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Some pregens for an Unknown Armies fantasy game I'm working on. Fever River the Matachin, playing the balalaika  Dacian the Tower of Pain Adept, self harming to generate charges  Marrow Bone the Avatar of the Knacker, wielding a goedendag  Rope Trick the Avatar of the Enlightenment, swinging her eponymous enchanted rope  Bonus.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:48
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| # ? May 8, 2024 17:35 |
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mellonbread posted:Some pregens for an Unknown Armies fantasy game I'm working on. These are literally so loving rad, and so is your name.
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Apr 11, 2023 02:12
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I forgot this thread existed. I’m still playing the Mystic orphan (on alternating weeks since it’s a co-GM’d game), and she’s gotten even richer. We ran a pre-generated module that starts with the players foiling a bank robber in Italy, and the group split the money. Instead of three ways, it only went to, because one character was a Soviet reporter who hated capitalism. The adventure ended with us finding golden statues in an Egyptian tomb. Devika took her share of the profits and bought herself a DC-3, changing her aspect from “aspiring highroller” to “world’s richest girl”. As an NPC, she still helps out the party, but they have to deal with the fallout of her crooked business deals, the jealousy of the Rockefellers, and the fact she’s still a teenager who spent a year being worshiped by cult.
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Apr 11, 2023 04:51
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For a new Warhammer Fantasy RPG game, the dice gave me a rural hunter with incredible strength and stamina and the highest possible Fellowship, the Charisma stat. I've decided Claus is what happens when you mix Gaston and Belle into the same character, seeking more than this provincial life while eating five dozen eggs to become the size of a barge.
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Apr 15, 2023 13:30
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Figure I'd share this story for a character I wrote. Lukan Vickers  Lukan Vickers was born in a small town to a thatcher and his wife. Growing up, Lukan developed a great interest in calligraphy after meeting a visiting calligrapher practicing his trade in town. He asked the man how he had become so skilled in his art. The man replied, “With much practice and patience”. Looking at the man’s work with awe and fascination, Lukan decided from that point that he wanted to become a calligrapher. He longed to draw fine strokes on the canvas with great skill and precision and create magnificent works. Lukan used the money he earned from assisting his father in his thatch work to purchase books which explained the finer techniques of calligraphy. He practiced day and night, following the words of the monks and artisans in his books on how to properly stroke the canvas and even the mindset one must have when doing so. Lukan became highly skilled in the art. Eventually, while advertising his trade in a neighboring town, his work caught the attention of a young woman. “Such fine artsmanship,” she whispered as she ran her hand across the canvas of one of his works. Their eyes met. She looked at him with a smile and said, “Hi! I’m Alaina. I don't think I’ve seen you around.” ''I’m from the next town over,” Lukan replied. “See something you’d like?” Alaina smiled and looked Lukan up and down. She replied “Why, yes I do.” Lukan smiled back. This would be the start of a passionate romance. Lukan would often write poems for his darling Alaina and ink them in the most beautiful designs. He would surprise her with them when he came into town to practice his craft. The couple would take long walks in the forest and hold each other ever so close, simply content to be in each other’s arms. Eventually Lukan proposed. With the money he had made from his work, he purchased a house in town. Years passed and Lukan and Alaina found happiness in each other and their lovely daughter Autumn. Lukan was a loving father and a good husband. He had steady work practicing his craft. Every week he would ride his horse Bessie along the trail back to his hometown to visit his ailing mother. Lukan’s father had since passed. He would often stay late to be of comfort to his mother, careful not to wake his family upon his arrival home. Lukan would often kiss his wife and daughter on the forehead before heading to bed himself. One night after a long evening visiting his mother, Lukan set out upon the trail to return home. The moon was out and lit the night sky. Bessie suddenly became very nervous. Lukan patted her head and tried his best to calm her when suddenly out of the bush a large wolf appeared. His fangs fierce in the moonlight, the wolf chased after Lukan and Bessie who rode fast to get away. Lukan narrowly escaped the beast after being bitten