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I had schemes to run a Groundhog apocalypse in an Unknown Armies campaign. Players would show up in the remote town where two godwalkers were clashing. The duel was between a wounded and half-mad Masterless Man who refused to die until he slain his foe, and a scheming Chronicler who was fated to observe the death of the unkillable man. The force of their hatred and magickal bullshit broke time in the area, and they were trapped replaying the same cycle that ends with the destruction of the entire town. The only way out was for the players to tip the balance of power between the two avatars. Whenever the town blew up, the world reset, and the players were thrown back to the beginning of the day. Only they remembered what had happened, although the Chronicler could at least sense that something was terribly wrong. Whichever avatar they helped would owe them a favour, and the other avatar would curse them forever. The bonus twist would have been that there was an assassin hunting the PCs, who was also aware of the loop. He'd pretend to redo the same actions, but he could be caught in pre-emptively bracing himself for explosions. He was added to throw their plans off and and give them a sense of being haunted.
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Nov 18, 2014 20:44
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Hey, y'all. It's been years since I DM'd anything, but the lockdown has dragged me back into the hobby kicking and screaming. I just wrapped a campaign of Arthurian Knights vs steam-powered zombies in Fate Condensed, and I'm trying to find a new system for the next game. I've been out of the hobby for 5 years, so I don't know the new hotnesses. What's a good system for a medieval mecha campaign inspired by Escaflowne? I'm looking for something relatively rules-light, but with a little crunch to let the players feel like tactical geniuses. Stuff I want the system to support: * Smashing down a dam with a hammer bigger than god * Veiled threats exchanged over noble banquets * Tragic character flaws that drive brave souls to ruin * Shoulder-slamming through castle walls * The ability to wield ballistas akimbo
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Jul 24, 2020 04:22
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I had a large scale combat recently where each PC had a support squad of 4 henchies. The PC could order the squad to either boost a player action with a +4 modifier, or do a separate action with a generic +4. While attached to the PC, they acted as a temporary HP boost, and their modifier was reduced each time a henchie died. Enemy squads worked the same way; a single memorable large villain and a squad of mooks. The players got pretty attached to their nameless sidekicks, and it created a good Helm's Deep feeling when the dust cleared, and only a handful of wounded survivors remained. The surviving henchies got promoted with names and ranks to became recurring cast. After all, they survived the Battle of Lyon together.
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Aug 16, 2020 19:47
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So, I'm falling back on good ol' Fate Condensed for my Escaflowne-inspired mecha game. The challenge I'm running into is separating the feeling of person-on-person battles from the increased scale and weight I want from mecha. I want fights between mecha to be closer to formal duels, decided decisively in a handful of rounds. Here's what I'm thinking so far: Humans:
One of the setting elements is that there's only about 20 mecha world-wide, each some unique bullshit gimmick that nobody else gets to have. If a player's mech can fly short distances, nobody else gets to. Do you have an electrified harpoon that drags fleeing opponents back into your zone? Only you get that. Gimmicks are represented by an Aspect and Stunt, and I want players to be carefully scrutizining their opponents to ascertain their magical bullshit before engaging. How does that sound to folks?
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Aug 21, 2020 17:29
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I would suggest treating it like a dungeon with ice-themed traps. Use a cliff face map, and let players travel freely across it at half their movement speed. Some areas are so bitterly cold + dangerous that ending a turn there takes damage. Maybe there's frozen monsters to skirt around, or a shortcut that needs the melee characters to hack through an ice wall,. Maybe there's a broken rope bridge the rogue has to repair for the wizard to safely cross.
