Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Haschel Cedricson
Jan 4, 2006

Brinkmanship

I don't know about Blaggutt the Chair Maker, but Blaggut the Boat Builder had one of the best character arcs in Redwall. :unsmith:

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Haschel Cedricson posted:

I don't know about Blaggutt the Chair Maker, but Blaggut the Boat Builder had one of the best character arcs in Redwall. :unsmith:

:respek:

I stole the name and a piece of his story. I couldn't resist.

Ichabod Sexbeast posted:

Blaggut the Chair Maker! Talks! Like DUFFMAN! Oh yeahhhh!

lol

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

While questioning the Deep One they captured in X-COM Files RPG, the players discovered he used to keep domesticated giant squid in his home by the volcanic vents before he joined the army. One player brought up that that means sperm whales were probably a nuisance species murdering his livestock. And so it is. Fishmen chasing sperm whales off their property angrily to keep them from eating their squid.

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!
According to my DM, using the Forgery skill, Mending, and Unseen Servant to mess with the Big Bad's bedside book of sudoku puzzles is a bridge too far.

CobiWann fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Oct 19, 2022

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

CobiWann posted:

According to my DM, using the Forgery skill, Mending, and Unseen Servant to mess with the Big Bad's bedside book of sudoku puzzles is a bridge too far.

As someone who doesn't like Sudoku, your DM is wrong.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

you should have cast exploding runes instead

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Ran all the antichrist’s men, One of my favorite spirit of 77 adventures, and it went weird. Normally, the adventure focuses on the evil Prentice corporation, but this time it was an all out musical battle against satan at a Fourth of July fundraiser. Luckily the players won.

Since both that and BEAST: bound and down are both set around July 4, but I didn’t have the same playgroup for either, both adventures presumably happened simultaneously. (It was also a rare episode of beast, because the players solved every problem within the first hour, making me scrounge up a plot where the evil sheriff, brewery owner and mafia try and get revenge. The players had a little more trouble than one, but not particularly much!)

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I'm going to be running a new Double Cross game about a world beset by Isekai protagonists and other evils, from the perspective of a group of them that are not trying to force the world to coddle their egos. One player decided to make Susan from Narnia, with the idea that this is where she went after Aslan rejected her before the Last Battle in one of the weirdest moves among C. S. Lewis's many weird moves.

Then another player made a character from a gentle post apocalypse, a chronicler who has been wandering through the snows trying to archive everything and learn everything before she accidentally turned on a self-driving food truck and got truck kunned. Except she dresses in white winter gear, has white hair, and ice powers. She is a white witch.

I very much look forward to the brief PTSD episode at the beginning of the story.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

That honestly sounds really amazing.

habituallyred
Feb 6, 2015
Absolutely looking forward to the Abysia/Xibalba arc. Where the players realize that thwarting one plan has given them exactly what they need to fix the consequences of the other one.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Robindaybird posted:

That honestly sounds really amazing.

The players were laughing a lot when they realized what happened.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

Golden Bee posted:

Many Tales!
'Ween of the Worlds!
The walker fired a burning beam. What was once a barn was now an ash pit, fit to blow away.
Halloween in our pulp game. We had a very new player who never played the system before. He decided that his Filipino mercenary had the aspect No Fun. He refused to dress up for the Halloween party or laugh at any of the jokes, which made the jokes the other two players made much funnier.

Yee haw! This session mystic orphan Devie and aerialist Evie were joined by super-serious Filipino mercenary Calvin Davino.
En route to a fancy dress party, with Devika playing a cowgirl and Evie as a foppish millionaire, a strange radio broadcast claimed that aliens were invading Grovers Mill New Jersey. The trio stopped by the radio station, where they found Orson Welles, furious that his light alien comedy was interrupted by this news event.

What ensued was a cat-and-mouse game between the overmatched trio and giant alien walkers with fire cannons. Strong rope and Cadillac horsepower, along with some help from the military and the mob, took out the invaders.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Apr 30, 2024

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!
According to my DM, my Warlock may not be polypatronus.

