day" that makes use of more accessible stones and crystals. By making the material more common place it helps build flavour into a campaign setting, but also gives those boring "semi-precious stones" worth X gold which turn up in loot piles much more interest. So let's get cracking!

The Planar Winds

Welcome to the Vault! Today's post is a new subject for the blog; 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. I've been involved in a campaign for a year or so now and really enjoying the play experience.

One of the aspects of 5th ed I like is how overt extra-planar influences have been baked into the core game; Celestials and Tieflings (extra-planar lineage species) are available for players, and Sorcerers and Warlocks have a variety of multidimensional bloodlines and patrons to choose from.