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The Wizard’s pearl idea is great! Definitely stealing that.Night10194 posted:I was okay with it because it was a one-shot and them getting 40 crowns for it from a grateful town that acknowledged it could never be enough but it was all they had fit WHFRP to a T. Yeah it works better for WHF because advancement isn’t directly tied to gold, and a crown is worth something like 20 silver (a gold piece in WH is more equivalent to a platinum piece in most D&D based games, though some OSR stuff works by a silver standard). For most D&D-alikes, 40 gold is barely pocket change. That’s a really low risk/reward ratio for a dungeon where most encounters are dangerous and attack on sight. (Even more when you factor in the Abyss). Gatto Grigio fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Jul 18, 2020 |
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Jul 18, 2020 15:49
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Yeah, it helps when 1 gold is 'enough to cover living in relative comfort for a month'. E: I've really never understood the value of 'EXP is tied to GP'. I get that it was for adventures where the goal was to get treasure out, not to just fight stuff, but a lot of adventures even in that milieu nowadays aren't about getting treasure. So why not tie EXP to achievements or successful missions or something? Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jul 18, 2020 |
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Jul 18, 2020 16:00
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Into The Odd bases advancement directly on number of successful expeditions and KNAVE bases it on the risk of the accomplishment. It feels like everyone recognizes that "XP = GP" is just "the reward is XP" with extra steps, but escaping with a pile of loot is part of the appeal.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:18
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Yeah I can see how gold = xp works from a gaming perspective (as in, like actual gaming or gambling) if you assume that the success of the mission is rated based on how much gold you acquired because PCs will be more likely to take risks if they get character advancement out of it.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:24
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It works really well if you're running a sandbox and want a default motivation for the players. In any campaign you're going to find motivations beyond just money or XP for characters pretty quickly, but in this style of play it's the players and not the GM who get to come up with those, and the XP=GP is great for giving the players motivation and an impulse to do something interesting (explore) as a default action until that starts to come together. It also doesn't hurt that GP is probably going to be useful for most bigger motivations the PCs come up with. I don't think it works well at all in systems 3e+, where the game is basically just an excuse to get into fun fights, but OSR stuff is very much about fights being undesirable (if often unavoidable). That's why spells that just bullshit out of encounters make sense in games like CG--if you can cast it once per day, then that's one encounter per day you basically just get to fast-forward, which lets you get to more exploring (the real reason you're there). This is why you have things like Into the Odd stating that it's goal is to make combat almost never last more than 3 (extremely quick to resolve) rounds--combat is meant to be a scary consequence, and the fun of it is more about figuring out how to stack the deck in your favor. One way that OSR stuff has gotten a bit unwieldy, though, is that since there's such a huge emphasis on OSR content being system-neutral, it becomes really hard to pace out treasure. Maybe a 1000gp golden tiara is half a level in one system, but not much at all in another, and totally irreverent in another. I've seen a lot of OSR modules (like A Wizard or Hot Spring Island) just sidestep it by basically ignoring treasure altogether. . .I think you're probably just supposed to skim the module before you run it and make small modifications wherever relevant to make it work for the precise system you're using (like the Wizardling pearl idea). This sort of works, but is pretty annoying and feels like one of the biggest weaknesses of this model for sure.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:47
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 5: STONE That's Stone. And the lettering is something called Sillian Rail In this post, we’ll cover Stone, our third themed area. Castle Gargantua, Page 39 posted:The Stone environments are like a dwarven city or a giant's fortress with vast halls and stern statues of weird, long-forgotten kings with too many eyes. Furniture, when it exists, is cut directly into the stone of the walls, the flagstone floors, and the arched ceilings. Uninhabited places have been abandoned for so long that a thick layer of dust and ash covers everything. When creatures and people roam, they scour the darkness or gather around fire pits where grisly things broil. The rooms, chambers, and corridors are built with a gray granitic smooth stone. The areas here are very cold and the ceilings are 90' high. Let’s get right into it. ROOMS & CHAMBERS Castle Gargantua, Page 30 posted:ABANDONED MINE SHAFT NUMBER AND TYPE OF EXITS We’ve got iron doors, stone slabs and empty arches. The stone slabs have to be pushed by “two characters with Strength scores over 13” to move them. Which in answer to our earlier question, implies that the entrances and exits to the rooms are intended to be human size, because otherwise the slab would be giant size and take more people to open. TREASURES The treasures are gems, animal pelts, goblets, horns, chests of coins, and other Norse/Dwarven trinkets. They range in value from 35 silver pieces to about 400. There are no bullshit secretly-worthless treasures like in the Lust room, but there are three magic items to find: Jagged flint weapons are incredibly sharp but brittle. They deal a D8 of bonus damage with each hit, and this damage can’t be healed by nonmagical means. But they break on a roll of 1. Magical chisels can be used like daggers, and ignore damage resistance from stone monsters. If you roll a natural 20 to hit, the stone creature you strike is turned to flesh. Dzargi horns are cut from an unknown creature, purple in color. It’s worth 1,000 silver pieces to a collector, and jack poo poo to anyone else. There’s a 1 in 4 chance that a given horn is magical and automatically attaches it to the person that picks it up. That gives them a bonus horn attack for D4 damage, and makes them immune to fear and mind control. These are… all good. They’re all useful and they all reward you for picking them up and using them. Not only is this a good thing by itself, it also makes the cursed and worthless treasures in the other rooms more useful to the DM. If some treasures are helpful, that encourages the players to experiment with more treasures, which means the wacky bullshit ones might actually get used instead of thrown in a bag and immediately sold. Good job, Castle Gargantua.  MONSTERS The Stone monsters combine a few well-executed dungeon standbys with some weird and creative originals. Border patrols were sent by a distant noble to investigate the castle when it appeared on the horizon, and have been lost inside ever since. There are 3D6 of them and a single boss level leader, all clad in plate armor and carrying meat cleavers and tower shields. There’s even a picture though what’s not visible in it is that “The face of the commander is upside-down upon his neck (i.e. his chin is at the top of his head).” I like this. This is a tough encounter, but these guys have no reason to fight you, and vice versa. Hell, they could be a huge force multiplier if you help them escape. You do remember the way out, right? Gugs are just the Gugs from the Dreamlands books. Like the description is just a quote from Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath, describing what a Gug looks like. There’s a picture too. Would have been nice if there was some description of how they behaved. They hit hard, they get multiple attacks, they’re faster than you and they’ve got good morale. No word on if they can speak or understand language. Eh. Greedy dwarves are basically duergar, roving in packs of 2D4. They pretend to be friendly, when in reality they’re thinking about robbing you and torturing you to death. I’m half-and-half on these guys. I think there might be too much stuff in the dungeon that pretends to be friendly for the players to fall for it. Then again, they’ve got a clear motivation, which is always nice. Leprous troglodytes are diseased cavemen who roam the dungeon in groups of D4. They stink so badly of rotting meat that you have to save versus poison when you come in scent range, or lose your turn vomiting. Their bite infects you with super-leprosy, causing you to lose CON and small body parts like fingers and ears. Oh and they can camouflage themselves and become impossible to detect. Overall pretty cool, but it would be nice if the text gave some example of how they behave. Do they try to eat people? Give them disease to turn them into more troglodytes? Can they speak? Monstrous albino moles burrow through stone to stalk casters, remaining out of their sight. When someone casts a spell, the mole bursts out and attacks them with a psychic blast, inflicting a “random permanent insanity”. The text doesn’t say what that means, I assume it’s like rolling for a disorder in Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green/Unknown Armies/Insert Horror Game. Luckily, the mole is blind, and can’t detect anyone who doesn’t use spells or magic items. An interesting concept, if a little underspecified. Ogre children are 2D6 big fat babies, interested only in eating things, hitting things, and making GBS threads everywhere. Better to just avoid them, because each one you kill has a 1 in 20 chance to spawn Ogre Dad, who mercilessly hunts you down and beats you to death. Sargoyles are little gargoyles with a name that’s either a typo or a reference to something that a Google search can’t find. They’re fast, they get multiple attacks, they resist 5 points of damage from every attack, and they have a breath attack that shoots flaming cinders all over a cone. Would be nice if we knew whether they were hostile, could be bargained with for safe passage, etc. There’s a lot of that going around. Valkyries are boss-level (Player Level+3) warrior women who roam the dungeon in groups of D4, looking for fights to get into. They challenge men to wrestling matches, paying them 100 GP if they win and claiming them as slaves if they lose. Oh and if a Lawful fighter dies in their presence, they take his soul to Valhalla and disappear, and the player’s next character gets maximum CHA. Not exactly original, but very strong motivations and roleplaying tips for the DM. Overall, an interesting selection of exotic and pedestrian-but-well-reallized NPCs. TRAPS These are a… mixed bag. The Dastardly wheel trap is one of the weirdest entries in the book. I’m not going to try and describe this, I’m just going to drop the exact words. Castle Gargantua, Dastardly Wheel Trap posted:A water wheel is hidden under a pressure plate. When a character steps upon it, a mechanism raises it to level and the wheel starts spinning. It goes so fast that the unfortunate character cannot stop running and needs the help of another to get out. Once the character thus trapped has spent more than 10 rounds inside the wheel, a secret compartment slides open in the nearest wall. There is the grip of a simple copper sword inside, as if the sword has been stuck into the wall. The sword has been charged through a crude dynamo all this time and delivers an electric shock for 1d8 damage per Average Level when touched. Moreover, pulling it draws the sword out and doesn't help to lift the character out of the wheel. A character can run frantically for as many rounds as Constitution points he has. When he stops, the wheel breaks his legs (1d6 damage, –4 Dexterity and the character can never walk again). The telltale sign of this trap is a puddle of water and small pieces of broken bones. The Phosphorus web is better. It’s disguised as a cobweb, but is actually a skein of piano wire, which snaps shut around anything that touches it, binding them and triggering a spray of burning phosphorous. It burns you for turns based on the average party level. I would have liked a line here about how you can get the burning powder off you by carefully pouring water on it and then painfully scraping it off the scorched tissue - the same thing you do with real white phosphorous burns. The Steam valve isn’t a steam valve, it’s a giant hatch that opens a door to a huge flooded cave, where a giant octopus lives. If you win the boss fight versus the octopus, you get the Coral Crown of the Sea Kings and the Trident of the Marianas Trench, neither of which do much but are worth a lot of money. If you roll this result again, the octopus is tougher, the crown is worth more money and the trident does more damage. This feels like something the author tossed into the Stone area because it wouldn’t fit anywhere else, but it doesn’t fit here either. Vile runes are engraved above stone spikes, which block one of the doors out of the room. The runes can be translated via the spell Read Magic, but doing so casts all the stored spells in the runes on the Magic User. They must make four Saves vs Magic, against Hypnosis, Charm, Heal and Petrification. The spikes don’t go away, but a chisel or hammer can break them. I don’t know how I feel about this one. It’s clever, but there’s no obvious tell to make it fair. The traps aren’t as good as the monsters, but some of them work. EXAMPLES Four Stone rooms to tie it all together. A giant stone bridge over a deep chasm 180 feet square, lit by windows high above. The sound of iron clanging echoes, the source indistinct. A single iron door at the opposite end leads onward The great (but human sized) hall of a long dead Jarl in an irregular cave, 120 by 240 feet. A group of ogre children toddle around a lit fire pit while they wait for dad to return, crawling under the long tables and tossing chairs into the bonfire to watch them burn. A wooden door at the opposite end of the chamber hangs ajar, but the stone slab beneath the Jarl’s throne has yet to be disturbed. A truly gargantuan temple to the Worm God, 360 feet in radius. There’s a single valkyrie wandering among the bases of the giant coiled statues, 100 GP jingling in her belt pouch. She hasn’t found the pouch of 19 electrum coins tucked beneath one of the plinths. The largest statue has the beaked skull of an unknown creature, a full 80 feet above the floor. A vast arch leads onward into the dungeon, two stone slabs concealing alternate exits An irregularly shaped cave, 180 by 300 feet. A spiral staircase rises upward from the cavern floor, to a landing where arches, slabs and iron doors lead further up into the castle. A single gug roams the cavern floor, where a jagged flint axe has been discarded among the stalagmites and calcium crusted pools. There are drums in the deep, somewhere. Good stuff.  Aside from a few letdowns, Stone is a good area. The strongest one we’ve covered so far. Next post, we’ll hit the last of the four generators, and my personal favorite: Wine. Everyone posted:The Succubi way is a useful, presumably difficult to immediately detect way to "debuff" a powerful opponent assuming you play somebody who could reasonably pull it off. Lamentable Conundrum is something I'd actually want to learn. Use Invisibility to move into a room with a bunch of enemies, cast the thing. While the enemies are trying to figure out the riddle, your buddies come in and subdue/butcher-the gently caress-out-of them. The victims of the spell "cannot use spells, items, or weapons, will strip as soon as possible, and must follow the most direct path to the caster regardless of traps and hazards" so it looks like it's more useful than I gave it credit for, completely neutralizing the enemy - unless their plan was already to run at you completely naked, without using weapons or magic. Ithle01 posted:I have a weakness for buying OSR modules or lovely random encounter decks because although I know they're largely a steaming mass of poo poo every now and again there's a piece of gold in that poo poo that I can pry out and use in my games and Castle Gargantua is definitely a good example of this. Despite the dumb sophomoric parts of the sex dungeon there's a couple useful bits like the gems-grow-from-your-skin disease. Also, dick treants, because sure why not. Tibalt posted:Man, Castle Gargantua seems like a really interesting idea that doesn't quite pull off the execution. I think it would have been better if they had leaned into the "everything is giant-sized" idea more consistently, and made the Castle itself mappable even if the entrances and exits lead to strange and bizarre locations. You could do even better by taking all the concepts and building an actual dungeon out of them, with everything premade and keyed. Keep the four themed areas and the better encounters but make the whole thing intentionally designed. But then you’d be writing a whole separate module, like one of those 5E fix-ups the Alexandrian guy does. I’m glad people are picking up on why I bothered to review this in the first place. A lot of it is trash, but enough of it is good to be infectious.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:54
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de_ratz as a dungeon is such a good idea. The execution here is a bit OSR-y for my tastes but I'm enjoying seeing the different rooms the generator can spit out. Re: the deck of encounters, one of the cards saying it can lead to another card made me think of an adventure packaged as a deck of tarot-sized cards, one for each major encounter. You could have cards at the back with monster stats etc so you just lay 'em out in front of you according to the encounter card. Hell, you could package a basic RPG (maybe one aimed at being played while travelling) that way. Preset cards for every character, instruction cards you flip and read as you go through the adventure.
