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Could a small clinic fit into the Abacus dungeon? Medic golems that zero in on people at low hp, then drag them to someplace the party does/n't want to go. Bonus points if there are orderly golems that beat up anyone in the clinic who is too healthy.
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Jun 30, 2016 00:13
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All are a part of the: Knights to Meet You. Knights Guys? Naughty or Knights? Knights Try? As detailed in: 1001 Knights
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Oct 18, 2016 21:07
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Evokers are a school club with a very diverse group of members. Agriculture majors who specialize in explosively fertilizing and ploughing fields. Engineering students who are in charge of demolitions. Chemistry majors who are in charge of disposing of toxic waste. They all agree on one thing: the evoker house fraternity was a mistake.
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Nov 1, 2016 23:08
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Writer Cath posted:So I'm taking the reins for a couple weeks with my group, DM'ing an encounter. Regular DM's using his DMPC and I've decided not to use my regular PC. Instead, the group will be off to investigate the abandoned magic school and they'll find hints of her around here and there: some arrows from her quiver, etc. Maybe the villain knows that the final lock to the treasure he is looking for requires something from the character. Maybe he needs bits from a bear, cat, owl, and uh whatever other animals are magically associated with stats. He has most of them but needs advice from a Ranger for the rest, or her animal companion is the target animal. The thing he is looking for is in the Janitor's office which can only be opened by someone who is not a student at the school? Obviously the Sorceror broke through the outer wards by digging up an ancient admission application and automagically applying. Or the item is only accessible to Professors and he needs a student to teach for a week until he qualifies. The school was abandoned for good reason, and the two have teamed up for survival. Surprisingly the Sorcerer does hold up his end of the bargain, as the item he is trying to get is embedded in or ingested by some horrible monster.
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Nov 29, 2016 07:00
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Don't buy a magic sword they said. An enchanting sheath will make any old lump of steel magic they said. But now here he is with a jammed sheath and that shop simply isn't there anymore.
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Feb 9, 2017 22:20
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The magic coin equivalent of a radio alarm clock. The coin makes a noise at the same time every day or week. The volume of the noise is determined by the distance from some magic "anchor" in the oni's lair. Sleeping in? Put the coin on the anchor. Thieves steal your coin? The coin is always loud enough to be heard from that anchor. Really annoying and easily traceable.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:32
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A whole squad for a single watchtower? Is the region dangerous, or is this tower also the local police station/post office/tax collection point/forestry station etc? Small town cop work could be an interesting session. Is it a rotating duty where all the guards have day jobs? Maybe today is training day, or a "training day" where the party just hangs out away from the stress of everyday life. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker stand between the kingdom and destruction.
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Apr 23, 2017 20:18
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Maybe somebody screwed with the data terminal, and now one of the code words designates Mr. Saturday as the target? I suspect the data terminal having a virus, rogue sentient program, codes for other operations, would be passe?
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Jul 8, 2017 09:25
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I am a VIP I don't have time to wade in some mystic pool of water. What do you mean my check bounced? I'll have you know that blarghablarg
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Sep 8, 2017 20:23
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If he was using this place to research before he became a bug he probably had various traps and wards to keep the bugs and the spores outish. Have a fair number of traps that are obvious to a person, but deadly to bugs. A giant sticky trap is an obvious choice, maybe some big mousetrap style things. The newly buggified wizard probably trained his new bug pals to avoid the current locations of the traps by rote. The blade trap dinner bell is a good start. Moving the traps without setting them off would be a great advantage. Some of the traps are probably covered in bug bits by now and are less obvious until your foot breaks through and gets stuck. A classic cliche would be that the necklace is the magic equivalent of a bug lamp. Put a shiny object on a golem and tell it to kill anything in the room when it is touched. The wizard wants something in the protected room, but isn't sure he could resist the necklace's allure. Or the room is a sort of decontamination chamber, where the golem cleans off visitors prior to entering a room with the really important stuff. If the forest is nasty enough the really important stuff could just be the wizard's old food and water source. The founding priestess could have been one of those "secret test of character" types and locked something behind not responding aggressively toward a strange construct moving toward you.
