Twist the Environment - Scapeshift in 'Dungeons and Dragons'

For Game Masters, inspiration is a key thing, that can sometimes be hard to find. When creating a new feature for your players to use. Finding hooks for their next quest can come from the next logical step, or just something inspired by something you watched or read. When making something new for your players to use, brewing something from the ground up can be a challenge.

Brewing is something I highly encourage all Game Masters to do. Even if you mostly run adventure modules. You get a better understanding of the rules and where they can be twisted to is you make your own stuff of varying power levels. To that end, I looked at one of my favourite things, Magic the Gathering and thought about how one of the most iconic spells in multiple ways of playing could be made in our favourite tabletop roleplaying game.

This is the second time I've done this. Check out the burning necromantic special here.

Shift the Landscape

Scapeshift has been a staple in weird land combo decks for as long as I can remember. The strange Morningtide Rare was reprinted into Standard a few years ago, doing precisely nothing except bringing the price down. Sacrificing land for another effect can be pretty powerful, and that's where it's seen most of its uses. But we're not talking about Magic right now.

Twisting an ocean into a forest - ‘scapeshift‘ by Daniel Ljunggren

The effect of turning any number of your lands into different lands is powerful and quite interesting to visualise. An immensely powerful transmutation could turn the landscape the players are on into something else very easily.

Ultimately when designing a new power, item, or spell, a brewing Game Master needs to think about where it can be useful. There may be advantages to turning a river arid and dry, or making a mountainous area flat to gain visibility over a battlefield. Warping the world so heavily that everything becomes an entirely different landscape will affect the land itself, as well as the weather.

The scapeshift spell generated with homebrewery

One key difference between this spell in Magic the Gathering and what I'm imagining the Dungeons and Dragons equivalent will be is a subject of its permanence. The lands are there forever in Magic. My first thought for the D&D version is that the change is temporary. I much prefer the modal version of consequences, like Plant Growth. It's a powerful spell that can lead to many strange things happening.

Greater than Turning Leaves

This has been a fun experiment that I can see certain spellcasters I GM for. It can leave some interesting interactions and powerful stories for your high level nature mages.

Now we want to hear from you. Would you allow a spell like this into your games? What other sources of inspiration when building new materials for your games? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out themselves. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.