Mors Rattus posted:

That said: being a nasnas does have some hefty mechanical benefits. It's just, the actual experience of Abyssal Mage Sight is horrific; it's only a tempting offer if you don't consider the part where you literally have nihilism and suffering overlaid onto your senses at all times.

Mors Rattus posted:

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed
I Can't Think Of A Second Nasnas Pun

Everyone posted:

If I recall correctly, Raistlin lost or drove away everyone he ever cared about and ended up getting torn to pieces in the Abyss by the Queen of Darkness, so... not really.

Tsilkani posted:

This seems to be the fatal flaw of most OSR games, to me: interesting fluff let down by dire mechanics and/or inherent character disposability. Even stuff like Kevin Crawford's Stars Without Number, which is a well-done book, is so ridiculously lethal it's hard to imagine how you could keep any sort of campaign going without a steady stream of replacement characters. I've been wanting to try Godbound, but I'm worried the same problem exists there.

quote:

I think you guys hit on both the reasons why this keeps happening.
Most designers don’t consider how much a given dungeon is paying out in XP in their preferred system. You don’t need to be good at math to get a ballpark figure, but I think your average designer doesn’t even think about it.
There are a lot of people out there who think that the Level 1 experience is the best part of D&D and that the entire game should be like it. See every first party Lamentations module, where treasure is basically non existent and the player characters are more likely to emerge degenerated in some way rather than increasing in power, if they survive at all.

Night10194 posted:

I was okay with it because it was a one-shot and them getting 40 crowns for it from a grateful town that acknowledged it could never be enough but it was all they had fit WHFRP to a T.

PurpleXVI posted:

I mean, I'd argue that the Illithiad modules pretty well do. There aren't any real points where the players can break the module by being able to fly/teleport and they're expected to potentially be able to kill an evil god's proxy by the end.

FMguru posted:

The tail end of the Gygax Giants/Drow/Spiderweb GDQ series handled high-level play pretty well.

Of course, it did it by broadly nerfing magic abilities and items. The Drow modules took place in the Underdark, where teleport spells didn't work and your enemies carried +4 swords and armor that lost its abilities if you took it out of the caverns. The final module took place in a level of the Abyss, where a whole bunch of magic spells were modified to have diminished or no effect.

So, um, maybe that isn't the best example.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

I feel like having Velociraptor practically next to Literally The Alien From Alien, Probably is a bit awkward and the former kind of suffers for it.

Wolf Girl definitely made me think of Mononoke.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

summon

Libertad posted:

Miles’ Moving Miracles: George Miles wants to improve upon the rare, expensive, and just not all that safe array of aerial magical transport; it’s far too easy to fall off a broomstick or carpet. Starting out with floating rods that can move via a small jolt of magic, Miles improves upon this with proper vehicle frames such as coaches that can hop long distances and flying carriages powered by successive castings of levitation and mundane propulsion. The military takes interest in this and funds his company for aerial warfare, and eventually George decides to devote all of his efforts in building a machine to fly to the moon. Said pseudo-rocket looks like a giant iron tree made up of millions of Movable Rods. It will inevitably explode and shower Endon in molten iron once it takes off, or destroy the ozone layer and expose the world to unfiltered sunlight, or push the entire city into the sea by falling over.

Wapole Languray posted:

No I don't get the frog and leech thing. Everything else is like... twisted church or Satan-y, but the frogs and leeches I don't get besides generic "evil creature" stuff.

Talas posted:

Hedonites of Slaanesh

Pussy Cartel posted:

mellonbread posted:

Surely nobody would be foolish enough to try stuffing an entire dungeon crawl into a Delta Green shotgun scenario entry, complete with monsters, magic items, and a powerful sorcerer at the end...

JCDent posted:

Yeah, I was gonna say, that's a weird-rear end name.

Libertad! posted:

Josef bugman posted:

I just imagine the title being said by Doctor Zaius.

"Do not go to the forbidden zone foolish human!"

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Yea that birth control section with with the deformed kids getting murdered isn't a precursor to eugenics.

It's just eugenics, straight up.

Thousand Year Old Vampire posted:

The Prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire are not necessarily geared toward complex political machinations between factions of immortal beings.

Thousand Year Old Vampire posted:

Memories and Experiences are important moments that have shaped your vampire, crystallized in writing. They make up the core of the vampire’s self—the things they know and care about. An Experience is a particular event; a Memory is an arc of Experiences that are tied together by subject or theme.

Experiences cover a particular event, but the amount of time represented by that event might vary dramatically. An Experience might describe a few seconds of impactful events, or it might cover two hundred years of lurking in an old castle.

Almost every Prompt will create an Experience, and Experiences eventually combine with one another to become Memories. But there is only so much your vampire can remember. To reflect this limitation there is only a finite amount of space for Memories on your record sheet. Old Memories will be lost over the course of the game, making room for new ones. You will need to make difficult choices about which Memories to preserve and which to forget; these hard decisions are the core of the game.

In game terms, an Experience is a single sentence that describes the resolution of a Prompt. Memories are a collection of related Experiences built up over time. Your vampire begins the game with space for five Memories, each of which can contain up to three Experiences.

Although a Prompt might ask several questions, an Experience does not need to address all of them.

An Experience should be a single evocative sentence. An Experience is the distillation of an event—a single sentence that combines what happened and why it matters to your vampire. A good format for an Experience is “[description of the event]; [how I feel or what I did about it].” If necessary, you can add a dash at the end to include more information.

TYOV posted:

Characters are the people with whom your vampire has a relationship. Each Character should be named and described in a sentence fragment, such as Lawrence Hollmueller, descendant of Baron Hollmueller or Sister Adelpho, a meddlesome nun. Add more descriptors each time you interact with them in the course of resolving a Prompt. Lawrence, from the previous example, might become Lawrence Hollmueller, descendant of Baron Hollmueller; I freed him from a Turkish prison.

If it makes sense to include a Character when resolving a Prompt, do so even if the Prompt doesn’t tell you to include a Character. In addition, create a new Character if a Prompt instructs you to include one but none are available.

A Character can be mortal or immortal; you will be told which type when you are instructed to create a new Character. Mortals are regular human beings or other creatures that die with the passage of time.