Ichabod Sexbeast
Dec 5, 2011

Giving 'em the old razzle-dazzle

CobiWann posted:

According to my DM, my Warlock may not be polypatronus.

Were the patrons cool with the arrangement, or was your warlock cheating on one with another?

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!
I wouldn't say cheating... more like my PC's then-patron tempted me with power as long as I didn't screw up while my now-patron tempted me with power as long as I screwed over the
then-patron.

Eh, what's the worst that could happen?

My Warlock of the Undead’s patron was Lorcan Morvaine, the Lich King (he of "Why would I lower myself to become a god" fame) but he was being tempted by Nephys, who was once the Goddess of Disease and Deceit until she was murdered by her sister and kind of died but didn't.

Last night my PC gave in to her after realizing she was the lesser of two evils, and when I joked “can I serve two Masters?” the DM came back with “you don’t have enough Eldritch and temporal power to be a bottom to two immortal tops.”

CzarChasm
Mar 14, 2009

I don't like it when you're watching me eat.

CobiWann posted:

I wouldn't say cheating... more like my PC's then-patron tempted me with power as long as I didn't screw up while my now-patron tempted me with power as long as I screwed over the
then-patron.

Eh, what's the worst that could happen?

My Warlock of the Undead’s patron was Lorcan Morvaine, the Lich King (he of "Why would I lower myself to become a god" fame) but he was being tempted by Nephys, who was once the Goddess of Disease and Deceit until she was murdered by her sister and kind of died but didn't.

Last night my PC gave in to her after realizing she was the lesser of two evils, and when I joked “can I serve two Masters?” the DM came back with “you don’t have enough Eldritch and temporal power to be a bottom to two immortal tops.”

Correction - "You don't have enough Eldritch and temporal power to be a bottom to two immortal tops -yet"

And now you have a side goal.

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!

CzarChasm posted:

Correction - "You don't have enough Eldritch and temporal power to be a bottom to two immortal tops -yet"

And now you have a side goal.

Viktor - "Do I have to call you Mommy?"

Nephys - "No, but I'll call you Mummy." snaps bandages

(She was also the Goddess of Mummies, and Viktor's endgame is to become a Mummy Lord so he can gain enough eternal power to topple the Lich King)

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Ran a spirit of 77 game where Disneyland is invaded by Russian paratroopers. One of the players reprogrammed animatronics to repel the invasion… The other made friends with the Russian general in charge, and defected, when the Russians promised they would let him open karate dojos all over the Soviet Union. He was nice though, sending the other player postcards that were 98% redacted.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Golden Bee posted:

Ran a spirit of 77 game where Disneyland is invaded by Russian paratroopers. One of the players reprogrammed animatronics to repel the invasion… The other made friends with the Russian general in charge, and defected, when the Russians promised they would let him open karate dojos all over the Soviet Union. He was nice though, sending the other player postcards that were 98% redacted.

Hahahaha this is great.

Ichabod Sexbeast
Dec 5, 2011

Giving 'em the old razzle-dazzle

Golden Bee posted:

Ran a spirit of 77 game where Disneyland is invaded by Russian paratroopers. One of the players reprogrammed animatronics to repel the invasion… The other made friends with the Russian general in charge, and defected, when the Russians promised they would let him open karate dojos all over the Soviet Union. He was nice though, sending the other player postcards that were 98% redacted.

Now every soldier in the red army will be an unstoppable karate master!

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

Good thing the ol US of A has a secret weapon at hand.

Gymkata!

Ichabod Sexbeast
Dec 5, 2011

Giving 'em the old razzle-dazzle

Cooked Auto posted:

Good thing the ol US of A has a secret weapon at hand.

Gymkata!

The REAL decider will be whether Sho'Nuff - the Shogun of Harlem - will be a soviet agent or America's most unlikely hero

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!

Ichabod Sexbeast posted:

The REAL decider will be whether Sho'Nuff - the Shogun of Harlem - will be a soviet agent or America's most unlikely hero

This idea is the realist.

