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Grey Hunter posted:My group and I had one of those off the wall world building moments last night. Wonderful stuff here!
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 12:45 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 14:20 |
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, Critical Race Theory is welcome at his table - how else will we warn future generations about the evils of kenders? Ibram X. Kender
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 13:30 |
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Grey Hunter posted:Default on your loans, lose your bones. My current setting is recovering from an apocalyptic event and doesn't have much use for centralized banking, but there's absolutely a world where Fourth Circle Savings and Loan is a major power. Any warlock will tell you that their collateral is unusual but their rates vey reasonable, and that you can easily earn your soul back by 14th level. For those not interest in power, coins and other valuables you store with the bank can be accessed from anywhere on the material plane from your obsidian card.
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 19:05 |
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Captain Walker posted:My current setting is recovering from an apocalyptic event and doesn't have much use for centralized banking, but there's absolutely a world where Fourth Circle Savings and Loan is a major power. Any warlock will tell you that their collateral is unusual but their rates vey reasonable, and that you can easily earn your soul back by 14th level. For those not interest in power, coins and other valuables you store with the bank can be accessed from anywhere on the material plane from your obsidian card. "You have a Sending incoming. Good afternoon. This is *tortured screams of the damned* Sending from the Second Bank of Dispater, calling in reference to an overdraft on your account. It seems you cast Hellish Rebuke three times today, but only have two spell slots for it. We have applied a penalty fee on your soul to cover this delinquency."
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 19:14 |
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goddammit now my soul is short a finger and it's gonna affect my spellcasting
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 19:19 |
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Grey Hunter posted:My group and I had one of those off the wall world building moments last night. I work in finance and this is all 100% accurate, good job
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 19:30 |
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You know it might be sexist, but instead of carrying around shrunken heads, perhaps gold plated severed testicles Because when it comes to predatory banks, my mind always jumps to gold man-sacks
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 21:24 |
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CzarChasm posted:You know it might be sexist, but instead of carrying around shrunken heads, perhaps gold plated severed testicles What about an excessively macho fairy? Hard to beat Manny Fae.
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# ? Jan 31, 2022 21:31 |
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A Scrying spell courtesy of Pee-N-See.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 01:33 |
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Fantasy mimicking technology is funny and all, but the opposite leaves a much stronger impress if your setting supports it. In Shin Megami Tensei IV, the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado hosts an order of elite demon-fighting warriors called Samurai, chosen by powerful relics called Gauntlets by the sages of the Monastery. Each Gauntlet is inhabited by a sprite named Burroughs, who calls her master by name and assists Samurai commanders in scrying on the knights under their command. It's obvious to the player that the Gauntlet is some kind of high tech device; "being chosen" literally involves touching the bottom screen on the 3DS, which then reads USER RECOGNIZED in "the mystic script" (presumably hiragana and modern kanji, as opposed to the more archaic written Japanese seen elsewhere). Burroughs is a built in AI capable of distinguishing between users and transmitting their positions. A major plot point is that the characters have no frame of reference for these things; all printed material approved by the Monastery is history, liturgy, praise of God, or all three. A big plot beat early on is the introduction of "Literature" to Mikado, including a story about a female knight in a fictional kingdom called France. When you later descend to the country of the Unclean Ones, those not chosen by God to live in Mikado, series veterans will quickly recognize Tokyo, post demon apocalypse. Anyway, back to infernal financial institutions: CobiWann posted:"This is *tortured screams of the damned* Sending from the Second Bank of Dispater," The browser game Fallen London is so named because it takes place in a London that has been swallowed into the underground by enigmatic Masters of the Bazaar. One of my favorite item descriptions is Nevercold Brass; Hell is literally just up the river, and it's described as their chief export. "You thought that was souls? No, they don't export souls."
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 18:01 |
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Working back through the thread, butFreshFeesh posted:They apparently felt that it was "unfair" that I rolled better stats
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# ? Feb 2, 2022 01:44 |
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Posting this solely because of the thread title - my DM is going to be co-hosting a Q&A Livestream on YouTube tonight (Friday, 4 February) at 6 PM EST. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08PhoohlBe8
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# ? Feb 4, 2022 12:57 |
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According to my DM, the spell is Heat Metal, not Detect Piercings.
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# ? Feb 12, 2022 00:36 |
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, the spell is Heat Metal, not Detect Piercings. Heating piercings you can't see sounds like a form of sexual harassment.
