And here we are at the tail end of another Ocular October – HAPPY HALLOWEEN everyone!

This the final entry of this year’s deep dive into the mad machinations of the Mistress of Mirrors, and it’s focused on “expansions” to the previous content – more ideas for challenges, monsters, traps, and especially LOOT for your party’s hard-earned victories in the realm of these dark Archfey.

The first section covers a number of alternate monsters to use from official sources, with some ideas on how to use them. The second goes into potential blessings and curses that could be applied when our heroes do something big – solve a dastardly puzzle, defeat a powerful guardian, smash a whole room’s worth of mirrors – anything that might make the Palace of Reflection sit up and take notice, for good or ill. The Lady of Mirrors may still control her realm, but the magic of mirrors can take on almost a life of its own sometimes…

The third section covers interesting treasure for the players to find in this realm of mirrors, both mundane and magical, including two unique homebrew items of my own: “Reflection”, Lord Mirror’s personal golden blade, and “Juxt Fruit”, an especially odd offering from the Lady’s Reflected Garden. The former activates off bright and low light for whoever wields it, and can be best utilized when the PCs manipulate local illumination to match what they need. The latter is a consumable that causes a massive and bizarre change in whoever eats it – you become a kind of “splicing” of yourself with an alternate reflection of yourself , representing a different path the PC could’ve taken in their adventuring journey. While this might almost seem like a Cursed item at first (and it certainly can be depending on your stats), it can also be extremely useful, especially if you find yourself otherwise low on resources, like turning the party Barbarian into a partial-Cleric for a while. Is it balanced? Not very intensely, but its nature as a consumable means that if anything truly busted happens, at least it’s not permanent!

And that’s it for this year! I hope anyone and everyone reading this enjoys my spooky-and-silly scribing this season. And if you use any of what this blog contains in your own D&D campaigns, do let me know, I love to hear about it! Stay tuned for next time!