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Jul 18, 2020 20:46
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 Chapter 4: Vilani Society Colonel Jing Xue, opening lecture on Vilani Psychology, Copernicus Naval College (2165) posted:Never forget that the Vilani are Human. So, uh, yeah. Keep that quote in mind for the future. This is the section where I found out the whole book buried the lede on Vilani society. It no longer functions as the founders intended. I mean, yeah, obviously it doesn’t, but without realizing it the Vilani have abandoned principles the Imperium’s founders put in place to keep their society’s worst habits in check. If those principles were still intact, it likely could function for centuries more. But however much they intended Vilani society to remain static, those methods have already partially failed. Modern Vilani culture, the book tells us, revolves around four key principles, three of which are intentional:
 Vilani education focuses less on individual achievement and more on working with groups; its ultimate goal is making group projects not awful. While they recognize different students have different levels of ability, students are expected to work together and smoothly compensate for each other’s failures instead of advancing on their own. Classes include members of all castes no matter how high- or lowborn; they expect students to learn how to work with those of higher and lower castes seamlessly. Upon graduation (which happens about when it does for Terrans), Vilani pick a career determined by their caste and stick around in it until they retire at the equivalent of their 110th birthday; anyone with Vilani blood can expect to live to 130 with commonly available medical care, and the trait appears to breed true. Those retirees, aside from providing some child rearing, serve to absorb economic output without giving any back, another element keeping Vilani society in stasis. Art and entertainment is another area where traditional Vilani values have decayed. While earlier Vilani visual art favored geometric patterns with specific meanings, its modern equivalent just goes for vaguely pleasing shapes. Commoners eat that poo poo up, though. Likewise, Vilani architecture tends to be monumental, broad, and substantially boring to Terran eyes. They also have an inconsistent appreciation of Terran visual art; they feel realistic art is pointless compared to photographs and the like, find abstract painting hilarious, and consider some highly symmetrical styles fine art even by their standards. That interest in literalism makes them really easy to sucker in with advertising, something Terrans often take advantage of. You do get plenty of literature and movie equivalents, but they focus on fundamentally different types of heroes than their Terran equivalents favor; no lone wolves or lost causes here, they enjoy rags-to-riches stories, police procedurals, and post-apocalyptic stories that emphasize rebuilding Vilani society from scratch. Anything pro-social, really; no room for antiheroes. Sports tend to be communal rather than strictly competitive; their most popular games include a golfing equivalent that focuses on perfecting a score on a single course and a cross between badminton and volleyball (since golfing there is as expensive as golfing here, commoners will often pay out the nose for mobile consoles simulating Terran golf). Vincent Royce, Ministry of Commerce official (2150) posted:The Vilani are crazy for geometric figures. I remember one I had to chaperone in Paris; we spent two hours in the Louvre and she didn’t like a single thing. Eventually we ended up at an old amusement park on the outskirts of the city – and she declared this rundown hedge maze we went through to be the finest piece of Terran art she’d seen. Vilani society is split between three (technically five) castes, each hereditary and passed down according to the lowest caste of the parents (mixed-caste marriages are rare but not discriminated against); while it is possible to move between castes, the fact that castes can trace their descent directly back to their pre-Consolidation Wars ancestors tells you how common that is. Commoners sprang from, well, commoners; they make up the bulk of the population and live modestly (though almost always have their needs satisfied). As a class, they tend to be menial workers, technical professionals, and entertainers. Managers descend from petty nobility, clerks, and small business owners, though they now include merchant ship captains, junior officers, product designers (such as they are), and small-scale managers (I think their portfolios max out at a large city). Though the highest ranked caste, the executives, are all equal in status and privileges, they descend from different parts of pre-Ziru Sirka society and dominate different Bureaus:
 I’m not going too deep into the structure of Imperial government because I’m not breaking down the dozen ranks and their duties and subduties here. Suffice to say, executives run anything bigger than a single planet and have portfolios that grow by maybe an order of magnitude per rank. However, at the top of the Imperium sits the Shadow Emperor and council of 15; three from each bureau, one from the Army, one from the Navy, and four from the outer Council (a group of 300 powerful nobles who gather to elect a new Shadow Emperor from their number when the last one dies) of the Emperor’s choice. I don’t know the origin of the “Shadow” thing (edit from the far future: Traveller wiki says it's because they were never seen by the public or acknowledged by name after the crowning). The Emperor has absolute power and the 15 councilors compete for the Emperor’s attention and struggle to keep their favor, since the Emperor refusing to give one faction attention leaves them out in the cold; however, even though all 15 tried to manage their portfolios on their own unless they seriously need intervention, the Shadow Emperor still rarely has enough time to deal with every issue and turn to the massive body of precedent they’ve assembled over the last 3000 years to make most of their decisions for them. Every governing position below the ruling Council is hereditary, but only the third child or younger can inherit and positions without a direct heir on the death of its previous holder pass out of family control, meaning there’s a certain amount of turnover as superior appoint new nobles. Finally, below them, you reach the basic division of Vilani worlds and holdings; colonies (habitable worlds with at most a few billion inhabitants, often insular and even more reactionary than usual) and outposts (uninhabitable worlds or systems with small settlements dedicated to a specific purpose, generally more cosmopolitan). Of course, there’s plenty of variation within that structure, especially among non-Vilani. Next time we’ll touch on the various Vilani subject races (and then how their military functions). Are you ready for bureaucrat lizards and space apes? You are now. OtspIII posted:One way that OSR stuff has gotten a bit unwieldy, though, is that since there's such a huge emphasis on OSR content being system-neutral, it becomes really hard to pace out treasure. Maybe a 1000gp golden tiara is half a level in one system, but not much at all in another, and totally irreverent in another. I've seen a lot of OSR modules (like A Wizard or Hot Spring Island) just sidestep it by basically ignoring treasure altogether. . .I think you're probably just supposed to skim the module before you run it and make small modifications wherever relevant to make it work for the precise system you're using (like the Wizardling pearl idea). This sort of works, but is pretty annoying and feels like one of the biggest weaknesses of this model for sure. I can definitely appreciate the idea of making these modules as much a basis for creativity as anything else - hence the emphasis on backwards compatibility; you use them to liven up a system you love and rely on your instincts to tell you what you should or shouldn't keep. For me, the problem is both that that boils down to relying on Rule Zero to make your module functional, which is just bad design, and it's fundamentally hostile to new DMs who don't have those instincts yet. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Aug 10, 2020 |
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Jul 18, 2020 21:07
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Falconier111 posted:For me, the problem is both that that boils down to relying on Rule Zero to make your module functional, which is just bad design, and it's fundamentally hostile to new DMs who don't have those instincts yet. I don't think you're wrong that it's a tough lift for new GMs--it feels like the secret final chapter of most OSR products is already being immersed in the big OSR blog culture or having tutored under an experienced GM. I don't think I'd call reliance on Rule Zero bad design, though. OSR is always all about 'shared imaginary space first, rules second'--while I think that in most RPGs people think of the rules as the highest authority in the game, OSR stuff is more about just giving the GM resources to use to keep things moving fairly/interestingly. The idea is that rules are inherently somewhat inflexible, and the players are very likely to actively fling themselves into situations the designers weren't designing for, so aiming for games text that covers all bases without forcing the GM to invoke Rule Zero is just pointless and counterproductive. I do 100% agree that most of these books should be doing more of the lifting in helping GMs adapt their material to their systems or campaigns, though. Even just an indication of what adaptations might need to be made would be helpful.