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Oct 4, 2020 20:26
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I'm running a fuedal mecha campaign in Fate Condensed, and I'm loving my players. It took them a while to figure out how the system let them use the environment, but now they're creating advantages and overcoming obstacles like naturals. The players pilot the Sunflower, the Tempest and the Grand Caravan. ( It's hella fun letting folks choose an epithet, honestly. ) After a tough fight cleaning out a nest of Tyrannosaurs beside an acid oasis, they had their first encounter with the recurring villains, the Deus and the Devil Rampant. The Deus is a crystalline Armour with sweeping blade wings, and the Devil Rampant wields a siege ballista and a looted city gate as a shield. The Deus charged into the Tempest and the Caravan, and hosed them up real bad with it's multiple attacks per round. The players decided that fighting fair was for suckers, so they grappled it, taking ongoing slashing damage from its wings, and dragged it into the acid oasis. During the melee the Caravan had its cockpit ripped open, so the pilot risked getting fatally splashed with acid as they stomped the Deus under the waves. The Sunflower had a hell of a time dodging boulder-shattering ballista bolts as it closed with the Devil Rampant. All this fighting caused a nearby herd of Brontos to stampede into the battlefield, so the mecha were dodging dinosaurs to line up shots, and trying to shove each other under the hooves. My favourite moment was when the Sunflower parkoured across a Bronto to do a flying rapier strike. The battle ended when both parties, badly hosed up and at ever-increasing risk of being overwhelmed by Brontos, mutually decided to withdraw. I'd expected the players to kill or capture one of the villains, so it was nice that I can re-use both of these characters for future battles. Tomorrow the PCs are going to fight the Devil Rampant in a flooded city ruin. Several slaver warships are docked among the ruins, and if someone doesn't supplex a battleship I will be real disappointed.
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Nov 8, 2020 07:29
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Leraika posted:So this is like what, Sakura Wars? The players were able to sneak into the city ruins much better than I expected. There was a warehouse full of sedated dinosaurs that I had intended to wake up and attack the Armours, but the players got there before anyone sounded an alarm. The Tempest bodychecked the warehouse down, then blasted the wreckage with its steam cannons to boil the dinosaurs alive in their crates. The Rampant's ballista has massive iron chains running to the bolts, and it was able to impale the Caravan with a ridiculously high shoot roll. It yanked the Caravan off its feet, pulled it through a building and dragged it into the sea. The Rampant, piloted by basically evil Chris Pratt, then sent his tamed Tyrannosaurs after her. The Caravan traded blows with the dinos underwater, and pulled itself ashore to make a heroic last stand protecting slave pens against their hungry claws. The Armour was too damaged to continue, and the pilot leapt free as the Tyrannos tore it apart. The Sunflower dived into the sea to emerge like Posideon under a slaver frigate, skewering its rapier from the hull out the deck. The captain responded by pinning him into the shoreline and unleashing a devastating cannon broadside. The Sunflower was able to squeeze out, and scrambled up onto the deck where its guns couldn't track him. He then tore a pirate cannon out of its mounting, ran his rapier down it like he was striking a match, and fired it pointblank into the ship's ammo dump. The climax was the heavily damaged Rampant and Sunflower dueling aboard a sinking barge. The Sunflower might have won, but he chose to turn back to save the Caravan's pilot. The Rampant escaped aboard the barge, vowing revenge. Squidster fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Nov 9, 2020 |
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Nov 9, 2020 07:09
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pog boyfriend posted:have you tried running a game about running food related shops. not joking with this post. 
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Dec 10, 2020 04:49
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I would suggest having the bard attend the concert early, and have it be every bit as mindblowingly good as the marketing says. Then when they get to their fantasy AirBnb, they find their room is double-booked with Guts! And oh no, there's just one bed. The PCs can do a small clash of personalities, get some roleplaying opportunities as they bounce off each other, etc. Then introduce the next PC, also booked for that room, then the rest, then like five NPCs until everyone realizes they've been scammed by a shifty landlord. When the angry party goes to confront the shady landlord, they find the empire has just declared an emergency curfew and is recruiting bold adventurers. And wouldn't you know it, room and board is free if you sign up now.
