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Evilreaver posted:I'm not a regular of this board so forgive me a bit if I'm in the wrong spot: What system are you using? I ask because Blades in the Dark is custom-made for running a group of criminals, and two of the gang types are assassins and thieves (though I can't remember the in-game names for them right now, and of course there's crossover between them; the game definitely supports a team who does loud wetwork on Tuesday and sneaky social heists on Friday).
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May 26, 2023 01:28
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Admiralty Flag posted:two of the gang types are assassins and thieves (though I can't remember the in-game names for them right now, and of course there's crossover between them; the game definitely supports a team who does loud wetwork on Tuesday and sneaky social heists on Friday). Assassins are just assassins. Thieves are "shadows" iirc. but the real reason I'm posting was that I read the last bit as "a team who does[...]sexy social heists on Friday"
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May 26, 2023 03:20
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Admiralty Flag posted:I'm sure folks will have some input here but you might get engagement in this thread as well: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&perpage=40&noseen=1&pagenumber=549 Thanks! As for the system my own personal homebrew  my friend group likes it but it's flawed as hell, it is what it is
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May 26, 2023 16:43
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Golden Bee posted:Mongol Diplomacy! The Wives of March! By Caleb Stokes A miracle. A curse. And a southern town swallowed by it all. If this pulp adventure had a cover, it would have a one-eared ruffian hanging from the third-floor balcony of the DeSoto hotel in Savannah Georgia, grabbing onto Aldous Bingen’s pant leg. (In the book itself, you would see Connie Johnson, climbing down from the penthouse to smash the thug across the face with a baseball bat, sending him down a few stories to land safely on a taxi cab.) I can’t say a lot about this adventure without spoiling one of the best horror modules out there. There’s no excuse not to read it, it’s free on drive-thru RPG. Still, it felt custom-made for the group. Florence and Javid rounded out the quartet. Her renown among musicians was vital to tracking down a wanted criminal on the wrong side of the tracks. His photographic / art history background help to decipher vital clues, and his distracting gunfire kept the group from a gory fate at the hands of a group of disfigured psychopaths. Still, there were lighter moments. Aldous arguing that his expertise as a Hollywood Butler would absolutely let them sneak out of a prestigious hotel instead of getting arrested. Javid, who wore a cloak and turban to appear more exotic, scammed a group of parishioners by saying he “totally wanted to be baptized, over there, in the river, not here.” And the players put so many people on the bus out of town, the Greyhound ticket taker recognized them on sight. What was surprising is how well the group stood up to psychological abuse at a torturous dinner party. Each found deep wellsprings of composure, despite their enemy's best attempts to rattle their cage. These attempts were met with empathy, stealth, and Javid hurling a plate at the light switch, plunging the room into darkness, so the butler could bring the car around. Being ever ready, Bingen had a fire axe, allowing the group to cut down telephone and electrical poles, as they drove like mad to flee the county. I really recommend reading this module, but expect different results if your campaign is horror instead of Pulp! Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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May 29, 2023 03:44
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So our 7th Sea group managed to fumble the bag pretty hard the other day. Despite every player being veterans of the hobby for 20-30 years, we committed the cardinal sin of splitting up the party.  There are five characters in the party, all of whom have recently joined a secret society called Die Kreuzritter: Kristjana: A Vesten/Ussuran (Scandinavian/Russian) huntress and rune sorceress. Laconic and private, her closest friend a steppes horse. (My character) Helgi: A Vesten whaler-turned-monster hunter. A soft-hearted gentile giant, rapidly becoming the party's moral core. Viktoria: A Ussuran shapeshifting noblewoman. Mandelos: An Aegean (Greek) demigod. A cocksure jock forever seeking opportunities for heroic escapades. An odd couple-type rival to Kristjana. Evelien: A Vendel (Danish) polymath, an anthropologist by trade. Circumspect widow to a Vesten, dedicated to stemming the Vendel/Vesten conflict. Now let's talk about hubris. The rewrite of 7th Sea that we're using slightly alters the first edition hubris mechanic. Basically, they used to be optional, or you could take a virtue instead at a cost. Almost everyone took a hubris, though, for cost reasons, and they're more interesting anyway, so I made them mandatory in the rewrite. So all of these characters have a fatal flaw. The only two hubrises that are pertinent to this story are Mandelos (Reckless) and Kristjana (Proud). The group receives intel that something weird is going on out in the Ussuran tundra that might be Die Kreuzritter's concern. One traveler has returned from the tundra saying that several of his buddies fell into a chasm formed by a glacial runoff stream that ought not be there. He wants us to find his friends (or their things, if they are dead, because there were some valuables). Die Kreuzritter has taken up his plight because they suspect his group may have inadvertently found some spooky poo poo they ought not to know. So the order sends our party to investigate. The GM establishes a minigame using several of the game's skills. We are trying to go as quickly as we think we can afford, pushing the limits of our travel speed and the effects of the extreme cold of the Ussuran tundra. Helgi and Evelien are not suited to many of the rolls, so they set a reasonable pace. Viktoria promptly takes the form of a snow leopard to stave off the cold and sets a slightly faster pace. Kristjana is the most skilled in these rolls (Survival, Tracking, etc.) and she is mounted, so she sets a fast pace to act as a trailblazer and forward scout. She makes an effort to mark her trail for the others to follow, and Evelien is making an effort to cover the group's tracks in bringing up the rear. And then there is Mandelos.  