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Jul 18, 2020 22:26
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E The Abyss (Chaotic Evil) Planar Traits: Objective Directional Gravity, Normal Time, Infinite Size, Mildly Chaos-Aligned, Mildly Evil-Aligned, Divinely Morphic, Normal Magic Abyss petitioners are immune to electricity and poison, and resistant to fire and acid. When they die, they explode in a cloud of poisonous, acidic vapor. The Abyss is an infinity of slaughter and horror in ways and shapes beyond counting. The Abyss is the end of morality and decency, where strength and guile are the only right. The Abyss is the spawning ground of demons, and where the vilest of mortal souls are remade to join their ranks. The Abyss needs little introduction to DnD fans: this is a plane of one layer after another (planar scholars disagree on whether there are 666 layers, an infinite number of layers, or if the number of layers fluctuates over time), all of them evil and filled with nastiness. These layers vary immensely from one another, any given layer will have a uniform terrain but any given layer could be a burning hellscape, a lush and voracious jungle where even the plants want to eat you, an ocean of unholy water, a lifeless vacuum overrun with undead, or anything else you can imagine. The elemental traits of the plane can accordingly vary from layer to layer, Fire-Dominant and minor Negative-Dominant are common. What all layers of the Abyss have in common is their absolute malice, every living thing in the Abyss wants to kill visitors (and typically each other). Some layers are thin and closely linked, with features that exist on one being visible from others - these linked layers are typically ruled by a powerful demon prince. Not every layer has a ruler, but many do. Petitioners in the Abyss are better known as manes, and always have sharp claws and teeth. Most have pale white skin, sparse hair, and blank white eyes, but others look almost identical to their old selves or take on various other monstrous transformations. Manes almost never retain conscious memories of their lives, but many display notable behavioral tendencies from their living selves - a fondness for a particular type of weapon, a predilection for some tactic or hunting behavior, even spellcasting abilities in rare cases. Few retain full class levels, but most do keep at least a few of the skills and abilities they had in life. Manes are considered the very lowest rank of demon in the Abyss, and most are immediately conscripted into the army of the local ruling demon lord or torn apart by Abyssal denizens. Manes who survive and prove their worth are often rewarded by their masters with being remade into a more powerful demon, a process that always extinguishes what remains of a mane's memory. Left to their own devices, manes are vicious predators who will instinctively fight amongst themselves to establish dominance. Society in the Abyss is simple: the strong and the cunning survive, the weak perish or serve their betters. There is no order and no society in the Abyss that is not maintained by fear, and the only checks on any Abyssal's power and behavior are other Abyssals. Even manes can work their way up the demonic hierarchy and become demon lords if they are strong and cunning and fortunate enough, and it is this promise of power that keeps mortal souls coming to the Abyss... where almost all of them become slaves or are simply devoured. Regardless of how many layers there are in the Abyss, the most notable are as followed: Layer 1: The Plain of Infinite Portals is the 'surface' of the Abyss, and takes the form of an endless, barren plain broken by vast rivers of unholy water (most of them part of the Styx), bottomless crevices and craters plunging into the earth, and fortresses of stone and black iron. These voids in the earth are portals - almost all of them one-way - to other layers, and do provide an expedient means to get to a desired layer... if a visitor has an accurate map describing which hole leads where. The fortresses are home to various demon lords and their armies, no single demon rules this plane and most war and politic endlessly among themselves when there is no external threat present (such as the Blood War if that exists in your cosmology). The most notable of these for visitors is Broken Reach, a fortress town built around a permanent portal to the Outlands and ruled by an uncommonly practical-minded succubus known as the Red Shroud. The Red Shroud is a powerful sorceress, but relies on guile rather than brute strength to maintain her position, and she permits visitors to freely come and go from Broken Reach. She's much more interested in information and planar trade than killing or enslaving traders, and just about anything - and anyone - can be bought or sold in Broken Reach for the right price. Layer 6: The Realm of a Million Eyes is a vast maze of twisting tunnels, where lidless eyes beyond counting are embedded in every surface. This is the realm of the Great Mother, progenitor of the beholders, and every eye is one of that godlike being's (or outright goddess, planar scholars disagree). Beholders and beholderkin roam the tunnels, preying on each other and any intruders they discover. It is said that the Great Mother sees all that transpires in the planes, and might even be willing to share her knowledge in exchange for the proper sort of persuasion. Layer 23: The Ice Wastes are what the name suggests, a plane of killing cold and darkness devoid of most life. This is a domain of the frost giants and a demon lord they revere as a god. Layers 45, 46, 47: These layers are tightly bonded and interconnected, and are ruled by the demon lord Graz'zt. Common to all three layers is the beautiful and deadly River of Salt, which is what it sounds like, and the three layers are deliberately planned out as a treacherous, always shifting maze of portals and alleys that turn back on each other. Unwary visitors may also run afoul of the purple fires of these layers, which burn cold rather than hot. Graz'zt himself is known for his cruel sense of humor, and he'll often refrain from killing or enslaving visitors should they amuse him. Though not as well-informed as the Red Shroud in the Plain of Infinite Portals, Graz'zt is often willing to make deals with mortal visitors if the results are likely to entertain him. If he's particularly amused, he may even honor the bargains. Layer 66: The Demonweb Pits are known and feared across the planes as the home of Lloth, spider goddess of the drow. The plane itself is shaped from a massive and unfathomably intricate web of unknown substance that calls to mind a spider's web, and is studded with portals to realms where Lloth is worshiped. The goddess herself maintains her direct divine realm as an iron stronghold shaped like a titanic spider that constantly roams the webs. Layer 74: Smargard is the home of the yuan-ti and their god, and consists of a massive, beautiful, horrifically toxic and voracious jungle with no ground or sky. Layer 88: The Brine Flats are believed to be where the waters of the River Styx empty, an endless ocean of briny water broken by rocky islands and full of fiendish marine life. Two vast towers that rise far out of the water, and extend deep into the lightless depths are the stronghold of the demon prince Demogorgon, one of the most powerful and dangerous beings in all the Lower Planes. Layer 113: This is a layer of cold and the dead, with the negative-dominant trait and consists of a vast tundra and small, frozen seas, all covered in tombstones and the undead. Historically, this was the domain of the demon lord Orcus, who was believed to have died recently and the layer taken over by some evil god or another. But fresh rumors suggest that the demon prince isn't dead after all and rules once again in the City of the Dead, no doubt clutching his terrible rod. Layer 222: The Slime Pits are home to Jubilex, the Slime Lord, and Zuggtmoy, Lady of Fungi. The layer is an ocean of bubbling, fetid sludge, and bizarre life forms sometimes arise from the ooze. Next time, Carceri!
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Jul 18, 2020 22:33
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Although they have boiled out any racial aspect of it at all, a lot of this description of the Vilani sounds like visions of Japan/China/East Asia generally in the 80s and 90s. Did they really call out group projects specifically in the education section? 
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Jul 18, 2020 22:35
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BinaryDoubts posted:de_ratz as a dungeon is such a good idea. The execution here is a bit OSR-y for my tastes but I'm enjoying seeing the different rooms the generator can spit out. I've always wished there was something like that available. There's the Hand of Fate video game which is pretty awesome, but I don't know how you'd actually make a game like that a reality (in meatspace, anyway).
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Jul 18, 2020 22:37
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Cythereal posted:Historically, this was the domain of the demon lord Orcus, who was believed to have died recently and the layer taken over by some evil god or another. But fresh rumors suggest that the demon prince isn't dead after all and rules once again in the City of the Dead, no doubt clutching his terrible rod. I have to ask if this was the phrasing in the book. Because I am mentally five years old and can't stop giggling.
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Jul 18, 2020 22:39
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PurpleXVI posted:I have to ask if this was the phrasing in the book. Because I am mentally five years old and can't stop giggling. Not in this book.
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Jul 18, 2020 22:41
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Nessus posted:Although they have boiled out any racial aspect of it at all, a lot of this description of the Vilani sounds like visions of Japan/China/East Asia generally in the 80s and 90s. Did they really call out group projects specifically in the education section? Oh god, and now I can’t unsee it  . In fairness, the emphasis was more on training people of multiple castes, skill levels, and origins to work together without class distinctions getting in the way of production; even high nobility have courses with commoners until graduation. The group projects thing was a comparison I came up with. And with that said...Bill Rodriguez, Nusku colonist (2163) posted:Human? I don’t know. I mean, they look Human enough, but I’ve seen a bunch of Vilani three-year-olds in class. They pay attention for hours on end. That’s not Human.
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Jul 19, 2020 00:02
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Hey, Falconier111, are you going to do Rim of Fire next to contrast?
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Jul 19, 2020 00:38
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Hypnobeard posted:Hey, Falconier111, are you going to do Rim of Fire next to contrast? Odds are low, but extant. See, I’d have to buy it first But really, this book is obscenely thick. I copied the entire text out of my pdf to paste it into word for a word count and got 185,270. I am nine posts in and we’re at page 90 of 240 (though I may be able to cut out as many as 50 of those pages through skipping relatively unimportant sections). Rim of Fire looks substantially smaller but after this I’m not touching GURPS sourcebooks for a little while.
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Jul 19, 2020 02:21
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Everyone posted:I could see uses for two of the three. The Succubi way is a useful, presumably difficult to immediately detect way to "debuff" a powerful opponent assuming you play somebody who could reasonably pull it off. Lamentable Conundrum is something I'd actually want to learn. Use Invisibility to move into a room with a bunch of enemies, cast the thing. While the enemies are trying to figure out the riddle, your buddies come in and subdue/butcher-the gently caress-out-of them. The archetypal bard that wants to seduce and gently caress every monster using the Succubi spell to level drain the dragon at the end of a dungeon is certainly a thing that could happen.
