Draconic December: The Dungeonshell Dragon

Draconic December is the Alexandrian’s Discord channel community challenge for the month. Here is my entry.

The Dungeonshell Dragon

“For ten thousand years, a hill is a hill. Then one day it gets up and crushes your home!”
-Brill Grothbone, de-hoveled transient

The Draco Dormitabitesta (commonly known as the Dungeonshell Dragon) displays a unique and extreme version of draconic lair-making/hoard-building behavior. Before entering a centuries-long slumber, the dragon creates a “cocoon” from its melted hoard. A twisting maze of dungeon passages form a ventilated “shell” around this cocoon, and this structure is in turn surrounded by earth and stone, hidden from the outside world. Until one day, it all starts to wake up. 

The Moving Mountain

A hill, mountain, tor, plateau, or similar prominence of earth has separated itself from the surrounding terrain and is on the move. At first, its speed is no faster than an average person’s walking speed, but it doubles each day, topping out at 10 times its initial velocity.

Hooks

For low-level PCs, simply avoiding the moving mountain or dealing with its second order effects may be the source of many adventures. Mid-level PCs can adventure inside the Trembling Dungeon. High-level PCs may seek to stop the phenomena, up to and including facing the Awakening Dragon.

Complications and Hazards

Stampede! Mundane animals panic for miles ahead of the mountain, storming through villages and campsites even while the mountain itself is only a distant rumble over the horizon.

Landslides. Sections of the mountain slough off as it moves, crushing terrain to the left and right of its course, and inhibiting attempts to scale its sides.

Disinterred dead. The churning motion of the mountain has plowed up the long-slumbering warriors of the Great Skeleton Army, who will march in the ruined wake of the mountain, intent on plundering the rival city-state that fell into ruin a thousand years ago.

Gonna get some hop-ons. Opportunistic oxenfolk from the wilds have climbed aboard the moving mountain and now use it as a raiding platform. They have rigged ballistas with retractable lines to use to snare interesting loot or zipline down to unfortunate communities they can pillage.

Fumaroles. Sulphuric gas, long contained within the mountain, is now released in stanky jets from fissures in the slopes of the mountain. A keen sense of smell or an eye for sulfur crystals can spot these dangers before they blast the unwary.

Unlucky village. They built their homes at the top of the hill for the nice view, but now that hill is changing their perspective. They are too busy squabbling with each other to mount an efficient evacuation. 

Rolling stones. A scree of Galeb Duhr have (understandably) misinterpreted the mountain’s movement as the return of Storstein, the primordial boulder god. They will send animated boulders tumbling down the slopes at any meatbags who attempt to interfere with their god’s holy procession.

Kaiju battle. A tarrasque, titan, or other big boi interprets the moving mountain as a rival and attempts to fight it.

Investigating and Understanding the Phenomena

Destination. The mountain’s destination will not be inherently obvious, but PCs who track its progress over time may be able to figure it out. The mountain will move toward the nearest heavy concentration of powerful magic. This could be an archmage’s tower, an extraplanar portal, an arcane metropolis (in a sufficiently high-magic setting), or something else entirely. The destination may even be secret, hidden, and lost to time, attracting ambulance-chasing wizards, nothics, and even more unsavory sorts to the mountain’s passage.

Means of locomotion. The moving mountain acts similarly to a tectonic plate, riding on extremely hot magma. Differences in temperature, viscosity, and gas composition, intuitively controlled by the sleeping dragon within, control its course.

Interacting with the mountain. The mountain is not a creature for most rules purposes. Abilities like the ranger’s Primeval Awareness may reveal that a dragon is within the mountain. Spells like Commune with Nature may also reveal clues as to the source of the phenomena. The dragon cannot be seen, and cannot be directly targeted by most spells, but at the DM’s discretion, some forms of telepathic communication or divination magic may allow glimpses into its restless, dreaming mind. Creatures with tremorsense (like the aforementioned galeb duhr) can sense a “heartbeat” deep within the mountain. Venturing into the Trembling Dungeon and closer to the dragon itself will improve the effectiveness of these techniques.

Few things will stop the moving mountain, but it will not cross oceans or mountain ranges. Fresh spoor from another ancient dragon (not easy to get), usually used to mark territory, could motivate the mountain to circumvent a particular region. Adventurers may come up with other schemes; it should be difficult, but by no means impossible, to subvert the mountain’s path. 

Early awakening. Sufficiently powerful magic, such as the spell Earthquake, may cause the dragon to awake before reaching its destination, for better or worse.

