u/aidndhomebrew

Here's a collection of free resources to use in your D&D or RPG campaigns. If you want to see any additional lore created, feel free to ask. Or submit your own. 🙂

Three enormous eggs sit among roots and bones in a damp cavern. Red and green light pulses through their cracked shells. They are warm, and something inside each one moves when the party draws near. Whatever laid them is nowhere in sight.

A broken pack lies beside the nest. Its owner left a hurried note: “Heard one call for help. Heard another answer in my voice.” Beneath it, in different handwriting: “Do not mistake a sound for a promise.”

Give the players room to investigate and decide:

• Watch the nest. The eggs seem close to hatching, but waiting may bring back their parent—or reveal who else is watching them.
• Listen or use magic. Each egg gives a different sign: a scratching claw, a slow heartbeat, a whispered word. Divination reveals living minds, but no clear species.
• Move or break an egg. The shells are heavy and fragile. A careful party might take one to safety; a frightened party might decide the risk is too great.
• Prepare for the hatch. They can barricade the cave, leave food, set a trap, or simply give the creatures space. Their preparations shape the first moments of the encounter.

Choose what’s inside only when the reveal will matter most:

Possibility	What hatches
Lost young	Three frightened dragon hatchlings. Their injured parent returns and judges the party by what it finds.
Unwelcome brood	Burrowing predators that mimic sounds they heard through the shells. The “cry for help” was learned from a previous visitor.
Ancient guardians	Small stone-scaled beings that imprint on whoever helps them hatch. They were left here to guard something deeper in the cave.
Something stranger	Two eggs contain harmless young. The third contains a creature none of the local records describe—and it has been tapping warnings to the others.

Keep the eggs’ sounds and movements consistent during play. The mystery then feels discoverable, even if the party never learns the full answer until a shell breaks.

At sunset, the desert becomes a mirror. Beneath its cracked, translucent surface lies Veyr, a city sealed a century ago when its mages tried to imprison the sun’s last hour. Each evening, its towers appear below the sand. By morning, they vanish.

Player hooks

• The missing hour: The party wakes to find everyone in a nearby caravan a day older, with no memory of the previous evening.
• A voice below: Each character hears a familiar voice calling from beneath the glass. The voices know things no stranger should.
• The spreading cracks: A desert settlement will be caught in the blast if the glass breaks at sunset. Its people ask the party to investigate.
• The bell keeper’s bargain: The party discovers that silencing the bell ends the theft of time but may kill Veyr’s inhabitants. Repairing the seal saves them for now, while allowing the theft to continue.

When plague reached his kingdom, Vhaldris swore that no subject would face death alone. He bound his soul to the black throne and called every dying citizen into his cathedral. Centuries later, green fire still burns for them, and hooded guardians stand watch. Vhaldris insists his people are safe. None have been allowed to leave.

Player hooks

• A missing loved one sends a letter from inside the sealed cathedral. They remember dying, but beg the party to come.
• Vhaldris offers to cure a spreading plague if the party retrieves the stolen jewel from his crown.
• The throne’s guardians begin appearing in nearby towns, escorting the dying away before their families can say goodbye.

The dead reached the village gates before sunrise. Behind her, families crowded into the chapel while fire consumed the rooftops.

Sister Amara planted her staff in the mud and raised one hand. A golden ward sprang up around the gate. The first skeleton struck it and shattered; a hundred more pressed forward. Amara’s arm shook, but she held the light long enough for every villager to escape through the chapel’s rear door.

When the ward finally broke, the gate stood empty. Amara smiled at the oncoming dead and called down the dawn.

A colossal arthropod aberration standing fourteen feet at the thorax and stretching thirty feet along its segmented body. Its most feared feature is the ocular crown — a writhing mass of twelve to twenty independently mobile eye-stalks, each capable of perceiving heat, magic, emotional resonance, and dimensional distortions. Additional eye-stalks line its entire body, granting near-total spherical perception. Raptorial foreclaws can bisect plate armour, and a paralytic secretion drips constantly from its joints, pooling on the cave floor for hours after it passes.

The Vorrethax is not mindless. It learns patrol routes, prioritises spellcasters, collapses tunnels to funnel prey, and has been observed keeping living captives paralysed near its lair. The skeletal remains in its territory are stripped clean and arranged in rows — catalogued, not scattered.

It is believed to be no natural creature, but a deliberate creation of the Age of Unbound Sorcery — engineered as a living sentinel placed over sites of extreme arcane significance, a living lock that cannot leave its claimed territory even when starving. A darker theory holds that its gathered eyes are not its own, but harvested — and that somewhere deeper still, something receives everything they see.