on the heel of his leg. He returned home and tended his wounds, deciding not to needlessly worry his wife who was fast asleep. That was the last time Lukan decided to travel home from his mother’s at night. For the next month Lukan often had dreams of the wolf that attacked him. It howled at the full moon vividly in these dreams. Then one night he dreamt that he was the wolf howling at the moon. As he awoke he saw that he was covered in blood and without any garments on him at all. He looked around and there in his house was to his great horror a gruesome scene, one which he would never have imagined in the worst of his nightmares. His wife Alaina and daughter Autumn had been ripped apart. He fell to the floor naked covered in blood and let out a curdling moan of agony. He clasped his wife’s mangled face in his arms and pulled her forehead next to his. He turned to the remains of his daughter and brushed her blood covered hair as he had done so many times when she was alive. He screamed in pain, his body writhing in despair. He walked out of his home, still naked and covered in blood, and ran into the woods where he fell in the mud. Lacking the strength and will to get up again, he lay there for hours. All of a sudden, he felt a wet and coarse feeling on the back of his neck. He looked up and saw Bessie standing there. He gathered all of his strength and got on his horse. Lukan rode into town so he could bury his wife and daughter. When he arrived in town, he could see people staring at him with great suspicion. He assumed it was because he was naked and tried to ignore it, focusing only on reaching the bodies of his family. As he got closer he could see a crowd of people gathered around his home. An old woman in the crowd turned and pointed at him. “Murderer! Monster!”. The crowd grabbed pitchforks and torches and chased after Lukan who rode far and fast on his steed, Bessie. Knowing now he may never return, Lukan traveled to the far side of his country of Eredan, gaining employment as a traveling calligrapher, staying in inns on the roadside and only coming into towns to sell his wares. It has been almost a month since his wife and child were taken from him and Lukan is simply a man who carries on, for what reason, perhaps he does not even know himself.  https://www.deviantart.com/dandzialf/art/Portrait-578655010 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W60lJ
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Jun 25, 2023 00:58
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Hey mellonbread, this is an excellent idea for a thread! Zoya Nikitchna Kuznetsova  (Art by Haonfest) Zoya Nikitchna Kuznetsova is a Russian-Estonian arms trafficker working for the CIA. I played her in a Night's Black Agents game a few years back. The game was cancelled, but I really liked the character, so I've worked on the concept ever since. Zoya Kuznetsova was born in Tallin, Estonian SSR to a single mother of Russian descent. She's one of Estonia's many stateless persons: ex-Soviet Russians living in the former Estonian SSR without Russian or Estonian citizenship. (Zoya's father is supposedly Estonian, but his name doesn't appear on her birth certificate.) She attempted to use a forged Estonian identity for a while, but the Central Intelligence Agency discovered it during a background check after she applied for a job at a front company. They blackmailed her into establishing connections with her extended family: a clan of Estonian smugglers running cigarettes and other stolen goods. The CIA sought to establish a separate, black source of funds after budget cuts in the post-Cold War peace dividend, and Zoya became the point man for these operations, using her family connections to move and launder European and Russian black-market guns. Zoya is bitter and inwardly quick to anger, though outwardly merely irritable. She resents having the CIA control her life and she resents her family for dragging her down with them into a life of criminality. She's pessimistic and being pushed around Europe on the CIA's whims has left her tense and overworked. She doesn't have much of a social life. Beneath her cold, hard exterior there's a romantic dream that some day some woman will whisk her off her feet and free her from all this crap. In the Night's Black Agents game, her connection to the vampire conspiracy was that the CIA had gotten her into smuggling more than just guns: human trafficking victims to feed the CIA's vampire experiments. Having dozens of lives on her conscience has gnawed a hole in her soul, and she motivates/tortures herself by keeping a newspaper clipping of one trafficking victim in her jacket pocket so she can remind herself of why she's fighting against the vampires and, equally importantly, doesn't deserve a happy ending.
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Dec 9, 2023 13:10
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LatwPIAT posted:Hey mellonbread, this is an excellent idea for a thread! This is a fantastic character! I really like how realistic and human she seems!