Despite being poorly acclimated to the tundra, he leans on his sheer physical prowess to set a pace to match Kristjana. He is racing a loving steppes horse across a tundra over multiple days. He is reckless, so this makes sense. But Kristjana is both his rival and is herself proud. She cannot allow him to win this race that she now finds herself in. So she continues setting as rapid a pace as she can, expecting Mandelos to fall back at some point. She is also using rune magic to make their camp warmer during rests, so she can do this essentially forever. But failing survival checks or getting battered by the cold doesn't slow a character down (yet) in this minigame. You go at whatever pace you want, and that pace sets the difficulty of things like survival and tracking. The penalty for failure are things like damage and exhaustion penalties. Mandelos is failing these checks all over the place and getting worn down by everything, but his superhuman physique is still letting him keep pace, and that's all he cares about. After three days of this, both of the players begin to realize that we have left the rest of the group behind. Kristjana originally intended on setting a fast pace for a day and then just staying a bit ahead of the group before letting them catch up. But her idiotic race with Mandelos has continued to stretch that lead so far that it would take the rest of the group multiple days to catch up even if she stops right where she is. The players notice this but the characters are in a hubris-driven death drive and will not stop. I ask for checks to notice things that might snap Kristjana back to a more reasonable pace, but I fail. (For example, making a medicine check to notice that Mandelos is literally killing himself in slow motion). She does not notice, so on we go. Meanwhile, the rest of the group has failed a check or two to cover their tracks. They begin hearing hunting horns from a great distance. It is behind them, and it is getting closer hour by hour. Helgi makes a lore check to identify that these are the hunting calls of frost giants, who tend packs of wolves for their hunting expeditions. This group picks up their pace, but th8ey are basically choosing to do so at the cost of their health. They are not as skilled as Kristjana (and are not mounted), and they are not demigods like Mandelos. But they do not want any part of those frost giants before the group is reunited. So a new race begins. It has been five days. Finally, after the other group has been hearing the hunting horns for two days, they have gotten close enough that Kristjana hears them from a great distance. She and Mandelos have no idea what they might be, but it sounds bad. She assumes Cossacks or something of that ilk. It doesn't matter what it is: it is far behind them, and it will catch up to the slower group first. This finally, finally allows me an excuse for her to halt. "Mandelos," she says. "I... we have been foolish and deluded. We need to turn around." I deliberately paraphrased a Winnie the Pooh line that I had just read to my son before game. "So you give up, then?" Mandelos says. "No. This is over and it has nothing to do with either of us. Our friends may be in danger. We need to turn around." Mandelos grins smugly, but finally says, "Yeah. We can settle this later." We turn around and head backward in double time. At the end of day six we arrive just in time. The rest of the party has exhausted itself and is hunkered down, partly to rest and partly to form a defensive perimeter for what they now assume to be an inevitable attack. The horns are now virtually on top of us and cannot be more than a couple hours away. "Evelien, come here," Kristjana says during this brief rest. Despite being Vendel and not Vesten, Evelien has a runic shield. It was her dead husband's, himself a Vesten warrior. It has the Elska ("Love") rune on it. Kristjana has noticed this before but hasn't been a jerk about it. She herself is a rune sorceress and is kind of prickly but isn't a total rear end in a top hat. However, as a rune sorceress (and whose player knows the rules a bit better), she knows something Evelien does not. "What is it, Kristjana," Evelien says as she comes over for a sidebar. She is keeping her voice down, expecting the worst from this interaction. "Do you know what your shield can do," is all Kristjana asks. Evelien says in narrative terms what her player says in mechanical terms: that it can buff a character in a few different skills. "It can also affect the weather, Evelien. It can make it snow. Rain and snow are the love of the gods come to Theah. That is what we need right now." Mechanically, there are a number of runes that add buffs but can alternatively be used to affect the weather: wind, temperature, precipitation, etc. Kristjana had been using one for days to make it warmer at camp. Elska can increase precipitation, and Evelien's player didn't realize that, or forgot. "It may not be too late to lose the hunting party. If you can make it snow, I can cover our trail. We may have just enough of a lead to leave them behind." Evelien is stunned. The shield is her most precious item, the only keepsake she has of her dead husband. Finally, she steels herself and says, "Show me how." The Vendel and the Vesten get to work covering the trail and Kristjana begins barking orders to break camp. We will probably end up in a ptiched battle with some frost giants, but we might give them the slip. We're going to find out first thing next session. Never. Split. Up. The. Party.
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May 29, 2023 12:23
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Railing Kill posted:So our 7th Sea group managed to fumble the bag pretty hard the other day. Despite every player being veterans of the hobby for 20-30 years, we committed the cardinal sin of splitting up the party. The way I read this, Evenlien had to think about whether or not she wanted to use the shield. Does using the rune use up or destroy the shield or something? Or am I just reading too much into it?
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May 29, 2023 15:31
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the_steve posted:The way I read this, Evenlien had to think about whether or not she wanted to use the shield. I wondered the same thing. They used the warmth power of the shield over an over for many days - does this other power destroy it?
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May 29, 2023 15:45
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No. The rune can be used once per day if attached to an item. Evelien had only ever used it for its buff effects, but not its precipitation effect. I chalked it up to the player genuinely not realizing there was an alternate use of it, and his character having made the same error. It was kind of an opportunity for me to use my character to show the mechanic for the other player. She "steeled herself" out of the shock of a Vesten calling attention to her runic shield. She has a fear of Vesten finding out a Vendel has this item and getting bent out of shape about it, or even attacking her. She normally keeps it wrapped for this reason. Granted, when Kristjana first noticed it a while back, she was a bit irked by it. But she has since learned part of its story, and besides the present situation calls for setting that petty poo poo aside.