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Jul 19, 2020 02:23
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 6: WINE Welcome back to Castle Gargantua. This is the last of the dungeon generators: Wine. Castle Gargantua, Page 47 posted:The Wine environments are places of gruesome revelry and orgy. Most rooms, chambers, and corridors are built with a strong and thick kind of wood that smells faintly of rotten vegetation, old barrels, and grapes. A few rooms are built with a gray ivy-covered stone. There are vine stocks here and there, growing into the very fabric of the walls, and interior gardens of opiates whose smell seeps deep into the halls and make visitors slightly dizzy. People encountered here will likely be drunk, and places are dirtier than the rest of the castle. Ceilings arch above at a 70' height. When inhabited, the places are lit with hooded lanterns. It also does something that pisses me off. We’ll get to that in a second. First, the rooms ROOMS & CHAMBERS Our rooms and chambers pick list this time is a panoply of Greco-Roman delights. Castle Gargantua, Page 47 posted:AMPHITHEATRE Anyway, the ones I do understand have a lot of personality. NUMBER AND TYPE OF EXITS The doors this time are just wood and metal, and the occasional arched tunnel. No special instructions about which ones are locked, Strength requirements to open, or anything else. TREASURES The regular treasure table has coins, gemstones, jewel encrusted chalices, and rare wines. The most valuable item on the list is worth a maximum of 200SP, and the average value of the items is closer to 50. We’ve got three magical treasures on offer. The Magical bountiful horn creates a gallon of red wine every time you blow it. There’s a 1 in 10 chance it also instantly kills you by turning you into wine. The text goes out of its way to say that characters killed in this manner cannot be resurrected. The Gnarled magical staff is a Thyrsus, a type of pinecone-headed rod carried by Dionysos and his servitors. When you hit an enemy with it, they transform into a random wild animal for D4 rounds. Every time you use it, though, you also get a random animal part attached to your body, like hooves on your feet, horns on your head, etc.  Courtesy of Wikipedia The Diminutive garnet orb is an itty bitty gemstone with a magical formula on it. If you read the formula with Read Magic, it tells you a spell that increases the gem’s size and value. But increase it too many times, and it explodes in a fireball, dealing damage that scales with the average party level. That’s one bullshit item and two that I like. Better than the Castle Gargantua average. MONSTERS Like the environments, the monsters are strongly Greco-Roman, a choice that mostly works. Bacchus is the Roman equivalent of Dionysos, God of Wine, Drama, Divine Madness and Freedom. He’s also a magic user with a magic staff and a bunch of special powers. Bacchus can
Listen: if you want to have weird sex poo poo in your scenario, that’s fine. If you don’t want to have weird sex poo poo in your scenario, also fine. If you want to put it in your scenario and then tell me where it is, in case I don’t want to use it, that’s fantastic. But please, don’t lie to me about where it is. Anyway, if you’re already drunk when you meet Bacchus, he tells you you’re a totally cool dude, drops a Cure Wounds and pays you 1d100sp. You can also choose to convert to Bacchus worship when you meet him. That changes your alignment to Chaotic and your class to Cleric, level D4. That’s right, you can instantly advance to Level 4. This might be the only way anyone could ever level up playing this module. Cluricaunes are a monster I’m going to let the game describe, so you can see why I’m a little confused. Cluricane posted:This wine-loving fey creature is but 4' tall. It wears a red coat, a tall black hat, a brown leather apron, long blue stockings, and pointed shoes with silver buckles. The cluricaune will try its utmost to keep the characters away. It can turn invisible and make the whole place appear as whatever it likes to repel them. The illusion itself cannot be detected, but the cluricaune is slightly dumb and the illusion's details aren't very consistent. Dipsodian warriors are vaguely humanoid creatures with enormous facial features, four eyes and no neck. They wander the dungeon in packs of 2D4, perpetually drunk, stumbling over their own elephantine feet. They’re very easy to surprise due to being unable to turn their head, and their ears blocking most of their peripheral vision from their eyes. The only thing that’s missing is any advice whatsoever about their behavior and motivations, besides perpetual inebriation. Lotus eaters are horse-headed humanoids that love to eat people alive. They each get a single target Sleep spell they can cast once per day, and there are D3 of them. The text says they’re “cruel and deceitful”, which at least means they might do something besides attack you instantly when you meet them. Maenad are Bacchus’ clergy - madwomen clad in animal skins, roaming the dungeon in choirs of 3D4, looking for creatures to tear to shreds with their bare hands. They “will tear all the creatures and characters they encounter apart at the slightest sign of violence.” I dig this for a couple reasons. First because I think the Cult of Dionysos is cool and should appear in more games. Second because it’s a very clear description of how they behave, and gives players options for dealing with them. If you draw on them, they attack instantly. But if you don’t, maybe you can lure them into fighting some other rear end in a top hat, get them both out of your way. Murderous revelers are bands of 4D4 drunken adventurers, looking for more wine and stuff to steal. They’ll attack you if they think you have anything good, but they’re drunk enough to move slowly and take penalties on basically everything. I like this for the same reason as I liked the peasants with ergotism in the Blood chapter. You can easily get tarpitted by superior numbers if you fight them head on, but they’re easy to evade, trick, etc. Satyrs are Bacchus’ favored ones - D4 goat-footed humanoids always in search of a good time. And their idea of a good time is “to kill the male characters and to enslave the females”. Again, this is violating our Lust quarantine. Because of the implication. We ran into these jokers when I ran this, and it was the first time I’ve ever had to say to a player “you think these guys want to rape you”. I told everyone beforehand this module had some bad poo poo in it, and we all agreed to try it anyway, but it still caught us off guard. (One of the players was also a Classicist, and objected to the idea that the Satyrs only wanted sex with women. A real Satyr fucks anything that moves) They at least have some cool mechanics. Their arrows force the target to dance compulsively on a failed Save vs Magic. Also, after two rounds, their swords fly up in the air and attack on their own, as though the Satyrs were wielding them. Vine treants are living grapevines. They’re conscious, and they hate anyone who drinks wine, for the same reason humans dislike it when people stick straws into babies. If you seem drunk, it’s coming after you. Cool design with a strong hook. Wine puddings are reeking masses of wine, vomit and vinegar, that slither around the dungeon looking for living things to envelop. They smell so bad that anyone within 30 feet of them takes a significant penalty to their chance to hit. They’re immune to physical damage, but fire or salt hurts them just fine. Slapping them with a sword causes them to divide, and you can guess how that goes. They can corrode their way through metal and wood, but their formula actually hardens leather armor into a cour bouilli as strong as plate. I love this stupid thing. It’s my favorite monster in the whole book. It’s gross and weird and it’s got cool mechanics. The players never ran into it in the two sessions of Castle Gargantua we got through, but I ported it over into a Delta Green scenario I ran for them later, and it was one of the most popular games I ever ran. Wine puddings rule. I like these monsters. There are a few missteps, but I don’t think they’re hard to rehabilitate. TRAPS We’ve got three, this time. Ethanol gas comes spraying into the room from pressurized tanks when a trigger plate is stepped on, intoxicating everyone inside and therefore dealing temporary DEX damage. Take so much DEX damage that you can’t move, and you pass out. Remain passed out in the room, and you die of suffocation/alcohol poisoning. Any open flame in the room causes an ethanol-splosion. I like this trap, it fits the theme and it’s dangerous without instantly deleting a character. Gem grapes are jewels that grow on a strange black vine, in a variety of designer colors. They have an apparent value of 50 silver each, but that changes once they’re plucked. The blue ones fall apart when picked, the red ones explode, the yellow ones disintegrate when you leave the castle, the green ones are fine, and the white ones turn into worms and make the entire vine disappear. This is barely a trap and barely a treasure. It offers the players a choice with no information whatsoever, and that choice has a chance to render the entire exercise meaningless on the first draw. Purple slime blocks one of the exits of the room you’re in. It slowly dissolves wood, metal and flesh, engulfing it. If you get any on your body, your choices are to sever the affected limb or drop a Cure Disease. If you burn it, it rapidly expands in all directions and deals the fire damage back to everything it touches. On the other hand, vinegar dissolves it safely. I’m conflicted on this one. It punishes the obvious play - use fire on slime - but I’ve never been a big fan of “meta” traps that kill you if you do the cautious thing that’s served you well up to that point. On the other hand, I like using vinegar to kill it. EXAMPLES Our last four rooms, generated using the Wine tables. This champagne vineyard stretches out across 300 feet of gently sloping hills, a single door granting egress at the opposite end. A band of 5 Dipsodians wander the terraces, eating the grapes raw, looking for something stronger. Among the roots are the skeletons of two long-dead monks This giant amphitheater is arrayed in a semicircle, filling the 120 by 120 foot room. A wooden door hangs open at the top of the seats, but the pit of the theater itself is filled with purple slime, blocking egress through the door behind the stage. A gnarled magic staff lies half submerged in the slime, immune to its corrosive effects. 600 butterflies flutter overhead. Occasionally one lands in the slime, confusing its bright colors for a flower, and is instantly dissolved. The Purple Satyr Tavern is built for giant customers, laid out in a circle 360 feet in diameter. Three doors in alcoves along one half of the circle provide entry and exit. The bar counter and shelves form the other half of the circle, above which are enormous windows that illuminate the room. A pair of Satyrs are trying to scale the shelves, in hopes of somehow opening the titanic bottles on the highest ledge. They have discarded the magical horn they found beneath one of the tables, after it reduced the third member of their party to a puddle of wine, which has mixed with the other Satyrs’ piss to form an unpleasant slurry The Wine Cellar is a long, 120 by 240 foot rectangle, but the casks are human sized. On each of its walls is an exit, three barred metal, one an empty archway. Five maenads lounge around a fountain of wine in the center of the room, drinking just enough to stay buzzed, not enough to blunt their edge of murderous ecstasy. I love it.  I don’t think this is a creature from the Wine section. It’s just here That’s the last of the dungeon generators. In the next post, we’ll begin exploring the Gold rooms. These are premade mini dungeons, complete with maps and keys and everything. I’ll confess right now that I don’t know this section as well as I do the four generators, so it’ll be a learning experience for me too. See you there.
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Jul 19, 2020 02:24
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mellonbread posted:(One of the players was also a Classicist, and objected to the idea that the Satyrs only wanted sex with women. A real Satyr fucks anything that moves) 
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Jul 19, 2020 03:11
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I've been on a Fantasy Craft kick lately, so I was going to do a few posts in here genning up character concepts in the system to show it off. If you've got any concepts you'd want me to try to make, go right ahead and post 'em.
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Jul 19, 2020 07:29
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Drke martial artist
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Jul 19, 2020 08:11
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Fivemarks posted:I've been on a Fantasy Craft kick lately, so I was going to do a few posts in here genning up character concepts in the system to show it off. If you've got any concepts you'd want me to try to make, go right ahead and post 'em. At least one soldier of some sort, to show up the sheer badassery of martials.
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Jul 19, 2020 08:14
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Fivemarks posted:I've been on a Fantasy Craft kick lately, so I was going to do a few posts in here genning up character concepts in the system to show it off. If you've got any concepts you'd want me to try to make, go right ahead and post 'em. Whatever makes the flashiest, most enthusiastic elf possible.
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Jul 19, 2020 12:00
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Fivemarks posted:I've been on a Fantasy Craft kick lately, so I was going to do a few posts in here genning up character concepts in the system to show it off. If you've got any concepts you'd want me to try to make, go right ahead and post 'em. A summoner, because it's almost always busted as hell and it's on an unrelated note my favorite fantasy character archetype.
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Jul 19, 2020 15:24
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Half-orcs are prohibited from reaching beyond level 4 in The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 11: The Deck of Trivialities and Healing 52: Sleep Tight “This encounter takes place in a remote inn far from any measure of civilization.” (Other than... an inn.) Basically, it’s a crossroads inn, servicing travelers. It’s run-down and well-used, but the proprietor family is friendly, and the food and drink is good. The beds, however, are infested with vermin that will spread to themselves and their clothing. Annoying but harmless in a larger sense. “The PCs get bedbugs.” Is that an amusing roleplaying prompt, or the most crushingly boring encounter ever devised? Jury? 53: Tourists “Deep in the heart of one of the region’s largest cities, the party is hastily endeavoring to complete a mission of great import.” Okay, I’ll put this in my “City Encounters When the Party is in a Big Hurry” deck. Anyway they’re accosted by five travellers who need directions to various places. They’re very apologetic for taking the party’s time, but also persistent. The PCs’ situation would have to be quite specific for this to be consequential or entertaining. Pass. 54: Medic! The PCs are approached in or near civilization by a wounded warrior in banded mail, who politely requests directions to the nearest temple that sells healing, but declines to give more information. If they follow her she reconvenes with four other wounded/unconscious comrades. They’ll be grateful for help getting to medical aid, will happily pay 30 silver if the PCs provide magical healing, and will gratefully join them as henchmen or something if the PCs heal them and refuse payment. They don’t have names, but even that is less important than the screamingly obvious question of how they got wounded. Give me a sentence at least! I can throw it out if I have a better idea, but then at least I have a default! Eh. Fine. Keep, there’s almost certainly some threat nearby that I can tie this in to. 55: Honor at a Price Leaving an expensive shop, a PC collides with a dandy flanked by two anxious-looking bodyguards. Unless they apologize profusely, he’ll slap them in the face with a glove and demand a d, d, d, duel! (Obviously one of the bodyguards will stand in as his champion.) If the PCs do win, the dandy will honorably apologize, pay for healing, and offer an additional 20 pp as recompense. I immediately feel sorry for these poor beleaguered bodyguards, and I’m sure the PCs will too. That provides a fun dynamic to an otherwise straightforward encounter. Keep. 56: The Survivor In a cold, snowy hill area, the PCs find two dozen dead orcs. “Although one has a dagger buried in his breast, and a few are surrounded in pools of blood where their flesh has been chewed to the bone, most of the orcs appear unharmed.” Except for being dead. Actually, one is barely alive, and she’ll be understandably grateful if saved. Her war band got lost in the arctic and were starting to resort to cannibalism. Considering they’re all dead now, she’s inclined to follow the PCs for a while. Keep. Nice potential henchman. Dallbun fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 15:49
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Dallbun posted:52: Sleep Tight Maybe keep. if it's an amusing infestation. Instead of bedbugs, it's something that does something inconvenient or amusing to the characters, and the only way to cure it is something out in the wilderness.