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Dec 9, 2023 13:13
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I picked favorite foods for my Unknown Armies 3 characters - both the ones I played myself and the scenario pregens. I got the idea from the character cards in LISA the Painful. PLAYER CHARACTERS Adrian Lebarge: Salami on white w mustard Alice Alcazar: Camarones Nixon Rudiment: Fritos Yoshida: Hot tsukemen w pork SCENARIO PREGENS Cage Cup Brennus: Heart (horse or beef) Gyges: Mushrooms Joseph: Fried artichoke w garum Phoenicia: Olives Scribonia: Honey Tirgatao: Fennel sausage Dungeon Crawling Double Feature Constantina: Smallmouth bass w lemon and garlic butter Dacian: Bread and wine Fever River: Vermouth Marrow Bone: Stewed meat Muscle Wizard: Black beans Rope Trick: Taffy Tankard Basher: Syrup roast ICONODULES Enver: KFC Hurrem: Fried eggplant w yogurt Mehmet: Chocolate Suliman: Persian rice Yusuf: Menemen Zuhal: Citrus fruit Temple of the Crying Buddha Katoki: Butter rice w soy sauce Mori: Natto Nakajima: Soba Suzuki: Soju Takeo: Baked sweet potato Yamaguchi: Tonkatsu Where The Hell Is Adrian Lebarge? Aura: Celery w peanut butter Claude/tte: Anything pistachio flavored Kitty: Tortellini w pesto Nick: Lite beer You’re Not Alexander! India: Fresh bread w sheep’s butter Jocasta: Roasted onion Kancharmonetes: Pomegranate Pseudanor: Mice LatwPIAT posted:Hey mellonbread, this is an excellent idea for a thread! All I've ever heard is how great the Night's Black Agents conspiracy building system is. Combined with the high power level of the player characters (depending on which game mode you're playing) it lets you build a whole world without painstakingly handcrafting every scenario, and count on the players finding a way to tear it apart.
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Dec 17, 2023 20:22
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Night10194 posted:For a new Warhammer Fantasy RPG game, the dice gave me a rural hunter with incredible strength and stamina and the highest possible Fellowship, the Charisma stat. I've decided Claus is what happens when you mix Gaston and Belle into the same character, seeking more than this provincial life while eating five dozen eggs to become the size of a barge.
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Dec 17, 2023 20:34
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Nessus posted:Isn't this how Sigmar got started? Roughly, though he was already prince of one of the largest tribal kingdoms in the region to begin with.
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Dec 17, 2023 20:37
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mellonbread posted:Glad you like it! I'm not a huge fan of GUMSHOE-based systems in general simply because they lack satisfying crunch for actually using skills, but Night's Black Agents has a lot of really good tools for structuring an investigation-focused, conspiracy-uncovering campaign. The conspiracy pyramid, response levels for each level of the pyramid, some of the cycles involved in pacing character 'downtime' and the need to escape authorities... and besides, I'm just a huge fan of that kind of spy fiction/conspiracy thriller stuff. If you're looking to run a spy/conspiracy thriller, I'd recommend it even if you're not going to use the system, because it's such a useful read both for structuring a game and for getting the mood right for a spy thriller. And now I need to think way too much about what Zoya's favourite food is!
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Dec 18, 2023 23:51
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ZazaplethZilzik of Fragged Empire is a Zhou organism, a living blob of all-consuming biohazard that's decided to take the form of an insectoid being. He has an insatiable appetite (although less so than other Zhou due to his smaller size) for just about anything that can be consumed, his blood's extremely toxic (even moreso than most Zhou tend to be, considering that they were originally designed as a literal bioweapon), and he has a tendency of spewing it everywhere. His brain is quite literally only barely large enough to be smart enough to function and remain sentient, and he has a tendency to act impulsively and pursue whatever shiny objects he sees. So far he's jumped out an airlock to explore some ancient ruins and just sort of exploded mid-combat, clearing the entire room of mooks. His favourite food is Nephilim flesh, but he's capable of and will happily eat just about anything. Dawn, the Mundane of Monster of the Week is an ordinary young woman with a hero complex, who found herself as a contractor of sorts with the agency after a chance encounter in an alleyway with some monsters and an actual agent and deciding that being a badass monster hunter was better than working night shift at 7/11. She's small, headstrong, and has a penchant for jumping into trouble without thinking. Sometimes this ends well for her, and she gets the innocents to safety. Sometimes it doesn't, and she ends up bleeding out on the floor in the process of trying to do so. Also, she watches anime, and was incredibly disappointed to learn that actual magic does not, in fact, involve chanting "magical peach heart shower" and doing a transformation scene. Her favourite food is chocolate, but she'll never admit it.
