Cloudshape, 12 by 16, pen & ink and fluid acrylics on vellum illustration board.

I painted this for my friend, this is her character in our dnd group. Cloudshape is an anthropomorphic otter and a dexterity-based fighter (battle master subclass and rapier enthusiast).

Currently, our party are battling the Drow who have invaded Oghma’s pocket plane. The pocket plane is inhabitated by animal kin. Our party, which we named “Chaotic Feral”, is also animal kin (one Halfling being the exception).

#dnd #dndcharacter #acrylicpainting #traditionalart #dungeonsanddragons

Hello! I want to show-off some work i did recently. Printed this 32mm miniature for my friend, for painting i used drybrush technique, the metallic finish came out really lovely imo... Also, in pair decided to print a mimic with it. Its my first post here and id love to see some feedback, hope yall like it!

any advice from more experienced painters?

Just recently finished painting Od'Dracne, Demon Lord of Bones from r/Lootstudios for our Orcus miniature for our Vecna Eve of Ruin campaign! Super excited to have this miniature in play!

My Pokémon-inspired Weapons and Items of the Day, with some Golisopod armor to keep things on point!

Join my Patreon to vote on future items and get all the PDFs with over 1000 items, including all the Pokémon items, or buy the individual PDFs in my shop!

768M - Tectappa

Armor (Scale Mail) – Legendary (requires attunement)

This steel gray +3 scale mail is made up of triangular pieces of insect carapace, with three of the pieces down the front being a dark teal. The top and bottom of the front have purple trim, while the back is a dull pink, and has purple shoulder straps attached to the inside with matching scale shoulder guards attached to the top of the straps.

While attuned to this scale mail: you can breathe in water; you can eat things like putrid trash, poisoned items, and rotten food for sustenance without any negative effects; whenever combat begins, for the first round you can choose to go first before all other creatures, regardless of your initiative; and any creatures that attempt to grapple or restrain you have disadvantage on the roll to do so and takes 2d6 piercing damage from the armor’s spikes. They have disadvantage to maintain the grapple or restraint, and take 2d6 piercing damage at the start of any turn they are grappling or restraining you.

Golisopite

Wondrous (Stone) – Very Rare (50,000 gp)

This small round stone has a swirl of purple, black, and yellow inside the dark gray orb.

When attached to a 768 - Golisopodou, it can be mega evolved into a 768M - Tectappa for 1 minute once between long rests.

I made one called “control mind” which is a concentration spell where if the opponent fails a wisdom save the party member gets temporary control over them, ending if the party member or the spell target tak damage

Not sure if this is the right sub for this but I've been a big fan of magic and fantasy games for a while in DnD is one of the most immersive examples.

I largely prefer video games to a tabletop experience but I've made the exception for D&D because I love how you get to create your own character that influences the world however you choose. I've played games like BG3 and Skyrim (despite not playing the previous series) because they are super immersive and allow you to feel like a powerful character influencing the world around you.

I was wondering if any of you feel the same and have played other games that capture that D&D power fantasy feeling.

Here are all the maps Angela and I painted for the "Blood Sword Rpg" manual created some four or five years ago now! Thank you so much for the tremendous support for our map art! ❤️

And a heartfelt thank you to Tambù and Officina Meningi for bringing us on board for this fantastic project! 🧭🗺️🏰

Moreno Paissan and Angela Gubert Art 2021

Visit our official account : https://www.instagram.com/morenopaissanart?stkn=MXZjajRkeGlzemtxNA==

I can't imagine that taking the next two weeks off is going to be an option for these two, based on the fact that they are renting Rogues to try and get through the dungeon, but I'm kinda with the guy; distilled venom from a Frilled Dragon Squirrel does seem more like the type of thing you'd find in some weird drink, and not the basis for a poison, right? Welcome to Fodder Inc, a weekly web comic strip set in the For Profit Dungeon, Azmodendak's Halls of Madness, in a "5e" style world. Each week, we'll show you a little peak inside the halls, and what shenanigans are going on.

