When I finally finished writing my Dungeons & Dragons campaign that ran from levels 1-20, I wasn’t sure what to do. I wrote about that phenomenon on this very website. I knew ‘play it’ was the answer, and I am part way through the campaign already, but for the past couple of years as I’ve moved from passive player to active homebrew-heavy DM, I have always been writing.
Making tweaks to existing modules to suit my DM style, to offer flavour, to aid my players. Writing one shots to get to grips with the basics, writing a mid-sized campaign to play through, writing a second mid-sized campaign for ideas that didn’t fit the first one, throwing it out to start work on a full campaign that actually learned from the first one’s mistakes instead of making them again but in a different setting, and so on. When I reached the end of the road, I had a lot of unused character ideas, battle mechanics, and quest ideas that I was tempted to write, but I turned my attention elsewhere in the search of something more technical.
DMs Have To Separate Writing From Playing
I try to forget that I need to play the adventures I write while writing them. I don’t do many voices or even feel particularly skilful at the acting and personality shifts being a DM requires, especially one focussed on world building and characterisation. If I let myself worry about having to play these characters largely unscripted in front of a group of friends, I’d never write them at all.
But it cannot be forgotten entirely. Planting jokes or secrets or twists is only worthwhile when you know someone is going to discover them. Therefore, I could not bring myself to write any of these additional quests or characters down. If they were any good, I’d remember them when I needed them. If not, then they weren’t. So I turned my attention to a new style of writing, and put together some subclasses.
I’d never written something this mechanical before. My campaigns have a lot of homebrew monsters, but they often riff heavily on existing ones (whether from official materials or homebrewed beasts uploaded online) with contextual or thematic changes. Same goes with my magic items, which often borrow from a handful of creators whose Patreons I frequent. I was flying solo on the subclasses.
How Pop Girlie Gladiators Was Born
I decided to start with characters who would embody these subclasses, both because I was more familiar with writing characters and to help ground the archetypes in specific details. These were Seamstress Quick, Brina Sawdust, Saint Rosacea, Livvy Stickristay, and Bobbi Eyebrow. At a certain point in reading that list, the inspiration for these subclasses probably became clear. I decided to name the collection Pop Girlie Gladiators, and went about building subclasses that both found a gap in the existing selection and embodied the works and personalities of the five songstresses features.
For Seamstress Quick (Taylor Swift, if you haven’t figured it out), a druid seemed the most natural. Plenty of druid subclasses draw on nature (Circle of Land maybe most of all), but none in the Folklore/Evermore cottagecore spirit, so Circle of Woodvale was born. It uses a variety of plant-based spells, poetry-inspired features and, in line with Death By A Thousand Cuts, allows for control of a melee weapon in a similar vein to Spiritual Weapon.
Brina Sawdust (Sabrina Carpenter) was the one I decided to make a bard, even though they would all naturally fit. College of Sweetness covered fresh ground for bards, inspiring those around them with kindness and mischief, while using alluring innocence to protect themselves from enemy attacks. Barry Keoghan is apparently immune to these effects.
For Saint Rosacea (Chappell Roan, yes this one is a stretch), I considered paladin after her VMA performance, but fighter seemed to suit her feisty personality. Her Outspoken subclass is based on Intimidation and the Frightened condition, with a specific set of Fear Dice. Paladin instead went to Livvy Stickristay (Olivia Rodrigo), under the Oath of Guts, based around angst, heartbreak, and fire-breathing.
Finally, Bobbi Eyebrow (Billie Eilish, this one’s a gimme) would be a Way of Melancholy monk. A range of emotions can be found in Eilish’s music, but between my favourite song Happier Than Ever and her biggest hit this year Birds of a Feather (whose first verse is about her lover carrying her casket after she is deceased), there is an undeniable melancholy to her work. I’ve always been fascinated by monks, doing a 180 reversal on my views since the official Playtests for the new updated rules and briefly trying it in Baldur’s Gate 3, and so this was the perfect way to test them out.
Building Subclasses Gives You A New Appreciation For Mechanics
In a way, this was the biggest benefit of building these subclasses. Not only was I channelling my remaining appetite for writing Dungeons & Dragons stuff into something productive, I was looking at the game from a new angle. Having settled into DMing, it has been a long while since I actually made a character. I run a DMPC by combat necessity in my smaller group, but have been phasing that out as I prefer to just run the enemies, and a DMPC is an inherent metagamer.
For that character, I opted for a backseat paladin who would use all their spell slots to heal the team and deal basic attacks in combat. The last few characters I have made in D&D have been similarly perfunctory – complements to the people actually playing the game while balancing the scales. I prefer running the game to playing, so I don’t miss it, but that means that the last time I actually made a character for myself was years ago when I had a much more limited idea of what each subclass would do.
Building these subclasses forced me to go deeper into the mechanics of each class to find a suitable and thematic gap, and then fill that gap with subclasses that avoided being over- or underpowered while still being unique. If you’re interested in seeing whether I succeeded, you can download Pop Girlie Gladiators for free here, which also includes character profiles and stat blocks for the five characters, and ten unique magic items.