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Jul 19, 2020 16:14
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Epicurius posted:Maybe keep. if it's an amusing infestation. Instead of bedbugs, it's something that does something inconvenient or amusing to the characters, and the only way to cure it is something out in the wilderness. It’s the sort of thing that only works for specific party dynamics. I disagree on the more amusing infestation part; the fact that it is bedbugs makes it hilariously mundane compared to the wild poo poo you get up to in DnD. But it only works if your players want to laugh at that mundanity.
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Jul 19, 2020 16:37
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 7: 300 POUNDS OF FLESH Welcome back to Castle Gargantua. In this update, we’ll tackle our first Gold area. Gold areas don’t use the random dungeon creation rules. They have premade maps, with monsters, traps and treasures keyed to the rooms like a conventional dungeon crawl. 300 Pounds of Flesh begins with some backstory about how things got the way they are: Castle Gargantua, Page 57 posted:A gang of trappers and their witch doctor went deep into the castle a few years ago. Most of them died screaming in its upper levels and some others went utterly insane. The few survivors managed to retreat as close to the entrance as they could and found a provisional shelter in an abandoned and vast kitchen that provided them with some protection. Since then, they've sent spies and scouts away every month to look for a safe exit. None have returned so far. As provisional became permanent and the weird food the kitchen had to offer away wasted away, they had to look for other means to survive and to feed themselves. They did what they knew best and set traps, catching adventurers, monsters, and guards on the fly as the unfortunates stumbled into the lair. The trappers ate them all.  If you read a lot of games in this genre, this style will look familiar. That’s because maps for the Gold areas were drawn by Dyson, the legendary dungeon mapper. The map has a numeric key that corresponds to textual descriptions of the room contents. We’ll go room by room. Room 1 has a big door blocking the entrance. If you knock or try to break it down, a couple unassuming humans open it and invite you in for dinner. It’s got some human size furniture, and a giant size coat on a hook 30 feet up, with a topaz in its pocket that nobody has retrieved yet. Room 2 is a kitchenette that’s been stripped of its furniture. There’s no one in there. Room 3 is the dining room. It’s got a human size table in the middle, with extra seats for all the party members. Five friendly humans are here, waiting for you to join them for dinner. What’s on the menu? Menu posted:MENU If you don’t fall for it, or if you pass your save, they’ve got a backup plan: the ceiling over the seating area where the players are at is weakened. When they realize you aren’t dying from the poison banquet, they casually saunter over to the giant size cabinet against the wall, retrieve some giant iron poles, and begin poking the ceiling over you until it collapses and drops a huge pile of furniture on you. While you sit there and watch it happen? Ok, it’s a bit of a ??? profit situation. By the time they get to this room (even though it’s the first Gold one on the board) the players are already going to be suspicious of NPCs offering them goodies. Which is good, because about half the food items on the menu cause death if you fail your Save vs Poison. The trappers have garbage morale, so if their master plan fails they probably run away rather than fight pissed off and well equipped adventurers. Let’s take a look at the other rooms. Room 4 Is the main kitchen. It’s got giant sized stoves, cabinets and other stuff, but also 10 bottles of Chablis Rocamadour, worth 100 silver each. There are also some barrels of incredibly strong liquor, which the trappers use as a soporific in the poison meal. Room 5 is a dormitory, with a few of the trappers’ personal effects. None of it is worth any money, but the quena made from human bones are a nice touch. Room 6 is the room full of trash above the dining room, with the weak floor that the trappers collapse with the poles. It’s accessible via a staircase from room 5. Room 7 is the master bedroom. It’s got a giant size bed, but the rest of the furniture is human size. This is the home of Heyronimus the Witch Doctor, stats as Magic User of Level equal to the players’ plus three. Because his level scales, he has no example spell list, the DM has to come up with it on their own. Great. There are also some random scrolls on the table, which also scale with the players’ level. If Heyronimus gets in trouble, he flees into Room 8, where a surprise awaits the players. Room 8 is the larder, filled with massive chests and barrels. The barrels contain salt, vinegar and blood. The chests hold the eponymous 300 pounds of meat. The Witch Doctor can command the contents of one chest to rise as a Flesh Golem, which attacks for 2D4 rounds before melting into a pool of fat. Its tallowy corpus is immune to bludgeoning damage and magic, but weak to slashing weapons and fire.  I like this minidungeon. It’s missing a couple important details, like what the trappers do in the very-likely event that the players don’t fall for the dinner invitation. There’s also the question of how it connects to the rest of the dungeon. Look at the map and tell me where the exit to the next area is. Do the adventurers turn around and leave once they’re done, to roll again on the Snakes and Ladders board? Can they leave without “clearing” the minidungeon? When I ran it, they crushed the reaction roll when the two trappers answered the door. One of them invited himself out into the hallway to personally “invite” the characters in, and begged them to help him escape the other cannibals. The other trappers realized he was trying to pull a runner, and surged out to stop them from escaping. The players doubled back into a room where they’d snuck past a sargoyle sleeping on an enormous throne, and the cannibals bumbled right into it. That was also the last session we played of Castle Gargantua, as interest waned and life got in the way. The Gold areas after this are new to me. The next one: Revenge of the Nutcracker.
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Jul 19, 2020 17:44
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Chapter 4: Vilani Subject Races Eight out of 10 intelligent beings in Vilani space are ethnic Vilani. However, one in 10 are straight up aliens and the last one in 10 are various minor human races (distinguished from major human races (Terrans and Vilani) by not having invented jump drives on their own). These cultures currently work as vassal states to the Imperium with their own culture and values, despite Vilani attempts to stamp them out.  First up alphabetically are the Anakundu, a minor human race with two distinguishing features: black eyes and associated dark freckles around and under them to reduce the glare off the snow in their home environment, and extreme racial insomnia. Even as infants they only sleep seven or so hours a night and they lose an average of one hour every 10 years until they go insane from sleeplessness once the average drops below two hours. After the Vilani came and annexed the Anakundu home world, they performed one of their few great feats of medicine and provided them a consequence-free sleeping pill that effectively extended their life span from ~50 years to ~75. Since then the Anakundu have done their damnedest to assimilate into Vilani culture and mostly succeeded, though the twin traumas of being conquered by and rendered reliant on the Vilani leave them with a pervasive sense of fatalism and their short lifespans prevent them from advancing up the Vilani hierarchy too far. They do, however, regularly reach manager status and participate in the Imperium as members in their own right. Two things about the Anakundu. First, remember Sharik Yangila? She was one of them. Second? Their sleeplessness stands from a genetic disorder resulting from a genetic bottleneck centuries ago. Vilani medicine can’t fix it, but Terran genetic therapy probably can. The book implies that fact determined Yangila’s decision to defect. While she was in power, her intelligence network reached deep enough that she could theoretically get a rundown from some scientist or agent on gene therapy and congenital disorders. If she did, after she was deposed she could have used her retirement to correspond with Terran scientists, providing them enough information to come up with a procedure to at least stave off her death a little while; it would be why she stayed in quiet retirement for years despite observers remarking on just how out of character that was. Then, once her time started running out and she felt they’d reached some kind of breakthrough, she staged her death, defected to the Confederation, and enjoyed decades of extra life in exchange for providing them information her spy network gathered before she left and advising them on high-level Vilani politics. She may have been a factor in the decisive reversal of Vilani fortunes towards the end of the Protracted Struggle. Answerin are another minor human race, this time distinguished by coal-black skin, epicanthic folds, and conscious control over their adrenal gland. They see fear as almost a mental illness and use all sorts of techniques to keep it under control. Largely assimilated by the Vilani before the Consolidation Wars, Answerin rarely show up in places as far away as the rimward frontier – but when they do, they show up as shock troopers, using their adrenal glands to trigger brief adrenaline surges that let them punch holes through walls and lift cars for a minute before spending the next hour exhausted. Answerin are culturally largely Vilani and always led by Vilani officers, meaning they can be tricked by unusual tactics (though they’re more than smart enough to develop countermeasures every time they get caught off guard for next time); Terran troops spend a great deal of time finding ways to make them trigger their adrenaline surges in disadvantageous ways, maneuvering them into blowing their load early while the Answerin try to hold it in before can they let it out at exactly the right time.  The next race has two given names; newts (given by Terrans) and Bwaps (what they call themselves). I refuse to use that second term, so “newts” it is. They look a lot like their Terran namesakes, sitting somewhere between lizards and amphibians in appearance and requiring environmental support to keep them wet in anything under 80% humidity. While the Vilani in general don’t seem to care much about religion, newts holder theirs so close it may well be biological: they see the universe as a whole as a massive interconnected web of mutually dependent parts that all suffer when any of them fall out of place. This makes them naturally inclined towards conservative mindsets and bureaucratic positions, since just making sure the paperwork gets filed right is practically a form of prayer. Like, seriously, they enjoy being mid-level bureaucrats. The founders of the Ziru Sirka recognized the newts were even better adapted to their ideal society than Vilani themselves would ever be, so they worked them into the system as administrators across the Imperium, and even today they serve the original purpose better than the society around them. That’s the thing about them; they view corruption not just as a crime, but a sin. They certainly can flex the rules, but breaking them or bending them in ways others can exploit for their benefit disgusts them on a deep level. So your characters will likely run into them as obstructive bureaucrats at first, but if they can follow the rules better than their competitors or point out corruption, even in Vilani authorities, they can likely trust the newts to have their back. The Dishaan exemplify where Vilani cultural imperialism goes wrong. 5 foot tall, dark-furred apelike creatures with long claws, the Dishaan as a species favor competitiveness and individualism to an extent Vilani find abhorrent, but they have enough capacity to work together that the authorities keep banging their heads on the problem of assimilating them while there’s still a thin sliver of hope they can finally make them behave (if they gave up entirely, they would interdict their worlds and close them off from the galaxy). Ever since their conquest 4000 years ago, almost all Dishaan spend their whole lives under heavy surveillance, obeying Vilani cultural norms as much as possible since they know punishment waits if they step out of line. Beyond Vilani control they morph into the worst kind of capitalists, backstabbing anyone they can in pursuit of profit or power. A few Dishaan take the mindset to its natural extreme; these “wreckers”, rare in their society even in stressful conditions, will periodically get dropped in behind enemy lines as the war grows more desperate, savaging everything they find until the locals finally put them down.  The Geonee were the Vilani’s first and greatest enemy, building their own competitive empire until the Vilani ground them down over 80 years of constant war. They’ve never forgotten the insult, especially since they consider themselves older and greater than the Vilani and the descendants of the ancient Empire that spread humans across the stars. While they do have some evidence of this – they obtained the jump drive by reverse engineering it from an ancient, derelict spaceship in their home system – there isn’t much else. Geonee are slightly shorter than most humans, owing to the high gravity of their homeworld, but they differ from the baseline most in that they are almost entirely carnivores; they can eat vegetables but they can’t digest them. They also retain a highly traditionalist and unusual culture, especially when it comes to gender relations; Geonee society is highly patriarchal and only allows unmarried and unrelated individuals of different genders to meet in the presence of a special creature outsiders aren’t even sure exists. They still hate the Vilani and are just waiting to stage a revolt, but they run against Terran values in many ways; these guys make solid hold-your-nose allies. The Nugiiri are one of the strangest-looking races Terrans are likely to encounter; if you played Mass Effect, the Keepers look about right – just add wings they can use to fly in low gravity. But individuals might vary from this template substantially. The species has several biological castes with their own roles and shapes, meaning you might not even recognize them as related unless you knew better. They rarely leave their home planet, and even when they do, they tend to only leave to do something important before going home. While their society looks nothing like what the Vilani want out of their subjects, since the Nugiiri are so reclusive, the authorities rarely pay attention to them. If you’re familiar with Traveller, you may recognize the Nugiiri as the Droyne, the descendants of the species that actually transplanted humanity across the region and pulled off all sorts of feats tens of thousands of years ago. At this point the Droyne are in fact scattered across multiple worlds within the Imperium’s border, but since they’re so reclusive the Vilani don’t even realize they’re all members of the same species. The book gives a bunch of details on what is and isn’t known about them in this, but the sidebar that gives us the info really only pertains to experienced Traveller players, so eh.  