The Trembling Dungeon

Twisting dungeon tunnels and ancient subterranean ruins separate the dragon from the surface. Accessible through openings created by landslides and fumaroles, the dungeon is home to both ancient and recent occupants. 

The DM could adapt an existing dungeon to serve this purpose, or randomly generate one. Because the dungeon serves primarily as an ecological/mystical purpose for the dragon, rather than an architectural/residential one for its denizens, it may have any number of dead-ends, illogically arranged rooms, or other “impractical” dungeon features.

Complications and Hazards

Restless slumber. The dungeon shakes and moves with the mountain’s movement and the dragon’s slow process of awakening. While it is not in danger of collapse until the dragon is fully awakened, chunks of stone and earth may fall free and land on the unwary.

Too greedily and too deep. Dwarven miners driven mad by gold fever refuse to leave the dungeon. They believe the dragon’s cocoon is a pure vein of treasure. Dangerous to themselves and others.

Disrupted parasites. An entire ecology of purple worms, bombardier beetles, and dire dermacentors has lived for hundreds of years within the mountain, depending on the dragon’s waste (and waste energy) to survive. They are now completely freaking out.

Pollyanna gnomes. These simple folk only wish to craft tall red felt hats and drink mushroom tea. They are self-deluded about what’s happening around them, but can be useful guides if convinced to help.

Doomsday cultists. They’ve been looking forward to the end of the world, and are hoping this regional disaster will turn into a global one.

Probing tongue. The dragon’s prehensile tongue is more than 120 feet long, and begins to instinctively explore the dungeon halls, even as the dragon itself still slumbers. For mechanical purposes, the tongue is more like a natural hazard than a monster, bowling over or grappling adventurers it encounters. But dealing more than 50 points of damage to it will cause it to rapidly retract toward the cocoon at the heart of the mountain. Dealing more than 100 points of damage will likely lead to the dragon’s early awakening. 

The Awakening Dragon

The final awakening process takes a full hour. The Trembling Dungeon begins to fall apart at this point, and the various denizens attempt to escape in a panic. During this time, the dragon is immune to all damage and any abilities or magic that would affect it short of Wish, divine intervention, or equally epic magic.

Use an Ancient Red Dragon stat block for the awakened dragon, with the changes and additions as noted below.

Lacquered in Gold. For the first three rounds of combat, the layers of metal coating the dragon give it +5 bonus to its AC, but limit its flying speed to 20’. Beginning on the fourth round, enough gold has sloughed off to allow it to fly freely, but the AC bonus also ends. 

Awakened Rage. The dragon is acting in a highly instinctual manner when it first awakens, and at best will be disoriented, aggressive, confused, and violent; but damage may serve as a shock to its system. As a general rule, the DC for any ability check to influence the dragon’s behavior (e.g., Charisma (Persuasion) or Charisma (Intimidation)) is equal to its current HP divided by 10 (minimum 12). The DM should give fair consideration to PCs’ non-violent proposals for reasoning with the dragon, but also be clear about the dragon’s agitated state and the difficulty of reasoning with it or diverting it from its purpose, at least at first.

Fixed Purpose. The dragon is immune to the Charmed and Frightened conditions. 

Immutable Form. The dragon is immune to any spell or effect that would alter its form.

Breath of Gold. The first time the dragon uses its breath weapon, it also expels the vast quantity of liquid gold that filled its throat and lungs during its long slumber. In addition to the normal effects of its breath weapon, those who fail their saving throws are coated in a thick layer of molten gold. They are restrained and take 7d8 damage on each of the dragon’s subsequent turns (as if affected by the spell Heat Metal cast with a seventh-level slot). Creatures restrained in this way may make a DC 21 Strength saving throw at the end of their turn to end the effect.

Still Groggy. Treat the dragon as if it had only a quarter as many hit points as it actually does for purposes of the Sleep spell. It has disadvantage on saving throws against spells such as Imprisonment that would put it in a sleeping or sleep-like state.

Unimpeded Awakening

If the dragon is not killed, subdued, reasoned with, or otherwise stopped from consuming the source of magic toward which the moving mountain moved, it will attempt to carry out the mythical impetus of its catastrophic slumber. This may take the form of opening a portal to the elemental plane of fire; spawning a new flight of red dragons; inciting all of the continent's volcanoes to erupt at once; or simply ending the world (hey, those cultists were right after all!)

