House Rules

House Rules

Standing rulings and homebrew mechanics that the DM (Wes Vaske, "Papa DM") has established at the table and that now apply to the Deez Nuts campaign. These are collected from session play; each notes the session where it was set down. New rulings are added as they arise.

Character Build

• Faction feats auto-qualify. Because the party stands high in their factions, prerequisite faction feats are granted free as you climb (e.g. a Harper Agent feat unlocking Harper Teamwork).
• +1 stat feats give +2. Any feat that would grant a +1 ability score increase instead grants +2 in this campaign ("you get +2 AND something cool").
• Legacy favored-enemy carryover. Abilities from the old (2014) rules carry into the 2024 rules where sensible — e.g. Keyleth retains advantage on dragon-knowledge checks from her former favored-enemy.
• Major respec between arcs. At arc breaks, a player may change subclass — or even class — and the associated mechanics freely. Story, background, and species remain canon and locked ("that part is canon and lore, and we're keeping that"); e.g. Shade may rebuild from bard toward wizard but stays a tiefling tied to the Eye of Gilbraxis and her infernal pact.

Tempered Soul

The feat's full mechanics live on Tempered Soul; every use is logged on Tempered Soul/Usage Log.

• Tempered Soul Aspects (the charge economy). The once-per-day limit is replaced. Each character has a base d4 soul die and, once earned, an Aspect — a domain in which they roll a d6 instead. Your charge pool is the sum of your dice (base d4 + one d6 Aspect = 10 charges); rolling a die costs charges equal to its sides (d4 = 4, d6 = 6). Long rest restores all charges; short rest restores half. Aspects deepen d6 → d8 → d10 → d12 → d20 with continued in-domain use; spreading across multiple Aspects makes any one of them slower to climb. One Aspect each, for now. The number of charge boxes scales with proficiency bonus (another at level 9).
• Aspects are earned by use. An Aspect crystallizes when a character has spent Tempered Soul "enough times in a single domain" — which is why every use is logged.
• Any d20 test is a legal target, and the die may also raise a save DC you impose on others.
• Timing: you may spend it after you know what you're facing — after the roll, after learning the stakes, before the outcome. "The whole point is, like, you know whether or not you need to go bigger." It may also be applied retroactively to a check already rolled.
• Narrate the surge. Every spend, the player states the emotion, memory, or instinct fuelling it. This is table convention, not optional colour.
• Camping on the road is a long rest — and so fully resets the pool.

Attunement

• Flexible attunement. You do not need a short or long rest to attune to a magic item. You may attune (and swap attunements) freely at any time — up until you take your first action in initiative, after which your attunements are locked for that encounter.

Magic Items & Consumables

• Anyone can use spell scrolls. The normal restriction (spell must be on your class list, or an Arcana check to cast) is waived — any character may use any spell scroll. (Flagged by the DM as provisional.)
• Healing potions drunk as a full Action heal the maximum. If you spend a full Action to drink a healing potion you regain the maximum possible hit points instead of rolling. Established values: regular 10, greater 20, superior 40. (Drinking faster, as a bonus action, rolls normally.)
• Devil-gifted items run on charges only. The items granted by the Hells cannot be upcast by burning extra spell slots — "just charges."
• The pact weapon carries the Raven Queen effect. Gootcha's ability to send a soul permanently to the Raven Queen is not bound to the Shadowfell Crossbow — as a warlock she may make any weapon her pact weapon, and it will carry the same effect. The crossbow need not be wielded.

Tools, Trade & Crafting

• Tool + related skill = advantage. If you are proficient with a tool and a skill related to the check at hand, you make the check with advantage.
• D&D Beyond list prices are canonical. For buying and selling items, the prices listed on D&D Beyond are the campaign's canonical values.
• Old Baldur's Gate crafting decanonized. The old "2-day" crafting rules from the Baldur's Gate era are no longer canon; crafting now runs through the current harvesting/crafting system (see Dragon Harvest & Crafting).

Bastions & Squires

• Bastions, but no bastion turns. Nuts Deep is the party's bastion. Each PC may claim one facility (forge, alchemy lab, arcane study, research facility, teleportation room, barracks…); facilities are level-gated and grant a discount on the cost and the time of crafting. The 5e bastion-turn economy is not used — anything a facility says you "can do on a bastion turn" is ignored, and all making runs through the campaign's crafting system.
• Squires. Each PC has a level-1 squire assigned by their faction. Squires roll their own initiative and act on their own — you may shout instructions and they may or may not listen; direct control comes later, with relationship. By default they are parked at the bastion, not dragged into every fight: "we're not just going to have a party of 12 or 13 characters." Each squire is also that character's starting helper for their facility.
• Hiring through a faction gets you people ideologically aligned with that faction.