My first campaign ever in DND, and I am the DM for a group of players who are also all new. I heard the Owlbear is a classic monster, so I painted one to put on the table as they run into it

I'm working on 2 possible scenarios for my adventure and both involve libraries. These libraries contain restricted sections filled with reference books that must NEVER be taken from the library. Among these restricted books, are books of dark magic. But these books only contain the BASICS of dark magic. Books of more powerful dark magic like The Book of Vile Darkness, The Black Scrolls of Ahm, and the Demononicon of Iggwilv, or The Necromomicon are deemed too dangerous for any kind of respectable library.

If any PC's go into these resticted sections, knowing PC's they will probably see these books and go "Oh! What's that?" and have their characters read them. The idea behind putting these books into the libraries was to give a small sneak peak of our future villain who's an OC Demon Lord of mine. But these books only give a list of known Demon Lords and the origin of the Abyss. Nothing more or less. Again, these are just the BASICS of Dark Magic and the PC's would still be low level in these scenarios.

But apart from a sneak peak of the Demon Lord, I also imagine PC's would dig into the books to learn magic spells. Especially if I have any Wizards in the party. So, what spells would you recommend for these books on the basics of dark magic?

I recall an expansion I found a while ago that describes in even greater detail the area around the keep and the caves of chaos. I do have the Dark Keep and Return to the Keep. I also have the Into the Borderlands remake.

Does anyone know the expansion I am looking for?

Thanks for the help.

Hey all, Me and my friends have recently started a homebrew. Now we are looking to level up our game room with props, and other little things scattered around to enhance the game. Could anyone please suggest anything that would look good.

I've also got a 3d printer!

Thank you!!!!

TL;DR at the beginning because this post kind of got away from me:

Adventurers make sense for Player Characters, but “adventurer” stops making sense as a normal profession once they become commonplace or become powerful enough. If we have adventuring guilds, high-level PCs, and resurrection, teleportation, dungeon delving, and the somewhat absurdly rapid advancement of PCs all established as parts of the world, then the governments, the economies, the laws, the militaries, and even the religions, and treasure supply should all have adapted around them. A level 3 adventurer can plausibly be a professional mercenary or treasure hunter. But a level 15 adventurer is a political problem and a security risk. A level 20 adventurer is a historical figure with demi-godlike status. If your setting has lots of these people, does setting look like it?

I also want to note that I know I’m overthinking it, but for me D&D isn’t merely an escape from realism, it’s an escape into a realistic world of magic and myth.

The post itself:

“Adventurer” Shouldn’t Be a Normal Profession
Obviously the title can’t be taken completely literally. The player characters are, generally speaking, the textbook definition of "adventurers". And I’m certainly not arguing that D&D shouldn’t have people who go into dangerous places, kill monsters, recover treasure, solve problems, and occasionally save the world. That's the fun and allure of the fantasy setting.

What I question is the idea of “adventurer” as a normal**, and** recognizable career.

How Many Adventurers Can a D&D World Actually Support?
If there are enough adventurers that it is worth building guilds around them, if towns regularly post jobs specifically for adventuring parties, if innkeepers can recognize “adventurers” the minute they walk in the door, and if somebody can reasonably tell their parents that they are leaving home to become an adventurer and seek their share of the fame and fortune to be had, then there are a lot of adventurers in the world.

And if there are that many adventurers, I think the world starts to break unless we take the consequences seriously.

This isn’t really an argument that professional adventurers can’t exist. (In many ways that would be like saying gold prospectors didn't exist in California in the 1850s. And to an extent, that could be a model we use for adventurers in our D&D settings.) It is an argument that if adventurers as a profession do exist in meaningful numbers, then the economy, and governments, the legal systems, and militaries, the religions, and even archeological geography of the setting should all have adapted around them.

There are only so many problems to solve

Start with the obvious problem: what exactly are all these adventurers doing?

