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 ideas—untested or proven—for bard-friendly milestone abilities that might help a bard pre-gen shine during a one-off night of gaming? Thanks for your help…

#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 players’ favorite songs - or what they thought their character’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, What’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 don’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 (“let’s you and him fight”), power cords to cause energy damage (electric lute as loot), the ability to copy someone else’s ability for a limited time (method acting)

#4

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

#5

There’s some homebrews if you search ‘bard’ on forums, but here’s something I made for fun.