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Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Hey all, I just wanted to show off these cards I recently designed and ordered for my friend, who's way into Pathfinder (he writes for Paizo):





The text could be a little bigger (I wasn't fully aware of how the card would look until I had them printed), but I'm super happy with them. They're critical hit/miss decks for a melee attack, a ranged attack, and for when you must roll to save vs. magic. If you roll a 1 or 20 while attempting these actions, you draw from the corresponding deck and do the results. My friend uses cut-up index cards that he's written on, so I figured I'd get him something fancy and borrowed his cards for a bit to turn them a little more pro-looking.

Anyone ever use props like this, instead of just consulting a crit hit/miss table? I've found our table has enjoyed them, it adds a much more tactile feel to our successes (and failures) that can't be matched by a GM just looking through a table and rolling a dice.

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Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Finnankainen posted:

I play in a Pathfinder group that uses a deck of cards quite similar to this. Some of them are pretty brutal including one that is just straight up decapitation. They certainly add some tension and excitement to the game, although it does seem like they end up being worse for us than our enemies since we have to live with the crippling after effects.

drat that's brutal. I think the harshest critical hit we have for melee is one that adds +4 to the critical multiplier, most cards add conditions, knock the target prone, or do temporary ability score damage.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

homullus posted:

If you don't call the spell that captures the warhorse "Hold Horseon", it could also be called "Hold Your Horses."

Please let this statement be a required verbal component to casting it.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Just a follow-up on those critical hit/miss cards I made - the GM loved 'em, and surprisingly in a two-hour session we used about 15 of them. At one point our strongest hitter (fighter with a glaive) critically miss, went prone and attacked self, got a critical hit on that, got a +4 critical multiplier and knocked himself out within 3 hp of death. From full health. Good laughs were had.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

sebmojo posted:

Are these available for sale? If not they should be, they sound like an instant Rolemaster conversion kit.

A good idea, but something like that already exists (Game Mastery Critical Hit Deck), though I definitely think my design is better. They have some creative results though. The reason I wanted to make these is because my GM already had his own deck of his creation made out of index cards and pencil - I figured I'd do him a solid and make it look official, using his results.

Still, if I didn't live in a different country from the printers I might consider it, you're the fourth person who has said I should do that.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Is this a decent place to discuss Dread? It's sort of a role-playing-heavy game where, instead of rolling dice to determine your success, you must perform a turn in Jenga without the tower collapsing (your character is considered dead, if not immediately then later, if you fail). There aren't any stats, just a questionnaire for each player to determine some aspects of their character. It's interesting, though I'm find that divorcing myself from what I know of creating Pathfinder campaigns to create a campaign mostly bereft of combat and stats is pretty drat hard.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

neonchameleon posted:

You don't normally create a Dread campaign though. It's for a single survival horror adventure and plays in an evening. So just create a single adventure/mission/enemy, and run it lightly. And when it's done it's done.

Yup - my problem is that I'm so used to creating dungeons and factions and such that creating a single adventure that isn't based around room-to-room encounters is pretty difficult.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Jade Mage posted:

Well, they came back and brought friends the next time, so obviously I broke them right! :colbert:

Good GMing: How to Break Your Players Just Right.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Does anyone have any ideas on what would be a good way to represent characters that are under effects? My friends and I are playing a campaign right now, and I'd really like some way to show that a character is under the effect of, say, a Prayer, or maybe sickened, or something like that, so that one doesn't need to go through the list of all possible things, reciting every effect that might be on them and double checking with the caster.
I was thinking of something like thin colored wooden disks to place under miniatures to represent different things, then putting one in front of the person who cast it or something like that.
This way, for example, the Cleric with the prayer (that's my guy!) can add disks to those affected, then when he tracks the effect running out, he simply removes them on his turn, instead of having to remind people that they're no longer affected, or that they do have bonuses now, etc.

Every try anything like this?

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

HatfulOfHollow posted:

I play a bard and I usually put dice next to an affected character with the number of remaining turns for each spell/effect currently going. If the spell affects the whole party I'll just keep the countdown dice next to me. Usually there are only 2 or 3 things going at once and I do the modifiers. So the fighter will roll his attack and say "that's a 15" and then I'll say "add +3 from ~bard things~ to make it an 18". Since the group I'm in are all pretty new it makes it easier if I just add the modifiers because it's one less thing they need to keep track of.