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Dec 16, 2020 07:48
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There's a comic called Frieren at the Funeral, which is all about an immortal elf struggling to connect with fleeting mortals. She raised a human apprentice Fern from childhood, but doesn't understand her at all. She doesn't know what her adoptive daughter's favourite foods are, what makes Fern happy, etc. How can you know these things when you've only been known someone for a decade? These elves take on whimsical hobbies that sharply butt against mortal expectations. Frieren was told there was a pretty flower in a forest, so why not spend a year searching every inch? She casually decides to go on a journey that may take fifty years, and doesn't really understand that her human companions will die of old age before it's done. The protagonist spends a lot of her time studying the current state of magic, as humans are constantly inventing and merging spells into more powerful forms. At one point, an immortal demon who was in stasis for a century is revived, and their much-feared killing magic turns out to be a level one magic missile. Dangerous to the unprotected, but barely a slap against modern shields. Even the human apprentice Fern is able to casually punk him.
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Dec 19, 2020 17:49
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Just spitballing, but what if they just socially agree to have 80 year lifespans? Like they 'die,' have a formal burial ceremony where other elves say nice things about the life they lived, and then they're 'reborn' with a new name and identity? Each life is considered separate, so marriages, property ownership, etc., are all peaceably ended. The newborn adult tries a new path, new skills, and just naturally forgets about their past life. Society has a continuance, and elves politely pretend to not remember previous iterations of each other. One life they were a heroic sage who saved the city, then a vicious bandit king. This time they're fostering dwarf children as a hobby. Immortal speed-runners playing at being mortal.
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Dec 19, 2020 19:43
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That sounds like a fun setup! I like that you're letting characters explore complicated questions. Zodack posted:Something I was struggling with is the party is going to meet anti-Elf guy's son in the town before and travel together. There's a schism in the family and I had it down to "his son is engaged to marry an elf that is part of a politically powerful family" but that didn't have enough bite. A bigger stain I was working on was that the elf would actually be a distant great-aunt/grandmother/relative or somehow otherwise related to their family which appals the father. But why wouldn't this bother the son? To the engaged son, this is ancient history, barely worth considering. But his father, who saw the pain on his own father's face, it's a revived childhood trauma. Squidster fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Dec 20, 2020 |
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Dec 20, 2020 02:50
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That does sound really cool! I'm sure the players are loving it. In my dinosaur-fighting mecha Fate game, we had a big dramatic duel between the pilot of the Tempest, Anath, and a desperate would-be pilot named Septima. The culture they're from believes mecha pilots are divine; living saints born to die in glory for their goddess. May your passing bless Punica. The problem is Anath lost her faith a decade ago, and believes they die only to fill the priests coffers. She's become an embarassment to the priesthood as she stubbornly survives against impossible odds. The duel itself was a diplomatic hail-mary proposed by the PCs when different nations almost came to blows. The priests told would-be pilot Septima that she could either defeat Anath in a duel for her mecha, or be sold as a mental battery to the villains. I wanted to capture that this was a tragedy, and that even victory would be Pyrrhic. Fate's not great at one-on-one duels between characters of comparable stats, so I tried setting up zones to represent emotional states.  The sequence was: 1) A physical round of combat where the real-world characters beat the poo poo out of each other with shield and javelin 2) A mental round to push their opponent to a new emotional zone, or trap them there. 3) Each combatant tagged in someone outside the combat to create advantages for them. Part of the gimmick was that players could only attack from adjacent zones. If Anath wanted to drive her opponent into mindless fury, she had to move to the adjacent anger hex. The PCs helped each other out by shouting out advice and encouragement, but as Septima started losing, her calls for help went unanswered. Anath confined her in All Is Lost, while standing in Shame, and methodically broke her opponent's legs. It worked out to be one of the most stressful combats in our game, and inspired lots of back-and-forth dialog as characters moved around the emotional spectrum. Anath felt awful after winning, forced to utterly destroy their opponent rather than merely kill them. When we closed the session, the PCs were planning a hospital raid to rescue the doomed pilot.