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!
According to my DM, there is a big difference between “Mommy Milkers” and “Mummy Milkers.”

Phy
Jun 27, 2008



Fun Shoe

CobiWann posted:

According to my DM, there is a big difference between “Mommy Milkers” and “Mummy Milkers.”

Not so big a difference as all that, one can make you sound just a touch matronly, the other just a touch natronly

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!
According to my DM, my fellow player having breast cancer on their Delta Green agent means that, yes, she can tell the rest of the party she's got sick tits.

(She's a cancer survivor IRL, but still, it was a live spit-take over Zoom by yours truly)

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

Golden Bee posted:

'Ween of the Worlds!
Fear the Fashion Spetnaz!
(See Fear and terror at fashion week!)

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Apr 30, 2024

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

CobiWann posted:

sick tits.

This is awesome. IMO Cancer survivors need to make all the dark, crass jokes about it that they possibly can.

My wife and I still make dark jokes about her two bouts of breast cancer [How do you get breast cancer a second time when you got your tits cut off the first time? I dunno but it helps if you are Mrs. Agrikk!] and we’ve had people come up to us all huffy about showing some ~ReSpEcT FoR tHe BaTtLe~ after overhearing us go on a tear about her chemo experiences.

Of course the people who get huffy don’t have any actual experience about cancer. Those that do typically join in on the humor.



Sorry. The cancer thread is over there, I see. I’ll show myself out.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Agrikk posted:

This is awesome. IMO Cancer survivors need to make all the dark, crass jokes about it that they possibly can.

My wife and I still make dark jokes about her two bouts of breast cancer [How do you get breast cancer a second time when you got your tits cut off the first time? I dunno but it helps if you are Mrs. Agrikk!] and we’ve had people come up to us all huffy about showing some ~ReSpEcT FoR tHe BaTtLe~ after overhearing us go on a tear about her chemo experiences.

Of course the people who get huffy don’t have any actual experience about cancer. Those that do typically join in on the humor.



Sorry. The cancer thread is over there, I see. I’ll show myself out.

Other people getting huffy about gallows humor is common with veterans too. It sucks. I'm not a vet, but a bunch of my friends are socialist vets that agree that the military sucks and deployment is definitely stupid and awful and darkly funny in equal parts. But god forbid one of them crack a bleak joke as old as soldiers in front of one of these flag waving goobers.

Anyway, I'll take a ten piece nuggie with a small fry.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
Actually, I have a fun story for the thread that I'll post later when I'm not phone-posting.

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

Railing Kill posted:

Other people getting huffy about gallows humor is common with veterans too. It sucks. I'm not a vet, but a bunch of my friends are socialist vets that agree that the military sucks and deployment is definitely stupid and awful and darkly funny in equal parts. But god forbid one of them crack a bleak joke as old as soldiers in front of one of these flag waving goobers.

Anyway, I'll take a ten piece nuggie with a small fry.

I'm a former non-combat officer in the Commonwealth armed forces and I've heard a lot of those jokes, but I can't laugh at them. I am so glad that I never had to kill anyone, but I was recherche et sauvetage (search and rescue) in Québec. Sometimes we lost men despite doing everything right, and I still have nightmares about it. I know that black/gallows humour helps mitigate the dark feelings, but military service is a pack of lies and the hyper-militarisation of the U.S. to serve capital and its slavish worship of veterans and violence really puts me off - I can't find any humour in that.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

JustJeff88 posted:

I'm a former non-combat officer in the Commonwealth armed forces and I've heard a lot of those jokes, but I can't laugh at them. I am so glad that I never had to kill anyone, but I was recherche et sauvetage (search and rescue) in Québec. Sometimes we lost men despite doing everything right, and I still have nightmares about it. I know that black/gallows humour helps mitigate the dark feelings, but military service is a pack of lies and the hyper-militarisation of the U.S. to serve capital and its slavish worship of veterans and violence really puts me off - I can't find any humour in that.