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# ? Feb 12, 2022 03:57 |
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In the weekly D&D game I run, the party has for some time been in possession of an egg which will pop out a little friendly critter every few days if attuned to. So far they have found a baby piercer, a tiny swarm of bees which can find fresh groundwater, and a spider whose harmless bite grants resistance to cold for 24 hours. Mostly goofy flavor stuff to inject some levity into an otherwise severe, end-of-the-world kind of quest. This morning the bard woke up to the feeling of something scaly winding its way up their leg. Freaking out, they jumped out of bed and discovered that there was a small snake, perhaps 1 foot long and with opalescent scales, glowing with a soft warm light in the covers. Deciding that someone was trying to assassinate him, he took a spear andЧcritical hitЧkilled the 2 hp beast. Realizing what had actually happened only while recounting the tale over breakfast with the rest of the party, he grew sullen and returned to his room. The cleric, wanting to help, went out into the town's large bazaar and spent all of his coin on a baby colobus monkey for the bard, and happily presented this new pet (obligation) as a way to "get him back in good spirits." The party then proceeded to spend the rest of the session gearing up to make sure they had everything the monkey would need to grow up healthy and strong as they continued their adventures, going so far as to lash some tree limbs to their pack donkey so it would have somewhere to climb. Honestly, it could have gone a lot worse.
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# ? Feb 14, 2022 09:07 |
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I love organic, improvised "bottle episodes" in tabletop games. We had a wild session in our group's Hawaii Mage 20 game on Saturday. The cast: Cezar: a recently retired Brazilian MMA fighter and family man, and a big gregarious teddy bear despite his profession. His magical paradigm is transcendentalism by way of sacred combat and rituals of blood and ordeal and meditation. Specialties: Mind and Time. Aroha: a soft-hearted Maori scuba instructor trying to atone for some of her ancestor's spiritual damage and trying to make her way as an adopted mother to her niece. Her paradigm is traditional Maori shamanism using song, haka, bodywork, and traditional medicines. Specialties: Life and Spirit. Doc: a misanthropic chemist holding two PhDs but who is also a goony goon, so he spends most of his time making drugs and selling what he doesn't use. His paradigm is "neo-alchemy," so think science and math but in a way that makes no sense and pisses off the Technocracy. Specialties: Matter and Forces. Adam: a British (?) transplant who is a metaphysical embodiment of The Green Man (and a number of other parallel wizards of lore), up to and including an androgynous bearing and arcane field that renders them hard to grasp or remember. Their paradigm is more traditional wizard poo poo: symbology, ritual circles, etc. Specialties: Prime and Entropy. The campaign thus far has centered around the relationship between the native Hawaiian Kopa Loei mages, the Technocratic capitalists muscling in on them, and the Tradition mages as the OG "colonists" as far as the Kopa Loei are concerned. As Tradition mages, we've been carefully nursing a fragile peace between the Technocrats and us, all while trying to help the Kopa Loei take their land back literally and spiritually (and necessarily undermining the Technocracy in the process). This has all led, in one way or another, to a bout between Cezar and his old nemesis, a fighter named Damien Faas. The bout is promoted as Cezar, a former champion, coming out of recent retirement to fight his rival to raise money for charity. (The charity is the Kopa Loei's fund for indigenous rights and land reclamation in Hawaii.) The fight is to be the inaugural event at a new casino opening in Honolulu which the Technocrats own. So about Damien: he is also a mage, and has been trying to pull Cezar into a sadistic, forbidden sect of their common tradition for years. He is also a piece of poo poo as an MMA fighter and fights dirty. Cezar hates his guts and has beaten him in all three of their professional bouts. Saturday's game was a five-round bout with several rounds of combat to extrapolate each round. Aroha is brought into Cezar's corner team as backup. Between those rounds, Doc and Adam would be acting elsewhere in the casino, doing heist poo poo against the Technocracy. The fight goes according to plan for Cezar: he roundly beats Damien over the course of three rounds. Damien tries some underhanded poo poo, but is fended off. In the end of the third round he goes as far as to use a Time effect to get just enough extra actions that it is noticeable to the thousands of mundane onlookers. Both had been using magic to buff themselves but had been doing it subtly, so that the crowd wouldn't notice anything. This is a huge risk to trigger a paradox backlash, but Damien gets away with it for now. Going into the fourth round, he starts acting weird. He begins taunting Cezar takes a clean combination right to the dome...and someone in his corner falls down instead. He's using a vulgar Life and/or Correspondence effect to sink his damage into his fight club flunkies. Aroha works to neutralize this on the sideline while Cezar