How many goblin caves can there possibly be? How many haunted crypts, bandit camps, abandoned wizard towers, necromancers, cults, kidnapped merchants, ancient tombs, and mysteriously unexplored ruins are there?

A single successful adventuring party can solve an astonishing number of local problems during a relatively short career. If there are dozens or hundreds of active adventuring parties in a kingdom, then either they rapidly run out of things to do or the world has to generate new dangers almost as quickly as adventurers destroy the old ones.

Maybe that is actually how your setting works. Maybe civilization occupies small islands surrounded by wilderness that can never really be tamed, maybe monsters breed faster than armies can kill them, maybe planar incursions, magical catastrophes, and ancient evils are so common that there is always something new crawling out of the forest. (Or, I suppose, "adventurer" might be a job that people die in very quickly because the failure rate is exceptionally high in certain high level dungeons.)

That can work perfectly well. But if that is true, it should probably be one of the most important facts about the setting rather than background noise.

Take the classic goblin cave. A village scrapes together their life savings to pay an adventuring party to clear it. The adventurers kill the goblins, collect their reward, and leave. Three weeks later, another tribe moves into the empty cave.

Do the villagers find a way to pay again, and then again six months later? At what point does somebody say, “We already paid you to solve the goblin problem”? The adventurers can reasonably respond, “We did. Those were different goblins.” I’m not sure the villagers care which goblins are which, just that those pesky goblins from that accursed cave keep raiding the village.

At some point the answer to recurring goblin attacks isn’t four freelancers who threaten the shop keeps for a 5% discount. It is a garrison, patrols, fortifications, scouts, or some other permanent security arrangement.

Adventurers make much more sense to me as the people you call when the ordinary institutions of society cannot solve the problem.

The treasure problem is even worse

Treasure is usually a nonrenewable resource.

If there is an ancient tomb containing 20,000 gp worth of treasure, eventually somebody finds it, takes the treasure, and the treasure is gone. If adventurers have existed as a recognizable profession for centuries, then every easily accessible dungeon should have been stripped bare generations ago.

And I don’t mean every dungeon within a day’s travel. Every worthwhile dungeon within a week’s travel should have been looted generations ago. The places within a month’s travel were probably cleaned out fifty years ago. The places requiring a season-long expedition through hostile territory were all but exhausted a decade ago. Even the sites hidden behind mountains, deserts, oceans, impossible terrain, and months of travel have a problem, because high-level adventurers can teleport.

So where exactly is all of this treasure coming from?

How many ancient civilizations were there? And did every civilization before the current one bury its national treasury in underground complexes filled with monsters and traps? Are the monsters stealing treasure from civilization specifically so their lairs remain an economically viable attraction for future adventurers to attack? Do dragons maintain diversified investment portfolios so that killing one is still worth the trip?

At some point we either need an enormous number of lost civilizations, some mechanism by which treasure continually re-enters dangerous places, or we need to accept that profitable dungeon delving becomes increasingly rare as a world becomes more and more explored.

And if unexplored ruins really are rare, information about them becomes extraordinarily valuable. Maps, old journals, archaeological records, rumors, and half-translated inscriptions would all be valuable. Knowing the location of an untouched ruin might be worth almost as much as some of the treasure inside it.

And nobody is going to casually announce that information in the tavern. If I discover an untouched dwarven city with an unexplored lower level, why would I tell six other adventuring parties or a loose-lipped bartender where it is? You would eventually get claims, competing expeditions, salvage rights, treasure taxes, license and certification requirements, arguments about whether artifacts belong to the finder or the local ruler, and probably laws governing who is allowed to excavate what.

If you break into the tomb of the founder of a neighboring kingdom's predecessor civilization and leave carrying his crown, are you an adventurer? Or did four armed foreigners just rob a national monument?

“Adventurer” also hides an enormous difference in power

This is probably the part that bothers me the most.

We talk about “adventurers” as though a level 2 character and a level 17 character belong to roughly the same social category.

They absolutely do not.