Another big thing we have isn't related to timers - one of our characters is a dual-wielding fighter whose specialty is nets. He throws nets on everyone, entangling them. Often we, and the DM, forget who has been entangled, if they're still entangled or have broken out, that sort of thing.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

homullus posted:

I'm not looking for advice specifically, more just general discussion and sharing perspective on the times when the GM has to describe something, and is trying to set up a particular atmosphere for a fact that is meant to be jarring/surprising/upsetting. What narrative techniques do you use?

Last night, the PCs were exploring a mining base that wasn't supposed to be deserted, but scorch marks and a pool of blood in an office that should have been occupied had them wary. They entered the canteen, and I stuck with describing the general impression of the place -- clean, well-lit, robot preparing food -- before mentioning the four corpses sitting at one of the tables, all shot to death where they sat. Two players (good-naturedly) immediately accused me of burying the lede. I can see how they would want to know that first; I can see how the PCs might even notice that before anything else. In a sense, though, the GM controls the PCs' "eyes" when they first enter a room before relinquishing his (or her) hold, and if HOLY COW GUYS, CORPSES! is the first thing I say, any other description I give will be half-heard, if I'm even allowed to finish my sentence before I am told what weapons they're readying or what specific item they want to analyze.

Did I have other options for having it hit them harder? The goal is increasing suspicion and dread (without actually playing DREAD).

Nah, that sounds like how it's supposed to go. It's basically the camera panning around the room, and then zooming in on four corpses with dramatic sting.

The only time that sort of thing was an issue for my group was when the GM described a building's living room in nonchalant detail, and completely forget to mention the seven-foot-tall glowing humanoid standing in the middle of it.

Corpses are not necessarily a thing that would stand out until you started looking around the room, which is what your description did. There's a difference between those and something that immediately draws all attention towards it. Just as long as you weren't like "Oh and there are four corpses" in the same tone and cadence that you described the rest of the room.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Going to be running an introductory adventure for that Numenera system in a few days, and I asked in the appropriate thread but...well, it's not super lively. Any advice for running it? In fact, it's been a long, long time since I've run a pre-built adventure, so advice for doing that would also be appreciated - ways I should prepare beyond reading and re-reading it, things I should do while playing, things to look out for when running a new system, etc.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Any tips on running an open-world game?

I'm writing a campaign about a newly-risen island that's got some ruins, some settlements (due to stasis), a evil god creature thing to defeat in the center of it, and a few goals for the players to complete to have some sort of arc (find answers to the island, discover a key to unlock a temple that's part of a sealing ritual, enter the center and destroy the god dude) but except for a kind of timeline, the players are free to wander about and do what they will in whatever order they wish.

I'm planning on having a number of places of interest that they may stumble upon, such as a haunted pirate ship, a den full of...some sort of creatures, maybe a powerful creature's lair, as well as a couple NPCs scattered around the place, like a mad wizard, a dragon, maybe a small pirate's lair that's getting started, as well as their home outpost.

I'm also having a mechanic that's similar to something Penny Arcade did a while ago, where they have a certain number of 'actions' they can perform each day, whether that's move, explore the area, recover, that sort of thing. These actions will start small, but grow as their resources get better, such as stronger mounts or improved rations.

I'm just not really sure how to write this. What I plan to do is just draw the map and write out the encounters available on the island, then drawing out a bunch of timelines/dates for things that change over time spent while on the island (maybe the kobold tribe will be taken out by the rampaging cannibals, or something). Any suggestions for this sort of thing? It's pretty much the first open-world thing I've planned out, so I'm worried that I'd be somehow pushing my players down a particular rail-roady path.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

fosborb posted:

In my experience, players will find the pirate ship first, and then proceed to bomb all areas of interest from the shore before sailing off into uncharted territory. But maybe your players are more reasonable.