The Free Kriegsspiel Wargame with Millions of YouTube Views

The Twitch streamer DougDoug and his viewers play video games in weird, amusing ways, either through mods of games like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto 5; or external limitations and restrictions on how they play, like controlling characters with voice commands only. They’re fun videos, but not typically germane to tabletop RPGs.

What is relevant is a recent series of YouTube videos edited down from longer Twitch streams. He and his chat (who choose their actions through polled consensus) battle for supremacy first in Europe, then the United States, and finally in outer space. The outcome of each turn's action is determined by AI text generation. The game continues until one side reaches 10 points by acquiring territories through either invasion or alliance.

What’s the antecedent to this style of game? The obvious point of reference is the venerable board game Diplomacy, which also functions through alliances and conquests. But I think a certain “looseness” in Doug’s adjudication of the game pushes it closer to the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) philosophy, as thoroughly explained by Jim Parkin in a Board Game Geek post here.

For example, Doug is effectively the referee, interpreting whether each block of AI text does or does not achieve the desired goal and thus score points. As in FKR, faith in the judge is required. Of course, nominally, Twitch chat (being Twitch chat) does not trust Doug, spamming the word “rigged” whenever a decision goes against them. But that’s more expressive of partisan enthusiasm than true distrust, and I would argue the members of the chat are “voting with their feet” by staying and continuing to play the game.

As another example, Doug, in his capacity as referee, must also make common-sense rulings mid-game, for example deciding in the first video that once a neutral nation has formed an alliance with one or the other player, the opposing player must invade it to “flip” it; they can’t simply attempt to overwrite the alliance with one of their own.

Working through Jim’s bullet list from the BGG post, we can make a pretty strong case for Doug’s game as FKR:

• Numbers don't add up to a game. The assets (people, armies, and resources) the two sides control don’t have stats or rules constraining their use. They are purely qualitative objects in the fiction, open to whatever use makes sense. 
• If the fiction fits, try it. The AI is a wild card and certainly introduces issues in terms of preserving in-game consistency, but less so than you might think, because it frequently “calls back” to events already introduced in the narrative, preserving some degree of continuity. In his capacity as referee, Doug additionally contextualizes the AI’s wilder diversions (and in a few cases, deletes obviously fiction-breaking tangents).
• You play worlds, not rules. Certainly true here, as the chat, in particular, introduces different media into the game. The second of the videos prominently features television character Saul Goodman, surely the world’s first Breaking Bad- / Better Call Saul-themed wargame.

The AI is an interesting factor in the resolution of the game that sets it apart from its antecedents. On one hand, it’s more chaotic and wild than dice or cards, because it can introduce so many unexpected elements out of left field. On the other hand, the AI, relying on the language it was trained on, repeatedly bends the story back toward genre tropes, favoring betrayals and surprising reversals of fortune.

As far as I know, Doug is not a TTRPG person, nor do I see any evidence from skimming the comments of the videos that the game was inspired by other RPGs, matrix games, or FKR. I suspect this was just an instance of convergent evolution, where people independently land on similar ideas, concepts, and rules simply because they make sense as a natural form of group storytelling and gameplay, universal to humans everywhere.

High-Stakes Encounters in Practice

Previously: Why is the Dragon Frightening?

I have six simple rules for high-stakes encounters and fights that create tension.

• Use established rules when possible. If a monster swallows PCs, start with a bite-and-swallow creatures in the Monster Manual as a template. If a special ability is similar to a spell, use the spell description rather than creating something from scratch. Homebrewing is sturdier when it’s applied judiciously.
• There’s a logic to the monster that can be unlocked. A tough monster is a puzzle. It should be possible to observe what makes it dangerous, what it wants, how it acts, and to introduce an appropriate strategy. The DM should reward PCs who intelligently engage in this way, particularly if they “risk” deviating from their tried-and-true combat loop to try something clever.
• The monster is not precious. Building upon the previous point, the DM should not try to “save” the monster or worry about a PC “ruining” an encounter. Monsters are cheap; players engaging with the fiction are precious. Weight accordingly.
• A bad choice is much better than no choice at all. A monster that incapacitates a PC is not much fun. A monster that gives a PC a choice between incapacitation and serious damage is more interesting. Players are much more engaged in tough fights if they get to make choices, even (especially?) choices between two terrible options.
• Escape is usually an option, but with consequences. Be ready to shift out of tactical, square-by-square maneuvering if the PCs turn from fighting to fleeing. Reward clever escape plans, and be clear about the costs of conventional ones. A roll of the dice is usually appropriate, but it should typically be made to measure the magnitude of the cost of escape, rather than a pass/fail on escape itself.
• Break reality, but don’t break the game. You can have monsters that subvert, invert, attack, or transform the way fights work in the game… as long as the players trust that the DM is adjudicating the situation fairly.