The Suerrat are biologically human; their genetic code only differs slightly from that of Terrans and they are fully interfertile with all other human races. But as similar as their genotype is, their phenotype is wildly different. While all humans have fine hair on their skin, Suerrat hair grows thick, red, and long, enough for it to count as fur. They stand substantially shorter than Terrans but weigh almost as much (there’s a lot of muscle there), have lower tolerance for light, and possess a slightly different body plan (notably, they have elongated feet with prehensile big toes). They strongly identify with nature and the forests they traditionally inhabit, balancing their respect for trees with a desire for companionship that runs even deeper than in most human races. Their empire was built on slower than light generation ships instead of jump drives and the planets they settled on or often marginal at best, so by the time the Consolidation Wars swept over them they’d far outstripped the Vilani in their proficiency with life-support technology. Today, the Suerrat run a plurality of the Imperium’s life support systems in trade waystations or outposts on otherwise uninhabitable worlds, and their expertise means the Vilani give them more leeway than most subject races to shape their environment; their quarters look more like forests and often teem with animals. Right now they don’t interact much with Terrans, but tthe book tells us they’re very likely to start buying up all kinds of Terran animals to add to their menageries the moment they hear about Terra’s biodiversity.  The Vegans are definitely the weirdest looking aliens the book presents. I mean, just look at that picture. That “head” contains only an eye, for instance; they smell and hear through special apertures in their skin and possess different mouths for breathing and eating. They can’t even use the same tools as human, since those tentacle-fingers hold things fundamentally differently than human hands. However, they are emotionally very similar to humans, with the same range of desires and feelings except for one difference: intensity. Vegans just don’t feel things very strongly. They do feel, but emotion doesn’t drive Vegans the same way it does humans or other races. This can make them calculating and opportunistic, though rarely to extremes. The Vegan Polity was the furthest away spacegoing state from Vland during the Consolidation Wars and the last of fall, and its conquest was capped off by the destruction of the Polity’s second most populated planet through nuking it enough to damage the biosphere; the remaining inhabitants hate the Vilani as much as Vegans can feel hate (which is a lot). Ever since the Vegans have bided their time, knowing that they didn’t have the resources to stage a revolt and that a failed revolt could get other planets nuked into oblivion. And now that the Terran Confederation’s burst onto the scene and challenged the Vilani, they are ripe to finally stage their revolt in coordination with newfound human allies. The Imperium does have plenty of other minor races, but Terran characters are unlikely to encounter them in this period, so this is all we get. Next time, we polish off the section with an exploration of the Vilani military and finally transfer into subsector creation.
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Jul 19, 2020 20:15
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Fivemarks posted:I've been on a Fantasy Craft kick lately, so I was going to do a few posts in here genning up character concepts in the system to show it off. If you've got any concepts you'd want me to try to make, go right ahead and post 'em. Peasant Revolutionary Warrior, focusing in pole arms and wrestling.
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Jul 19, 2020 20:29
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Dallbun posted:
Pass unless the campaign is specifically about the trials and tribulations of shitfarmers. Heroes can’t be bothered by bedbugs and you’re setting up for a ten minute pest control routine at every inn your players visit for the rest of the time you play with them.
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Jul 19, 2020 21:55
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E Carceri (Chaotic Evil) Planar Traits: Normal Gravity, Normal Time, Infinite Size, Mildly Evil-Aligned, Divinely Morphic, Normal Magic Carceri petitioners are immune to cold and acid, and resistant to electricity and fire. They additionally receive +10 to Bluff checks, and cannot leave the plane by any means short of a deity's power (or comparable being's). Carceri is the great prison of the planes, a jail for traitors and deceivers. Carceri is a plane of darkness and despair, all of it inflicted by its inhabitants. Carceri is a plane that few visit, and even fewer leave. Carceri is highly unusual if not downright unique among the planes, as petitioners do not arrive here unless they have committed very specific actions in life, and the specific action (well, crime) committed determines the layer that a petitioner is sentenced to. This behavior, and the fact that petitioners cannot leave Carceri by any normal means, has lead many planar scholars to suspect that Carceri is artificial in some fashion, perhaps created by whatever power carved the tunnels of Pandemonium's lower layers. Others theorize that Carceri is a remnant of some previous cosmology, before the shape of the planes took the form of the Great Wheel. Religiously inclined scholars sometimes speculate that Carceri is made and kept this way by some grand arrangement among the gods. Regardless of the truth, only the power of a god or something equivalent can remove a Carcerian petitioner from the plane, and almost all portals to the plane are one way. Carcerian petitioners are assigned to each layer based on what crime they committed in life, but all of them betrayed someone or something important. On Carceri, they look almost or outright identical to how they appeared in life. It's only when you speak to them that differences become apparent: if they weren't already cunning, deceitful people when they got here, they invariably become so shortly after arrival. It is extremely rare for Carcerian petitioners to have any substantial memories, class levels, or skills from their former life, but all of them instinctively know what they did to get sentenced to the plane even if they lack all context. Many claim to remember some presence ordering them sent to the plane, even if your setting otherwise lacks any kind of divine judgment of the dead. Whether this is actually true, or simply a delusion of petitioners unable to accept that their own actions placed them here, is unknown. Society on Carceri tends towards the tribal. The plane is large enough that despite being a prison, normal prison society doesn't develop in most cases due to the spread out population. Most tribes of petitioners stake a claim to some resource or geographical feature, and leaders among these petitioners tend to be charismatic sorts who often claim to have a secret way to escape (which is just as likely to be a sincere delusion as it is to be a lie told to manipulate other petitioners). Many fiends and evil outsiders of various stripes come and go as they please through the plane, and some see the petitioners of Carceri as a resource, often extracting services and labor in exchange for luxuries from beyond the plane.  The structure of Carceri resembles a Matryoshka doll, each layer consisting of a spherical world punctured by voids and caverns that lead into the layer below, and other worlds on the same layer stretch away in opposite directions in a limitless chain. The next layer out is invisible from the surface of any given layer, and as such the belief that Carceri consists of six layers may well be mistaken. There might be layers further out than Orthrys, and layers deeper within than Agathys. For rather understandable reasons, most planar scholars are content to study Carceri from afar rather than visiting in person. Orthrys is the first layer, and is the prison for those who betrayed their nation or political cause. This layer is an endless marsh, dotted by rocky mountains that rise out of the muck. The River Styx winds lazily through the layer, and is the only reliable way to leave Carceri for visitors. Petitioners almost invariably hate travelers on the Styx with a homicidal passion, and will attack any craft passing through. One of the mountains rising from the fetid waters is home to a fortress of black stone known as the Bastion of the Last Hope. The Bastion is ruled by a pragmatically minded demon believed to be a lieutenant to one of the great demon lords of the Abyss - rumors disagree on who - who sees value in keeping an eye on Carceri and running a clearing house for trading information and services, though those who frequent Carceri might be even less trustworthy than Abyssals! From two of the planets of Orthrys, mountains of white stone reach so incredibly high that they meet and merge in the middle, bridging the two orbs. This twin mountain is home to an enigmatic race of titanic beings ancient beyond belief, who have carved out a palace of staggering scale and beauty here. These beings claim to be the original rulers of the planes, and that Carceri was built specifically for them in an age all others have forgotten. Whether their story is true or not, the titans do have vast repositories of genuine knowledge and magical artifacts, and they are willing to trade these gifts in exchange for assisting them in their quest to escape Carceri and retake their rightful place in the cosmos. Cathrys is a layer bursting with life, most of it extremely inimical to more normal sorts life, and is home to petitioners who betrayed reason in favor of lust or brute rage. Seas of red grass that grow taller than oceans are deep break up 'continents' of primeval jungles. The plant life in both secretes natural acid that deals constant damage to those on the plane (petitioners are, naturally, immune to acid), and the blades of the red grass are razor sharp and inflict damage every turn to those who don't make a reflex save. The only locale of any great note on Cathrys is the Apothecary of Sin, a complex of wooden huts and catwalks built atop the jungle. A demon alchemist known as Sinmaker runs the apothecary, where he experiments constantly with all manner of poisons, diseases, and acids. Any caustic or otherwise nasty substance imaginable can be found for sale here with the only question asked being 'How much do you want?,' and Sinmaker occasionally commissions visitors to retrieve exotic components from other planes for his research - he's remarkably trustworthy about such errands, paying well and on time, as his obsession leaves him rather single-minded. Minethys is an endless desert of stinging sand and harsh weather, with sandstorms driven by hurricane force winds and massive tornadoes being particularly common. This is the prison for hoarders, not merely of wealth and material goods. Most petitioners live underground, digging out meager shelters amidst the dunes. Yet there is some evidence that Minethys was once something different. The shifting sands occasionally reveal a vast city of white marble buried beneath the sand that planar scholars have dubbed Payratheon, or the Sand Tombs as they're more commonly called. Little is known of the city, but enterprising adventurers burrowing deep into the sands with the aid of  have reported petrified undead and peculiar monsters that don't appear to be fiendish in nature, and plenty of treasure. So far, however, the origins and inhabitants of the city remain a mystery.Colothys is a layer of chasms and mountains of spectacular height and steepness, nigh-impossible to navigate outside of a handful of trails carefully mapped by petitioners. These petitioners are liars whose untruths got others killed or worse, and finding an accurate map of the trails is something of a task. Parts of some orbs are covered by a strange, fast-growing vine that sprout beautiful flowers and bountiful fruit, which petitioners have dubbed 'hanging gardens.' The name doesn't mean quite what you might think: this kudzu-like plant is best avoided, as it is intelligent and reacts violently to contact, attempting to strangle or - rumors claim - infest anyone and anything that touches it. Scholars believe that there is a singular orb in this layer that is the heart of the infestation, and containing its spread is something even petitioners will work together to achieve. Should the hanging gardens manage to spread their seed beyond Carceri, wherever they spread to is likely to be in serious trouble. Porphatys is a layer where each orb is covered in a shallow, frigid sea fed constantly by black snow from the eternal layer of clouds above. Both water and snow are acid, and no structure lasts long on this layer. This is the prison for cowards, those who had the opportunity to help others but held back out of fear, and they crowd the sandbars that rise out of the acid sea. A strange white ship sails the seas and orbs of Porphatys, that moves without any visible crew or wind for its sails when the weather is calm. The so-called Ship of One Hundred is so named for the stone sarcophagi that lie on one of the lower decks, exactly one hundred of them. No one who has opened a sarcophagus has lived to tell the tale, as something always happens shortly thereafter that purges the ship of life. Some petitioners and fiends make their home aboard the ship, content to be ferried along on the ship's unknowable course, and take a very dim view of anyone who wants to open a sarcophagus or prod the ship too forcefully in an effort to study it. Agathys is the innermost known layer of Carceri, and is the prison for those who betrayed the gods (or other powerful beings, scholars and petitioners disagree, some also claim it's a prison for those who betrayed some concept of the natural order of the cosmos). Not that petitioners on Agathys are typically in any position to speak, this is a plane of killing cold, a desert of black ice broken only by petitioners frozen into the surface of the orbs. Agathys has the minor Negative-Dominant planar trait, and undead are common here. One being, however, resides on Agathys by choice: the Greyhawk deity Nerull, the god of death. Nerull's realm rises out of the ice as a vast fortress of black iron and ice, lit by lanterns that emit a pale green glow. Nerull's servants conduct experiments on the living and the dead here, and regularly sacrifice captured heroes to their god. Nerull typically resides on his throne in the center of the fortress, but sometimes disappears into tunnels below for unknown purposes. These tunnels are forbidden to all intruders, and are heavily warded against scrying magic. Next time, Hades!