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Oct 6, 2017 12:21
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I seem to remember that Aboleths have some sort of freaky curse that renders their victims unable to breathe air. You could have the Aboleth offer a deal with the devil whenever the party gets low on gill time remaining. Fight some monsters that summon pockets of air to screw over the cursed before the Aboleth even makes an offer. The pathetic remnants of past adventuring parties that had to take the deal, but can't beat the Aboleth alone. Can the party convince them to part with their baubles and advice when they have been disappointed so many times before? The classic twist of the timer running out only for the party to discover that they can breathe water but not air. But that is probably too direct a railroad to the Aboleth boss fight. Or you could play up the Minotaur angle. This sunuvabitch survived the flooding of the whole drat labyrinth. It was hardly 3 dead ends and a spiral when the flooding began. But the Minotaur has been going ever onward, tunneling through the earth at a heroic rate. That adamantium great-axe isn't just for show. Sure the Minotaur stops occasionally to sleep and zap a rod of create food or whatever. But what it truly craves is the fresh meat of adventurers. The labyrinth is folded in on itself, home to countless unopened shafts for when the Minotaur wants to clear a hallway for hunting. A minotaur who insisted on a pure labyrinth would have died long ago. But the Minotaur who managed to get water lost in their labyrinth doesn't care about "fairness" or "no doubling back on your path" anymore.
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Oct 25, 2017 08:19
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Was the world high fantasy under the rule of Gog Magog? Think of things you find in low fantasy but not in high fantasy and say that those are the keys to artifact destruction. Only peasants rode actual horses under the tyranny of old since wishes were horses. Not even worth shoeing the drat things, worse than deer or mice. So at least one artifact can be destroyed by throwing a horseshoe at it while it is stuck in the ground. A Dryad shaped itself into this fancy boat to try and convince Gog to spare their forest. Awful shame if somebody tried to fix something that is incapable of breaking with some iron nails. Bonus points if all of the destructive methods involve good old fashioned village grade iron. P. S.The antithesis to a hat is a pair of shoes. Hope the world's best cobbler likes iron buckles.
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Nov 25, 2017 11:08
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To try and integrate the "Mad Max" and "Baby Bugzilla" parts of the story introduce some crazy tribe that rides the fullsize Bugs. The city was established where it was because any Giant Bug that moves into that area is doomed. The first settlers made their homes in the carapace of Giant Bugs that went astray and ended up in this dead zone etc. The nomads would lose just as much as the city folk if Albert Entomologist succeeds in their plan. But they don't know that, as the city folk have been driving the nomads further and further away from the city. The players should prove themselves to at least one tribe as a "plan B." I don't know what plan A is, but when plan B is leading a nomad tribe's giant bug into a combined PIT maneuver and boarding action it doesn't really matter. Maybe the scientist has discovered that the Giant Bugs are eating their dead now that the City prevents the old and infirm from removing themselves from circulation Think Mad Cow disease but with giant sandworms that entire tribes depend upon. Obviously the Scientist was some sort of ex-nomad and thinks that the sacrifice of some of these giant bugs is worth it to destroy the city.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:02
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Just because the Wizard Player can't make it doesn't mean that the wizard character coudn't spend the whole fight channeling the plane of ice into a building or somesuch.
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Jan 8, 2018 20:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If you're in my SotDL campaign, don't read this. For the mess hall you could include a couch or two. So the officers can eat with the men without having to sit at the same tables and such. Or there are banners on the wall that just happen to be the right size for this sort of thing. It only bounces the ball once, but what were you expecting out of some old war trophy/priceless tapestry/barracks art?
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Jun 19, 2018 10:30
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For Charisma improving prosthetics I would go with an extremely rad skin augmentation. At the low end it is like having a really nice magic eye picture engraved on your face. You literally catch people's eyes and such. At the high end you are rocking the Mona Lisa or an equivalent world famous piece of artwork as a full body tattoo. Intelligence starts with a mechanical calculator and works its way up to replacing part of your skull with a magical fax machine. Having a direct line to Modron help desks on any calculable subject makes it totally worthwhile.