What does this look like in practice? The following are examples of monsters from our 5E game that wrapped up earlier this year. These monsters attacked things beyond HP, and brought their own strange logic and challenge to the encounters.

The Fiction Manifester. The mischievous intruder in the mystical library is attuned to books buried in an enormous pile in the center of the room. For example, one book makes him so nimble that he has a +10 to his AC, for a total of 28, making him supremely difficult to hit by conventional means. Another gives him immunity to most conditions. The books briefly flash with light similar to Faerie Fire when he draws upon their magic.

It’s possible, but difficult, to beat him through conventional attacks and spells. Finding and destroying the books will cut off his power, but will draw the ire of the library guardian golems. Reshelving the books in their proper places will break the magic without incurring the guardians’ wrath. 

The Time Manipulator. Commit an anachronistic crime, and a Timekeeper will hunt you down in 12 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes, and 12 seconds to punish you for your crime against chronality. Every time the Timekeeper hits, its target must save, or their initiative drops by 1d12, and the Timekeeper’s initiative increases by an equal amount. For every interval of 12 by which the Timekeeper’s initiative exceeds the initiative of the next-highest enemy initiative in the encounter, it gains an extra turn per round.

The Fate Eater. This fate-spinning spider can steal whole vistas of possibility, literally devouring possible timelines stretching out before a character. On a failed saving throw, a character must roll on a prompt table; the DM then gives them a choice of two (very broadly outlined) paths in their future. One is gone forever, and the spider heals some amount of damage in the process. 

The Wish Granter. This demon prince first uses Dark Gift, a signature ability that allows a saving throw; those that fail learn the Wish spell and gain a 9th-level spell slot that can only be used to cast Wish, with various caveats, principally that it cannot be used to replicate lower level spells, but must instead be a true “wish” in the classic sense. The wish also cannot harm the prince. The prince then uses the spell Command – upcast to hit as many PCs as failed the first save – with the command word “wish.” The wishes follow the normal logic of the spell, but with a greater emphasis on the monkey’s paw downsides.

Why is the Dragon Frightening?

In Dungeon World, the dragon is frightening because its hard moves can ruin the PCs, and there are limited ways to fight back against it.

In Troika, the dragon is frightening because it acts deliberately. Consider one of the most beautifully written explanations of a game rule that I have ever seen, which has informed a lot of my own monster and encounter design: 

“The goblins have few [initiative] Tokens because they are cowardly, not because they are slow; the dragon has many because it knows exactly what it wants, not because it is fast.”

In D&D 5E the dragon is frightening because… it has a mechanic that says “save or you’re frightened.” Which the PCs will ignore, because they cast Heroes Feast that morning. Oh good, I was afraid something exciting might happen.

OK, that’s a little harsh. I’ve run perfectly good dragon fights in 5E. The first dragon our 5E group encountered was novel just because it was A Dragon. The last dragon they fought pulled out every trick in the book: casting spells, unleashing a Prismatic Spray breath weapon on the PCs, and nuking the battlefield when bloodied. And they could only fight it to a draw.

But what I’ve found from big 5E fights is that they don’t succeed on DPS and big HP totals or immunities. Damage acts like a clock on the fight, to ensure it doesn’t go on forever. But the really tense fights came from monsters that threatened the PCs in unusual ways, and objectives that differed from race-to-zero slugfests.

To whit, we’ve had multiple tough fights where the group healer looks around afterward and asks “who is injured?” And the PCs realized that despite the tension in the fight, they took very little damage. Because the encounter was attacking something besides their HP total.

Next: High-Stakes Encounters in Practice

Stranger Than Fiction: Ascetics

It’s taken as a platitude that truth is stranger than fiction, but we have to remind ourselves constantly, lest our games be more ordinary than everyday life.

Consider the historical example of Simeon Stylites. Was the strangest holy man in your game as strange as this real-world one? Certainly players would not soon forget such an NPC encounter. I would guess that most games have too few strange religious outcasts, and very few have too many.

In the interest of moving money to the mouth zone, a random table.

Why is the fervent ascetic you encounter on your journey locally famous?