Fronts are a quick way to organize forces that should continue to grow and evolve if players are not directly confronting them. http://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/fronts

Nah - although you did give me an idea to have them clear out the ship to make it useable, it won't be initially for some reason I'll think up - people I play with are really good about following a DM's lead, within reason. While each encounter or mini-plot is a toss-up as to how they'll handle it, I've never seen them derail anything for more than half a session or so.

Also, the island is surrounded by some very, very hard-to-navigate waters. Dagon's followers have started acting up with the rising of the island, which is causing some hell for the waters surrounding this place (the campaign starts with them shipwrecking while on the way to the outpost).

Edit: Not really a fan of this 'Front' stuff. I understand what it's trying to get across, but it seems to be doing it in such a bookish and administrative manner that it's just...eh. Like, I don't need a list of Custom Moves or Grim Portents - it seems like they're just assigning unnecessary terms to regular ol' campaign lingo. Also it's really confusing to read.

That's a really good idea, yeah.
\/\/\/\/\/

Morpheus fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Oct 27, 2014

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

petrol blue posted:

For our current Dungeon World campaign, the GM printed out a hex map with our current location on it, and told us to just add sites of interest - so we ended up with things like "magical vortex", "happy smiling friendly halfling village", "humant colony" and so on. We've not had a chance to explore the majority of them, but getting players involved in world-gen is never a bad move.

I wouldn't worry too much about a strict timeline, because players probably won't put the parts of the hidden story together, meaning it's time you could have spent on other stuff. Just keep a vague track of the major players and what they're trying to do at the moment, and it should be fine.

Oh no, I hate that hidden timeline stuff. Paizo puts it in way too much of their campaigns, and as a player in them I find it impossible to know what's going on half the time because of it. Pain in the rear end. This'll be stuff like "A year after arriving, the ancient golem will move to attack the outpost unless the players already found it and disabled it" or "Three months after the Cheliax force is discovered, an envoy is sent to converse". That sort of stuff. Nothing hidden, only stuff that the players actually will see, to make it feel more like this is stuff that is happening, that it's not just a universe that revolves around them and their actions.

I will likely get my players involved in generating some of the world, but more like they'll be giving me ideas. I'll ask them what exists on the island, modify it to fit their goals and the world, and place it somewhere on the island that they won't know of until they explore it. The big theme of the game will be discovering why the island sank, why it rose up again, and who is still on it and why.

Morpheus fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Oct 27, 2014

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
For my open world game I'm going to use a Chessex battlemat, with a four-pack of differently-colored markers. Hopefully it doesn't rub off too much when I roll it up between sessions.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Serdain posted:

Does anyone (and apologies if this has been asked recently, it's a big thread) have any experience with The Burning Wheel Gold?

Rym DeCoster from Geek Nights (who I saw at PAX) rants and raves about how good of a system it is, but i'm unable to find anything about it on SA or the rest of the internet. I've read through the basic rules .pdf and loved what i've seen, but its lack of popularity makes me feel like there must be some kind of terrible trap in the full version of the book?

The rules book is the size of a novel. A thick novel. With small text. It's also really wordy and a pain in the butt to understand. From what I've heard, it's really cool, but getting through that thing is no easy feat.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Speaking of that groundhog day, is there any way to do a groundhog day situation with genre-savvy players in a different situation than that, like, where a day within a major city keeps repeating and only the players know for some reason? I like the idea but I feel like the people I play with would just start murdering recklessly until the right switch clicks, or something similar.

Edit: Step 1) is obviously to make it a Daybreak-style situation, where wounds incurred carry over to the next loop.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
So I'm running a Shadowrun campaign for my group. In it, they're sort of pulled into an investigation wherein they find that there's a powerful stealth weaponized satellite orbiting Earth from before the Awakening and it's got an AI on it that wants to get out. The AI has only been able to send small bits of information, which has led it to a technomancer (computer wizard) named K-Kat that wants to help it. So it sent down a Key that will allow someone to access it, but part of the key was intercepted, and the rest split up by the technomancer in worry. So now there are a few factions trying to gain access to this thing - K-Kat, the corps Ares and Renraku (one for the weaponry, one for the AI), and a dragon, whose motivations I haven't solidified yet.