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Jul 6, 2018 06:13
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Malpais Legate posted:So I've got two bits I'd appreciate a little input on for my 5E game. Scenario cliffnotes: my players are in a voidy/far realm dungeon type area after a hole in reality was ripped open. Because they weren't really expecting this, the party was split when it happened, with three of them in the building and two waiting outside. I'm trying to design the dungeon with two start positions in mind, one for the half of the party that is already inside, and the other for the half of the party that was outside when it started. Should I just give up on that front and hamfist a way to put everyone back together? I'm kind-of fond of the division making them a little more vulnerable, but juggling the crawl from two ends just doesn't sound feasible or fun for both sides. Lean into the Far Realm angle with two battle maps but the same enemies are on both. So if either group of players punch a monster the other group can clearly see it. The party can't buff each other or help out with most obstacles but I am sure they will waste no time in setting up a punch based communication system.
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Jul 25, 2018 05:22
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The former Rogue/Wizard never gets around to playing an instrument, singing, or anything like that. But they never need to for they are the latest host for an ancient song. The music never ceases, but adapts itself to whatever the current situation is. Imagine the same piece of music as played by a dulcimer during stealth and a bunch of drums during a fight. The words to the song are unknown to any living soul, but liches and other ancients find it infuriating to share a room with the song. When they die the song will be passed on. For it is truly The Song That Never Ends.
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Aug 2, 2018 19:36
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Edit: The guy above me has a better idea. The lightning phasing people into the Feywild was just a side effect of some ritual starting up. What the ritual actually does is make [insert monster here] show up in the material plane where the lightning strikes. A real stroke of luck for the [insert monsters here] that your ship just happened to be passing by. Fortunately it shoudn't last longer than 7 or so rounds.
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Aug 10, 2018 05:47
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Danger Diabolik posted:I want to put a really incompetent imp into my ryuutama game as a way to give my players some interesting magic items. The idea being that he gives them "cursed items" that are actually beneficial. But so far I haven't been able to come up with anything good. Paper Mario and the Thousand Year door was a good source for these: You can't swim(always float) The wind will blow you away(feather fall, constant) No one will think you are a man(morph ball) The finest foods will lose their flavor(poison resistance) You will never be clean again(Acid Resistance) People will talk behind your back(Blindfold of Telepathy) Strangers will never understand you(Helmet that makes you invisible, to anyone who has ever worn the helmet)
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Aug 24, 2018 05:37
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Have they met this guy before? If not consider that he has made himself into that fancy memorial for fallen fanatics. Maybe the heroes were the people who enabled this final transformation, maybe not. Either way this seems to be the last straw for some of the cult's followers. Make it look like people are having doubts about serving a practically immobile leader. Let a cultist reconsider their life choices, and leave in peace. When they follow up on that cultist, have them... still be okay. At least at first. This is actually just a bump on the cult's path to greatness. The locals might not be too big on following a living version of a Vanesh statue but other people are. Big time. And the thing about leader's perfection is that it is ever growing new facets. Perhaps in time perfection buds off more perfection. The only thing more convincing than one charismatic cult leader is... Even if you cannot be born or modified into perfection yourself, you can achieve perfection as part of leader. And eventually our heroes will find that perfection is being thrust upon them. Edit: Forget about that budding stuff. A miles long corkscrew of prosthetic limbs unstoppably spiraling forward. Faith that can move mountains, redirect seas, drill through any barrier. A dance number escalated into strategic assaults. habituallyred fucked around with this message at 09:06 on Sep 10, 2018 |
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Sep 10, 2018 08:05
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Tetracube posted:I'm giving my PCs a list of "impossible" tasks to open a portal to the feywild (specifically, items to bring to the portal). Ex. A bowl that holds the sun (fill a bowl with water that reflects the sun above) An endorsement from their worst foe. (A dagger or some other dangerous bit lodged in the PC's body) A King's gaze. (One of those paintings where the eyes follow you around the room, of a king)
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Sep 22, 2018 20:23
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The obvious answer is that they are summoned by somebody who was expecting a pack of demons. I know the timeline doesn't quite match up. But the idea of somebody loudly complaining about these rubbish demons with terrible disguises and wanting their sacrifices back... Edit: The grand vizier has finally figured out how to sneak a summoning circle into the royal presence. At the bottom of a cake. The whole royal family is gathered as the time delayed runes activate. Instead of demons popping out of the cake the party does... The sun rises on what should be the final day of the subjugation of the kingdom of wherever. The attacking army prepares to summon their demonic allies for a final day of "all the blood they can shed." The defenders have exhausted all of their tricks and traps, but feel certain that they could win if not for those accursed demons. The summoning is complete, the party arrives and... habituallyred fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 21:26
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Have they run into any dwarves yet? Because a library filled with earth/mountain symbology certainly sounds like the dwarven equivalent to one of those end of the world seed banks. Especially when you consider that in earth style worlds an archipelago is just a big mountain not entirely covered up by water. So what do dwarves consider valuable enough to store at the top of the highest peak in preparation for armageddon? Plump helmet seeds and masterwork artifacts? A map of their entire underground kingdom, complete with all of their greatest secrets? A Magic pool of pure life with awakened attendants to help cure survivors? Also why did they make a lock that requires a diverse set of elemental affinities? Was the apocalypse in spite of some grand coalition? Did this whole mountain get planeshifted over from someplace else and only the library is now obvious? Is there a big old civilization of dwarves drowned under the mountain? Or even... undrowned!