That's fair. My dad was a paramedic for thirty years and he has an on again/off again relationship with gallows humor. There are certain lines he won't cross, and certain calls that really haunt him. I get it. I object mainly to people outside a group wagging their fingers at people in a group that uses gallows humor to cope form time to time.

Also, I draw a pretty sharp line between "disaffected veterans using gallows humor to cope with their experiences" and "chud vets being crass and mean about everything." The former are making do, and the latter buy into the pack of lies and jingoistic bullcrap.

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

Railing Kill posted:

Also, I draw a pretty sharp line between "disaffected veterans using gallows humor to cope with their experiences" and "chud vets being crass and mean about everything." The former are making do, and the latter buy into the pack of lies and jingoistic bullcrap.

I understand that line very well; the US is full of the latter. I'm a dual British/Canadian citizen who just wanted to serve his countries. It was not a positive experience for me but, for some, I realise that military service wasn't a burden. However, I have spent enough time in the US to clearly see the USs capital/military complex as well as the jingoistic MAGA douchebags who glorify bloody revenge and violence against anyone who isn't 3/4 white and 1/4 bald eagle. Combined with my own unpleasant tour of duty - I made it to the equivalent of captain and served four years, so it was substantial - it soured me on anything military.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
I'm running a short 7th Sea campaign to act as a gap between the campaign that just ended, and the one that's about to start. I designed it to be episodic and flexible in length, so we could keep it running as long as necessary and end it whenever it was necessary to do so. The reason I mention all of this is that I pre=planned every session, and I'm a big dork for minigames. I like using any system's rules in small but novel ways, to give the players something new to play with, and give them new uses for the stuff already on their character sheets. So I designed a system to seed and simulate an entire 32-person tournament to drop the players into.

Anyway, one of the characters is a ballerina from the game's equivalent of Russia. Just prior to the events of the game, she was saved from indentured servitude at her ballet academy by a Sidhe (fae) lover, who whisked her away to have her play out grand adventures for his amusement. That what she's been doing since, basically traipsing around with the party having grand adventures and enjoying her freedom.

But along the way, the impresario of her school and her former teacher come to get her. The party fights them off, but in so doing some spooky, prehistoric magic-machine poo poo kills the impresario and assimilates the teacher. So now the teacher is more like a T-800 hell-bent on getting the ballerina. It so happens that, lodged deep in the metaplot of 7th Sea, the creators of those magical machines were once at war with the Sidhe (and would like to be still). So when the ballerina's Sidhe lover comes back into the "real world" for another tryst with her, he is intercepted by the Terminator. While the party is busy doing other poo poo, those two hunt each other across the setting's equivalent of Germany and beat the absolute poo poo out of each other.

Then finally, right around when this tournament is about to take place, the ballerina gets word from her Sidhe lover via her dreams that he is in dire straits. He is on death's door and it is everything he can do to simply hide from the Terminator at this point. He lost the battle, and it's a matter of time before he is found. He tells her approximately where he is, but tells her farewell, that he plans to make a last stand.

Now, I dropped that in stated with a sort of "end of a JRPG" time logic; i.e. time is ostensibly of the essence, but the story will flex around the party whenever they want to get to this. (Sephiroth is going to slam that meteor into Earth any minute, but go ahead and gently caress around with Chocobo racing. Take as much time as you need.) That sounds weird, but in 7th Sea's melodramatic metaphysics, GMs will routinely set up contradictions and outright illogical outcomes based on "what needs to happen right now for the story to be as cool as it can be?"

The ballerina, of course, immediately frets about this. The party has important, possibly setting-shaking information to share with someone down where this tournament is to take place. It is heavy main plot stuff, and might affect who gets voted as the next Hierophant (i.e., Pope). I figure, the party is going to do this tournament to settle that main plot stuff before they leave, and then go save the Sidhe on their way to the next main plot point. Instead, they go all-in on camaraderie with their ballerina comrade and make immediately for the mountains where the Sidhe is hiding. She is going to save him like he once saved her, and her friends are all on board.