just resolves himself to win on points. He's way ahead on the scorecard, so he stays the course. Halfway through round five, the final round, Cezar reverses a grapple and puts Damien into a hold. Even sinking the actual damage into his minions, Damien is hosed by this and if he were a normal person he would pretty much have to tap out. But he's not a normal person. His eyes roll into the back of his head and he croaks out a laugh. Cezar is sitting on him using his arms and legs to choke out Damien. Then the lights go out al over the arena. No one can see anything, not even emergency lighting. The crowd gasps and falls more or less silent in the seconds of apprehension that follow. Only Damien's laughter is heard in the darkness. When the lights come up ten seconds later, Damien has a knife jammed in his ribs, and one of his minions has put his own loving eyes out with huge pins. The crowd sees this, panics, and then falls prey to the real goal of this stunt: they lose their gatdamn minds. They start rioting and attacking each other. Damien has used the combat as a ritual to trigger something he had going on with his followers and driven the arena insane. Aroha suspects that the guy with the pins in his eyes is the willing sacrifice to finish the job. She works feverishly to use Life magic to save the guy while she hopes the crowd doesn't tear him (or her too) to pieces first. Meanwhile, the heist group of Doc and Adam just noticed a Kopa Loei mage beat them to their own heist, and then the lights went out on them too. The lights come back on just in time for them to give chase to the Kopa Loei mage with whom we thought we had an understanding. Cezar is left sitting atop Damien and his increasingly ragged laughter. There's definitely a knife in his ribs, and the crowd is starting to yell that Cezar did it. He didn't, but he's been here before, in a way. He killed another kid when he was a teen growing up in a favella outside of Curitiba. It was an accident in a rolling brawl and the other kid just, like, ended up with a knife in his ribs, with Cezar sitting on top of him. The similarity is not lost on him. See, Cezar sometimes gets unstuck in time. It's part of how his magic first manifested. He gets flashbacks sometimes that he's not quite sure are past or future or present... The session ends on the cusp of a willpower roll against Cezar's flashbacks. If he fends it off, he can use Mind magic to calm the crowd. If he doesn't, poo poo's going to get real weird.
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# ? Feb 15, 2022 02:34 |
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Railing Kill posted:I love organic, improvised "bottle episodes" in tabletop games. My favorite "bottle episode" was when the child of two of my players managed to injure himself and so all of them had to leave. The other players didn't want to advance the plot but they still wanted to play. I had absolutely no side quests planned so I ripped off the episode of Star Trek DS9 where Jake and Nog buy a ton of packets of a condiment called "Yamok sauce" from Quark and keep on trading until they end up with a plot of land that they sell for a ton of money. Bam, the tavern owner has found himself with four barrels of yamok sauce thanks to his incompetent employee, which everybody knows is a dwarven delicacy and there aren't many dwarves in the village. We improvised a ridiculous series of trades and at the end of it they were rewarded with some minor magic items and a grateful tavern owner who would help them out in the future. For the record we decided that yamok sauce tastes like dirt but somehow spicy.
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 06:18 |
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Haschel Cedricson posted:had absolutely no side quests planned so I ripped off the episode of Star Trek DS9 where Jake and Nog buy a ton of packets of a condiment called "Yamok sauce" from Quark and keep on trading until they end up with a plot of land that they sell for a ton of money. I think there's a Japanese folk tale along these lines. Multiple JRPGs have a trading duel sidequest where you and a rival start with something like a pair of chopsticks, useless to you but valuable to someone else, and after enough trades you end up with something worth big еее.
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 18:26 |
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Haschel Cedricson posted:My favorite "bottle episode" was when the child of two of my players managed to injure himself and so all of them had to leave. The other players didn't want to advance the plot but they still wanted to play. I had absolutely no side quests planned so I ripped off the episode of Star Trek DS9 where Jake and Nog buy a ton of packets of a condiment called "Yamok sauce" from Quark and keep on trading until they end up with a plot of land that they sell for a ton of money. I heartily approve of this whole story, for many reasons.
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 20:50 |
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Haschel Cedricson posted:For the record we decided that yamok sauce tastes like dirt but somehow spicy. so it's just sauce made from freshly ground pepper
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 21:07 |
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A Cardassian chef invented this one weird trick for seasoning. Bajorans hate him!