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Oct 9, 2018 03:17
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There are extra macguffins in the shadowfell version, behind especially nasty traps/rooms. Trade a macguffin for an instant escape, or play silly games and risk a macguffin for a chance to escape. Have a round-robin of memorable experiences that flesh out the PCs at the start of the session. Have some symbolic item from each of these experiences get spread around the shadowfell mansion. If there was a stage three I would have a doppleganger show up for each character that lost/gave up their symbolic item. Or the shadow monster could start out tough but simple and gain complexity, like a signature move from every stolen item. The shadow monster should advance every time they want a short rest or take a long time futzing around with something. Make sure to have obstacles that can be overcome slowly but surely, and to make the monster scary enough that they almost never take this option.
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Oct 15, 2018 04:42
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I think a time locked door with conveniently located information posters would be more than enough. "Due to recurring security concerns visitors to our compound must wait in this antechamber for 30 minutes. Feel free to read the literature, and to reconsider murdering us."
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Oct 21, 2018 17:48
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The Deck of Many things doesn't exist thanks to the last set of jackasses to think drawing from it was a good idea. The main characters learn how it all went down thanks to anamnesis inducing tea or a really intense scrying session. Run a one-shot as a flashback where the climax is these folks drawing from the deck. Talk about whatever they got out of the deck and how it changed the world. I think the term is collaborative world building? So now the main characters know where an incredibly valuable gem is because they buried their trapped pal during the flashback. Nobody gave a drat about the kingdom of Shuf before learning that the king gained their throne via deck and is intensely vulnerable to blackmail, etc. Give the players a chance to set the stakes for the next couple of adventures. Or just to have a laugh at semi-random idiots getting unmade by chance, instead of their existing characters. If they still aren't satisfied play things by Jumanji rules. The deck can only be used again once all the previous draws are settled. Edit: Optionally drawn cards are banished far away and only activate when put in the deck. Edit: more ideas, passed up a chance for a "Whoso pulleth out this card of this stone and deck is rightwise king born of all Elfland" The Deck of Many Things does and doesn't exist. Every deck is potentially a Deck of Many Things. When the rarest possible combination of cards is drawn twice in a row, the next x draws from that deck are basically from a Deck of Many things. The Deck of Many Things does exist. When first drawn from the remaining cards turned blank and spread around the world. Governments and secret societies fight in the shadows to retrieve these cards and put them back in the deck. This activates the cards. habituallyred fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 19, 2018 22:34
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The innkeeper should probably bring up the death of their daughter during negotiations. Whether this is to drive up the price, force the PCs to buy through a cutout, or raise questions about what the daughter brought home during her last visit. A fine line should be walked between "an inn nice enough to attract garrison money," and "an inn nice enough to take over as our new officer's barracks."
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Dec 14, 2018 00:34
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Don't think "puzzle," think "home alone." You have x entrances that attackers are coming in and y inconveniently sized movable objects. And you better believe that not all those drat cabinets and such perfectly screen the entrances they are closest to. Do the players take extra time to get a perfect solution or settle and have to deal with extra robot snakes? If the opening tutorial chores are moving the furniture in using various push and pull powers so much the better. If you prefer the lights on puzzle the initial ominous onlookers spike the lab's power distribution systems with their opening attack. Power needs to be carefully reapplied to activate the various life support and defence systems by going to the "convenient" in room breaker switches in a certain order. Think the Apollo 13 power solution, there is enough power for everything if the order is just right. Don't hesitate to let various skills sub in for actual puzzle work. Succeed or fail either could tie into the chase. The automated defence system is designed to kill everybody not biologically related to the good doctor if tampered with. Fortunately there is a time delay and this can be cancelled by Martina herself hopping in the estate's golf cart and high fiving the right panel. Between the attackers and the damage to estate it could take ten minutes to get to the panel with the cart. The panel is usually five minutes away and is programmed accordingly.