So I never run the tournament. That's ok. I'll just keep that for future use. But I assume the party is done throwing curveballs at me.

They are not. (Players never are.)

Before they head into the mountains where the Sidhe is hiding, another PC, an Inish (Irish) native and someone familiar with Sidhe folklore, asks, "If the Sidhe are at odds with this devil, we should enlist their help. We should find a Faerie Circle." That's a fun idea, so they look around and find a ruin from antiquity out on a small island just off the coast where they are standing, where the mountains meet the sea. I describe it as just a little ways out, maybe 100 feet, the kind of rocky spire that was once part of the mainland but tides and time have eroded the land and pulled it out to sea. The ruin out there looks like standing stones and might be a gate to Bryn Bresail, the Sidhe realm.

But it's 100 feet out there, and is sheer, rocky cliffs on their side, and on the island. I expect them to problem solve a bit, and a few of the players start table-talking some solutions. Then the ballerina's player says:

"I'm going to jump."

Her thinking is: this is all in service of the Sidhe, and she is empowered by the Sidhe (she is carrying one of their swords). She is also a ballerina with 5 dots of Leap on her character sheet. Surely living mythology will not let her down. I stress that, in a normal game or in the real world, this would absolutely, 100% not be possible, that it is simply too far out there. I ask one more time: "Are you sure you want to do this?" She does, and makes the roll. I set the target number at an acheivable but otherwise absurd number. Most TNs in this game sit between 10 and 30. I set this one at 50. A character with as much Leap skill could maybe make this roll, but without all that investment and bit of luck to boot, there was no way. No one else in the party could hit a 40, let alone a 50. There character was made to make this impossible roll, and she killed it. 58.

Narratively, it was described as impossibly long. With her comrades watching helplessly, the character leapt out into open space, and an unseen force seemed to keep her aloft as the game went into wire-fu physics for just one moment. She landed en pointe at the very edge of the island. She strode up to the ruined standing stones and read aloud the Cymric (Gaelic) words her Inish friend gave to her to read (on a whim of his own). From out of nowhere, from all sides of her, Sidhe hunters astride all sorts of mythical beasts appeared and demanded, "Who dareth summon us, Child of Theah, and for what purpose?" They are told why, that some devil made of flesh and iron hunts The Prince of Butterflies at this very moment, and that his life is in danger. They agree to help, but their existence is one of "bans and rules." They require a reciprocal agreement before they can do anything, and the ballerina agrees to compose and perform a play for them based on her adventures. Agreed, they scoop up the ballerina, leap to the mainland, and join up with the party. One of them blows a horn and everyone goes charging into the mountains.

I cooked up another minigame for the hunt, and that went great. They did that and beat the Terminator in the next session, because of-loving-course they did. How could they not after all that?

Also: lol at the dancer's deal with the fae. Good luck with that. But that's literally a story for another time. Given that the endgame of the main plot is likely to have the party squaring off against Fantasy Vlad Tepes, she may or may not live to satisfy her end of the bargain.

FreshFeesh
Jun 3, 2007

Drum Solo
That is seriously, seriously cool. Awesome on you to dive into infrequently-explored aspects of the setting, and awesome on the players for hitting the gas as hard as possible

HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!
My friend's Planescape game has had some fun moments in it. As there is the issue of level 1 characters not really being powerful enough to meaningfully interact with the power-players in Sigil, we have been a number of more mundane tasks to make ends meet while our characters familiarise ourselves with this strange multiverse we found ourselves stranded in. One thing that happened early on was that we got asked by the owner of the boarding house we were staying at if we could help with a tenant refusing to pay their bill, or at least to vacate their room. With the promise of a small reward for helping, the party bard went to the merchant to try diplomacy first. He failed as the merchant failed to even open the door and talk, forcing the bard to use minor illusion to project a hologram of himself into the room. In the end we resorted to using the sleep spell to knock the merchant and his bodyguard out, and then we carried them and their belongings and deposited them into the street. The merchant had only seen the bard in our party and so directed his petty revenge towards him and him alone.

