I’m putting giant snails into my homebrew world now. It’s a skypunk setting so I just have to decide if the snails are native to a specific cloud enshrouded plateau, a flying nuisance species of blimp-mollusks, or an invasive species that shows up everywhere. Maybe all of the above.

The biggest thing that irritates me from this is the implication that anybody is arguing for “historical accuracy” to medieval Europe in a setting that has dragons and goblins that shoot lightning from their fingertips. If, for whatever weird reason, the DM doesn’t want potatoes to exist that’s okay, but you’re not waiting for the Columbian exchange to bring them over from the Americas because the Americas don’t exist here. If you have a player character that’s a shape shifting sentient blob who casts illusions and is on a quest to seduce every milliner they can find then a plain tasting sausage made from fine ground questionable cuts of meat shouldn’t be seen as a stretch.

Additionally, as someone who majored in History in college, I can assure you that most people insisting on “historical accuracy” on any one or two things they learned from a tweet or a tiktok about are almost definitely getting fifteen other things wrong in any given session.

My ruling would be that the vampire does not appear in the mirror but the illusions do. If someone got creative I would also rule that if you aim your attacks based on looking at a reflection you would be attacking a single target with full concealment (normal attack roll with disadvantage) and not rolling to see if you hit an illusion because you’re aiming specifically at where they aren’t.

The biggest problem with homebrew is that most of it is unbalanced crap made up by people who think rule of cool is an appropriate substitute for learning why those numbers in that book they barely skimmed are arranged the way they are. Yes, there’s some good stuff out there but like the internet in general Sturgeon’s Law is usually a generous assessment.

A great example was in a game I briefly played the DM allowed a homebrew class with seven different class features, most of which could be used in the same turn combined to great effect, at first level. Why? Because the DM didn’t know half the rules to the basic system, the class came from a pretty website that was designed to look like an official source book, and the abilities sounded really cool. Nevermind that it made one PC more powerful than the other four party members combined.

Take homebrew with a large grain of salt or everybody will end up very salty.

Not at all, Konsi. Your skin is a very healthy shade of green.

As a tall person I can confirm that using a short girlfriend’s head as an elbow rest is a gesture of affection. I also do this with platonic friends, to mixed results. My favorite recollection is walking up to a college friend on campus who was talking to someone else, she introduced me and I did the armrest thing while joining the conversation. After a minute the other person said “Um, are you gonna…” And my friend said “Nah, he’ll get bored with it eventually and I’m used to it. I have a lot of tall friends.”