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May 29, 2023 18:28
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Railing Kill posted:No. The rune can be used once per day if attached to an item. Evelien had only ever used it for its buff effects, but not its precipitation effect. I chalked it up to the player genuinely not realizing there was an alternate use of it, and his character having made the same error. It was kind of an opportunity for me to use my character to show the mechanic for the other player. She "steeled herself" out of the shock of a Vesten calling attention to her runic shield. She has a fear of Vesten finding out a Vendel has this item and getting bent out of shape about it, or even attacking her. She normally keeps it wrapped for this reason. Granted, when Kristjana first noticed it a while back, she was a bit irked by it. But she has since learned part of its story, and besides the present situation calls for setting that petty poo poo aside. How was she able to use the warming effect of the shield discretely before?
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May 29, 2023 19:04
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JustJeff88 posted:How was she able to use the warming effect of the shield discretely before? Evelien didn't make camp warmer. My character did. Kristjana is the actual rune sorceress and has access to a bunch of runes, including one that can make the area warmer. Evelien isn't a sorceress but has an item with one rune on it which she can use once per day, to either buff some skills or make it precipitate. Up to this point, Evelien had been able to discreetly buff her own stats without too much fuss. Sorry if that was unclear. Lotta Viking stuff flying around this campaign.
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May 29, 2023 19:42
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Evilreaver posted:I'm not a regular of this board so forgive me a bit if I'm in the wrong spot: There's also The Roleplayer's Guide to Heists, which had a bunch of setups for various genres. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/329485
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May 30, 2023 11:57
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According to my DM, I may not refer to a Monk’s Patient Defense as “The Patient D Method.”
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Jun 4, 2023 18:45
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, I may not refer to a Monk’s Patient Defense as “The Patient D Method.” Well no, there's two bards running round Tanicus called Patient D. It'd be confusing.
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Jun 4, 2023 18:52
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Well no, there's two bards running round Tanicus called Patient D. It'd be confusing. We also have the Warforged Wizard DJ named “Forty-Foot Radius.”
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Jun 4, 2023 19:24
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Golden Bee posted:The Wives of March! By Caleb Stokes “That’s a Matisse,” sighed Valeira. “People will bomb just about anything.” I took the original module, set it in Melbourne instead of Boston, and made the gal reporter character into Tess Truman, an otherwise clever girl who was under the impression that Florence was her exclusive girlfriend. We had the return of Madame Valera, AKA Valerie Schmidt, the Hollywood Boulevard psychic. The roster was completed by Steel Eagle and his sidekick Jimmy, mainstay Aldous, and Connie Smith, pro athlete. Valera was throwing Florence a birthday party, with Flo’s girlfriend Tessie… and Florence’s parents. Across town, Aldous had been hired by Bebe Bouchard, rival singer and member of the Century Club. His job was to keep “his adventurous friends” from entering the venue and upstaging her. Of course, Florence lied her way on stage and started a duet. The Eagle charmed the hell out of the doorman, preventing the security team from rushing the stage. From then on, Florence Zee was the hero of Melbourne. Unfortunately, Melbourne had its share of villains. Chemical magnate Brody Starkweather was tied into a Nazi plot; when the players snuck into his factory, they found local thugs led by Nazi Überman Klaus Adler. And worse, they had kidnapped Tessie! The group's element of surprise was ruined by an enraged Florence. The pistol-heavy party almost blew up the factory, but luckily the team found and activated an emergency override to render the chemicals inert. On the downside, most of the Nazis escaped, with Aldous managing to take out four with his revolver. Eager to follow up leads, and not wanting to talk too long to the police, the group headed to Starkweather’s mansion. He wasn’t kidnapped at all, and in fact invited them to dinner… Unfortunately, this was a trap! His cologne was poisoned, and none of our heroes had the antidote. Starkweather and his goons tied the group up in the basement. They had been very special guests… so he served them a bomb on a silver platter! Madame Valera and Aldous, both masters of discrete burglary, freed the group. Unfortunately, no one had much skill for defusal. So with only seconds to spare, Valera unlocked the door, and Connie sprinted up the stairs, through the mansion, and pitched the thing into the pool seconds before it exploded! (In order to celebrate her cleverness, Valera helped herself to the mansion’s artwork.) The group quickly realized that by not blowing up the mansion, they had preserved tons of evidence. Starkweather was going to use his chemicals to take revenge on the feckless Australian parliament! They only knew one orphan with a plane that could get them there fast enough… and after sucking up to her, were on their way to Canberra! Did the Alan Irani have parachutes? ——— There’s not a lot of space to maneuver inside a zeppelin pilot house. That’s just the way Klaus Adler liked it; he took wild swings at Jimmy (who somehow survived with great rolls). And despite the Nazis taking Tessie hostage again, the fight was remarkably even. Starkweather emotionally abused the “faux bearable” Valera. Florence tricked a group of thugs into diving through an open door, but one of them grabbed her leg. Aldous got one of his rare knockouts, pointing out the pilot had a stain on his shirt, then cold cocking him. The tide was turned when Florence appealed to Starkweather as a fellow Australian. Surely he wouldn’t earn a place in history by using chemicals over ideals! If she wasn’t a Hometown hero and beloved in the press, it wouldn’t have worked, but she was utterly persuasive. Adler, outnumbered, pushed his way to the exit and dove away with his parachute. Steel Eagle explained that he was now 3-0. (“But you only fought him twice!” argued Jimmy. “Yes, but one of those times… He saw me from far away… and he must’ve run away then.”) Florence and Tess admitted their love, while the rest of the group awkwardly pretended that Florence had been faithful. Starkweather thanked the group for not blowing up his mansion, although he’d probably have to sell the artwork to pay for lawyers. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Jun 5, 2023 03:59
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Golden Bee posted:To end all Wars! By Paul "Wiggy" Wade-Williams Is the pen mightier than a mind-rotting sword? I had some spare time this afternoon and someone on a Discord I was on talked about making a character but never getting to play an RPG. I whipped up a mini adventure. (I knew I wanted to run something on a train and something on a boat, she picked Oksana Larrson, and we went from there.) Oksana was hunting down stolen Swedish artifacts in North Egypt. After sneaking aboard a smuggler ship, she accidentally saw two crewmembers goofing around with ancient weapons. One told the other to block low, and then split his pal's head open with a Nordic sword! In a surprising move, Oksana told the captain that she had snuck aboard, and that one of the crew had murdered another. He was so startled by her honesty that he gave her a bunk… and promised to sell the weapon immediately. Unfortunately, Oksana had left her suitcase back in Alexandria, and by the time she called her editor and bought a train ticket, the weapon exchange had happened. Le Reynard, arrogant French dandy, intended to use his new artifact to win a duel at a Cairo soirée. Dutiful reporter Larrson spent much of the train ride corroborating details. It would be preferable to stop manslaughter, but she also had a duty to the truth! In Cairo, she leveraged a connection with the security team to get into the event. Unfortunately, the ambassador she wanted to warn was utterly convinced of his abilities. She told him that he was going to be killed, and he promised to ban the perpetrator from the premises. Of course, she got his name wrong… and the duel was about to begin. With seconds to spare, she grabbed the weapon, fled the party, and hustled to the airport. (She wisely decided to check it as luggage instead of a carry-on.) Cultural artifact: returned to Sweden. Manslaughter: averted. Story: filed. Not bad for a first game! Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Jun 10, 2023 01:57
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Golden Bee posted:To end all Wars! By Paul "Wiggy" Wade-Williams Every time I despair of being a Forever DM with no players I read these tales and I feel some hope :]
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Jun 10, 2023 05:29
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According to my DM, casting Wall of Force while in Pennsylvania requires a traffic cone as a spell component.