1. A repentant former soldier. They have worked thousands of swords and other weapons into a massive modern art sculpture. Will evangelically attempt to convince armed PCs to donate their weapons to the project. A little too interested in swords for it to be healthy (possibly a Gladio worshiper?) 
2. A wizened pilgrim from a far-off land. They attribute their longevity to fasting, prayer, rigorous calisthenics, and a diet of salt scorpions (only available locally!) Searching their modest yurt will reveal pigments, dyes, and tinctures they use to fake this elderly appearance; in reality they’re not a day over 30.
3. A hairless farmer who has forsaken the plow. They now dwell inside a huge, hollow brass statue near the forgotten lord’s road. The statue amplifies their voice, and they can often be heard singing, crying, or proselytizing in the early morning hours. Local tax sheriffs pay them a grudging tithe to keep them from quiet during winter’s thaws, when their vocalizations could trigger dangerous avalanches. 
4. An impoverished fisherman who has found their true calling. Their shrine holds thousands of small clay statues, which they lovingly care for, cleaning them and making tiny sacrifices to “feed” them. For a modest donation, they can dedicate one such statue to you, as a temporary receptacle for your soul, in case of your untimely death. It will be safe in their care until such time as your relatives can retrieve it and return you to your homeland for burial.
5. A flockless sheep herder who was just sick of “the politics.” They can read the future in sacrificial entrails, but their prognostications are uniformly negative. The superstitious local towns pay them to not use this reputed ability, in a kind of backwards protection racket. The local hetmen would like nothing more than to get rid of this annoyance, but they’re worried the seer will see it coming.
6. A fearless young runaway, ready to usher in a new age. By some combination of dumb luck and divine providence, they single-handedly killed six soldiers from the King-in-Repose’s Army, and now a dangerously hangry mob of pitchfork-shaperners has gathered around their hilltop altar, ready to march on the capital at their divine leader’s sign. 

The Bag of Threads

One of my players – interested in DMing their own game – asked me about how backstories factor into session planning, and how they connect to other events that occur in a game. My answer was substantive enough that I wanted to revisit it, rework it for clarity, and share here.

***

I like to boil any backstory down to about one sentence. Then it goes into the bag of ideas that I pull from when I prep sessions. That same bag is where all the "loose ends" go after each session. NPCs, treasure, monsters, events, conflicts, debts, rivalries, complications, all sorts of one-sentence "loose ends" or "loose threads." For each thing the characters resolve, they leave multiple things unresolved; so this is a major source of ideas for preparation.

So for example, very early on, a character sold their shadow to a merchant. This went into the bag of ideas. At some point, selling the shadow was going to come up again, and probably complicate things for them. Either being shadowless would be an issue, or the shadow itself would appear in some compromising way. That idea gradually turned into "what if the merchant sells the shadow to a third party, and it's weaponized?"

But the great thing about those "loose threads" jostling around in the bag of ideas is that they get tangled together. So, what if the shadow thread was intertwined with another loose thread? What if "the character sold their shadow" gets tangled together with "the disappearance of that character’s sister was the inciting incident that led to their life of adventure"? 

So the party is attacked by a weaponized version of the sister’s shadow instead of the character’s shadow. Why is the sister’s shadow also detached? Because she sold hers too, of course. So that creates a parallel between the siblings. And provides a clue as to where she is, and what she's doing.

The characters eventually followed those clues to find the sister pragmatically working with a group of mindflayers. And those mindflayers provided a natural way to tangle together more loose threads. Different characters' stories were tangled together, and the mindflayers became a cluster of complications. So the sister is working with the mindflayers. Who are trying to bend the power of the paladin’s god to their own end. And they've also put a parasite in the rogue’s head. And so on.

And, of course, the players have to choose to pull on those threads. A lot of threads are dropped into games, and the players never grab them. And that's fine. They may go back in the bag, or I might discard them, if it seems like they're not really relevant anymore.

This is more art than science, but once you get used to it, it really makes session planning easier by centering it on the characters, their past actions, and the things they care about, as measured by what they focus on in the actual game.

Knave-ifying 5E Spells

D&D 5E advocates a rulings-not-rules philosophy, rejecting 3.5E’s and 4E’s attempts to capture as much of the game as possible in formal rules. 5E is better at sticking to this philosophy in some places than others. One of the weakest areas is the spell list in the Player’s Handbook.

The 5E spell list takes up a full quarter of the total page count of the Player’s Handbook. Some descriptions are admirably succinct. Jump is 14 words long. Others are beasts. Symbol takes up more than half a page on its own.