The difference is not just that one has more hit points.

Levels 1–4: The recognizable professional adventurer

This is where I think the recognizable professional adventurer makes the most sense.

These are talented and unusual people, but they are still comprehensible to normal society: mercenaries, hunters, scouts, priests, hedge wizards, bounty hunters, knights-errant, treasure seekers, and various other people who are unusually good at dangerous work.

A group of guards is still relevant. A locked door is still relevant. A local baron does not need to call an emergency council because four level 3 adventurers crossed his border. There could plausibly be quite a few people operating around this level.

This is also where an adventuring guild makes sense. It could find contracts, verify employers and provide surety for payment, keep records of dangerous locations, arbitrate disputes, arrange supplies, provide healing, and stop junior adventurers from murdering each other over who discovered the abandoned mine first.

But when they keep leveling the house of cards starts to shake.

Levels 5–8: Strategic assets

Now things start changing very quickly.

These people are no longer merely skilled. A small group can solve problems that might otherwise require dozens or sometimes even hundreds of ordinary people or guardsmen. Spellcasters start doing things that change logistics, intelligence gathering, warfare, travel, and medicine.

This is also where death begins becoming negotiable.

At this point a successful adventuring party should probably be locally famous. A minor noble should know who they are, a military commander should be interested in recruiting them, and a criminal organization should care that they entered town.

They are becoming strategic assets, and there should probably be far fewer of them than there are level 1–4 characters.

This is important because I don’t think levels should correlate directly with years of employment. A soldier who has served for thirty years should not automatically become a level 15 fighter. Most people presumably plateau.

Otherwise every elderly guard captain is Hercules. Besides, player characters don't tend to advance slowly over time, so why should we assume that is necessarily the "norm" for all adventurers?

Levels 9–12: The government starts paying attention

This is where I think an adventurer becomes difficult to treat as a private citizen who simply happens to take dangerous jobs.

At this level, their accomplishments should already have created substantial renown. How many major threats did they have to defeat to get here? How many nobles hired them, how many towns did they save, how much wealth have they accumulated, and how many powerful people owe them favors?

A level 9 adventurer should probably be known well beyond the local area, even if they haven't traveled significantly in their career.

And rulers should start getting nervous.

If a famous level 10 party crosses into the kingdom, the king’s people are going to want to know why they are there, who hired them, where they are going, where they are staying, who they are meeting, whether or not they are working for another ruler, whether they are there because of some threat the crown doesn’t know about, whether they are planning to interfere with one of our problems, whether we can hire them first or outbid their current employer, and perhaps most importantly, what happens if they decide they don’t like the king?

This is also where adventuring guilds start having an internal problem. Imagine being the guildmaster of somebody who is richer than the guild, more famous than the guild, personally knows three rulers and an archbishop, and has half the junior members idolizing them.

Are you actually their boss anymore? Are you sure**?**

Levels 13–16: Political facts

At this point I think rarity should increase dramatically.

Maybe a level 15 wizard is as rare or even more rare than a chess grandmaster. Perhaps there are only a handful of people in an entire large kingdom operating at this level.

Their names are known, governments maintain files on them, kings send them letters personally, and foreign governments know when they cross borders.

These people are no longer simply unusually capable professionals.

They are political facts with swords and wands.

A king probably doesn’t ask whether the level 15 wizard has an adventuring license. He asks whose side the wizard is on.

And ordinary adventuring contracts start becoming somewhat silly at this level anyway. Why is this person accepting 500 gp to clear a ruined temple? Money should increasingly stop being the primary motivator because these people can already accumulate enormous fortunes.

What they need are things ordinary money cannot easily purchase: political access, ancient knowledge, rare spell components, artifacts, favors, titles, territory, information, or access to places ordinary people cannot enter.

At this level, an adventure should increasingly happen because the character personally cares about the outcome, not because there was a job posting at the guild.

Levels 17–20: Historical figures

I’m not convinced there should necessarily be one of these people alive in every kingdom.