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Jan 4, 2021 01:14
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Paper mirrors. Enormous sheets of blank canvas that sketch whoever stands in front of them. As they step away, the ink fades. Spend too long staring at it, and an ink doppelganger steps out to consume them. A divine book of imperfect summoning. It can summon almost anything! Ask for a treasure chest, get a measuring vest. Request an angel, get a bagel. It can't actually get what you want, but it sure can fetch something with similar syllables. Boiling vats of magical ink, fed by toxic potions and dark sacrifices. Some of the sacrifices can be freed to cause chaos, some can break free to attack the players.
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Jan 19, 2021 06:29
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I have attained DM Nirvana, and can go no higher; after a player somehow pulled off an impossible rescue for the arc's tragic villain, she was struggling to hold back tears and had difficulty speaking in character. Making a player cry, without being mean to them, is the highest honor. I'm deeply grateful that I've stumbled into a group willing to unashamedly commit to dicegames. Now, my challenge is that I had really planned to kill off this villain to harvest that sweet pathos, and now I gotta make space in a crowded plot for a redemption arc. I might have to put the villain on a boat and take them offstage for a bit.
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Mar 2, 2021 07:20
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My god, one of my players wrote diss tracks for today's duel. The PC is Kaspar, a gentle Dutchman piloting the Sunflower, facing off against Young Henny Geens, an untested mecha pilot with hosed up hands. I am so proud of these playersquote:Geens got a son, we call him little Henny,
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Mar 8, 2021 03:00
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pog boyfriend posted:call it cryptcoin op. cheers
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Mar 10, 2021 19:10
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I suggest creature comforts that the character would appreciate, but that the players will forget. A bedroll with a magic warming spell. A decanter of endless spices so the meal is always fresh ( you can faintly hear a kitchen on the other side ). Socks that are always dry. A pair of matching flasks, one hot and one cold. A curious iron cube that freezes a liter of water. Edit: a bag of holding from UberElves, where once per day you can pluck out a freshly cooked meal. When you're done, put the dishes back in the bag and the elves will clean it right up! It's customary to leave a tip. Just never ask if the elves on the other side can climb on through... Squidster fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 00:35
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I think someone in this thread, umpteen years ago, came up with a good orc take. An orc is a monster anyone can become, as their appearance morphs to match the ugliness of their heart. Chased out of civilized communities, they form animalistic hateful bands that prey on travelers.
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Apr 8, 2021 20:56
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AfricanBootyShine posted:It's something that clearly jumps out to our group. None of us are white and a couple of my players are decolonial scholars, so common racist tropes really jump out at us. It takes me out of the game when I realise that the language used by the PHB to describe orcs and goblins is exactly the same language used to describe Africans and indigenous people by colonisers. Like you could change 'orc' to African and it'd read exactly like a historical text from the early 20th century.
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Apr 9, 2021 00:19
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The billionaire who hired them to test the security system does not actually own the cruise ship. He's scamming them, and plans to slip in and steal the prize while the PCs and security are shooting each other.
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Apr 10, 2021 01:01
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We just had a fun reveal like that! In my robots game, the players decided to do a Bad Thing to save the nation. It involved mutilating a political leader's corpse with puppet wires chained to a mecha engine, and then using their sympathy magic to pilot the dead woman as if she were an Armour. We'd previously established that using this machine, the Slave Engine, would seriously gently caress up whoever piloted it. The player who volunteered to do this texted me to say "hey, what if my character's only friend in the world drugged my PC and took his place?" We played out the high stakes diplomacy with that PC playing as the dead leader, intercut with nightmare fragments of mental collapse. Then the character woke up in their room, tied to their bed, and rushed out to find their closest friend had sacrificed themselves. They had a tearful goodbye as the friend begged the PC to resist the dark path, and be the gentle knight he chose to die for. Listening to the other two players realize what was happening in ever-increasing horror was deeply satisfying.