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Jul 20, 2020 00:41
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Man, the Outer Planes seem way safer now than they were back in ADnD. Granted, that's a relative term, but still.
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Jul 20, 2020 01:02
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Falconier111 posted:Man, the Outer Planes seem way safer now than they were back in ADnD. Granted, that's a relative term, but still. There's gold in tourism.
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Jul 20, 2020 01:43
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 8: REVENGE OF THE NUTCRACKER In this post, we’re handling our second Gold dungeon area: Revenge of the Nutcracker. The backstory: Castle Gargantua, Page 63 posted:When the magician Drosselmeyer first explored the castle, he stumbled upon monstrous magical mice that remained from the castle’s early days. He was no match for the creatures and weaved a cunning plan to enlist a little army for free, spiriting away the lovely princess of a neighboring kingdom and taking control of the soldiers the king sent to rescue her wave after wave, turning them into wooden toys under his sway. The plan didn't work so well as the toy soldiers and the mice reached a stalemate that's now lasted for centuries. Let’s get a look at the map.  Room 1 is the front line dividing the rat and nutcracker infested areas of the castle. There’s giant furniture piled up in between to form a barricade, with three giant mice fighting twelve toy soldiers. The fight goes nowhere because neither side can get past the others’ damage resistance, and eventually the soldiers retreat, leaving the field to the mice. This shows the players that conventional weapons aren’t going to harm either side. The toy soldiers are weak to fire, while the mice are weak to your usual panoply of anti-supernatural gear: silver, cold iron, magic weapons and holy water. The mice are blind but have excellent hearing, meaning you can completely neutralize them with a Silence spell. The text doesn’t say if the mice are intelligent, only that they attack the characters if they notice them after driving off the toy soldiers. The front line has doors leading into the mouse and soldier controlled areas of the minidungeon. Room 2 is a great library, now a barracks for the toy soldiers. They were ordered to fight the mice by the wizard, and in his absence they continue to do so. They aren’t interested in the player characters at all and will ignore them unless attacked. All the books in the library are blank. Room 3 is the basement of a magical tower. There’s a painting on the ceiling of tiny angels flapping around the sky, and a big wooden nutcracker guarding the stairs upward. A Lawful aligned character who stares at the painting for more than three rounds is sucked into the painting and added to it as a new angel on a failed Save vs Magic. Hope you converted to Bacchus worship when you had the chance. The nutcracker is a wood golem. He was told to stop anyone from going up the stairs, so unlike the other toy soldiers, he’ll attack you if you try to pass. He has the same damage immunities and weaknesses as them. Room 4 is the next floor of the magic tower. This time, the ceiling tapestry is hidden above a layer of red velvet. One of the blue maidens in the painting holds a key, which is actually a real key that you can grab and use to unlock the porthole leading to the next floor. Room 5 is the hidden attic of the wizard tower. The princess the wizard kidnapped is asleep in a stasis coffin. You can break her out, but she’s not much use. She wants you to take her back to her kingdom, which doesn’t exist because it’s been hundreds of years. But the players might not know that, and she offers a reward if they do. Also, she speaks French. Room 6 is the main attic. It’s controlled by the magical mice from the first room, who retreat here after winning the skirmish with the toy soldiers. The text says it’s possible to bargain with them for safe passage, “if the characters have taken the mice’s side in their prior fight”. So I guess they’re intelligent and capable of communication after all. Anyway, the attic is full of trinkets that you roll for on a D20 table. You can just keep searching until you find everything if you want. Let’s roll a few D20s and see what we get.
Remember when I gently suggested in an earlier post that RPG modules shouldn’t instruct the DM to pull another book off the shelf and run that instead? My opinion on that hasn’t changed. Anyway, Room 7 is the Mouse Queen’s attic. A droning sound is audible from a door to the North. The Mouse Queen sits in her rocking chair, waiting for something interesting to come up the stairs. She is erudite, bipedal, wears a Tudor dress, and speaks flawless French, Russian, and Polish. A true renaissance (or is it early modern?) woman. She offers 1,000 silver if you kill all the toy soldiers, or pays out if you’ve already done so. She also warns you not to open the weird bee-sounding door, and attacks if you do. She’s got the same damage immunities as the other mice, but her gown also transforms into a rat swarm that attacks you during the fight. Room 8 is a wasp’s nest, inside which the Mouse Queen’s treasure is hidden: four gold bars, worth 1,000 silver each. The giant wasps guarding it will attack anyone who’s not her. They can be distracted with honey, but fire or smoke enrages them and gives them a bonus to hit you. Their sting permanently paralyzes you on a failed Save vs Poison, unless a Cleric casts Neutralize Poison on you. This is yet another “clever” trap that punishes the players for doing the obvious thing, with a totally illogical and dangerous result. You want to use smoke to put the wasps to sleep, instead of fighting a combat encounter? gently caress you, get paralyzed! At least they can’t open doors. And why honey? Wasps will eat anything sweet, just toss a nectarine in there and watch them go nuts. Better yet, put the nectarine inside a container they can’t fly out of. Use the junk from the attic to make a giant wasp trap.  So the wizard wanted to kill the mice, so he… made a bunch of toy soldiers that couldn’t damage the mice. He was a wizard powerful enough to turn human beings into immortal golems made of wood, but he couldn’t just hire a cleric to toss some holy water on the drat things. Or give his toy soldiers cold-iron swords. Class act. Anyway, this minidungeon is a nice blend of puzzles, combat encounters and diplomacy that doesn’t exactly astound, but is perfectly serviceable. The presentation gives some things out of order (like whether the mice can be reasoned with) and that’s going to inconvenience the DM unless you read the whole section before running it. Which is normally standard practice, except in this case it’s hampering Castle Gargantua’s procedurally generated build-it-as-you-play utility. Like with our last dungeon area, there’s no exit on the map that leads further into the dungeon. I don’t think any of the Gold areas have one. In our next update, Gold space number three: Hall of the Wondrous Pools
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Jul 20, 2020 02:27
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BinaryDoubts posted:Re: the deck of encounters, one of the cards saying it can lead to another card made me think of an adventure packaged as a deck of tarot-sized cards, one for each major encounter. You could have cards at the back with monster stats etc so you just lay 'em out in front of you according to the encounter card. Hell, you could package a basic RPG (maybe one aimed at being played while travelling) that way. Preset cards for every character, instruction cards you flip and read as you go through the adventure. I'll back that Kickstarter. Falconier111 posted:they govern the trailing part of the empire (picture a map with coreward as up and rimward as down, trailing is to the right). Hey ! Let's look at maps ! Here's the Traveller Map website set to the Interstellar Wars millieu. https://travellermap.com/?p=-7.08!-7.331!2.6&options=58359&milieu=IW Note the Coreward, Trailing, Rimward, Spinward directions. Also note that each of those fuzzy little dots is an inhabited system. Each of those is at least one jump (one week travel time) apart. There's Terra down in the bottom center and Vland about 4 sectors Coreward. That's about a three-year travel time, each way. Up at the top of the map should be a "Viewing IW data. Tap to return to M1105". Hit it, or find the Golden Age milieu in the settings at the top right. Now we're in the time period where the basic map was generated, Traveller history started here. You can see the Imperium, its neighbors Major and Minor, the big bite out of the Solomani Sphere where the Imperium obviously won a war. Zoom in. The sector names show up, you start to get the subsector grid within them, and trade routes show up in green. Zoom in again and names of governments start showing up and the hex grid this is all based on is drawn in. Push in again and subsector names appear, and worlds take on some detail; the letters are starport types with A being full-service and can build starships, blue worlds have liquid water, a dot at about 2 o'clock indicates a gas giant, and more icons start to fill in. Keep zooming in and you'll get world names, and a string of numbers and letters called the Universal World Profile which gives details about breathing the air, how may people live there, and what their government is like. I absolutely love this site. Falconier111 posted:Odds are low, but extant. See, I’d have to buy it first No, no you don't. If you'll review it, I'll provide it. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 02:28
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I find it hard to square the "mice versus wooden soldiers" dungeon with the other parts of Gargantua where you can get cursed into eternal horniness by a satyr or whatever. Great concept, though.
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Jul 20, 2020 04:13
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So, Fantasy Craft. I'm not sure that this is going to be a full deep dive into Fantasy Craft itself, though that would probably be a very good thing- instead, this is going to be a probable ongoing thing where people throw a concept at me, I see if it's workable or not in Fantasy Craft, and then try to make it if it is. Not too hard, but still a good way of showing off the flexibility and wide range of characters you can make in the system, which some people have called "3.x and Pathfinder done right." To be honest, I'd agree with them on that, though with the ongoing non-release of Spellbound, its in the ironic position of spellcasters not being as supported as everyone else; a fair difference from Spellcaster Edition and Spellcaster Edition with more chudness. With all of that said, I'm going to get started with the first installment of "Five's FantasyCraft Funtimes on FATAL and Friends." Our first character is going to be something I particularly had fun playing in one session before the DM said that casters were too weak and tried to switch us to Pathfinder: A Half Orc Samurai, eager to prove themself to anyone who doubts him. That concept gives us a few things to start with making our character. They are a half orc, which means we'll need to make them a half orc. They're a samurai, which means they'll need to be able to do certain things: Fight with sword and spear, use a bow, ride a horse, and do noble and/or aristocratic stuff. Fortunately, these are all fairly easy to do. Step 1) Attributes With our concept set, we move on to choosing our character's attributes. There are six Attributes in FantasyCraft: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. Each Attribute does a thing, and Craft appears to have tried to avoid making Dexterity the godstat for martials and Intelligence the actual godstat for everything else.  Rather than roll for Attributes, Fantasycraft has all Attributes purchased by way of a 36 point pointbuy system- the lowest you can buy, 8, costs 0 while the highest you can buy, 18, costs 22 points. To me, 36 points splits the difference between feeling too powerful and starting out weak.  Spending all of our points, I went with a spread of 14, 14, 14, 12, 10, 10 before assigning them to Attributes. Now, for our Samurai, we'll need a fairly balanced array of stats: Strength for fighting in melee, Dexterity for avoiding attacks and firing a bow, Constitution for being tough, and Charisma for handling court and social situations. With Strength, Dex, and Charisma being the most important, they'll get the highest attributes, followed by Con, followed by the remainder going to Int and Wis. This gives us the following Attributes: 14 Strength 14 Dexterity 12 Constitution 10 Intelligence 10 Wisdom 14 Charisma. Now with our attributes chosen, we move on to Step 2. Step 2) Origin Origin is a catchall term, this is the stage at which we choose our character's Origin Skills, Species and Speciality, and a talent if our character is human. Origin Skills are two skills that we choose at our Origin that are always going to be Class Skills for this character. For this character, I'll pick Search and Sense Motive. Search, because one can never be too on guard for assassins, and Sense Motive because it helps to be able to read people. Because our concept calls for us playing a Half Orc, we'll have to look at the available Species.