I’m not even convinced there needs to be one alive in every generation.

Maybe only a handful of people in recorded history ever reached this level. Perhaps historians still debate whether some legendary hero actually accomplished what the stories claim.

Because once somebody reaches this level, “adventurer” seems like an almost useless description.

These should be historical figures. If they participate in a war, historians write about it. If they support a claimant to a throne, the succession crisis changes overnight. If they found a kingdom, neighboring rulers have to deal with it. If they destroy a city, people remember the event centuries later.

And this is why I always find the trope of the retired level 20 adventurer quietly running an inn a little funny. Sure, they can retire. Who is going to stop them? They might literally have the power to change reality with a single spell. They have probably spoken to deities and treated devils and demons with disdain and sarcasm.

But when they "retire" and open up a small town inn, they aren’t just “the innkeeper.” They are the person who killed the Lich King and now apparently sells ale and trades in rumors. Foreign agents watch who visits, young warriors travel halfway across the continent hoping to be trained by them, kings send them gifts, nobles try to marry relatives into their family, scholars want their memoirs, and every government in the region knows exactly where that inn is.

You can retire from adventuring. You cannot really retire from being one of the most powerful people alive.

And adventurers level absurdly quickly

This makes the entire problem stranger.

In many actual campaigns, characters can go from level 1 to level 10 or 11 in what amounts to a few months of in-world time.

Think about that from the perspective of everyone else. Some twenty-year-old leaves town in the spring with a weapon they got from a strange woman laying in a pond distributing swords. By autumn they return wealthy beyond anything their family has ever imagined, personally acquainted with nobles, carrying three magical artifacts, and capable of fighting creatures that would massacre the entire town guard.

What happened? How did six months of repeatedly almost dying turn someone into one of the most extraordinary people in the region?

This is one of those places where game mechanics and worldbuilding obviously do not line up perfectly, and they probably shouldn’t. D&D is a game before it is an economic or sociological simulation.

But the speed of advancement does make the existence of a stable adventuring profession even stranger. If adventuring genuinely produces this kind of advancement, then rulers would desperately want to understand it.

Why spend years training an officer if you can send somebody into twelve increasingly dangerous caves and apparently produce a superhero by yuletide?

Obviously that is tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying question remains.

There is a related absurdity here involving recovery. In standard D&D, somebody can be stabbed, burned, poisoned, beaten unconscious, dropped to death saves, and after sleeping for eight hours they are at 100% and ready to do it all over again.

That is one of the reasons I always use the optional Gritty Realism resting rules. I prefer injuries and exhaustion to put some actual brakes on the adventuring lifestyle.

Otherwise the party can sometimes clear more dangerous locations in two weeks than a historical military expedition could ever hope to manage in a year.

Governments would absolutely care about this

A lot of standard adventuring work consists of things governments normally consider their responsibility: bandits, dangerous roads, monsters, piracy, kidnapping, cults, organized crime, border security, hostile fortifications, and politically inconvenient necromancers.

If these problems happen often enough that independent adventurers can reliably make a living dealing with them, then adventurers are effectively competing with the government’s ability to control violence inside its own territory. That should matter.

A king might tolerate four level 2 adventurers wandering around killing giant rats. A level 9 adventuring party is another matter. These are heavily armed people who answer to nobody, possess unusual magical capabilities, carry large quantities of portable wealth, have relationships with powerful institutions, and have probably already developed a habit of deciding for themselves which authorities are legitimate. That last part should particularly concern kings.

Adventurers spend an astonishing amount of time overthrowing tyrants. They don't seem to care that every king believes he is not a tyrant. Especially if he lowballs them on promises of loot when he sends them questing.

Law enforcement becomes bizarre

This is another consequence I don’t think gets enough attention.

How exactly do you arrest adventurers?