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Jun 12, 2023 17:46
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, casting Wall of Force while in Pennsylvania requires a traffic cone as a spell component. Oh poo poo is THAT where the portal beneath Centralia takes you? Also the tradeoff should be that casting Catapult on a battery should be not just a cantrip but a free action
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Jun 12, 2023 17:53
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Oh poo poo is THAT where the portal beneath Centralia takes you? Only if thrown at winter deities or fey of the Winter Courts.
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Jun 12, 2023 17:57
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playing Aftermath! with my buddies as they are attempting to hold off a siege of Hell's Angels on their hotel. The interior lobby has been reinforced with wooden detritus and shooting holes have been put in place. One of our players attempts to shove a pipe bomb through a hole, and gets a 19(near critical failure). I tell him to roll a Deftness CST(essentially just a dex saving throw) to give him two turns to run instead of one. He fails. He gets one turn, runs, gets launched 4 meters and takes some subdual(non lethal) damage. We also calculate damage from the fragmentation, and he gets very lucky, only taking a little over half his health in one explosion. His next action is to roll a system shock test, which he critically succeeds. I rule that he is launched and peppered with shrapnel, but ultimately his iron will resolves and he lifts a longsword to the sky, screaming a warriors cry and inspiring the Soldiers of Fortune to fight ever harder(he was a renaissance reenactor pre apocalypse, which means he has almost no modern combat skills, but he does know how to handle a longsword). The moral of the story is to never fat finger a pipe bomb.
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Jun 13, 2023 00:58
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Golden Bee posted:Beginner’s luck! The Hidden Prince by Miguel de Luis! In the city of brotherly love, a sorority can be a dangerous place… Reporter Oksana Larrson met the party on the tarmac. They may notta believed it, but the city of brotherly love had fallen to chaos, and the mayor believed a sorority house was responsible. The party (Flo, Aldous, Devika, La La Santinella) decided to detour before heading to sorority row at UPenn. Since none of the party members were from America, they asked where they could meet the city's most important politician, Ben Franklin. Luckily, Franklin was greeting the people near Independence Hall. Half of the group took the tour, while Florence and Oksana used their social skills on nearby street buskers to prevent a protest from becoming violent. The group had to hurry. The bulk of the adventure was investigating the house and sorority. Both the girls and the building were mysteriously sapphic. Florence, who had promised to behave, caught Lala in the kitchen with a flirty coed, and nearly kissed her! Aldous snuck around, but needed more time to investigate. After calling on the University president to allow (fake) termite tenting, the group snuck into the basement and found a crone! Negotiations broke down (“Philadelphia doesn’t need a basement witch!”), and the battle was on… It seemed like it would be difficult, with the witch warded against physical weapons and impervious to goading. She crawled onto the ceiling and cackled. Luckily, Aldous always carries the right tool, which in this case was a fire extinguisher. He rolled a +4. The witch got -4. But the GM had five fate points. Time to reroll. Pause. The GM tapped his chin. “She really doesn’t have any aspect that would protect her from a fire extinguisher…huh.” Our nemesis dropped from the ceiling, one hit KO’d. ------- We finished things ahead of schedule, so I ran The Hidden Prince by Miguel de Luis. The players were chilling in a New York hotel. Devika, having failed to earn new millions through good old-fashioned newspaper sales, arrived. She told the group (now Santinella, Florence, and Javid Kulfi) about an idiotic dumb kid she met at the newsboys' lodge. He had an accent and didn’t know anything about New York! She left, eager to rejoin high society with a trip to Saks Fifth Avenue. A shady duo entered the hotel after, asking if anyone in the lobby had seen a boy they had a photograph of. He was lost, the son of rich Dutch parents, and there'd be a lot of money for whoever could find and return him. Luckily Javid was around. The photographer knew that the pictured boy was actually a prince of Bergonia, a country that had recently endured a coup. The group guessed that the duo was working for the Prussian government…and that Devika was probably the last person to see the boy. At Saks, the girl millionaire asked why they even cared about the kid, but reluctantly revealed that he sold newspapers (badly) down by the Battery. Santinella rewarded Devika with sewn doll clothes that resembled her “burglary ensemble”. (Yup, Devi still had "Lil' Devi" from Wickedest Sound!) Finding and convincing the boy wasn’t a huge problem. Unfortunately, the embassy they wanted to use for sanctuary, the Australian one, was surrounded by unmarked Prussian cars. The Australian envoy was eager to help out Florence, since she had saved parliament in To End all Wars, but the security detail was hungover from a party last night. The group intended to lead the Prussian detachment