What if all the descriptions were like the former? More specifically, what if they followed the logic of Knave's spell descriptions? 

What does it mean, mechanically, for time to move 10 times faster, or gravity to triple? 5E would work these details out with a dozen paragraphs explaining saving throws, special conditions to end the effect, interactions with ability checks, and combat implications. Knave simply assumes that the DM could reasonably adjudicate the effect based on common sense and the shared logic of the game world. 

So could we do it? Can we Knave-ify 5E spells? Let's try the first dozen spells in alphabetical order.

For this exercise, we won’t cover level, school, casting time, range, components, duration. Note that Knave uses “nearby” for range and common sense measures like “the size of an apple.” We’ll assume that anything not outright stated would be adjudicated at the table. As with Knave, there is no effort to balance these, and they are treated as basically level-less, or having effects that scale with level (denoted by “L” below).

Acid Splash: Conjure a goblet’s worth of weak acid, dealing Ld6 damage to a creature or destroying a fragile object.

5E has an abundance of spells that deal damage and do little else. 5E’s system for upcasting spells keys to tier rather than directly to level, which has a balance logic, but isn’t intuitive or easy to condense to a formula. If it were up to me, cantrips would be out of the game entirely, but that’s an entire post of its own. 

Aid: Temporarily increase L friendly creatures maximum HP by 5.

Note that Aid temporarily raises maximum hit points, but is different from temporary hit points, and a character could benefit from both simultaneously. Have I mentioned that I do not enjoy explaining the moon logic of this game design to new players? This effect is not even particularly interesting, and would be on the shortlist of spells that I would consider cutting entirely for its non-diegetic “numbers go up” implementation.

Alarm: An audible or silent alarm (your choice) triggers when an unfamiliar creature enters a warded space no larger than a 10xL cube.

Alter Self: Adapt the physical means of locomotion, survival, or predation – such as wings, gills, or talons – of a beast or monster you have seen before.

The last part is an underrated trick. 5E occasionally uses this conceit – the druid’s Wild Shape ability is limited to “a beast that you have seen before.” If a player wants to Wild Shape into a particular animal, the DM can ask them to make the case for their past encounter with such a creature, or even briefly flash back to their pre-adventuring days. This also gives 5E players a strong incentive to go out into the world and see new and dangerous creatures. More 5E spells and abilities that do things like summon creatures or create illusions should be predicated on the caster’s direct observation and interaction with such things.

Animal Friendship: Target beast must make a Wisdom saving throw or be charmed.

Animal Messenger: Target tiny beast reliably delivers a short message to a recipient, within L days travel, based on a general description of the recipient.

Animal Shapes: Target creatures transform into beasts with CR no greater than L/4.

There may be a more elegant way to cap the size of the beasts involved. Considering that Animal Shapes is an 8th-level spell, I’m not sure why 5E is so stingy about the strength of the assumed form. Or why this spell doesn’t simply re-use the logic of the Polymorph spell.

CR is also annoying because it is mostly a DM-facing stat (essentially, a rule for encounter balance and experience calculation) -- but, rarely, character abilities key off of it. When I homebrew beasts in 5E, I have to reverse engineer a CR after the fact, because the druid will ask me if they can Wild Shape into the fantastic animal they just encountered.

D&D 5E’s various transformation spells all include extensive language about what happens to equipment, what effects or conditions would return the subject to their normal form, and so forth. If this can’t be left to DM discretion, 5E should just have a universal rule for how transformations work.

Animate Dead: Raise L-2 skeletons or zombies capable of obeying simple orders for as long as you exert conscious control over them.

Animate Objects: Imbue a collection of objects the size of a person or smaller with temporary life; use a swarm stat block for many tiny or small objects, or a bear stat block for one big object.

Antilife Shell: Living things may not enter the 10’ radius shimmering dome that surrounds you.

Antimagic Field: Magic is blocked or suppressed within this invisible 10’ radius sphere.

Antipathy/Sympathy: All nearby creatures of a type of your choice must make a Wisdom save or be attracted or repelled (your choice) in your presence.

Note that in 5E’s rules, antipathy applies the frightened condition, but sympathy does not apply the charmed condition. I cannot think of a reason why this would be. GAME DESIGN.

We could repeat this exercise for the rest of the alphabet, but as with so many hacks, you have to stop and ask yourself if it would not make more sense to just design from the ground up, rather than painstakingly fixing the things you don’t like about the existing system.