After finding one of the people who died with the key (which brought them into the adventure), I had thought that the group would hunt down someone (an old-school decker) mentioned in a ~*~mysterious message~*~, get his help, get the dead guy's address, leading them to a battle with some cops, a decryption algorithm for the part of the key that the hacker was killed with, and a lead to K-Kat.

What DID happen, however, was that they pissed off the decker with threats and intimidation, forced the hacker's address off of him, killed a couple of cops and left without searching the place (leaving one cop alive). So now they have an arrest warrant on their head. It's a lot of fun as someone running the campaign, not so great for someone planning it (but hey, players amirite). I'm pretty sure I had my head in my hands at the end of it.

Still trying to figure out where to go next. I'm thinking that the dragon's going to be introduced a lot earlier than planned, rescuing them from a trap set by Ares to try to buy the key fragment off of them, but I'm not sure what to do from there. I don't want him to just become their dispatcher, sending them out on mission after mission, but he'll need to play some sort of role in this, probably using them for his own devices in exchange for clearing their warrants. Doesn't help that it's my first campaign that I've attempted to make in this setting.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
I'm having some trouble inspiring my friends to do stuff in the 'off time' of our Pathfinder game (set in the Manawastes, at the moment). They've expressed that, yeah, they want to do stuff in this when not adventuring - since it is an open-world game, there's a lot of opportunity to do so - but they're just not sure what. At least, stuff that doesn't directly apply to adventuring, like crafting magic items or whatever.

How can I figure out some things that they can be doing, or perhaps some non-adventuring goals to reach towards? They definitely want to, they've just expressed a definitive lack of creativity.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Tias posted:

If you can buy/borrow it where you are, try leafing through a Kingmaker module. I'm playing one at the moment, and there's a lot of interesting event tables and citybuilding rules you can swipe.

We have actually played through all of Kingmaker, the campaign - something like that may come up, but currently this is a party of level 2 adventurers. Commanding cities is a little beyond their grasps at the moment (unless the module has some really low level stuff to start with). As for bases, though....hmm. Might not be a bad idea to set up some sort of HQ, though we're not too far in at the moment.

Should be noted that we, as players, broke the city building over our knee, and eventually abandoned it because we were making money and resources hand over first, spitting out magic items all over the place and generally just mucking up and sort of role playing it might have afforded us. It wasn't bad, but just didn't feel particularly fleshed out.

Morpheus fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Nov 9, 2015

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
As someone who appreciates good presentation, that is a nice document. My GM documents are usually as fancy as I can be bothered to use tabs and italics.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
So, my Shadowrunning PCs have recently made a deal with a law enforcement official that if they get a certain object (an unencrypted datastick), their criminal record will be wiped away. So they got the datastick and unencrypted it, and it turns out its part of a whole, which is something of a large campaign that I'm putting together. However, they think that the official wanted the 'whole', and not the datastick itself, and he told them to meet him in four days, then cut off communication.

Is there any way in-game to have them know that he doesn't want the entire thing, just this one part on the datastick, or is it just something I'm going to have to tell them out-of-character?

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Baronjutter posted:

Just play it out. If they're too dumb to understand a simple contract that's their fault. Are they just going to not meet up in 4 days because they can't beat your entire campaign by then? They'll figure it out when they meet him. "Hi we got the stick but there's more data we couldn't find" "I only asked for the stick, you did your job".

Or just straight up remind them that the official only specified the stick next time they bring it up. If it's something their characters would remember but they as players have mixed up you can correct that.

Wellll what's going to happen is that they'll hand over the stick and the man's going to try to kill them. So...I'm just hoping they actually show up with the stick and not get cold feet or something.

Though considering how they have repeatedly managed to duck and weave around any semblance of structure I've set up, I've really got to plan for that contingency. Perhaps he had someone follow them in case they decided to renege...

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Moose King posted:

Really, the guy has plenty of reasons to double-cross them. For one, he only asked them to retrieve the thing, not decrypt it and see the secret information. Now they know too much, so he HAS to kill them.

That's actually not a bad idea. I'd like to make him a reoccuring character too...let's see how that turns out.

Also I think I'm going to let the players do their thing, and when they start to run out of time (even though they've completed it already) I'll just have them roll a memory check, then say "As you think about it, it actually dawns on you that..."