on a merry chase. Instead, the prince found doll clothes in the back of the car, and Santinella explained that they belonged to Devika. Only when he started to run away did they realize that the two children almost certainly hated each other. The Prussians ran for the kid. Florence and Javid answered with their pistols. The foreign kidnappers were slain in a New York minute. The final scene of the game was a triple interrogation (because of the public killings). Florence baffled her questioner with lies. Javid’s detective had boxes of evidence… and the shutterbug just alluded to the King Solomon killing, asked if that Pasadena zeppelin could’ve blown itself up, and demanded his lawyer. Lala called Devika, asking for a donation to the policemens' ball. A few weeks later, the players lounged in a Vermont hotel. Having been “encouraged” to stay out of Manhattan, they relaxed by the lake and read the international section. Not only had the prince ascended the throne, Prussia had lost US military aid. They considered a visit to Bergonia, before remembering the last time they saw its monarch, they had accidentally covered him in his kidnappers’ blood. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Jun 13, 2023 07:15
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LurchinTard posted:Aftermath! I love Aftermath! (“Aftermath-Bang” in our group) for some serious crunch. Rules on “fumbling bursts” to the sequence of rolls for being blown up. Nom nom. But my favorite rules are for scavenging a city block and the random loot tables in Operation Morpheus. Sooo good! I am running a high fantasy Rolemaster campaign but I think I’d like to revisit Aftermath for our next campaign when this one wraps. In about a decade at the rate this one is going.
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Jun 15, 2023 21:26
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According to my DM, my Bard cannot get caught between the moon and Strahd von Zarovich. I know Strahd's clingy, but it's true.
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Jun 16, 2023 23:48
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the gm advise thread reminded me of a time when a player RADICALLY changed the tone of fight and turned the dumbest joke villain into something creepy and i wanted to share for a superhero game i had the players break into jail to break someone out and accidentally let a bunch of bad guys out. this was good for me because i could suddenly have a bunch of new bad guys of the week. as a joke character, i had their creepy and untrustworthy "man on the inside" be Spalding Naismith an evil basketball from the "golden age". some players found fun notes about the FUNdamentals of team sports and there was a lot of notes from the guards about how all sports EXCEPT BASKETBALL were allowed and the proper containment for a basketball. And originally it was just gonna be a fun and cheeky bad guy, until one player saw an npc with a basketball for a head (he takes over people's bodies that way) and for some reason assumed that the funny little basketball bounces your head into your chest cavity and sits on top of your body and puppets the corpse that way. when i said "no no they're still alive!!" that made it WORSE because now they're freaking out because the head is suffocating in there. The fun part was there was already a villain whose whole thing was something unsettling creeping into something fun for kids, the Bill Nye type guy stuck in a mascot costume and getting worse as more "retcons" pile up so I was able to tie into that and turn these two background low level scrubs into major threats.
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Jun 17, 2023 02:36
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, my Bard cannot get caught between the moon and Strahd von Zarovich. God drat it, now that song's gonna be in my head for the rest of the night.
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Jun 17, 2023 04:30
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Didn't mean to make you Cross.
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Jun 17, 2023 17:26
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, my Bard cannot get caught between the moon and Strahd von Zarovich. The best that you can do The best that you can do Is stab him through the heart with a wooden stake
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Jun 17, 2023 17:43
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*Jessica by The Allman Brothers begins to play* Tonight... Ransom has a fight at the opera.          Viktor is sued by his original Warlock patron for breach of contract in the court of Sigil...     And Zinnia gets an airship.   
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Jun 19, 2023 01:16
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Those minis are fresh as heck
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Jun 19, 2023 02:25
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Ominous Jazz posted:Those minis are fresh as heck 
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Jun 19, 2023 06:24
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It’s just not fair. The amount of riches in CobiWann’s games is mind boggling. From a dedicated gaming crew To a GM with an amazing sense of collaborative storytelling To a mini- and terrain collection that is unsurpassed To a goddamn airship model I enjoy gaming with my friends of 35 years just fine, but drat if I’m not incredibly jealous of these pictures and that group.