This didn't come up until we got ambushed by an assassin from an alley. The assassin hadn't expected the bard to have companions. He also hadn't expected my wizard and the barbarian to crit with our attacks, somewhat trivialising the encounter after the initial surprise attack that nearly dropped the bard to 0 in one hit. While we didn't have any evidence to point to the merchant being responsible, he was the only logical choice as we hadn't had a chance to make any other enemies yet. We hoped that this would be the end of his revenge, as we figured that someone who was staying in a modest bunkhouse would probably not have a huge amount of money to spend on assassins for petty revenge. After the second attempt we revised our assumptions. The second attempt came a few days later and involved the assassin using a sleeping drug in the bunkhouse to try and keep everyone asleep while he murdered the bard in the middle of the night. Luckily the tiniest person in the party and the one who should be more vulnerable to the dosage, our gnome druid, was also the only person to make her saving throws so she was able to rouse us and we managed to chase the assassin into the street and kill them.

At this point it was clear that the merchant wasn't going to stop, and it was also likely he was spending someone else's money so we did some recon while we decided to ruin his life. While out of character some of our group didn't want to simply fall back on murdering people who crossed us, we did agree that ruining their reputations, their livelihoods and possibly causing their boss to murder them was perfectly acceptable. My wizard and the druid did some recon and found that the merchant worked at a jeweler, and that his boss had either a very monstrous or demonic bodyguard. Not the kind of person who would take kindly to being crossed. So with a combination of the druid casting pass without trace, the bard using message and suggestion, and my diviner manipulating the merchant's saving throw our party started our plan. We were going to suggest that the merchant steal from his boss, something small and easily missed, something petty. Then a few days later we'd come back and repeat the trick but getting him to take something a little more valuable. Over a week or two we would ramp up his theft until his boss inevitably caught him.

As suggestion lets you know when the target follows the compulsion because the spell ends, we knew that the petty man barely waited a minute or two before he stole something.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

HiKaizer posted:

My friend's Planescape game has had some fun moments in it. As there is the issue of level 1 characters not really being powerful enough to meaningfully interact with the power-players in Sigil, we have been a number of more mundane tasks to make ends meet while our characters familiarise ourselves with this strange multiverse we found ourselves stranded in. One thing that happened early on was that we got asked by the owner of the boarding house we were staying at if we could help with a tenant refusing to pay their bill, or at least to vacate their room. With the promise of a small reward for helping, the party bard went to the merchant to try diplomacy first. He failed as the merchant failed to even open the door and talk, forcing the bard to use minor illusion to project a hologram of himself into the room. In the end we resorted to using the sleep spell to knock the merchant and his bodyguard out, and then we carried them and their belongings and deposited them into the street. The merchant had only seen the bard in our party and so directed his petty revenge towards him and him alone.

This didn't come up until we got ambushed by an assassin from an alley. The assassin hadn't expected the bard to have companions. He also hadn't expected my wizard and the barbarian to crit with our attacks, somewhat trivialising the encounter after the initial surprise attack that nearly dropped the bard to 0 in one hit. While we didn't have any evidence to point to the merchant being responsible, he was the only logical choice as we hadn't had a chance to make any other enemies yet. We hoped that this would be the end of his revenge, as we figured that someone who was staying in a modest bunkhouse would probably not have a huge amount of money to spend on assassins for petty revenge. After the second attempt we revised our assumptions. The second attempt came a few days later and involved the assassin using a sleeping drug in the bunkhouse to try and keep everyone asleep while he murdered the bard in the middle of the night. Luckily the tiniest person in the party and the one who should be more vulnerable to the dosage, our gnome druid, was also the only person to make her saving throws so she was able to rouse us and we managed to chase the assassin into the street and kill them.