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Apr 11, 2021 04:18
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Reginald, the haggard town drunk who was once a supremely gifted bard, lost his lover at sea. They had been quarrelling, as young men are wont to do, when there a terrible accident involving a fisherman's boat. The lover drowned believing Reginald murdered them. Now anytime a villager with this shared mental connection tries to sail, the dead lover's ghost is raised up in torment and fury to attack them. It's not that the villagers can't dispell the ghost; it's that they're ashamed. If only the players could convince the ghost that it really was an accident, or inspire Reginald to write that perfect song to communicate his regret and enduring love. Alternately, none of the villagers can leave the island because they're all dead and this is purgatory SMASH CUT to JJ Abrams credits
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May 1, 2021 17:50
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That's fantastic to read! These are the good stories.
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May 3, 2021 16:38
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We're approaching 150 hours in my feudal mecha game, and I'd like to get some custom figures made for the players. Has anyone used a 3d figure service and got a good result from 'em?
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May 18, 2021 04:12
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Phrosphor posted:Is it a good or bad sign that the players have made a second group chat called 'secret plans' that I am not allowed in? I love going back after a game to see the player reactions.  This was them overhearing a conversation between their two adopted Tiefling NPCs, a pair of teen orphans they hired as trackers. The teens are increasingly certain they will die in the coming war. 
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May 25, 2021 02:54
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As a player i wouldn't even think of surrendering to a murder cult; it seems like that would intuitively be suicide. Maybe the hostage gets maimed in the fight, but is deeply grateful to the party. They could still go zero-tolerance on magic, but become a problematic ally rather than a direct opponent. As long as the players gain *something* from the event, I think they'll feel satisfied.
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May 25, 2021 15:50
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Morpheus posted:But I'm worried that my players will think I railroaded them toward this, that they had no choice in the matter, that kind of thing. I'm going to give them one more opportunity to surrender, but I doubt they're going to take it. Tiocfaidh Yar Ma posted:Yeah definitely. I made it clear in the setting expectations part before the game that consequences in the game would exist similar to some analogous real world thing. For instance for drawing a weapon and posturing at a corrupt guard during a shakedown would be the same as drawing a weapon on a cop, or that the feeling they got from an arcana check on a strange glowing orb they found was a similar feeling to a being handed a heavy football irl and being told its a fusion reactor - do you really want to try hitting it with something sharp? Also important to stress the 'dying is part of the game' talk, that if there wasn't a chance to die it'd be no challenge and no fun. Sorry, I'm a little unclear; is this a game you're running together?
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May 26, 2021 02:50
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My strategy to signpost unwinnable fights has been to point to the party's adopted NPCs and say "you might survive, but they definitely won't."
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May 26, 2021 14:36
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Ooh, that's fun! It could be a forbidden contraband in the hold. The Elf Mafia ensorcelled the captain to deliver the cargo or die, and any obstacle in the path of delivery injures her. Or maybe it's a Farscape Moya situation, where the ship is mystically pregnant with a smaller ship, and the whole crew is the 'father.' The player's actions will determine the personality of the infant ship. Maybe the ship is a ocean leviathan transformed to look like it's made of wood and cloth. The crew are actually it's organs/emotions, and the ship's cat is a sneaky parasite.
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Jun 1, 2021 03:43
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Are they at all interested in worldbuilding or creative exercises? The Fate campaign I'm in has been really successful because the players designed the world. Fate stresses that character relationships and shared history, and it helped springboard players into things. We established that there was an Iron Queen who ruled a fragile alliance of nations. Everybody choose their favourite historical nation, then worked out what they contributed to their alliance. Border tensions and cultural attitudes naturally developed, and it helped contextualize how the player characters talked to each other. They knew who they were within these societies. Carthage and Holland are vying over control of the sea trade; Austria's lifeblood is their military, and feels Holland is effete and decadent. All the nations are plotting for influence over their neighbouring territory of Italy, where the players were deployed. That said, if your players have been murderhoboing for fifteen years, maybe playing RPGs is like collecting model trains; something you do out of habit long after the love is gone.
