Make a Map

     Recently, my PCs have been in a more exploratory and adventurous mood than is typical of them. They usually like to hang out in villages and cities and have more urban social adventures. So, I found myself in need of overland maps pretty quickly. I decided to assign land-type values to each face of a d6, corresponding to plains, water (river, lake, ocean), swamp, mountains, forests, and deserts, grabbed a hand full of dice and tossed them on a sheet of paper. 

     I've already posted this initial idea on the internet, but here I wanted to show my work. Since I also recently decided to learn watercolors, I decided to haphazardly slap on some colors over the notations. 

It's no Audubon or O'Keeffe, but it'll do.

     Maybe next time I'll slap the paint on some hex grid paper first, and work out "point of interest" and civilizations too. 

     What do you do if you need maps in a pinch?

Intoxication

My brother came up with a thing for our 5e campaign where Intoxication works kinda like Exhaustion. Here's my take on it.

If the PCs drink more than one drink in an in-game hour, they have to make a Con save vs Poison (determined by the alcohol's DC). Failure means they gain a level of Intoxication.

Level 1 - d8 temporary HP, disadvantage on Dex saves and skill checks.
Level 2 - Disadvantage on Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma savesand skill checks, movement is reduced by half.
Level 3 - Poisoned, lose Dex bonus to AC.
Level 4 - Unconscious. Won't wake up, unless you take damage.
Level 5 - Fatal alcohol poisoning. Roll death saves. If you succeed, you lose a level of Intoxication.

If you take a long rest, you can get rid of two levels of Intoxication.

It still needs work, like a list of alcohol. If you do your own version, I'd love to see it.

Varying Your Prices

I play D&D with my four younger brothers and my Dad, and I like to be the DM. When I generate a town, one thing I like to think about is what goods of which it might have a surplus or shortage. Let's use the random example village of Stalton. I'm going to arbitrarily determine that it has a surplus of iron, but a shortage of wood and cloth.

In my games, I'll use discounts and increases in multiples of 5's, from +25% to -25%, and the percentage determines the severity of shortage to the abundance of surplus. So, as long as the PCs are in Stalton, they'll see that iron goods are 25% cheaper, but wood is 15% more expensive, and cloth is 10% more expensive.

But, what if they're buying an ax? It's made of both iron and wood. Combine the discount and increase. In this case, you'll get a total of 10% off (15 - 25 = -10). If your PCs want an item made of two things that have discounts (I really recommend one discount and two increases, but it's your game), just use the lesser of the two discounts. NPCs gotta make money too, you know!