Combat

• No massive-damage instant kill. There is no rule in this campaign by which a single huge hit instantly kills a creature above 0 HP; damage is tracked normally.
• How you kill determines whether they can come back. The DM now routinely asks whether a specific body part was targeted. Destroying the head means Revivify fails — recovery would need a greater reincarnation-type spell. (Used deliberately by Baelgrum on the caster Keith Sorrowmere.)
• Restrained blocks somatic components. A restrained creature cannot cast a spell with somatic components unless it first passes the relevant Strength check. (Web plus Silence is therefore a full caster lockout.)
• Command "Halt" does not block reactions. The halted creature takes no action, bonus action, or movement on its turn, but may still take reactions.
• Command is not a truth serum. Command cannot be stretched into "tell me what I want to know" — it is not powerful enough to simply make a target do whatever you want.
• Mounted combat — full footprint. A mounted character occupies the entire space of their mount (all four squares of a Large mount) for the purposes of reach and aura effects, not just a single square.
• Riding huge+ creatures (mounted grapple). To ride a Huge or larger creature, succeed on an Athletics check to grapple onto it; while mounted you hold on with one hand (advantage on melee attacks with the other), it does not reduce the creature's speed, and you make a contested Strength check at the end of each of the creature's turns to stay on.
• Falling. Falling damage caps at 10d8. A creature that falls onto another deals — and takes — the same falling damage.
• Cover. Creatures of equal size grant each other only half cover (+2 AC), not three-quarters. Cover applies to ranged attack rolls but not to save-based spells. Line of sight is tracked strictly.
• Alexios's Battlefield Command. Requires the target to have a minimum Intelligence and to understand language — it does not work on mindless creatures.
• Hidden/surprise initiative. Attacking a foe who can't see you means that foe rolls initiative at disadvantage (you roll normally); being fully invisible additionally grants you advantage on your own initiative.
• Hiding. Hiding is an action against a flat DC 15 Stealth check; being invisible grants advantage on the check. Once hidden you have the invisible condition, your Stealth total becomes the DC to find you, and you gain advantage on initiative and on your first attack. You stay hidden until a creature takes the Search action and finds you; attacking or stepping into line of sight normally breaks it. (Sessions 51–52)
• Hostile touch spells. Casting a leveled touch spell on an unwilling target (e.g. Remove Curse on a corrupted NPC who doesn't want it) means rolling initiative and making a spell attack to land the touch.

Spells & Effects

• Moonbeam is not sunlight. It does not trigger drow (or other) sunlight sensitivity — but it still damages allies who stand in it.
• Circle Magic. A homebrew ritual: secondary casters lend the primary caster spell slots (any matching-or-lower slot, no specific spell required) to expand a spell's area, safeguard chosen targets from it, and extend its duration (up to 24 hours with seven casters). Casting time scales up — up to roughly one minute. (Used to thaw the frost giant Hrimthur with a "safe" Burning Hands that healed rather than harmed him.)
• 2024 familiars are spirits — and can sense the infernal. Familiars under the 2024 rules are celestial, fiend, or fey spirits in animal shape; as such they can feel infernal resonance (used in Session 51 to sweep Luskan and map the blood-red coin hoards).

Sea Travel (hex-crawl subsystem)

Established in Session 47 for ship voyages:

• The map is a hex grid at 6 miles per hex. Ship speed is measured in hours per hex: with the wind ~1 hour, neutral ~2 hours, against the wind ~3 hours; travel time is doubled at night.
• Crew morale (cap +10) is added to ship checks and is raised via Performance (DC 10 + current morale), once per day per player.
• Cold-water immersion: a character can last a number of rounds equal to their Constitution modifier before they must begin making Constitution saves.
• The ship's railing grants half cover against things in the water. Underwater attacks require an Athletics check (with disadvantage for two-handed weapons). The ship's ballista: +6 to hit, 3d10 damage, with a loading action.

Exploration & Travel

• Group travel checks are averaged. On an overland leg every character rolls Survival and the DM takes the party average to resolve the journey.
• Group nat-20 = double travel. On a group travel check, a natural 20 (with the group succeeding) covers double distance for that leg.
• Take 10. In a safe, unpressured moment a character may "take 10" on a Perception or Investigation check.
• Ice traversal. On steep ice, "slope" costs apply: +5 ft of movement to climb a slope (difficult terrain even with crampons), with steeper slopes also requiring an Acrobatics check or you slide prone to the bottom; vertical climbs are DC 15 Athletics per 8-ft level (advantage with crampons). High ground gives +2 to hit, low ground −2. Boots such as Xanphina's Winter Strider ignore all of it.

Flavor / Sensory

• First-time sensory save. A genuinely novel, disturbing sensory experience (e.g. the wet sound of the Eye of Gilbraxis tearing free of its socket, or looting a long-rotted corpse) forces a one-time Constitution save — only the first time.