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Jun 19, 2023 06:44
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Golden Bee posted:Odd Girl Out & Never trust stealth to a songbird, with Nazis right behind. I used to marvel at stories of player characters being extremely destructive. It always seemed a bit silly. But today, the players really wrecked stuff up. Our party (Oksana Larsson, Steel Eagle, Florence) was touring Prague Castle when a man rushed over. The skittish Oksana fled, and he pursued, and it could’ve gotten quite silly if Florence hadn’t intervened. The man was a messenger from the great synagogue, and they needed a Jewish hero at once! The mission was daunting. Take a 2000-pound crate containing the golem of Prague, the ancient defender of the Jewish people, and hide it where the Nazis couldn’t find it. The group had a rented lorry (Steel Eagle loves trucks!) and was loading up when an insistent blonde woman offered to help. The woman recognized Florence, but it wasn’t mutual… it wasn’t until she tried to run them off the road that Flo realized it was Claudia Knight, Starkweather's nazi personal assistant! The players rammed their way through traffic, shooting a traffic light to lose their Nazi pursuers, and pulled ridiculous favors to get onto the next train. Their destination was the Larsson farm in Gothenburg, Sweden. Unfortunately, Germany was in the middle, but the players earned themselves a lot of time with their frantic driving, artfully mislabeled cargo, and stealing Hugo Boss’s train ticket while he waited on the platform*. It was night when Claudia showed up, blew some cigarette smoke into the ladies' faces, and aimed pistols at them both. Would kindly join her at the front of the train? By the time Steel Eagle, aka Gyatso, the Tibetian spirit of Brooklyn, noticed something was wrong, the girls were cabins away. He and his sidekick Jimmy easily dispatched the five mooks sent to deal with him, sending teeth onto nearby passengers. Gyatso rushed ahead, telling Jimmy to kindly de-train the bodies. Up ahead, former hobo Florence was able to slip off into the darkness, but it didn’t help her rescue Oksana. Claudia proved more than a match for both women. As a Nazi, she was under no obligation to fight fair… and she revealed her companion, a newly enhanced KLAUS ADLER! The Ubersoldatan was decked out in new, servo-powered armor that made him a human tank. He grabbed the Swedish reporter with ease, and was about to hurl her from the train when Steel Eagle lept from above! Gyatso was barely able to stagger the man, however. His new armor made him impervious to fisticuffs! In desperation, Oksana unhooked the train cars. While arguably a smart and necessary move, this caused a minor derailment. —— (In one of the more lighthearted moments of the session, the group was traveling through rural Germany to make it to a port. They found a farm family burning western flags and singing about German supremacy… which led to a beatdown from Gyatso. “Tell these kids I’m the spirit of American freedom, and if they ever disrespect our flag again, I’ll beat them up too!”) The players didn’t cause much more destruction on the way to Sweden. They did discover destruction that they'd already caused: economic hardship for Ibn Nasiruddin, the kindly smuggler Oksana had exposed Beginner's Luck! At sea, the group was able to repel a storm of nightmarish, acid-drooling bat-like creatures with barely any damage to the ship. —— When I wrote the adventure, I had planned for the players to go to a farm in Gothenburg. Of course, the players were low on fate points, so there was a detour; Bebe Bouchard, Florence’s rival, was playing a big show in Copenhagen. The players, who had thus far kept the golem and themselves out of Nazi clutches, decided to throw a nightclub show and advertise it in the newspaper. This turned into the toughest fight in the campaign. The Nazis had a numbers advantage and hot dice. The players were physically and psychologically battered, barely able to turn things around by defeating some mook squads. They would’ve lost completely until they had the idea of unleashing the golem. The 8-foot-tall, 2000-pound rock monster was not the game changer the players had hoped for. It was able to dent Klaus’s armor, but the Reich’s supersoldier was able to lay beatdowns on Gyatso and Oksana at will. Meanwhile, Claudia harangued Florence with vile, well-researched invective. It was a shame that someone of such fine Aryan stock had to pollute themselves in the beds of other women, making a living as a second-rate version of Bebe the Schwarzer-sänger! Florence might’ve been able to bear this, until Claudia spoke a few words breathily into her ear… directly to Florence Zee’s demon. As the Aussie fled the stage in tears, the Nazi She-Wolf climbed the rock monster and disabled its wards! —— Steel Eagle was too clever for Klaus though. The All-American American used the stage equipment to electrocute Adler’s armor, ducked into the crowd, and fired his derringer at Claudia. Oksana launched a series of kicks at the bullet wound, taking her out and turning it into a 2 on 1 fight. Feeling the spirit of Florence lead them onwards**, they were able to kick through the floorboards on the stage, sending Klaus tumbling, his armor shredded, into the sub-basement. Meanwhile, Florence shoveled quarters into a payphone, waking her beau Tessie Truman. The sobbing Flo tried admitting to adultery, which her girlfriend refused to accept at 5 AM AEST. Florence was told to fly to Melbourne immediately… and prepare for a long conversation. With the help of local authorities and Rabbis, the group was able to hide the golem in an old barn on the Larrson property. The players had won, and all they had to do was endanger a lot, and I mean a lot, of civilians. —— *Hugo was being hunted by NPC Javid Kulfi. They had been enemies since Javid helped destroy the Nazi fashion automaton on the banks of the Seine. The players only inconvenienced Hugo so that Javid wouldn’t give away their position by killing a member of high command on the train. **Florence had taken three consequences in the fight, one from a stunt that lets her choose action order, two from Claudia’s verbal abuse. Flo conceded the conflict and got a whopping FOUR points, which the players needed to survive. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Jun 19, 2023 06:57
