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I'm running a killing game kind of campaign, where the players and many other people in the world have been given powers and compelled to explore ancient ruins for shards of power and/or murder others in the game and take their power. Every player in the game has a different power, a pretty common trope you see in things like Jojo's or Black Clover or any of the myriad similar stories, so I need to design a bunch of NPCs that have cool or interesting powers. My player's seem pretty hesitant to go on a killing spree at this point, and not every other player in the game is interested in murder either. The players power are weaker than the NPCs at this point because they split the power among the party instead of one of them taking it all. Some of the party powers include producing magical music that inspires and improves the abilities of the party members, and freezing small objects in place like an immovable rod. Some of the NPCs include a doctor named Pliny that has tremendous knowledge of fake medical remedies, made to work by his power, and a storyteller named Scheherazade that can bring elements of her stories to life. Basically, I would love suggestions for interesting NPCs and NPC powers that I can use in my campaign.
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Dec 23, 2018 08:52
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:12 |
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Alright, I need some help homebrewing. I'm running a campaign where each player was granted a power. They got to pick the domain and give me general ideas about what they wanted their powers to be, and then I put them together to create the final results. So far they have: Bard - Revelry Domain. Generates otherworldly music that enhances the abilities of the party, but he doesn't have much control over it. This is literally him channeling real world radio stations and gaining buffs based on the song that is playing. He's generated a playlist for this and rolls randomly for the song. Ranger - Space Domain. That's space as in, time and space, and not outer space. His ability is to freeze things in place a la immovable rod. It's limited to small objects and he can only freeze a few items at a time. Rogue - Shadow Domain. Her ability is to quickly weave shadows together to create small objects like daggers, lockpicks, manacles, etc. Also all weapons she crafts out of this deal 1d8 psychic damage as their weapon damage, allowing her to actually use daggers as a rogue and not be garbage. Druid - Disease Domain. The druid is a spore druid and chose disease as his domain. After choosing it his left hand began to rot, though it did not lose any functionality. He can now touch living things, or make a melee attack roll, to attempt to spread blight to them. Those are the four that I have done, and the party seems happy with them. The last party member is a sorcerer and the least inspired and has had trouble separating himself from 'just make bigger numbers'. He floated a couple abilities to me that were way, way too complicated, involving keeping track of spells that he cast, and others cast, and keeping running totals of numbers that were impacted by the weather, and it was, quite frankly, a complete mess. He tried a couple of different iterations but wasn't really happy with any of them. He wants to make his domain Metamagic and just be good at magic, which is kind of not what I was going for with giving people abilities, but also I want him to be happy. So here is my question: can anyone help me come up with a cool ability in the Metamagic domain? I need as many suggestions as possible so I can hopefully get one to stick, and they can be fairly game breaking. These abilities are supposed to be powerful, and as the players complete tasks they will be able to improve their abilities and gain new ones within their domains, so they need to be somewhat scalable.
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Jan 23, 2019 07:36
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I want to thank everyone for suggestions as to the Domain powers for my Sorcerer. I've taken them all into account and I'm working with him now. In the mean time, I thought I'd post a story about an Out of the Abyss session I'm playing in because I'm pretty sure we broke part of the campaign and I thought it was really fun (early in the campaign, arriving in Sloobludop): Not sure how much homebrew my DM put into this: We arrived in Sloobludop and did some reconnaissance work to get a feel for what was going on. We learned the old leader, a priest of the Sea Mother, had been deposed by his daughter, a follower of the Deep Father. We learned the father was still alive and got in contact with him, and through a side excursion I'm fairly certain my DM made up, we learned that the Deep Father was actually Demogorgon. The daughter had been making sacrifices to him in a bizarre ritual. We also learned that all of this happened fairly recently and the entire population had not yet turned to the Deep Father. Also we learned that the rituals were nearing their goal, to summon or create something, though we didn't really know what. So we came up with a plan. With the father's blessing, we presented ourselves as emissaries of the Sea Mother to his son, a still devout follower of the Sea Mother. We convinced him we had come to anoint him as the chosen one of the Sea Mother, to cast off this new perversion. Once he was good and worked up, we let ourselves become captured, aside from our wizard who evaded detection with a combination of disguise self and invisibility. We were held and then led to a large ceremony where we were to be the final sacrifices in the ritual. The ritual began, but was quickly interrupted. With a combination of an eversmoking bottle, invisibility, thaumaturgy, and major image we made it seem like a sort of fog rose around the docks at the ceremony, and two misty serpents emerged snaking their way through the crowd, twisting together in the center and creating an opening. As this was happening the father who had been docile til this moment announced the Sea Mother had chosen a champion and the son appeared in the middle of the clearing, wearing a Cloak of Billowing we had lent him and a powerful magical trident. The son announced his new divine backing, revealed the truth of the Deep Father, and demanded his sister present her champion. She summoned a demon, and the two began to battle. Through a few well placed stealth buffs and effects, we were able to manipulate the 1 on 1 combat in the son's favor without anyone realizing we had been involved. As the son struck down the demon the sister grew frenzied and attempt to complete the ritual by sacrificing herself. We had foreseen this, however, and during the confusion of the fight we had our wizard make our fighter invisible so he could slip away and approach her. As she drew her blade to kill herself, he sprung seemingly from nowhere and used a disarming strike maneuver to send the blade into the lake. He then successfully grappled her and held her down. From the display of the Sea Mother's power and the victory her champion had won, public opinion quickly turned away from the Deep Father and a speech from father calmed the crowds down and the eventually dispersed and we took the daughter into custody. I really liked this whole encounter because we didn't end up killing anyone at all and we manipulated things behind the scenes to sway public opinion. We figured that we wouldn't we be able to pull it off as foreigners coming into a town and telling them their new god was wrong, so we worked from the edges to make the whole thing seem internal and that we were incidental. CubeTheory fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 20:31
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I play a high elf wizard that comes from a post-scarcity society that is built on strong logical beliefs, he uses animate dead because bones are bones are bones, they're just calcium and the person's spirit isn't there anymore, so may as well use them.