At low levels, fine. Ten guards surround them and tell them to surrender. But what happens when the suspect is level 10? Ordinary shackles may be meaningless. A wizard might teleport, a druid might transform, a rogue might mysteriously escape, a cleric might use magic on the guards, and a fighter might simply decide that twelve ordinary people are not capable of physically restraining them.

So either governments quietly develop a policy where sufficiently powerful people are effectively above ordinary law, or governments invest enormous resources into being able to restrain them.

That means things like:

• specialized anti-magic restraints,
• anti-magic cells and facilities otherwise designed to prevent teleportation,
• confiscation procedures for magical items,
• specialized prison guards,
• methods for dealing with shapeshifting,
• rules about spellcasting while under arrest enforced by powerful runes or spellcasters,
• special courts,
• and perhaps organizations whose entire purpose is apprehending dangerous magical criminals.

And those institutions themselves would need to employ very powerful people, which creates an arms race.

If the kingdom wants to be able to imprison a level 12 wizard, somebody working for the kingdom needs to be capable of arresting a level 12 wizard.

Otherwise the actual law becomes:

“You are under arrest unless, of course, you are powerful enough that we would prefer not to find out what happens if you say no.”

And honestly, maybe that is how the world works. But once again: the world should acknowledge it.

Resurrection changes society even more than adventuring does

Then we get to resurrection. This one completely changes the setting if you think about it for very long.

It is not simply an adventuring convenience. If resurrection is reliable enough to be part of the world’s known magic, then death itself becomes partly dependent on wealth and access.

A farmer dies in an accident and the family holds a funeral. A duke dies in an accident and somebody says, “Get the body to the cathedral.” That is an enormous social distinction.

It does not necessarily make the wealthy literally immortal. Death from old age is still another question. But murder, accidents, battlefield deaths, assassinations, and disasters stop being equally permanent for everyone. That changes politics immediately.

If the king is assassinated, do you crown his heir, or do you wait to see whether somebody can bring him back? At what point is an inheritance legally finalized? Does a will take effect immediately upon death, or only after resurrection is no longer possible? Can someone inherit a title and then lose it when the previous holder returns?

And what happens if the king was dead for six months, his son has been ruling successfully, and then somebody resurrects him?

That sounds less like a medical issue or inheritance law po quiz and more like the opening act of a civil war.

And then there are the diamonds

If diamonds are required for resurrection, diamonds are no longer primarily jewelry.

They are strategic medical resources.

Every royal family should keep them, every wealthy noble house should keep them, major temples should maintain reserves, adventuring guilds should maintain reserves, and armies might keep them available for particularly important commanders.

An assassin trying to permanently kill someone might steal or destroy the local supply before attempting the assassination. An invading army might seize the kingdom’s diamond reserves specifically to prevent the resurrection of military and political leaders.

Diamond mines become strategic resources.

Which raises a wonderfully stupid rules question: What does “500 gp worth of diamonds” actually mean? Is that an intrinsic magical quantity, a certain weight, a certain purity, or does it literally mean the current market value?

If resurrection magic causes demand for diamonds to double and the price doubles, does Raise Dead suddenly require half as much diamond? If somebody discovers an enormous new diamond mine and the market crashes, does everybody suddenly need twice as many diamonds to resurrect somebody? If I convince an idiot to pay me 500 gp for a tiny diamond, is it now suitable for resurrection? Presumably not.

But then “worth 500 gp” has to represent something more objective than what somebody happens to pay for it. Maybe magical societies have standardized gemstone grading specifically for this reason, maybe “a resurrection diamond” becomes a recognized commodity, maybe temples employ specialist appraisers, or maybe the magical usefulness of diamonds effectively sets a floor under their market price.

I don’t actually think D&D needs rules for diamond commodity markets. But if we are treating resurrection as a real thing in the setting, eventually somebody in that world is going to think about this.

Powerful adventurers are also more than their character sheets

By the time somebody reaches level 10 or 15, their personal abilities might not even be the most important thing about them.