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In today's session my group managed to (yet again) turn a rather mundane task into something potentially lethal  To set the stage I had died in the previous session due to an unfortunate byproduct of a Lamia using the geas spell on a very heavily armed (former) ally of ours. Said (former) ally was a Gith with a very good sword that hit like a tank and was simply told "Murder" by the Lamia before he killed it. This of course caused him to kill everything in sight including my very squishy Monk self until the rest of the party took him down. Now this wasn't actually an issue as the reward for the job we had just completed were two vouchers of Resurrection, redeemable at any temple in the city! I was feeling like I had plateaued a bit with a Monk so I worked with my DM and he was fine with me coming back as a Lawful Evil Paladin, Oath of Conquest in service to Tiamat. This made sense story wise as we had already done a bit of work for the local Tiamat sect and Burke (the Tortle Druid) was already an adherent of Tiamat. At the end of the session the DM handwaved it a bit and said "well when you go to resurrect him at a temple the body disappears and when you go back to the base he's there" Well this got expanded on quite a bit during today's session. Since the voucher was good at any temple in the city the rest of the party thought it would be loving hilarious to go to a temple of Bahamut to get me resurrected. They show up hand over the voucher and Burke tells the priest that he'd like to get his Monk friend who's in service of Tiamat resurrected. Unsurprisingly this throws the priest for a bit of a loop and he eventually assumes Burke was kidding because nobody would be dumb enough to walk into a temple of Bahamut with that sort of request. Brian, the resident This snaps the priest out of it and he leads the party, along with my body, into another room and proceeds to snap his fingers to cast Resurrection on me. After doing this he turns away and basically tells the party to gently caress right off but the party notices something has gone a little...wonky. My body is no longer in the room. They start making a fuss and demand the priest give them back the voucher because he obviously did the spell wrong since there's no more body! This gets the priest to turn back around and all of a sudden alarms start going off in the temple, there's sounds of footsteps outside the door and another priest bursts into the room. Since said priest looks much more senior the party turns their attention on him with the same demands only to be met with a Silence spell to shut them up for a minute while the two priests talked. After they finished the conversation the now very pissed off senior priest ends the spell and turns to the party which goes something like this.  My subordinate here thought you were kidding when you said your monk friend was a follower of Tiamat. If you were kidding please explain to me why the alarms that indicate a godly incursion into our temple are going off? (the party) I mean technically only Burke there is a follower of Tiamat  What about our voucher!? You didn't resurrect him! This is bullshit, we're going to go to another temple! I'm going to give you two choices. One we call this voucher used and you get the gently caress out of our temple no questions asked. Two, you get the voucher back and you get the gently caress out of our temple with a head start. Everybody does some arcana rolls and decides that loving with a priest whose subordinate can cast Resurrection with a snap of their fingers is an extremely bad idea Nice doing business with you If we ever see any of you again, including your friend, you're all dead.So turns out what happened is that as part of me becoming Hell Knight in service to Tiamat is that she personally intervened in my resurrection. She did this by basically waltzing into a Temple of Bahamut, grabbing me right as Resurrection was cast and waltzing right back out. This of course caused an absolute shitstorm in the temple that the rest of the party managed to walk away from unharmed. On the way out Brian's player offhand mentions he'd love to get a shirt that says something along the lines of "I went to the temple of Bahamut and all I got was this stupid t-shirt". A roll or two later Brian is festooned with a wondrous magical item courtesy of the gift shop right outside the temple. Said wondrous item is a shirt of Bahamut wearing sunglasses with that text on it and it's enchanted so it always fits, never gets dirty and his scales always shine. Of course I tried to deface it as soon as I saw it but the enchantment wasn't having this. And this was supposed to be a downtime session 
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Jun 20, 2023 03:21
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I'm trying to remember if I've ever run a "downtime session" that the players didn't manage to turn into some kind of major incident. I'm sure it's possible but nothing comes to mind.
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Jun 20, 2023 05:59
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pr0digal posted:On the way out Brian's player offhand mentions he'd love to get a shirt that says something along the lines of "I went to the temple of Bahamut and all I got was this stupid t-shirt". A roll or two later Brian is festooned with a wondrous magical item courtesy of the gift shop right outside the temple. Said wondrous item is a shirt of Bahamut wearing sunglasses with that text on it and it's enchanted so it always fits, never gets dirty and his scales always shine. Of course I tried to deface it as soon as I saw it but the enchantment wasn't having this. "Mundane" magical items are the best. I'm calling it now: that shirt is going to get stolen somehow and your capstone adventure will be to get it back, and it will be amazing.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:10
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Golden Bee posted:Hearts of iron, fists of clay! Some things are odder than Hollywood. Maude Brown had returned from Nova Roma, the hidden Roman city underneath Libya. She missed her radio fame, she claimed, and was back to take over Hollywood with a new picture: the first-ever sword and surfboard action musical. To that effect, she had brought in Canadian race car scion Maple Saint Lee, and her trusted legal counsel, Tacito Uriel Velasco, a.k.a. the Jade Jaguar. Also lounging in the studio were Devika, Giula Santinella, and Gyatso. Maude served hors d’oeuvres on the soundstage, showing off a weird mystic necklace nobody could place. You might think, aren’t Tacito and Steel Eagle extremely competitive within their niches? Well, only partially. (In fact, at one point Devika asked who is tougher and the Jade Jaguar said “Steel Eagle” without a second’s hesitation.) Anyway, with butler Aldous’s leg mysteriously in a cast, it was up to the group to save the picture. They wouldn’t mind finding the screenwriter, Stanley Brewster? His bungalow had been broken into a few days ago and he hadn’t been seen since. The group raced to the scene. While the others investigated the garage and first floor, Devi skulked around the yard, looking for signs of entry. Her carefulness was rewarded when she found the back doors completely smashed in. The party scoured the first and second floors. They found two weird pools of oily blood that didn’t dry and smelled of gasoline; annotated books on MANTONG, the alleged first language of humanity; and an address book which led to Brewster’s writing partner. At the partner’s writing complex, Devika told the lawyer to ‘memorize the billboard across the street’ as she jimmied open the front door. The missing occupant, Richard Shaver, was a slob. Which meant he left out a lot of evidence, including screenplay pages about ancient robots, and marked-up maps of a small oil town up the Pacific Coast Highway. The fiery stuntwoman Lala Santinella was eager to get there, challenging new girl/race car driver Maple St. Lee. And with Devika’s help, she absolutely smoked her, driving on sidewalks and medians, leaving burnt rubber all the way up Highway 1. Maple had the excuse of carrying the rest of the passengers (the Eagle’s sidekick Jimmy Pulaski and Maude Brown among them), but Lala wasn’t buying it. “If you were being followed by a