Behind the scenes: Designing Manse Magnificent

Architect! Your friendly Hosts here at Moon Birch Games have worked for two years creating the Dungeons & Dragons 5E-compatible roleplaying sourcebook Manse Magnificent. Launching on Kickstarter in early 2025, our book will give you rules for constructing a lavish magical home base you can carry in a knapsack. This supplement lets your character craft, research, train, meditate, garden, carouse, perform, and more during downtime. All this, and (take note, DMs!) it won’t break your campaign.

We bring the benefits of the 7th-level magnificent mansion spell to low-level characters in the form of the Cornerstone. This wondrous item lets level-4 characters Construct a cozy hearth, a safe sanctuary. As you rise in level, your Cornerstone also rises in power, and your hearth grows ever more luxurious. You can choose from many colorful room types, a dedicated staff, magical amenities, and even customizable landscapes and vistas. It’s not just a simple shelter – the hearth also provides food, safety, companionship, community, interplanar rumors, business opportunities, self-improvement, entertainment – maybe even self-revelation. Mechanical game amenities and roleplaying opportunities – they all wait in your magnificent home.

The whole project started with one question:

Why, exactly, can’t the ceilings be higher?

In D&D Fifth Edition the 7th-level magnificent mansion spell sets the mansion’s volume equal to fifty 10×10-foot cubes, configured as the caster wishes. Stack all fifty cubes straight up, and you’d get a 10×10 room with a 500-foot ceiling, great for juggling practice or a really skinny missile silo. But ask yourself: Why does the spell make you stack? How does it break the game to give your whole mansion high ceilings automatically?

After those questions, you might have follow-ups: Why the four-level gap between the 3rd-level spell tiny hut and this 7th-level mansion? Why is its portal size fixed? Why shouldn’t the player characters eat well at lower levels too? And once you say “let them eat,” you have new thoughts: What if it were also easy for low-level PCs to [find a teacher / hear rumors / research an adversary ]? By then you’ve already started outlining Manse Magnificent.

Evolving

The Manse Cornerstone honors a venerable but underpopulated category of magical items that rise in power with the user. In tabletop RPGs the idea goes back at least to FASA’s Earthdawn (1993), where your Thread Item rose in Rank as you discovered its history. D&D 3.x showed off Legendary Weapons in Unearthed Arcana (2004) and especially in the 3.5 supplement Weapons of Legacy (2005). The 4E supplement Adventurer’s Vault (2008) floated the idea of “level scaling” and “empowering events.” Fifth Edition has several third-party takes on the idea.

Items in Weapons of Legacy gained new powers every 2-3 levels. You paid lots of gold, performed Legacy Rituals to unlock a Least, Lesser, and Greater Legacy, and paid a (brrr) personal cost. (The Lesser Ritual for the orc warlord’s spear Guurgal: “Spend 24 hours in veneration of Gruumsh, praying, chanting, and offering sacrifices. At the end of this observance, you must put out your left eye with Guurgal.”) Each Legacy weapon’s ferocious price balanced, or tried to balance, its kickass combat powers.

Our Cornerstone mostly dodges those balance issues by optimizing, not for combat, but for your satisfaction as a player. When nothing can leave the astral hearth, you won’t break the game by enjoying a gourmet menu and a valet. Our 1-1-1 Rule puts a hard ceiling on rules abuses. And because the Cornerstone has no innate combat or spellcasting abilities, it won’t overshadow the PCs’ cool magic weapons.

Cozy

The hearth isn’t a wizardly “place of power”; it’s a place of peace. Technically the PCs don’t control the hearth, not the way they command (say) a Wand of Fireballs. They’re guests. Properly played, the hearth conjures for its guests a convivial hospitality, and they never need worry about rent or eviction. Really!

Manse Magnificent avoids defining prior Cornerstone owners who might hound the party and steal back their treasure. That’s a natural hook, but it’s not the fantasy. To decorate your private suite, to declare that everyone in the laundry room blows bubbles while they talk, to visit the talking badgers in the forest and furnish their oak-tree burrow — that is the fantasy: the cozy tinkertoy fantasy of the electric-train layout, the doll tea party, or the three-bedroom ranch house in The Sims. Optimize for player satisfaction.

