Hey there adventurers! I love the recent addition of the warforged race and their additional lore provided in Eberron: Rising From The Last War, and since D&D Beyond provides me with a terrifying amount of freedom I thought the best way to show my appreciation for this carefully balanced player race is to add my own tweaks.
However, as the title of this piece suggests, you should hate all of my ideas. This is because I wrote them all under the following conditions:
- I had not slept in 9 days.
- The only food or drink I consumed in the last 9 days was cranberry-flavored Emergen-C sprinkled on leftover Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.
- I was listening to the Diablo III soundtrack backwards on a loop.
- According to my doctor I had an "amoeba whose large size is of historic scientific note" in my cranial cavity.
- The amoeba insisted on creative control of the final draft.
Therefore I am required by the content team to use the above headline, implying I am about to instill hatred in my own ideas. Whether you agree with them or an amoeba-enhanced individual is entirely up to you.
Skin Material
Previously, the armor-like warforged were made from stone, steel, and wood. This now includes deep-fried chicken. Some alchemists got sucked into that whole chicken sandwich war, and the final result was sentient chicken sandwiches.
We know what you're thinking: this isn't funny, it's just strange. And maybe you don't even like chicken that much. Well too bad, it's very lucrative in corporate America right now to even write the phrase "chicken sandwich" on your website so that it will show up in a billion Google search results. So warforged are just part chicken now, and if by sheer coincidence any megacorporations would like to use this for cross-promotional purposes please get in touch with us.
Players may choose between crispy, buffalo, herbs and spices, and original recipe warforged.
Vegan players may choose between soy, almond, oat, or cashew based armor.
Additional Quirks
We thought you could use some more 1d8 quirks to choose from at character creation, so feel free to choose from the following.
d8 | Quirk |
---|---|
1 | You think you are missing an internal gear and compulsively eat pocket watches in the hopes of it resolving your deficiency. |
2 | You think every time someone says "Damn!" they are calling for someone named Dan. |
3 | You start beatboxing uncontrollably every time you hear a sick rhyme. |
4 | You think fedoras actually look good on you. |
5 | You think goblins taste like cilantro. |
6 | You whisper "resistance is futile" while hugging people, which you do as often as possible. |
7 | You were designed to mimic humanoid facial expressions, but like real-world robots designed for it, you are utterly terrifying and people use animated images of your weird mechanical face as magical meme fodder. |
8 | You collect and keep doves in your pockets and release them after your friends speak in order to drive home their points. |
More Warforged Names
Still can't name your own warforged? Yeesh. Okay. Here you go.
More Warforged Names: Anchor, Bookend, Creep, Doorstop, Epipen, Fedora, Glow-up, Hotplate, Inkjet, Jujubee, Krusty, Luxembourg, Marzipan, Niacin, Onomatopoeia, Pzzzzzrpt, Quilt, Rectangle, Softshoe, Textile, Uvula, V-neck, Wingding, Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Yoshinoya, Zankou.
You Can Replace One Of Your Hands With What Is Basically Just A Chainsaw
To be used for trees and deadites zombies.
All Warforged Can Turn Into A Vehicle At Will
Players can choose between morphing into a war machine, a covered wagon, a keelboat, or a boombox.
Transforming takes the character's action, makes an "ee-aw-oo-ee" sound, and now the creature is a vehicle that other people can ride around in with the same AC and movement of that vehicle.
If players choose keelboats, they must roll a DC 20 Wisdom saving throw once per day, timing at the discretion of the dungeon master, and on a failed save they involuntarily turn into a boat while on land. This is because it's funny to see a useless boat in the middle of an inn or a battlefield.
Also the warforged's face is still visible in a really awkward way, because let's be honest, it's too hard to hide that part and robot-y faces are cool to look at.
Additional Languages
You can now speak to inanimate objects. This should solve most puzzles, as you can now speak to their actual stone and steel parts to ask for the answers. Whew, finally, no more of those annoying puzzles!
Dan Telfer is the Dungeons Humorist aka Comedy Archmage for D&D Beyond (a fun way they are letting him say "writer"), dungeon master for the Nerd Poker podcast, a stand-up comedian, a TV writer who also helped win some Emmys over at Comedy Central, and a former editor of MAD Magazine and The Onion. He can be found riding his bike around Los Angeles from gig to gig to gaming store, though the best way to find out what he's up to is to follow him on Twitter via @dantelfer.
Spell: only fried chicken warforged can cast this: level 9 transmutation: you sacrifice yourself to turn everything whithin 5 square miles into fried chicken
This was middling coffee room humour. Had my friends said this in a DnD chat, we'd be cackling, but that's cause we always think our own friends are hilarious. From someone we don't know on a large website, it's eh. Good luck with your comedy career in the future though.
Parts is parts...
To be honest, I love the Transformer idea. XD
I would really prefer a serious article about better ways to improve warforged and leave this kind of stuff for Reddit or Twitter. Thanks.
(Sorry Dan)
Everyone agrees with that.
yes
It’s still several months until April 1st.
Dan i’m actually gonna make a buffalo chicken warforged that eats pocket watches.
I know right? I read this 'cause I have a warforged character and I thought there might be actually cohesive and usable content here. It should on the title something like 'THIS IS A JOKE ARTICLE AND IS NOT USEFUL AT ALL" no offense, Dan. It's just... who's going to approve those rules in a D&D game?
FWIW, Dan's articles are some of the things I most enjoy reading on here.
If you don't like them, don't read them. You have lost nothing.
agree
MephistophelesBard read the title of this article: new rules for warforged everyone should hate
some interesting gems in here
Here's a likely unpopular opinion:
If you don't like the article, it's probably not meant for you.
What I'm seeing here is a lot of "I don't want to see content that isn't meant for me" types of feed back and, at the end of the day, you clicked on the link my people. In other words, no one is making you read or use this content.
Let people like what they like.
[/discourse]
Just because I'm curious, here's a poll...do you like Dan's joke articles?
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/53469-the-dan-telfer-poll
My warforged just got retconned into chicken nuggets
I hope you're happy with yourself
My two-cent perspective: D&D is a big tent, with room for some silliness among all the other things various people enjoy about it. I submit the following quote directly from official WotC content:
“On the opposite side of the room ... is a life-size stone statue of a nude Halaster wearing a cowboy hat and riding a donkey.”
I hope your party likes mince meat.
I really don't understand why Telfer's articles get any status on this site. They're unfunny, often mean-spirited and cruel, and generally not even bargain-bin meme fodder. I find them boring and cliche-filled at best, actively clogging up the front page and baffling to new players I send to this site at worst. If we must have these "joke" articles, give them a sub-page that people can go to if they want, rather than making D&D Beyond look like a joke.
to all the participants in the ongoing debate/snipe war over whether or not these articles should be published:
maybe an article structure like this would look good?
2 articles/week: Dan Telfer
2 articles/week: James Haeck
1 article/week: other authors
whenever available: d&d Beyond Heroes
Also, on a totally unrelated note, the Party Time! wizard seems to have vanished.