tail, you should’ve just gone faster.” Sound logic! Lala, for reference: https://imgur.com/a/kk4n1RF The apartment map led to the Carcossa oil company. The racer, lawyer and millionaire-orphan met the boss under the guise of investing. They learned a lot but tipped their hands… only to be ambushed by hordes of humanoid oil workers. Devika and Lala were ambushed by the receptionist, who pulled out a baseball bat. Devi picked up a picture frame from the woman’s desk and glassed her with it; Lala sprung off a wall and toppled a filing cabinet. The woman was smushed by the cabinet, oddly, and exploded in a spray of oily blood! This is where the redundancy came in handy. The Steel Eagle and Jade Jaguar mopped the floor with the roughnecks. Glowing fists, diving sweeps, chain chokes, rising knees, all thrown around like fake compliments at a bachelorette party. At the ladies' request, the pair even did a cool double jump-kick into the boss’s locked door, sending it flying into the far wall. The next part was much less cool, as Maude took out her purse pistol and tried to blow Devika away! Devi rolled to cover, and the group easily overpowered the radio starlet. A suspicious Gyatso ripped off her necklace, and she demanded her servants fetch her royal gown! …Wait, was this whole mission from someone kidnapped and mind-controlled? The party picked up the phone and called Aldous. He confirmed their suspicions (he was convinced that Maude shoved him and broke his leg!), and asked if they had secured the writers. This caught Lala off guard. She and Gyatso had been loading up flares to destroy the entire oilfield. Instead, the players headed into the “forbidden” sinkhole in field three. Bizarre caves, carved with perfect geometry, stretched far beneath the Earth. Piles of stones that would’ve stopped normal men were smashed by Eagle and Jaguar. Maple's insistence that the missing writing pair couldn’t be hidden in blocked-off areas was ignored. Eventually, the group reached a sandy section, following casual footprints to Brewster & Shaver. (Lala reasoned that all the creatures would be barefoot or wearing workboots.) The pair explained the situation: they were investigating MANTONG, but were ambushed at Brewster’s bungalow. They had accelerated their timeline, but had gotten lost underground, searching over and over for the ruins that would prove humanity’s connection to ancient aliens. Devika got out her newspaper cuttings book. She told the despairing typewriter-warriors that aliens were definitely real, and magic too, but nobody really cared. People wanted funny movies about Amazons playing beach volleyball. This, combined with peer pressure, and the promise of food, were enough to be convincing. Lala told everybody to grab some keys from the office and take trucks back, because she and Maple were gonna be racing back to the city. The last surprise came when a bunch of extras surprised the group at the Hollywood Brown Derby. Maude was given a cake by a group of waiters dressed as Roman legionnaires. As they carried her out, singing, it took everyone else a few minutes to realize that those were her royal retainers. Hollywood! Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Jun 26, 2023 18:37
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About fourteen years ago in GBS there was a forum game called History of the World. It was a cross between Risk and Civilization, and it quickly (de-?)evolved into people writing ridiculous flavor text and lore for their made-up nations. An IRC chat was made first for diplomacy, and then for friendship. When the game ended we stayed in IRC, then migrated to Discord, and now we are all friends who do poo poo like Secret Santa's and meetups. Now I'm DMing a 5e campaign, and since almost all of my players were in that original forum game I thought it would be fun to have it take place in a world with all our old nations. This means that while I have a ton of room to expand on the worldbuilding, my hands are still somewhat constrained by the silly nations from the original game. And that's how my world has a nation of humanoid elephant-men who have unlocked the secret to gunpowder, a nation called the "Bratwurst Confederacy", and another nation called "Brohemia" that is like if ancient Rome and a frat house got merged in a teleporter accident. In the original game there was a player playing Boatopia who took over most of the Mediterranean until he was tricked into failing a Toxx Clause which resulted in him getting banned and his nation deleted, so the plot of the D&D game so far is that long ago, so long ago that it's almost legend, the Boat People terrorized the nation until they suddenly disappeared and nobody knows why. Now they're suddenly back and they have ironclad technology! I didn't plan to run a nautical-centered campaign. The very first adventure involved the players foiling a smuggling ring, with the climatic fight taking place on the smuggler's ship. Like all DMs, I thought the ship was just a setpiece. When my players killed the smugglers they realized "Hey, there's no reason we can't just keep this ship and the cargo on board." And that's how a bunch of level one players started a trading company called the Crawdad Consortium. We have spent more time on economic roleplaying discussions than I ever imagined possible, and the weirder part is that we are all still having fun with it. Some highlights of the game so far: * The elephant nation according to lore fought off the Boat People long ago, partially due to the giant cannons protecting the harbor. Naturally, these gunpowder weapons are called "Tuskets". * I improvised "The Fool's Cellar" as the name of a tavern. We then ran with the name and decided the tavern was located in the loft of a furniture store so customers wanting to buy mattresses had to deal with drunken revelers looking down at them. * In the town of Davematthewston (not my idea) there is a cabal of frost wizards called the Nat'i (my idea, because Natty Ice). * The ruler of Brohemia is Chad "The Chad" Chadson, but he is advised by a cabinet called The Den. Members of The Den are Aiden, Braden, Caden, Hayden, Jaden, Tayden, Zayden, and Maiden. Maiden's real name is Sarah but since she's on The Den everyone calls her Maiden. She hates this, and she may be my favorite NPC ever. The party still learning more about the Boat People, and I'm looking forward to them discovering Toxx Magic made the Boat People disappear and so they will have to adventure on the plane of Mechanus to reach the source of Toxx Magic. Anyway, this game is absolutely stupid as hell but we are all playing it straight and it's the most fun I've ever had DMing.
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Jun 26, 2023 19:32
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Haschel Cedricson posted:Anyway, this game is absolutely stupid as hell but we are all playing it straight and it's the most fun I've ever had DMing. That sounds amazing and hilarious
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Jun 26, 2023 22:23
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Please tell me that Sarah/Maiden constantly plots to overthrow 'The Chad' in a bloody coup so she can take power and be advised by Hannah, Micah, Leah, Delilah etc
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Jun 26, 2023 23:49
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