In addition to these 12 races, there are Species Feats, which can be purchased using the level 1 Feat that all characters get. Species Feats are anything from "You're a drow now" to special abilities only available to a certain species. Some of these Species Feats are mutually exclusive with others. For our Samurai, since we want to play a Half Orc, we'll have to go with Human, which means choosing a Talent. There are a lot of talents, so many that I'm not really going to list them, but trust me that they're a bunch of 'em. The Talent I went with is Industrious: It increases Constitution by 1, sets our Base Speed to 30 ft, and gives us a few benefits
Onward to finishing up Origin. With our Race and Talent chosen, we move on to choosing our Specialty. Again, there are a lot of these, so I won't be listing them all. For our Samurai, I've chosen Cavalier. Cavalier helps us be better at fighting on horseback and being a noble horseman.
Brief Sidetrack: Feats So, Feats have come up early in this, which means now's as good of a time as any to talk about them. Feats are much as they are in 3.5 or Pathfinder, with the exception that they're all actually good, useful, and things like system Mastery aren't a thing. Let's look at the three feats we've picked up: Orc Blood, to represent this character being a Half Orc, Yeoman's Work, and Favored Gear Orc Blood is a Blood feat, which means we can't take any more Blood style feats with it. It also has to be taken at level 1, taking up this character's level 1 feat slot. The benefits are pretty nice, though: the higher of our Strength or Constitution scores rises by 1, and we gain the Grueling Combatant quality as if we were an Orc. We also get to pick Orc only feats. Yeoman's Work, on the other hand, is a gear feat. It does one thing, but that's important: It gives us +3 Prudence, which will be important when we get to talking about that when we finish up our character Favored Gear is another Gear Feat. The version we got is specific to a mount, but in general, Favored Gear lets us choose 1 specific piece of Gear that we own, and lets us roll 2 Action Die whenever we spend 1 to boost a skill or attack check with it. The Item also can't be destroyed with a critical miss or a failure, and we can switch it whenever we gain a class level. With all of that done, We have the basic skeleton of our character before we get them into a class and give them interests and equipment. Step 3) Class There are a number of base classes available in Fantasy Craft- for this character, who is supposed to be a Samurai, there's no real choice however. We're making our Half Orc a Lancer. A Lancer is, in the book, said to have the party role of "Combatant/Talker". They're focused on mounted combat, with an additional focus on translating their horseback abilities to social situations. Example Lancers are a Prosperous Nomad, a Chivalrous Nomad, a Samurai Warrior, a bold Tribesman, and a Wyrm Rider. Yeah, Lancer is definitely what we're going with. So, Lancer has the following class Skills: Athletics, Impress, Intimidate, Notice, Resolve, Ride, Survival, and Tactics. It gives 4 + Intelligence Modifier skill points per level, times 4 at level 1, so we have 16 skill points to spend on those eight skills, and our two Origin Skills. Max Skill Rank at level 1 is 4, so with that? We could also, based on our Enlightened Crafting ability from Industrious, boost craft up if we wanted to make stuff.
Lancer Starts with 12+ Con Modifier Vitality, meaning we've got 13 Vitality to accompany our 13 Wounds. Then starting Lancers have 6 Proficiencies. Proficiencies in Fantasy Craft can be used to gain Proficiency in a class of weapons, used to increase a Proficiency to a Forte, or spent to obtain Tricks. Having a Forte in a weapon group gives you +1 to attacks made with weapons in that group, and let you use weapons in that group that require a Forte. Tricks are special things you can do in combat or that enhance your attacks. Because our Samurai should be good at Swords and Spears and Bows, and we have six Proficiencies, I choose to spend four of my Proficiencies on getting Edged Forte and Bow Forte. The remaining two we'll spend on Tricks: Mixup twice, once for Feint, and once for Trip. Now let's look at what Lancer gives us at Level 1 off of it's chart. It has a Base Attack Bonus of +1, A Fortitude save of +1, a Reflex Save of +0, and a Will save of +1. It has a Defense bonus of +0, a bonus to Initiative of +2, a Lifestyle bonus of +2, and a Legend of +0. The Core Ability of Lancer is Lifetime Companion, while we get the Class Ability Born In the Saddle at this level. Lifetime Companion gives a Lancer a mount as per the Animal Partner feat. In addition to the bonuses from Animal Partner, the mount gets replaced at no cost if lost or killed. The Lancer also gets a 20% discount to buy Mounts and Mount Accessories. Animal Partner gives the person who takes it an animal NPC with an XP value equal to or less than 50 + 5x the number of permanant terrain feats you have. This NPC is a special character, meaning it doesn't die as easily. We're getting a horse. Born in the Saddle, on the otherhand, makes us better at both riding stuff and at intimidating people. Whenever we fail an Intimidate or Ride Check and don't suffer an error, we still suceed so long as the check DC (or our opponent's check result) is equal to or less than our Class Level + 20. With our class done, we move on, then, to our interests Step 4) Interests Interests are things like an Alignment, Languages, and Studies. Alignments are, rather than a set grid like in 3.x, more akin to a choice to follow a god, a code of honor, kinship with a powerful force, or whatever; in campaigns with Miracles active, Alignments are needed to get divine spells. Languages are, well, languages. Each Language counts as 1 Interest. Studies are a bit more... Loose. A study is just something that a character takes time to learn about. When a GM and you agree that a study relates to a skill check, you get a +1 bonus with that check. When a study relates to a Knowledge Check, you get 1 additional hint. Sharing a study with an NPC gives a +1 bonus to skill checks made to improve their Disposition. Characters start out with four Interests: A language, a Study in our native culture and homeland, and 2 additional Interests. Step 5) Finishing Up Okay, now we're just finishing up on this character. Action Die, which are important at always in good supply, are determined at a base level based on your level. At level 1, we've got 3#d4 Action Die to play with. Money in Fantasy Craft is handled by Coin, which is split into two basic types, both represented in general by silver pieces. There is Cash in Hand, which is the amount of money a character has acquired in the current adventure, and can be spent freely; and Stake, which is all the money put away over time for major purchases and times of need. Stake can only be used while in a city or visiting your home. At the end of adventures, you can transfer a certain amount of coin in hand into your stake; the rest gets spent automatically during Downtime. As a new character, we start with 100 Silver x our Career level, so 100. Lifestyle is important. It determines both a character's general style, and our knack for handling money. Lifestyle itself is divided into Panache and Prudence: Panache is our style, Prudence our money handling. Lifestyle is gained from our level in our class, along with benefits from some feats and Origins. Our Samurai has a total of 5 Lifestyle: 2 from being a level 1 Lancer, and 3 Prudence from Yeoman's Work. For the sake of having money, we put our 2 Lifestyle into Panache, meaning that we have the following benefits: We have a +1 Appearance bonus, which gives a bonus per point over another character's Appearance to Charisma based skill checks, and an income of 20s per month. Our 3 Prudence means that we convert 30% of our cash in hand into stake.  We also have 10 Reputation- Reputation is used ot purchase Renown, advancing along the Heroic, Military, and Noble Renown Tracks. The higher your renown is, the more people know who you are, the more Prizes (Read: Magic Items) you can have and keep, and the more favors you can get. Unfortunately, we start with 10 Reputation, which isn't enough to purchase Renown.  We do have 100 Silver, though, meaning we can afford to purchase some equipment. Armor: Armor is expensive, because of course it is. Defenses in FantasyCraft don't follow the classic 3.5 "More armor makes you harder to hit" thing; Instead you have Defense, which is based on your Dexterity and own abilities, which enemies roll against to hit you. Then you have Damage Reduction, which is given by armor and some other effects, which reduces the damage done to you. Weapons: Weapons are fairly self explainitory. Some need multiple hands to hold, some Siege weapons are too large for a normal sized character to wield, while the more powerful weapons require a Forte to use. Bows and crossbow are special- rather than each individual bow and crossbow do different damage, damage is determined by the arrow used, with most arrows and bolts doing 1d6 damage. Bows determine range and give additional qualities. Guns, on the other hand, have damage determined by the weapon being used, but do vastly more damage in exchange for some combination of taking time to load, having the unreliable tag, or both. A Dueling Pistol will do 3d4 damage and crit on an 18-20, but will malfunction on the roll of a 1, 2 or 3, and takes 7 handle item actions to reload. Our Samurai has 100 Silver, which isn't much. What we can afford is a Short Bow to use on Horseback, a Cavalry Axe until they can afford/earn a Katana, and Partial Studded Leather Armor, leaving them with 5 Silver remaining. With that, beyond fluff, our character is finished. While I know some people have problems with FC's character creation, I think it's fun. The Last Orcish Samurai  Initiative: +4 Damage Reduction: 2 Defense: 11 (10+2(Dex)-1(Armor Defense Penalty)) Vitality: 13 Wounds: 13 Fortitude Save: 2 Reflex Save: 2 Will Save: 1 Cavalry Axe Attack: +4(2+1+1) to Hit, Crit on a 20, 1d8+3 Lethal Damage, AP 2 (ignores 2 DR), Cavalry (No Penalties when mounted) Shortbow Attack: +4(2+1+1) To hit, Crit on a 19-20, 1d6+2 Lethal Damage, AP 2 (Ignores 2 DR) with Standard Arrows, Poisonous (Can be poisoned), Cavalry (No Penalties when Mounted) 15 Arrows. Tricks:
Attributes:
Skills:
Qualities:
Feats:
Lifestyle: 2 Panache(+1 Appearance Bonus, 20s), 3 Prudence (30% Money Saved/Earned) Reputation: 10 Renown: 0 Interests: Orcish, Orkkaido Culture Study, Bushido Study, Equestrian Study.
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Jul 20, 2020 04:27
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BinaryDoubts posted:I find it hard to square the "mice versus wooden soldiers" dungeon with the other parts of Gargantua where you can get cursed into eternal horniness by a satyr or whatever. Great concept, though. Yeah, it's kind of like turning the corner and suddenly finding a Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland homage. It might be neat, but the tone doesn't mesh well with all the random cannibals, sex dungeons, and grotesque horrors in the other rooms.
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Jul 20, 2020 05:40
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