At this point it was clear that the merchant wasn't going to stop, and it was also likely he was spending someone else's money so we did some recon while we decided to ruin his life. While out of character some of our group didn't want to simply fall back on murdering people who crossed us, we did agree that ruining their reputations, their livelihoods and possibly causing their boss to murder them was perfectly acceptable. My wizard and the druid did some recon and found that the merchant worked at a jeweler, and that his boss had either a very monstrous or demonic bodyguard. Not the kind of person who would take kindly to being crossed. So with a combination of the druid casting pass without trace, the bard using message and suggestion, and my diviner manipulating the merchant's saving throw our party started our plan. We were going to suggest that the merchant steal from his boss, something small and easily missed, something petty. Then a few days later we'd come back and repeat the trick but getting him to take something a little more valuable. Over a week or two we would ramp up his theft until his boss inevitably caught him.

As suggestion lets you know when the target follows the compulsion because the spell ends, we knew that the petty man barely waited a minute or two before he stole something.

lol

I love emergent bad guys. Sometimes players just find someone to dunk on. We had a similar villain in a 7th Sea campaign way back. He was a Montaigne (French) noble who had bought a ship and crewed it, but knew nothing about sailing. His catch phrase was an imperious, "how dare you?" He ran afoul of us but was meant as a throwaway bad guy for one session. But the way we foiled him was so fun that the GM brought him back later to get revenge. The rest of the group would have been willing to let it go after we foiling him again, but I was playing a liberated fate witch. So I used fate magic to ruin him, largely without even going anywhere near him. And I took my time.

You know Cricket from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? His character arc was not dissimilar.

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever
That is a very good level 1 start, but what would have happened had the druid failed his saving throw too? I'm not big on level 1... anything in any addition but 4e. I think that level 3 should be the new level 1, honestly. Vancian casting means that being low level is piss-boring.

I'm also not that crazy about Planescape as a setting. I like Torment, the game, but the setting really is very dystopian in many ways - it's the same reason that I don't like Dark Sun. I think that it's because I am very cynical about the 'real' world (I wish that it were imaginary) and I'm reminded too much of current... predicaments. In the case of Dark Sun the setting is supposed to be a bleak, dying world, but for Planescape I think that it's more on account of the staggering poverty of the Hive being so prominent for much of Torment.

HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!

JustJeff88 posted:

That is a very good level 1 start, but what would have happened had the druid failed his saving throw too?

We're all friends and our GM has no interest in being a dick or adversarial at all. I don't know what his plans were and I doubt he had specific plans for that scene, but I know he has contingencies in mind if players die in combat generally that could have been used there.

As for the rest of your comments, I get it, but also I'm playing a game with my friends so I'm happy to make some concessions to enjoy that time. They wanted to play D&D, so I'll play D&D with them. Plus Planescape the setting, as opposed to the video game is a lot more than just the Hive. We have only been there once and muggers attacked us the first time so our characters aren't really eager to return. The part that interests our group is the meeting and mingling of all the weird and extraplanar stuff in D&D and that's what we're focusing on. The Faction War story might come into play later if we get high enough level and everyone wants to continue but we only play once a fortnight so that is not a concern for quite a while.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

HiKaizer posted:

We're all friends and our GM has no interest in being a dick or adversarial at all. I don't know what his plans were and I doubt he had specific plans for that scene, but I know he has contingencies in mind if players die in combat generally that could have been used there.

As for the rest of your comments, I get it, but also I'm playing a game with my friends so I'm happy to make some concessions to enjoy that time. They wanted to play D&D, so I'll play D&D with them. Plus Planescape the setting, as opposed to the video game is a lot more than just the Hive. We have only been there once and muggers attacked us the first time so our characters aren't really eager to return. The part that interests our group is the meeting and mingling of all the weird and extraplanar stuff in D&D and that's what we're focusing on. The Faction War story might come into play later if we get high enough level and everyone wants to continue but we only play once a fortnight so that is not a concern for quite a while.

I see your point, but doesn't one need to be a pretty damned high level before really getting into the setting? Planescape is really heavy on demons, celestials, devils, deities, quasi-immortals and all sorts of things that would make a level 20 piss himself.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply