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This was somebody's Introductory Wizardry 201 project, and what's behind the lock are just some current periodicals. Of an age before when the world was rich in magic, untouched for millennia. Careful reading will give a very light treatment of several cities which are forgotten tombs of wonders in the modern age, potentially including one modern city which has forgotten it is a forgotten tomb of wonders. If you want something to fight, all the old advertising cantrips haven't had a buyer in eons, are almost certainly mad, and probably don't speak a modern language, so prepare to get scalded by body wash glamers, poisoned by rotten cologne, and receive free sample sandwiches from a portal which now connects to the heart of a glacier.
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Oct 8, 2018 22:32
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Or they speak Common perfectly well, but they haven't had an advertising subject in thousands of years and now that some have finally arrived they aren't willing to let them go and leave them on their own again with nobody to tell about the refreshing taste of SplendorMax spiced fruit punch.
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Oct 8, 2018 23:52
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A rival cleric cursed to be a cat. They've been trapped in that room for centuries.
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Oct 9, 2018 03:06
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Have they run into any dwarves yet? Because a library filled with earth/mountain symbology certainly sounds like the dwarven equivalent to one of those end of the world seed banks. Especially when you consider that in earth style worlds an archipelago is just a big mountain not entirely covered up by water. So what do dwarves consider valuable enough to store at the top of the highest peak in preparation for armageddon? Plump helmet seeds and masterwork artifacts? A map of their entire underground kingdom, complete with all of their greatest secrets? A Magic pool of pure life with awakened attendants to help cure survivors? Also why did they make a lock that requires a diverse set of elemental affinities? Was the apocalypse in spite of some grand coalition? Did this whole mountain get planeshifted over from someplace else and only the library is now obvious? Is there a big old civilization of dwarves drowned under the mountain? Or even... undrowned!
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Oct 9, 2018 03:17
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Inkspot posted:A rival cleric cursed to be a cat. They've been trapped in that room for centuries. 
Azhais fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Oct 9, 2018 |
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Oct 9, 2018 04:09
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In the 5E game I'm running, I decided to shamelessly steal the idea a DM used in either this thread or the 5E one: trick the party with a night hag-induced collective nightmare. However, instead of a big melee in a dark town like the original poster described, I'm going for more of a haunted mansion vibe. Instead of monsters, they are going to be bombarded with supernatural traps (playing with the idea that they can't detect them, yet, but if they ever physically enter its demiplane, they will get the device for detection). Its intended to be incredibly Illbleed. The place is even named as an anagram for Illbleed. What I'm looking for is suggestions both in how I can add to the atmosphere of it and suggestions for specific traps. Does the idea I'm playing with work in this secretly stakeless scenario? I wouldn't normally just hit them with things they couldn't have taken measures against but I'm new enough still that they wouldn't know to question it.
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Oct 9, 2018 18:52
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Alright, I also have a GM-type world building question. One player is a wizard that's "coded" Irish, for lack of a better word. His name is R.E. O'Speedwagon (pronounced Ari for short). I need similar Irish sounding musician/ band name puns for when we get back to his homeland. I have old man McJagger as one crafted already, but I need help with continuing this stupid dumb joke. Help me, goons!
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Oct 9, 2018 18:53
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Chieves posted:Alright, I also have a GM-type world building question. If you just keep looking at character names for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure you should absolutely find a few.
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Oct 9, 2018 19:19
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Someone should be dropkicked by a man who then introduces himself as Murphy.
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Oct 9, 2018 19:24
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Keeshhound posted:Someone should be dropkicked by a man who then introduces himself as Murphy. Well poo poo, none of us are going to beat this idea. Have a bar staffed by a chained zombie who's been trained to offer people cranberry drinks.
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Oct 9, 2018 19:27
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Send them on a quest to find a man on a silver mountain
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Oct 9, 2018 19:30
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Chieves posted:Alright, I also have a GM-type world building question.
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Oct 9, 2018 19:41
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Milligan, an antipaladin whose signature armour is covered in spikes. He fell for a number of reasons, but primarily because he referred to the Prince as a "grovelling bastard".
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Oct 9, 2018 20:30
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A skeleton themed Necromancer named Bone-o.
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Oct 9, 2018 20:40
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Have a couple of guys named Charlie and Craig show up and loudly proclaim that they have walked 500 miles, and then walked 500 more. Yeah, yeah, I know it's Scottish not Irish, but still.
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Oct 9, 2018 20:42
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cptn_dr posted:A skeleton themed Necromancer named Bone-o. He's always drunk and sees double, when he talks to people he addresses them as a pair. Also, he repeats himself, like there's an echo.
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Oct 9, 2018 21:15
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cptn_dr posted:A skeleton themed Necromancer named Bone-o. 
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Oct 9, 2018 22:54
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An NPC named Shane who's the greatest poet in the world but you'll never know because he's also the ugliest, drunkest person with the worst teeth you've ever seen and absolutely unintelligible when he speaks.
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Oct 9, 2018 22:58
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A bald headed woman bard from the wizard's past who tears a photo of the wizard in half in front of the group after a she performs in a tavern they are in.
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Oct 9, 2018 23:46
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Thanks for the advice guys. I spoke with the player who kept rolling ones and she is totally cool with it still happening. We had a frank discussion where I explained that I didn't want her, or the party, to feel like they were being punished for rolling badly. She assured me that they all thought it was great fun and if things went perfectly all the time it would be boring. I also encouraged her to get involved with describing what happens on a failure rather than me, and she said she was going to think about it. All of my players are very new to roleplaying, and I was planning on encouraging them to add more description of what was happening in the next session, so that should help. Finally, to address the comments about excessive rolling - I actually only made her roll one stealth check against the distracted thugs passive perception, I just added the 'kept rolling well' part to my story because I didn't want to be called out for doing it that way! I should have just left it. For clarity there were two rolls. One for stealth at the start of the encounter when she said she wanted to hide when they first noticed the thugs, and one for trying to disarm them from behind. Cheers!
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Oct 9, 2018 23:50
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Sounds like you are all good 
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Oct 10, 2018 00:17
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Finally wrote up the monster cooking/eating rules. Thoughts?quote:Monsters must be consumed within 3 days of killing, or the meat will go bad. Monster meat must be cooked over a short or long rest.
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Oct 10, 2018 03:13
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Yeah! Also I am 100% about monster eating rules. I like the small flavorful bonuses.
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Oct 10, 2018 04:30
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Ysengrin posted:flavorful bonuses. 
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Oct 10, 2018 05:19
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I am starting a pathfinder game after not playing for several years. I have been a GM before and would like to get better. I think I might use tabletopaudio to create ambience and I am looking at several different sound board apps. I also want to use campaign coins and I found some good printer paper that looks like parchment to print out clues, etc. Are there any other good accessories or resources I could be using aside from those in the OP? Also, I have a real enthusiastic player who has created a detailed back story. I would like to give some small reward to encourage the effort and inspire the other players. What would be appropriate at first level? I was thinking a small +2 skill bonus? Or maybe a chance to re roll a die once per session?
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Oct 10, 2018 14:42
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Fishmonger named Molly Malone? Town drunk named Johnny Jump-Up, though that’s kinda bigoted actually.
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Oct 10, 2018 14:43
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Collective nightmares a fun roleplay idea, though mine was more taking ideas from Lovecraft's Dreamlands, plus some Fey who are quite at home in them.
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Oct 10, 2018 15:11
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Imagined posted:An NPC named Shane who's the greatest poet in the world but you'll never know because he's also the ugliest, drunkest person with the worst teeth you've ever seen and absolutely unintelligible when he speaks. However, when he duets with a tavern wench named Molly they somehow produce an incredible, wistful, heartfelt song. They do this only on the campaign world's equivalent of Christmas. ("Fairytale of New York" is the best Xmas song don't @ me)
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Oct 10, 2018 15:12
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Pollyanna posted:Fishmonger named Molly Malone? Similarly, rather than "this NPC is Shane MacGowan", there's the infamous drunkard poet Pogue Mahone, who's also the local head cleric of an appropriate deity, and surprisingly good at it. Why, one day he could be Pope. And speaking of clerics... you know what just look at the username. Those GP were just resting in the account. These cows had Reduce Animal cast on them, but the ones over there are far away. You get the idea. Spider baby, except it's real and a drider. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Oct 10, 2018 |
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Oct 10, 2018 15:18
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Drider baby adopted by adventures sounds like a great PC idea. Lolth is definitely that crazy.
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Oct 10, 2018 17:02
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space pope posted:Also, I have a real enthusiastic player who has created a detailed back story. I would like to give some small reward to encourage the effort and inspire the other players. What would be appropriate at first level? I was thinking a small +2 skill bonus? Or maybe a chance to re roll a die once per session? I find the best way to reward players for creating an cool backstory is to say "Wow, that's an amazingly detailed and cool backstory that you created! Hey, everybody, get a load of this amazingly detailed and cool backstory!" and then have bits of the backstory show up in the game.
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Oct 10, 2018 17:11
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Whybird posted:I find the best way to reward players for creating an cool backstory is to say "Wow, that's an amazingly detailed and cool backstory that you created! Hey, everybody, get a load of this amazingly detailed and cool backstory!" and then have bits of the backstory show up in the game. I was definitely going to do that too!
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Oct 10, 2018 17:28
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space pope posted:I was definitely going to do that too! I guess my point is, attaching a numerical benefit to an OC action kinda devalues it. It'd be like if a friend invited you over and cooked a delicious meal for you -- you could show your appreciation by saying how good it was, or offering to cook him dinner in return, but it'd be kinda weird if you pulled your wallet out and gave him twenty bucks.
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Oct 10, 2018 17:50
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Being involved in all the plot hooks and getting to drive the story is as much, if not in fact more, of a reward as a +2 in terms of getting everyone else to notice it and think, you know, maybe I should expand my backstory a bit. Obviously don't completely neglect everyone who hasn't made a super deep backstory. Maybe that player gets some extra sidequests or something. Or to be more precise: the party gets some extra sidequests that are hooked on that player's backstory details, but the rewards are for everyone.
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Oct 10, 2018 18:00
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space pope posted:I am starting a pathfinder game after not playing for several years. I have been a GM before and would like to get better. I think I might use tabletopaudio to create ambience and I am looking at several different sound board apps. I also want to use campaign coins and I found some good printer paper that looks like parchment to print out clues, etc. Are there any other good accessories or resources I could be using aside from those in the OP? This and some of the responses have gotten me thinking: does anyone else here use inspiration points? They're just free re-rolls, no strings attached. I'm in a group that's been doing a house rule of 1 per session, plus whatever extra ones you may get over time for doing neat things or just contributing something really fun. Even if it's just "you made us all laugh with a great in-character response, here's a point." I've been using it with a group I'm DMing for, A) to partially combat nights of sheer bad luck and terrible rolls, and B) to reward players for getting more in-character naturally and being more creative. Like some players that are maybe more used to video games may not be as used to describing how they attack, or getting invested in naming things or talking to NPCs. One of my players recently decided to name her drone (we're playing StarFinder for a bit) and came up with a list of names I genuinely really enjoyed, so I gave her an inspiration point. Does this seem maybe too liberal with free re-rolls? I've been trying it as a means of encouraging creative detail, and in space pope's case I would have probably given that player an inspiration point for coming out of the gate with the extra effort, but at the same time I wouldn't wanna penalize someone for not going out of their way to do that if, perhaps, they specifically wanted to have a character organically develop or something. What do you all think?
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Oct 11, 2018 17:19
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OK, so I introduced some hints of a thing that I only meant to foreshadow something to come much later in the campaign. My players were heading back to town and are generally cautious, I didn't expect them to go, "Ooh what's that??!" and immediately drop everything they were doing to investigate the foreshadowing right that second. They're not really ready for it, even! This isn't what happened, but imagine I have a party of level 3-4 players, and for foreshadowing and flavor I describe how a huge dragon sweeps across the sky above them while they're traveling somewhere else, and they watch as it heads miles to the east toward a mountain peak. Imagine my players then dropped everything and went trying to find that dragon right that second. So what do now? Do I reconfigure everything I was planning massively, or do I railroad them back on track?
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Oct 12, 2018 00:37
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Is going and checking out a place with a dragon really going to derail your plans massively? If so, I might call that over-planning unless you have a tight timetable that's already in motion or something.
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Oct 12, 2018 00:46
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Lol you got squirrelled. You roll with it, and work the rest of the stuff in as best you can, it's a dragon hunt now.
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Oct 12, 2018 00:53
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Roll with it and don't pull punches. They're on a dragon hunt now but they're also level 3-4 characters on a dragon hunt and thats an undertaking that should quickly get them in over their heads.Ghost Stromboli posted:This and some of the responses have gotten me thinking: does anyone else here use inspiration points? They're just free re-rolls, no strings attached. I'm in a group that's been doing a house rule of 1 per session, plus whatever extra ones you may get over time for doing neat things or just contributing something really fun. Even if it's just "you made us all laugh with a great in-character response, here's a point." I feel like only you can answer that. Are the free re-rolls removing the tension from rolling for an action? If they are you're being too liberal. If not, you're fine.
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Oct 12, 2018 01:34
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Imagined posted:So what do now? Do I reconfigure everything I was planning massively, or do I railroad them back on track? No, you do the opposite: take everything you HAD planned to go elsewhere, and move it into their path.
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Oct 12, 2018 01:35
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