Looking for Inspiration for Bards

#1

Greetings.

I have decided to run a holiday one-shot adventure as a break for my current gaming group.

I am using the special event as an opportunity to try out the new Bard character type from ICRPG Master Edition as one of my pre-generated characters for the adventure.

Now bards (at least as they have existed over the years in D&D 1e through 5e) have never trended toward my personal thematic tastes as either a player or a game master; however, Master Edition has given me pause to reconsider the class and see what it can really do.

Each pre-gen character Is being seeded with some sweet loot and a couple of milestone abilities for the single-night adventure, in order to simulate some development and adventuring experience, so the players have some cool options during game play instead of starting from scratch. I am building a dwarven bard pre-gen for my regular player who runs a righteous elven priest in our ongoing campaign, just to shake things up a bit during the one-shot.

I have perused the character type description and the available Master Edition abilities, and there is a decent short list of milestone buffs geared toward the bard class; I find myself still looking for additional milestone ability options beneficial to and thematically consistent with the bard class.

I hereby query this forum: do you have any homebrew ideasā€”untested or provenā€”for bard-friendly milestone abilities that might help a bard pre-gen shine during a one-off night of gaming? Thanks for your helpā€¦

#2

Have you checked out the Mariachi from Ghost Mountain in Master Edition (page 234)? Might be some ideas you can grab from that.

#3

I think a lot of the ways bards can shine are beyond specific mechanics. I would always try to find out playersā€™ favorite songs - or what they thought their characterā€™s favorite songs would be - and then get video clips or song lyrics to use when doing inspiration, healing, walk-on music, whatever. And then also pull a few epic songs - Immigrant Song, Buffy Theme, Whatā€™s Up Danger, etc for the epic battles. And the online Shakespear insult generator (http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/index.html ) is invaluable. I donā€™t have any talent myself, so quoting was the best I could do. For a one-shot - maybe you could poll the players and let the person playing the bard get a head start on prep?

Some ability / loot ideas: allow their provocation to force the enemy to duel the tank rather than yourself (ā€œletā€™s you and him fightā€), power cords to cause energy damage (electric lute as loot), the ability to copy someone elseā€™s ability for a limited time (method acting)

#4

Those are all fantastic ideas to consider. Thanks, guys.

#5

Thereā€™s some homebrews if you search ā€˜bardā€™ on forums, but hereā€™s something I made for fun.