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Jan 8, 2019 10:08
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Any good excuses for a travel montage coming up? Play up the idea that they didn't have much reason to travel together, but now they do. Think about those session zero "name a cool thing you did with another character," questions, but the cool things happen during this montage instead. The wizard and the barbarian put aside their differences to go fishing. The ranger and the fighter trade important lessons about armor and swimming, etc. You could also introduce rival adventuring parties to contrast themselves with. Maybe one group of disparate mercenaries that immediately fall apart into warring cliques and backstabbing. And another party with a strongly connected background. It could be the old everybody came from the same "orphanage to knightly order" pipeline. Or it could be that the party makes friends with one of their rivals and hears the whole story of how x figure saved their life and gave them a new career. And then they talk to another member of that rival party that has the exact same story... Cultist-skin meat flail screams Michigan J. Frog to me. If you want comedy it always does something useful for the guy who loves it when nobody else is around. Ancient magic is translated, traps are disarmed, monsters are tenderized etc. If you want drama the flail is always up to something when x party member is the only one that can see it. Bonus points if the original cult's plan was to summon something by dancing in a magic circle.
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Jan 17, 2019 22:24
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thegoatgod_pan posted:Does anyone have advice on doing a Haunted House in Mage the Awakening(2nd ed)? Neither of my players knows any Spirit or Death magic, so they won't be able to just hand-wave away all their problems, but they can fly, teleport, light things on fire, turn invisible, warp space and time, etc, and worst of all, easily get accurate information about all occult phenomena via mage sight, which makes me worry that the experience won't be properly atmospheric or scary. This is a tough one, but I have one idea if there is a strict deadline for dealing with the Haunted House. Steal the bit from various haunted house movies where varied groups of investigators are all sent in at once. The players can only access the House as one of these investigative groups. Make the House pull stuff that shouldn't be scary for a bunch of mages when they are in the room with some hapless mundane saps. So half the tension is whether or not risking their cover is worth countering this particular manifestation. The college kids in the house for a dare are probably pretty easy to fool if you don't do anything their majors cover. Those lab coated types with all those gadgets and cameras are another story. The psychic is a fake, and is drat sure that psychic powers and such are all bullshit. Can't help you if they get in the house, go back in time to yesterday, and then walk all over everything.
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Jan 22, 2019 09:39
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Tias posted:I'm currently running a norse mythology campaign which, predictably, is seeing the characters travel through some grim frost weather. I've planned a couple of encounters on the way (such as the terrible Fossegrim fairy and an attack by wolves, one of which I've already exhausted), but other than that, just making them roll a strength check for exposure now and again doesn't seem to be so satisfying for them. If you don't mind going full on subsystem I have an idea. There is a game on steam called Frost that is a an excellent dying in grim frost weather simulator. It is a deck builder where you have to put x number of food, fuel, and people under a region to advance. You have to balance having some of each resource with the danger of drawing a hand that is full of food when you desperately need fuel, etc. You should be able to reverse engineer it with a regular deck of cards. Hearts as food, Diamonds as fuel, Spades for people, and Clubs as useless junk/treasure/fatigue. If the players have a relatively even distribution of resources they start with 3 food, 3 fuel, 3 people, and 1 junk. If you want to go fully programmatic draw 4 cards from the main deck to act as obstacles for passing an area. Players draw 5 cards from their personal stash and need to set a matching card out for each obstacle card, except for clubs. Cards that are put out stay out between turns, and only return to the discard pile after that area is passed. People cards can also be discarded in exchange for taking a card from the main deck to the player's hand. You can skip your turn to put all junk cards in your hand back in the main deck. Passing an area in your first hand should provide a bonus, second hand is break even, third and further should have some sort of increasing penalty. Since this is in service to a campaign rather than trying to be its own thing let the players use their skills and stuff to influence things. The party hunter can trade fuel for food by making traps. The otherwise useless junk is actually a boat and substitutes perfectly for fuel when you need to cross a river. The party nobleman can permanently lose a food card for 1d6 people cards by throwing a party near a rival expedition. A fuel card is burnt up as the party discusses what to do around a fire to draw more cards, etc.