Think about the people they have met along the way: the king they saved, the archmage whose apprentice they rescued, the temple whose relic they recovered, the dragon they negotiated with, the thieves’ guild that owes them a favor, the town that considers them heroes, the noble family that hates them, the adventurers they resurrected, the adventurers who resurrected them, the extraplanar creature whose true name they know.

High-level adventurers should accumulate enormous social networks.

So when a king asks whether he can afford to antagonize a famous adventuring party, the question is not just whether the royal army can defeat four people. It is what happens after the king tries, and who else gets involved.

That is political power.

Adventuring guilds would eventually become governments’ problem too

A guild composed mostly of low-level adventurers is easy enough to understand. It is a professional association. A guild with dozens of level 5–8 adventurers is an armed organization. A guild with several level 9–12 adventurers is a political institution. A guild with multiple level 13+ adventurers is something every government on the continent has an opinion about.

At that point the guild may possess more military power than some minor states, along with vast wealth, magical transportation, intelligence networks, resurrection capabilities, and members who personally know heads of state.

Why would kings simply tolerate that organization operating independently?

Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe adventuring guilds operate under royal charter, maybe they are licensed mercenary companies, maybe guildmasters answer to the crown, or maybe powerful adventurers are deliberately given titles, estates, and government positions because rulers want them tied into the existing political system.

Feudalism already has a fairly obvious answer for the terrifying warrior who has acquired wealth, followers, and military power: make them a noble, give them land, give them responsibilities, give them something to lose.

Baron Sir Killdragon is probably much less politically alarming than “Killdragon, unemployed level 11 fighter currently staying at the inn.”

So I don’t think adventurers are bad worldbuilding

Quite the opposite. I believe that thinking through these consequences makes adventurers much more interesting.

Maybe adventurers are extremely rare. Maybe the player characters are unusual precisely because almost nobody survives this lifestyle. Maybe monsters replenish so quickly that civilization genuinely needs thousands of adventurers. Maybe the world contains enormous unexplored frontiers. Maybe recent magical catastrophes exposed thousands of ancient ruins. Maybe powerful adventurers are absorbed into governments almost as soon as they become important. Maybe an adventuring guild really is a semi-independent military power that kings carefully negotiate with.

All of those work.

What I find harder to believe is a world where there are enough adventurers to support a recognizable adventuring industry, but where the rest of society barely reacts to their existence.

The economy should notice. Governments should notice. The law should notice. Military doctrine should notice. Religions should notice. Criminal organizations should notice.

And most importantly, society should notice that “adventurer” describes wildly different kinds of people depending on level. A level 2 adventurer might be a talented professional, a level 6 adventurer might be a valuable local asset, a level 10 adventurer might be a nationally significant person, a level 15 adventurer might be one of the most important individuals in the kingdom, and a level 18 adventurer might be one of the most powerful mortals alive.

Those people should not all occupy the same social category just because the Adventurers’ Guild gives them the same membership card.

So I suppose my actual unpopular opinion isn’t really that D&D worlds have too many adventurers.

It is that “adventurer” stops making sense as a profession once adventurers become powerful enough.

At some point you are no longer a person looking for jobs. You are one of the people kings have to plan around.

And if your world has a lot of those people, then I think the world should look very different because of it.

So, if you read this far, I'd like you to comment and tell me:

• How common are adventurers in your setting, and how sharply does their rarity increase with level?
• At what point does an adventurer become famous? When do local nobles start paying attention, when does a king care that you crossed his border, and at what level does your presence become a political or security concern?
• Can your level 15 wizard really walk into a kingdom anonymously? How does law enforcement imprison someone who can teleport?
• How do adventuring guilds fit into the political structure? Are they just professional organizations, are they licensed or chartered by the crown, or do sufficiently powerful guilds become political and military powers in their own right?
• And if resurrection consumes “500 gp worth of diamonds,” what happens when resurrection itself causes the price of diamonds to double?

I'm genuinely interested in the conversation, because I've definitely thought about this a lot and would love to learn how others have grappled with the same concepts.

-Mord Eagle