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 21:17 |
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IcePhoenix posted:so it's just sauce made from freshly ground pepper Dirt but spicy is how my dad characterizes radish
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 22:36 |
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Captain Walker posted:I think there's a Japanese folk tale along these lines. Multiple JRPGs have a trading duel sidequest where you and a rival start with something like a pair of chopsticks, useless to you but valuable to someone else, and after enough trades you end up with something worth big еее. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Millionaire
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 22:54 |
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Haschel Cedricson posted:My favorite "bottle episode" was when the child of two of my players managed to injure himself and so all of them had to leave. The other players didn't want to advance the plot but they still wanted to play. I had absolutely no side quests planned so I ripped off the episode of Star Trek DS9 where Jake and Nog buy a ton of packets of a condiment called "Yamok sauce" from Quark and keep on trading until they end up with a plot of land that they sell for a ton of money. I am stealing this whole thing for the next "random tavern event".
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# ? Feb 18, 2022 22:58 |
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Notable Gaming Experiences: we decided that yamok sauce tastes like dirt but somehow spicy.
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# ? Feb 19, 2022 23:15 |
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Phy posted:Dirt but spicy is how my dad characterizes radish I like to eat sliced radishes with salty crisps.
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# ? Feb 20, 2022 16:26 |
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There is a real life American example; One Red Paperclip which ends up with a house.
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# ? Feb 21, 2022 10:28 |
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I wish that I could remember more of this, but time and too many concussions have taken their toll. In any event, it was art imitating life or however that's said. In the Forgotten Realms cannon, Cyric conspired with Shar to destroy Midnight/Mystra, which I believe was what brought on the transition to 4th edition in the Realms. In our campaign long years ago, well before this was cannon, I had a slightly irregular svirfneblin thief/illusionist who started out dual class but, when he was about level 9/7, I asked my DM for permission to stop advancing as a thief, mostly because thieves were kind of shite in 2e, and he let me do that. This character was level 9/28, I believe, and the only character that I have ever had ascend to godhood. Svirfneblin are by nature a gloomy, grim group mostly due to being in the Underdark surrounded at all tiems by people who want them dead, but my guy was a wise-cracking irreverant prankster who came to the surface largely because he was tired of being surrounded by hostile drow, duergar, mind flayers and the like. In our game Cyric (acting alone; Shar didn't figure into our cannon), was trying - not surprisingly - to kill Mystra and our party of epic-level characters was trying to stop him. The novel 'Crucible' hadn't come out yet I believe but Cyrinishad had, and we had followed the FR cannon up until this point except that in our universe Kelemvor had taken a stance of neutrality despite his former relationship with Mystra, which was at least fitting as a LN god of the dead. There was no way we could thwart a greater deity by ourselves, with the unwritten rule in FR being that only powers can destroy powers, so we had to make a deal with the devil... in this case nearly literally, as it was Mask. the god of thieves. Mask's avatar during and after the Time of Troubles was the sword Godsbane, which Cyric had destroyed when he went insane. Mask had fallen from an intermediate power to a demipower and was barely able to make it back to a lesser power. Cyric had stolen his portfolio over intrigue and possibly lies, and Mask wanted it back. In the end, Cyric was thwarted (there was no way we could actually destroy him). Mask took back the portfoilio of lies and intrigue and rose back to an intermediate power. My character became a demi-power in the service of a grateful Mystra and took the portfolio over illusions and illusionists that Cyric had stolen from Leira, who he killed during the ToT, as well as the additional portfolio of mischief and pranks, while also making a very dangerous enemy and having an uneasy and untrustworthy ally in Mask. Cyric remained a greater power because he still had strife, death and a bunch of other things in his portfolio. I'm sad that that campaign ended there, but I also don't know how it could have carried on. I decided to post this now because something reminded me recently that Cyric & Shar had assassinated Mystra and it led to an edition change, and this was something quite similar that ended differently a good 10 years before it was published fantasy history.
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# ? Feb 26, 2022 04:45 |
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According to my DM, my Warlock's familiar has the right to join a union.