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Jan 28, 2019 00:06
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Midig posted:Ok. Theory crafting time. What would I run if I wanted to make a character or team who focuses on capturing enemies alive? Though it would be cool if we had a bounty hunter campaign I know wizard has a spell that summons a hand which can grapple or push with a very high strength check. Anything which saps STR/DEX is also nice and enchanting is probably going to be very nice. Do not know a lot about conjuration, but any teleporting is probably going to be important. That way we sneak in with invisibility, enchant, grapple, pull in the portal and out. Maybe some persuasion checks. What character level are we talking here?
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Feb 6, 2019 20:27
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Midig posted:Preferably effective by level 5. Anything longer than that is a bit too much work until reaching the goal. Fighter 3, Warlock 2 Take the Close Quarters Shooter UA fighting style and carry lots of nets with you. The fighting style nullifies the disadvantage on trying to net someone. Choose Battlemaster. Use things like Disarming Attack and Trip Attack to put your foe in bad positions. I believe these maneuvers can be performed while netting as they just require a weapon attack. As for the warlock levels, take Hex. Since removing a net is a strength ability check and not a save, hex will give them disadvantage on removing it at bonus action speed. Take the Devil's Sight invocation and the Darkness spell to disorient them as you move in and capture them. This part is kind of sketchy, but if you can convince your DM, take another level in warlock and take the Improved Pact Weapon and make your pact weapon a net to give it resistance to damage and you can just summon them out of thin air.
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Feb 6, 2019 23:20
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Midig posted:The GM would probably object to bringing the guy over with the summon object, it might have been a good idea otherwise. It might be seen as an exploit and GMs do not look kindly upon players who area one trick pony. If you run a party full of high AC, eventually enemies start casting willpower saving throws and so forth. I just meant you can make more nets out of thin air. The GM permission is because you can't choose nets as a pact weapon, though Improved Pact Weapon opens up other ranged weapona
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Feb 6, 2019 23:33
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Convince someone in your party to be a Hexblade warlock with Devil's Sight and you can dance in the darkness together
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Feb 12, 2019 22:55
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Thinking about picking up and running Dragon Heist. Anyone have any opinions they'd like to share about it? Or even just a sort of summary of how it plays?
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Feb 13, 2019 17:16
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Trying to homebrew a feat for a monk player in my campaign that wants to be Kenshiro since we're never getting high enough level to get the real stuff. Here's what I'm thinking: After using Flurry of Blows, if the target's HP is less than your Monk level + Wisdom Ability Modifier, at the beginning of that creature's turn they are reduced to 0 HP and explode in a bloody mess. Hostile creatures in a 10 foot radius must make a Wisom saving throw or be feared until the beginning of their next turn.
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Feb 14, 2019 18:43
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inthesto posted:So I'm starting a new campaign with my group, and the basic premise is that the PCs are students at a lousy adventuring school and they're trying to avoid getting expelled or killed. Uhhhh, Rakdos is clearly Glee Club
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Feb 14, 2019 20:00
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Anyone know what time the UA drops today?
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Feb 25, 2019 16:43
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Wasn't the Artificer UA supposed to be out by now? Did they delay it again and I missed it?
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Feb 28, 2019 21:33
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Hey, I recorded a thing for the start of a Waterdeep campaign I'm running tonight, but I don't actually know anything about recording and I can't tell if I'm bad at it or my voice is just garbage, or if it's fine and I'm being self conscience, someone listen to it and tell me if it's unlistenable before I embarrass myself in front of my friends https://soundcloud.com/jared-mccloud-668073680/first-draft/s-ukSWI
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Mar 14, 2019 20:57
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I hardly ever see anyone with Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, but I feel like it's one of those "there's almost certainly a better option" type spells that's probably more fun/versatile than it looks at a glance. My wizard, while fighting a Yeti on a hazardous mountain path, put him in a sphere and drop kicked it off the side of the mountain.
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Mar 27, 2019 03:40
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change my name posted:I feel like our group is having the opposite problem. Our setting is in a pretty advanced magitech/fantasy version of Europe, so it makes sense that they'd be getting magical items as rewards for completing longer adventures, even though they're only level 4... except I've realized that no one really uses any of the stuff they're accumulating. I had this problem with my group. One way I found to fix it was to set up a quest that rewarded them with the ability to custom order a couple of magic items. Giving them agency over what they got, what it did, and how it looked led to them being more invested in the items and they felt like the items were part of their characters.
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Apr 27, 2019 17:35
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:12 |
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All Brooms of Flying should be sentient and act like the magic carpet from Aladdin and constantly troll the players.
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Apr 30, 2019 04:46
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