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Jul 5, 2021 16:18
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It does sound like the player wants to lean into edgelording. Maybe check with them about what kind of community relationships they'd like to have, and see if the concept needs workshopping. Maybe they look nightmarish now, but are saving enough money to look more 'nice'? Maybe it plays Bad Cop for the local sheriff, or hangs out in the dump where it forms an unlikely friendship with ragtag orphans. Horrible nightmare protector of the helpless is a fun archetype.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:12
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Have you considered writing a prose book or campaign splatbook instead? May as well get some use out of it if you've already done the work.
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Jul 8, 2021 14:01
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Village throws a big ol party to celebrate, everyone has a good time until people start hallucinating. Someone spiked the wine! ( Make sure to sneak some arc-plot prophecy or traumatic backstory into the players separate visions! ) When people come to, the chest of medicine is missing! Suspicion falls on a strange family of Tiefling outcasts who live in the foothills. There's monsters and weird demon guard dogs out there. The twist; they totes did steal the medicine, but only because they knew the village would never give them any. They're willing to sell it back, but violence or good arguments work too. You can throw in a Romeo Juliet subplot in there if your players like that sort of thing.
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Sep 9, 2021 00:47
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I generally do a quick summary of each days travel, and let players roleplay the campfire chat with the NPCs. Maybe a caravan guard is working up the courage to ask out one of the customers. Maybe a guide is scribbling sketches of rumoured beasties in the corner of their maps, or telling stories to pass the time. Another caravan is heading the opposite way, and has news to share, but is wary you might be bandits. I'll say that nothing got my players engaged like finding that they were being stalked by pallid ape-like creatures, lurking out beyond the firelight. The creatures never attacked, but knowing they were out there spiked the tension and springboarded some fun rp.
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Oct 11, 2021 05:07
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You find a frustrated-looking wizard caught frozen solid in his own stasis trap. In his hand is a smudged post-it with the password written on it. Now you must sneak into his private chambers and find out the make and model of his first flying carpet ( currently circling the tower rafters ), the name of his pet ( on the collar of a bloodthirsty beast ), and his birthday ( moldy cake in a nearby zone of cold). After finding the password, the wizard unfreezes, and isn't exactly thrilled about all the identity theft you've just done. ( I hate riddles )
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Dec 1, 2021 00:28
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It could be an flightless Ostrich Phoenix. Born from dawn's light, a giant by dusk, and blows away into ash at midnight.
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Dec 1, 2021 00:53
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pog boyfriend posted:mechanically the goal of puzzles and riddles are not to stump the players but to provide a break from the monotony. a puzzle i used which you are free to steal was minesweeper except instead of just telling you adjacent mines, it told you both the number of adjacent mines, then the number of adjacent treasures. opening treasure chests that were trapped had a reflex/dexterity save against explosives. the goal is to grab the treasures Arbitrary puzzles in tabletop have always felt like an unwelcome bait and switch to me. Enjoying combat, RPing, or exploration? Well get ready to STOP THAT cuz it's trial-and-error o'clock! A good puzzle should be shaped by the environment, and provide interesting tidbits of setting information back to the players. If the players need a break from the monotony of one type of gameplay, offer some conversation or RP, go for a sprite break, or order pizza or something.
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Dec 1, 2021 17:36
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I think the progenitor of the locked dungeon trope is from LoTR, with the party struggling to decipher the riddle of the Moria gates. Even then, rather than an actual riddle to be solved, or an insecure security device, it's just a magical captcha. Be-est thou not of orcish disposition? Proclaim these elven runes, and tap thou all tiles with palm trees.
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Dec 1, 2021 23:36
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Torquemada posted:His fingers start to shorten and bulge. His hands start to look like a rubber glove after you remove it, like when the fingertips are still inside out? That’s his arm structure reversing its growth, his whole arm being drawn inexorably back into his body (probably to regrow somewhere else?). Choose whether this is painful, with his nails bending inwards and snapping off, along with his bones and joint cartilage, or perhaps more disturbingly completely pain-free, as the character of his new flesh exerts its eldritch will over his pathetic mortal shell. Either works.
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Jan 5, 2022 04:49
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