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# ? Feb 27, 2022 01:10 |
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Oh, I also just remembered that, in cannon at this time, Waukeen the goddess of merchants and trade was missing and Leera (not the same as Leira, who was proper dead), goddess of joy and parties, was holding her divine portfolio. Later on in official material Waukeen was rescued by adventurers, but in our world we had Leera subume her portfolio and rank up to an Intermediate Power because we liked the idea of a bunch of greedy, bean-counting merchants trying to get along with another group of silly, professional party planners.
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# ? Feb 27, 2022 03:05 |
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JustJeff88 posted:we liked the idea of a bunch of greedy, bean-counting merchants trying to get along with another group of silly, professional party planners. This is how you get Spirit Halloween in Faerun.
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# ? Feb 27, 2022 06:31 |
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the_steve posted:This is how you get Spirit Halloween in Faerun. I admit that I had to look this up.
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# ? Feb 27, 2022 06:45 |
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, my Warlock's familiar has the right to join a union. drat straight they do
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# ? Feb 27, 2022 09:37 |
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I don't have a specific story to post, I just wanted to tell y'all about a cool thing that happened. In 2015, Covok posted a recruitment thread to play Urban Shadows, and I signed up, along with Mistaya, SevenSocks, and Terminal Blue. It was a voice chat game that met once a week, Wednesday evening. We played the game for like 7 months, until it ended naturally. We also played a short (5-ish session) game of Apoc World and some Atomic Robo, and then Covok stepped away1. The rest of us, however, kept playing. Terminal Blue also started up a Sprawl game alongside (on Sundays) that ran for about a year, and some of those players joined the main group for another game or two once that ended. Overall, though, it was the four of us, playing week in and out, for years. We played tons of short campaigns2, usually 8-12 sessions, including 1980s Miami Urban Shadows, sky pirate Thirsty Sword Lesbians, a few different Apoc World games, Monsterhearts, some cool one-shots and playtests, and everything in between. Unfortunately, finally, due to scheduling conflicts and life moving on, we decided last week to call it quits. But I'd like to thank all of them for playing so long with me, and I just want to say that SA is a pretty cool place to find a group. 1. It's possible there was another game in there? It was a long time ago. 2. Mostly PbtA, but also some BitD and even Shadowrun 1E.
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 01:39 |
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QuantumNinja posted:I don't have a specific story to post, I just wanted to tell y'all about a cool thing that happened. In 2015, Covok posted a recruitment thread to play Urban Shadows, and I signed up, along with Mistaya, SevenSocks, and Terminal Blue. It was a voice chat game that met once a week, Wednesday evening. We played the game for like 7 months, until it ended naturally. We also played a short (5-ish session) game of Apoc World and some Atomic Robo, and then Covok stepped away1. The rest of us, however, kept playing. Terminal Blue also started up a Sprawl game alongside (on Sundays) that ran for about a year, and some of those players joined the main group for another game or two once that ended. Overall, though, it was the four of us, playing week in and out, for years. We played tons of short campaigns2, usually 8-12 sessions, including 1980s Miami Urban Shadows, sky pirate Thirsty Sword Lesbians, a few different Apoc World games, Monsterhearts, some cool one-shots and playtests, and everything in between. Unfortunately, finally, due to scheduling conflicts and life moving on, we decided last week to call it quits. But I'd like to thank all of them for playing so long with me, and I just want to say that SA is a pretty cool place to find a group. I'm not crying you're crying Seriously, though, this is wonderful and heartwarming.
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 02:30 |
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Was it Covok that ran a bunch of campaigns on the LP subforum ages ago or am I thinking of someone else? Because I somehow still remember bits and pieces of some Shadowrun campaign with a troll/orc who wore hawaii shirts and some Urban Fantasy campaign that had a bear running a restaurant and no one batted an eyelid about that outside the part.
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 02:46 |
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Our DM had this model hidden at work for the past three years, waiting for the perfect moment to spring it on us. A loving DOOR mimic.
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 03:45 |
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I don't have a cool story or anything to go with it but today I got to do a 90 ft piledriver to a Hag
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 03:57 |
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QuantumNinja posted:Apoc World / Monsterhearts Did you try MH because of Apocalypse World? Both of those have always interested me.. The 'messy lives of teenage monsters' makes me giggle and I'm really curious what you thought of Monsterhearts. They're both a devilishly simple system and I love the concept of strings.
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 16:11 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 14:20 |
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IcePhoenix posted:I don't have a cool story or anything to go with it but today I got to do a 90 ft piledriver to a Hag BAH GAWD
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# ? Feb 28, 2022 19:20 |