But hey, they'll get karma points from whatever they're doing anyway, so I doubt they'll mind the hoops they had to jump through. Really, I'm the onlyone that suffers from their choices...yayyyyy being a GM!

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

HatfulOfHollow posted:

That's the worst thing you can do. The players will feel like they've wasted their time. Either tell them right away that they're being dumb and over-thinking things or alter the story to accommodate their actions. If you let them jump through a bunch of hoops and then suddenly go "oh yeah, you guys remember he actually said..." it's just going to feel like a terrible deus ex machina.

I'm not going to have them look for ghosts or anything - they're going to be advancing the storyline at large, just not in the order i thought.

What I had planned:

- Bad Man wants mcguffin
- Players get mcguffin and give it to Bad Man who betrays them
- Players advance overarching plot after this

Instead it's more like

- Bad Man wants mcguffin
- Players get mcguffin and advance overarching plot
- Players give mcguffin to Bad Man

I'd never just have them chase dead leads and red herrings, that's boring as poo poo. Anytime they look up a lead that I had to cook up on the spot, there's something to follow - like, in checking out an apartment of a man mentioned in the logs for the mcguffin (a Matrix contact) that I sorta just threw up on the spot, they noticed they were being followed, chased down a man who was being puppeteered, and in doing so the game sort of foreshadowed a big player in this conflict a little earlier that expected, but in a much more mysterious way.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Ominous Jazz posted:

so, I wanna put in a logic puzzle for my players based on the Jail House Rock fight in Stone Ocean

only, replace the words "stand user" with "wizard". Basically, their memories are lost and they can only learn 3 facts and if they learn a fourth, the first thing learned slips out. I was thinking about having them have to do some kind of complicated lever sequence to shut off some magic bullshit or like a water trap, or a situation where they strategically push out the idea that the wizard is their friend in order to kick his rear end.
Just for some context, this wizard is a magical experimenter squating inside a hellcastle on a ley line with his humanimal centaur creations.
Any ideas? Is this a thing that doesn't work as well in elf games? What other fights from jojo should I rip off?

Regarding this, would it be possible to do a sort of 'Memento'-style story, where you start at the end, where they escape, and go backwards? So each puzzle they solve, they arrive at the start of the previous puzzle (in your session), and then you skip backwards to the beginning o the previous puzzle.

(this will make no sense if you haven't seen the film Memento)

Can toss in some time shenanigans or something when they reach the end/beginning - maybe at the beginning of your session, they're about to get crushed by spikes or some unescapable trap, and a portal opens. Then you go backwards, using that memory thing, which eventually leads them to the beginning of this adventure where they'd get kidnapped, which would normally be anticlimactic except that's when the adventurers from the future jump through a portal and save them from being kidnapped/amnesia-d. Thus starting a big battle that wouldn't have occured before or...something.

Or something time shenaniganny. That's the only way I can think of to communicate a sort of repeated amnesia that also keeps the information hidden from your players.

Actually I like this idea, I need to do it myself.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
The only way to have a strictly-controlled pacing is either to lead the players along, or have things happen to them independently of their actions - ie have enemies come find them, have events occur in a way that they can't ignore (like, if they witness an explosion then chances are good that they're going to drop what they're doing to investigate it). But then, there's a an equally-good chance that they're just going to want to roll to get blasted at the floating tavern (home of Dragon's Cloud ale), try to steal a cannon, or cut a ship free for themselves and go on a piratey crusade. Players!

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

I am definitely going to try this out. Also, the top comment, with the modified initiative resolution stuff, is pretty cool too.

One thing though, is there any way to resolve what happens when a player thwarts the monster's plans? ie, if the Lich is going to cast Frostbolt next turn, and his only target casts some sort of frost-resistance shield, would there be any reason for the Lich to actually continue casting the spell, or is he going to switch gears to another spell? Like, yes, he could change targets, but what if there isn't one to change to? You could argue that he has to discharge it into a wall, or something, but that seems to give the players a heavy advantage (which, of course, isn't necessarily a bad thing).