In the hearth, each player is master of a (sub)domain. As long as they stay broadly within the specified luxury level, they could place the hearth underwater and make the Host a talking dolphin. Why not? A creative hearth, like the mansion spell itself, entertains all the players and can help reveal character. In Episode 111 of Critical Role’s Campaign Two, “New Homes and Old Friends” (24 September 2020), Liam O’Brien’s character Caleb Widogast gave the Mighty Nein group an hour-long tour of his magnificent mansion, Widogast’s Nascent Nein-Sided Tower. With rooms inspired by Caleb’s troubled history, the tower represented the wizard’s mind and feelings.

Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Wanderhome, Ryuutama, Tiny Taverns, a dozen more – nowadays “cozy” is a well-appointed subgenre of roleplaying. On his Rise Up Comus blog in January 2022 Josh McCrowell, whose excellent new-school megadungeon His Majesty the Worm incorporates cozy elements, wrote about the cozy experience. Josh believes people who actively pursue cozy games are seeking bleed – the condition “when a player’s feelings are influenced by those of their character (or vice versa). […] Cozy games give players space to deal with emotional and social maintenance and growth. Players don’t need to worry about the high-stress, immediate trials of mere survival and can instead put their attention towards the delicate work of becoming a better person. It is impossible to have a quiet conversation on a difficult subject while being attacked by a bear.”

Safe

To pass a semi-enlightening hour or two, check the arguments online about whether tiny hut protects against dragon breath. After decades, a consensus has emerged (dragon breath BLOCKED!), though you may want to discuss that with your players.

In embracing this ruling, we establish the hearth as a safe space, and moreso in the astral demiplane. Sure, at level 12, the residents may grapple with “incursions,” but even these alien interlopers are mostly benign. They’re just meeting their new neighbors in the Astral plane.

Expanding?

“Why no portals?” Right from the first draft, Manse had rules for cross-dimensional doorways that permit instant travel from the hearth to destinations across the campaign world and throughout the multiverse. Doctor Strange! The Sanctum Sanctorum! Of course the manse would have portals.

But wow, do portals blow up your campaign like a not-so-skinny missile silo. The level-13 manse can hold just a hundred people, but that’s at one time. The Architect could open a back-room portal, then march an army through the living room, 99 troops a minute hut-hut-hut, straight to the enemy kingdom. Even limiting capacity to 100 a day, you could place a few elite strike teams where they’re not wanted.

This is a solvable problem – we had ideas – but ultimately Manse offers comfort and fun downtime, not disruption. Optimize for player satisfaction, but don’t blow up the campaign.

Still: Some campaigns exist to be blown up, you know? Beyond level 13 (let’s imagine), the Cornerstone expands its awareness to locate and shelter like-minded beings from a thousand places. A new lamppost apparates on the grounds, and sometimes strange people appear under it. They have a problem the PCs can help with, if they just pop back through this handy new portal.

And (let’s further imagine) the high-level hearth can become a campaign setting itself:

• At high levels the demiplane gains seas, and the PCs can sail them on fantastically lavish clipper ships.
• The growing demiplane starts to bump into physical border realms. The PCs visit those realms to resolve problems.
• As their hearth rises in luxury, the heroes accrue status with astral entities, who manifest for a visit. If the PCs entertain them properly, these entities confer favors and make requests.

Like the mansion itself, the term “magnificent” has a lot of ceiling room. There may yet be a new portal ahead.

Supportive!

With the book already written and in editing, we’re planning to launch a Kickstarter in early 2025. But it can only manifest in the Material Plane with your support. If you love this idea, please consider doing us a solid:

1. Subscribe to our mailing list and social media. Links below.
2. Spread the word to other players. It helps!
3. Soon we’ll call for playtesters. Talk to your gaming group now to see if they’d be interested.
4. Back our Kickstarter when the time comes — we’ll announce the launch here and in our newsletter.