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Feb 12, 2019 11:26
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The tin cups are from the future. A great [thing] of bronze was unmade by a powerful sorcerer. The tin and copper will be separated out and sent back in time. Will history repeat itself, or will they remain simple tin cups?
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Mar 18, 2019 21:19
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Make it a "prison reform school" run by a warden who is 200% down with what they did. The sort of creep that makes you think twice about whether or not you are on the right side of history. As long as they don't confront him or cause problems their time in prison is pretty cushy. The warden is doling out his own brand of justice to prisoners without regard to whatever the legal system says should happen. Do the players skate through their sentence, secretly break out the richest/nicest prisoners, or take on the whole system from the inside?
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Mar 26, 2019 01:24
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The final target for summoning is a town where there is no difference between the living and the dead. By now even the living members of the town sleep in coffins. The local accent is starting to incorporate a disturbing number of groans. People are mangling or shooting themselves to match the returned. The town is constantly trying to integrate their returned loved ones into their lives. Maybe the town factory is too complex for the returned to work at so the townsfolk burn it down? An old soldier's home will probably feature prominently. There is a limit to how much the townsfolk will change themselves to match up. The charm was applied just in time and has two purposes. It isn't enough for the townsfolk to accept the returned as their own. People passing through also have to be fooled. Fortunately anyone who fuels the charm doesn't count. A living person and a dead person have to eat the victim off of ritual plates. The necromancer is definitely keeping this a secret as long as they can, plus or minus a few trusted townsfolk. By the time it comes to a confrontation the necromancer has given up on the success of this scheme. They start lumping zombies together like playdough in a delicate ritual. Bonus points if you actually use playdough as zombie markers, jamming them together as the process continues. The more the players can disrupt this process the clumsier the resulting monstrosity is. The zombies that the players deal with get broken down into animate chunks that refuse to die. Tangling guts make anywhere a zombie was killed difficult terrain. Merely slicing a zombie with a sword means you now have to deal with half a zombie and a crawling hand. Edit: The necromancer is actually sort of relieved when the players break things up. They have gotten in way over their head, and are dreading trying to make the last few corpses bipedal. But they have learned so much for their next attempt to call Orcus... habituallyred fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Apr 14, 2019 |
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Apr 14, 2019 06:04
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hyphz posted:What do you do when the pacing suggests a plot bang but the setting would have massive problems with it? He could have Chandlered it and had "someone come through the door with a gun", but we were several layers deep in Jammer HQ in the Netherworld and if that had happened it would basically mean either someone was a traitor or all the guards were dead or incapacitated, which would be much more of a threat than likely intended at this point, and would probably lead to much larger things that the PCs being involved. hyphz posted:How do you accommodate PC ideas without making established parts of the setting look hopelessly naive? Aka, "NAPKINS! THAT'S BRILLIANT!" These guys have been in the war for years, so why would a PC have an idea which helps? Most fiction seems to manage this by either a) having the character having encountered unique circumstances that made take them unique, or b) having the character come up with an idea which is understandably obvious to them given their background, but a surprise to the reader/audience. b) is impossible in an RPG and a) requires rather a lot of foresight. How do you manage this? If you are playing with Buro then they are a great source of object lessons on why any particularly clever idea is only used by the suicidal. A poor implementation of a great idea could have poisoned the well until the players come along and suggest a better way to try it. Another approach is that one or more factions does know about the PC idea but has been sitting on it, as they believe their enemies could do disproportionate damage with the idea. A Feng Shui example would be the Ascended use of Doppleganger Demons. Everybody else fools around with trying to infiltrate the enemy with unpredictable demons. But the Ascended just force these demons to copy "untouchable" prisoners and then take advantage of demonic weaknesses to find out everything they want to know. A brilliant idea that at least two of their rivals are much better equipped to take advantage of, so they never actually do this. (Until of course a player character needs a good excuse to not be dead.) hyphz posted:So, the GM obviously adlibbed what a Feng Shui site in Ancient Greece would be, and he went for the Parthenon. We head over there by cart, passing through the gates of Athens, and I'm googling pictures of it and trying to work out neat stunts.. and then we can't actually fight in the Parthenon because in Ancient Greece