Morpheus fucked around with this message at 17:50 on May 6, 2016

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Regarding the "huddle, discuss actions, then resolve them" mechanic, the Burning Wheel systems such as Mouse Guard and Torchbearer do this, in a sort of rock-paper-scissors system (though obviously more complex) during resolution.

Morpheus fucked around with this message at 14:50 on May 9, 2016

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

sebmojo posted:

13th age.

Mongoose Traveler is actually pretty great, and you can run the fantastic pirates of drinax free campaign.

Isn't 13th age just D&D plus an escalation die? Or is there more to it than that (I thumbed through the rulebook briefly)

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
I don't know if this'll help you or not, but the entire game of Xenoblade (the original, on the Wii and 3DS), takes place on the colossal bodies of two robots that have stopped moving mid-combat:



(a massive loving sword acts as a bridge between the two)

What I'm saying is you could potentially create an entire campaign upon the back of this giant - think of what petrified it in the first place, what would happen if that petrification were to end, how long has it been there, and does anybody want to do something with it (perhaps the wizard). Does it have a power source, perhaps, a source of incredible magical energy if someone can perhaps penetrate the creatures that lead to its heart/head?

Also if there are small civilizations thriving on there, I think it'd be neat to develop lingo that they've become accustomed to using, like describing directions beyond 'up' and 'down'.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

AlphaDog posted:

I once used "Oh shiiiiiit, a huge shadow's blocked out the sun! <Turn to player> What is it?" when everyone seemed to be getting bored with a combat scene. It worked out fine.

This is a good idea, but it requires the right player. The people I play with, myself included, would not like to get asked about this sort of stuff. I'm not there to create the situations, I'm there to respond to them and inflict change via my avatar.

Edit: Though I suppose if he's playing Dungeon World, this isn't a problem.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

thegoatgod_pan posted:

thanks for the great advice!

I love the idea of using a newspaper to fill them in as to major global shifts, etc, and it really fits with the high-magic steampunkiness of the world. For the first session I made them a heavily altered J. Peterman catalogue to pick some magical equipment (started at level 2 and wanted to catch them up on wealth by level), for the second I'll definitely give them a newspaper spelling out the immediate consequences of their actions, that they are wanted by law enforcement and some random stories with plot hooks.

Also, since my plan didn't raise any red flags I think I will plan for an urban and a wilderness adventure, and change them slightly to fit whereever they end up.

Hm, I like the idea of having, every now and then when the characters are milling about in town, an old-timey newspaper boy yelling 'extree extree! Read all about it!' with some randomly created headline that (usually) is just unimportant news. And maybe every now and then the headline of the day is something important, either a plot hook or foreshadowing for something in the future.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Illegal Username posted:

I'm gonna run a RPG based on Stalker or Roadside Picnic.
I've got a campaign thought out and it involves the players are going to enter the Zone, and go through a small forest into a suburb and then to the city proper.

I have ideas for the actual setpieces but what i need are some weird rear end anomalies, mutants and artifacts to describe how utterly alien their environment is. gently caress laws of physics and causality, you're in the Zone now.

I've got things like a completely normal looking human being who scratches symbols into concrete with his fingernails, things you can only see with your eyes closed, things that cast a shadow in a certain direction regardless of the light shining on them, a piece of crystal that causes intense euphoria for anyone who touches it (basically space drugs), and a zone of thick, viscous air which is breathable but sounds propagate through it so fast that speech is unintelligible and something like a gunshot will cause burst eardrums.

Basically it's a carte blanche to be an rear end in a top hat to your players without being restricted to physics. And the players are basically expecting one curveball and/or puzzle after another, Please help me goons!

How about time anomalies that show up that just show, say, a small locale at the time of the explosion/event, just looping. So most of the time it'd be maybe a tree or grass being blown away, sometimes they see a person dying horrifically over and over again, and any attempt to enter the area results in terrible burns or extremely advanced aging upon whatever limbs are put into the spot.

Shadows of people that don't have anyone attached to them, moving through motions that they did when they were alive (but projected against walls and such, not just existing in space)

Swarms of razor-sharp leaves that result in areas torn to shreds.

A massive rumbling underneath the earth intermittently that never reveals its source.

A specific area where the sun's position in the sky is relative to where you are (so, in the center of the area it's high noon, on the edges it's dusk).

A place in which they can hear the crackling of fire all around them.

Then there's simple stuff, like creatures turned entirely inside out, teal flames, fruits that grow rotten, etc

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
So my party is about to go on a kidnap heist in Shadowrun - they're infiltrating a soiree to grab relative member of importance in Portland, and I need some tips about running this sort of thing. Right now I know that there's going to be a meeting between the guy and a corp behind closed doors for them to give him a bribe, and that there's going to be something of a nemesis in the crowd of the soiree as well that they don't know about yet. Any other tips on what I should have ready?

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

gradenko_2000 posted:

A twist I like to throw in is to put the mark in circumstances where they're part of a group: the President's daughter hanging out with her girlfriends, or the Japanese businessman and his sycophantic assistants, or the rock star that likes to mosh pit.

Do you try to extricate them from that close-knit pack, or do you kidnap a bunch of additionals? How do you do it?

Well the mark is either going to be shmoozing it up with people at the party, or with the corp men when he's taking the bribe. Always with at least one bodyguard. So, knowing my group, they're almost certainly going to simply shoot everyone once they're in a closed room and jump through the window, possibly unconcious guy slung over the troll's shoulder.

So I'm going to put in bulletproof glass. I mean, why wouldn't this guy have it in his home? Should make things interesting in that regard at least.

I suspect they'll also try to infiltrate via the catering company, which means I'm going to let them subscribe to the AR node that the company uses to identify all the guests.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Haschel Cedricson posted:

You should absolutely find a way to work the Portland Shanghai Tunnels into the kidnapping.

That's actually how they got into Portland.

Thanks for the awesome suggestions though! I'm essentially going to try to have one different thing happen to each runner - it'll be delightful chaos, especially when they all come to a head at the same time. Which of course is exactly what is going to happen.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

starkebn posted:

Shadowrun can be so 'mission' based I wouldn't sweat it. Just keep playing week to week until the inspiration hits. Hopefully someone can give you better advice!

Yeah it's pretty much baked into the structure of the game. I find that it's best to just lay things out and let the players run around in a little sandbox. My 'map' for the last mission I ran for my guys was a series of interconnected bubbles with notes inside of them. And then the guys pretty much sidelined the entire thing by hacking the reception and getting a fake email sent. Because gently caress it, I can use the map later.

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Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
I'm about to run a World of Darkness (mortals, maybe introducing Hunters later on) campaign for the first time - I've done a small intro-level adventure recently but that's pretty much all the exposure I've had to the adventure structures and such. Doesn't help that there aren't a whole lot of resources on running nWoD mortal-only stuff around, but...anyway.

It's going to be a fairly standard cult-wants-to-summon-a-hideous-beast-from-beyond-the-veil sort of plot, one where the characters all begin on the last train of the night that's essentially hijacked by cultists to take them to a ritual sacrifice location. Maybe a little cheesy but I don't think my players care too much about that sort of thing. They'll escape after glimpsing their first taste of horrific beasts, realize that all is not right in the world, and be given a mission by a dying hunter to meet up with a wizard for...some reason.

Anyway my big thought is that of the big bad - the great horror. I want them to meet it a few times before realizing what it is, and I want the form to be of a somewhat polite man in a suit. Similar to the Beast from the Magicians, or the storekeeper from Needful Things (Stephen King). I don't want them to realize that this pontificating gentleman is actually something that can dislocate its jaw to swallow a sacrifice whole (which will be the scene where it reveals itself, most likely), just some mysterious, somewhat sinister figure. His power will be growing as the cult's power does, so he won't be able to manipulate the world or cause any problems, but he will be interacting with the party as a sort of curiousity, like a cat toying with a mouse.

I'm just...I guess I'm wondering what direction to take this. Like, I don't want him to be particularly affable, mostly polite and well spoken, but almost completely devoid of empathy. Would it be revealing too much if he had a few conversations with them in some dangerous environments beforehand? I don't think my players would be genre savvy enough to realize what he is, especially since the plots we run tend to be fairly blunt about what is evil and what isn't. I mostly just want him to seem completely out of place.

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