it's an active building and full of innocent people, and any sort of conspiracy stuff there would be blindingly obvious. So we end up in a blank corridor underneath it. You can even make sub lists for each faction, and how their nefarious schemes have left you with a free field of fire. Have the Eaters of the Lotus made everyone bedridden with a horrible plague? Are the Ascended playing a macabre game of "Simon Says" with control phrases and innocent bystanders? Everyone in town knows the Guided Hand Master by sight and grovels in a corner when they see him? hyphz posted:(Feng Shui 2 Specific) How do you prevent Killer/Gambler from ruining the pace of fight scenes? Basically, the remaining players were left with just the two Featured Foes, who went down before they could take any action. (Well, one of them did shoot the Bruiser with a lightning bolt, which did no damage to him at all because of his Toughness, causing him to grin ominously and then.. not do anything because the sorcerer was shot by another character before the Bruiser's first active shot) The second part is a big problem with Feng Shui's balance: shot imbalance. Some characters are faster than others, which not only means that they act first but that they have more actions per sequence. Feng Shui 1 tried to address this with a team schtick that made everyone start on the same shot as the fastest member of the team. Unless you have a player that is outright allergic to the spotlight I recommend implementing this schtick with any team that has won a fight and agreed on a name. Putting up with some player power creep is nothing compared to the benefits of equalizing playing time. hyphz posted:We then had to deal with hiding 22 bodies thanks to the necessary scale of the encounter for the killer/gambler.. habituallyred fucked around with this message at 09:47 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 09:44
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Did the magic items get gathered along with the corpses of the fallen? At some point they could have risen from the grave and gotten stuck in that old saying about master swordsmen calling off a duel when neither would make the first move. Neither side wishes to risk an interruption to their "fight" so they agree to let the players each take one item from a member of each side. A century old standoff between the mummies of old enemies would be really cool, but I don't know if you want the added angles. Steampunk wise I would play with the idea that the magic items are part of some device that controls the door. The players can swap out their old equipment for the new stuff. Make a reference to the old, "weigh your heart against a feather?" My minds eye sees steam engines with magic rods rods filling in for pistons, boilers patched with shields, helms acting as pressure release valves, etc. But that doesn't match up here, so save it for a steampunk dungeon that a previous group barely escaped.
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Jun 4, 2019 22:12
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Anyone know a good system for fantasy games in the style of British Isles folklore? Like less "I cast fireball at the dragon" and more outwitting devils and giants, like the various heroic Jacks or the Brave Little Tailor who killed seven in one blow. Beyond the Wall?
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Oct 6, 2019 10:07
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3 hours and you don't want wanton slaughter of ratmen for any of them? Time to bring in the local homeowners association. "Those filthy ratmen totally promised to be nice, boring, neighbors. The neighborhood really wanted direct access to natural garbagemen. So everyone looked the other way when they moved into the warehouse and started up their trash collection. But now they are going into houses and taking metal objects that are not trash, no matter how many times the (missus/mister) describes my precious fixer-uppers that way. And the last straw is these noise complaints. It sounds like my stomach after I eat (once sacred dish of the dead god, hey didn't you have a dream featuring this dish recently?). We asked them to cut it out one last time but they said that they were breaking from being nice neighbors to being boring neighbors. The cheek! So do you folks want to join our angry mob? You look pretty well equipped so I'll match the copper a tail bounty if you do." I think you get the idea. Maybe throw in some religious discrimination against strange gods, with a bad description of the dead god's holy symbol. Bonus points if the fixer-upper projects got finished by the ratmen, but some turn out to be berserk animated armors or whatever would be interesting to fight in a maze of possibly burning trash heaps.
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Oct 7, 2019 08:38
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Yawgmoth posted:This is true, although coming up with those plot hooks can be a bit of a trial sometimes. Probably too late, but I do have something to add to the advice about making it a national level event. Narrow down the scope of what happens to a single big event. I don't know if this means drugging a barbarian ambassador for a less subtle Manchurian candidate or Sharn-11. But make the players a big part of the post event investigation. Parallel teams of adventurers and government officers are investigating each aspect of the case. Take a page out of [i]A Scanner Darkly[i] and let the players be on the team investigating, "where did all these high-end drugs come from."
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Oct 24, 2019 20:13
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