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Dec 31, 2023 14:39
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edit: here's a screenshot of the mockup I did of my dude in Heroforge: I posted this in the D&D thread but what the hell I had a funny moment in my current tabletop group recently (spoiler tags because I know this is a published adventure, don't know which one, don't tell me) Playing a rogue for the first time, thri-kreen, being very cautious. His name is "Scout" because that's his assigned role. He was a spelljamming scout thr-kreen who crashed to Faerun in an escape pod and not-so-secretly views everyone he meets as primitive barbarians; he's an arcane trickster and i've been giving his magic an artificer-esque advanced-tech flavor. We're moving through an underground temple and I find a secret door. Check for traps, roll a natural one, don't find any traps. Open the door, nothing goes off. Inside is a dark altar and three scrolls on it. I check for traps. Another natural one, no traps found. Confidently say there are no traps, move forward to the altar. Rest of the group follows behind me into the room. Since I checked for traps and didn't find any, I confidently grab a scroll from the altar. DM says "roll for initiative" I roll a 21, so I go first I ask what's happening and DM says "nothing yet but your spider sense is tingling." I ask if I can make it back out of the room. He says do an acrobatics check. I roll and it's 25 or so and so I literally backflip over everyone else's heads out of the room. On initiative 20, before anyone else in the party can act, the door to the room snaps closed and the room starts filling with boiling water, everyone else in the party starts taking damage, I'm just out in the hallway with my thri-kreen telepathy pulling a C-3P0 at the trash compactor, "hey, you guys ok in there? anything I can do to help?" Eventually I find the door control and open it at which point I point out that I saved the party I have never felt more thiefly Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 16:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:edit: here's a screenshot of the mockup I did of my dude in Heroforge: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/45020/roleplaying-games/rulings-in-practice-traps It’s about making traps interactive instead of just rolls. Because you rolled badly, something you didn’t have a choice over, you couldn’t make informed or interesting decisions, and certainly the rest of the party couldn’t.
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Dec 31, 2023 20:48
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Eh, why not. I'm currently in two games, a D&D 5e game where we each have multiple characters who are part of a big caravan together, and a Fading Suns 2e game. The FS character is pretty simple, Varn the Gannok Engineer. He, like most other Gannok, is just a big "grease monkey" pun - they're a chimp-like alien species who have an innate knack for technology. He was originally conceived as a sort of industrial espionage expert, and as such has several skills useful for spy work along with being a master mechanic. Plus a computer surgically implanted in his skull, that he didn't exactly volunteer for. This plan promptly went off the rails, Varn outed himself to the party he was supposed to be spying on, and is currently left dangling as his superior's operation in the Engineers got rolled up for his boss being an indiscrete fucko. (Basically, I was actually not good at playing this and the GM accommodated.) Varn is discovering that without this poo poo hanging over his head, he's got a passion for terraforming mechanics and a most un-Engineerly faith in the dominant Space Catholic religion of the setting, along with a few wild experiences with the rest of the party including visions that may have come from Space God. As a result, he's now debating with himself and will probably soon approach the party's priest about the viability of resigning from his guild and becoming an initiate in the priesthood. This will totally not end in disaster for him. In the 5e game, we're members of a caravan wandering a blasted desert wasteland. We've only got two characters each so far but are supposed to start working in a third soon. Our characters can't be "on stage" together for any meaningful activity, so we regularly divide into smaller parties to handle different adventures concurrently. Character 1 is Erriat, an aarakocra necromancer patterned after a vulture because of course they are. Erriat is a weird mystic for their small birdpeople tribe, following a tradition of wizard magic to protect their people from the various spirits and supernatural forces. Not just ghosts but also fey and fiends and so on. A big part of the tradition is for the wizard to obfuscate nearly everything about their identity to make it harder for spirits to get a handle on them. Can't get your true name stolen by the fey if you kill and bury your name like an annoying neighbor! They went out adventuring because they need to learn more about the wider world so they have the experience to catch spirits in any lies and scams later, and maybe bring home any interesting tidbits of spirit lore they might find. This all makes them inquisitive but closed-off, slightly amoral because they are dedicated to their overarching mission above most other considerations (which includes not bringing more poo poo down upon their tribe), and with a tendency to play up being a weird bird mystic to help deflect anyone who starts prying. Character 2 is Soniel, a tabaxi Redemption paladin, styled after a scraggly puma. (I've got a US Southwest desert animal theme going with my characters.) Who has the Criminal background, so he also actually does a lot of the party's thiefy stuff like picking locks. See, the place is a blasted wasteland because of a bit of a divine war a long time ago. Some parts of the continent thus violently suppress the religious because gently caress The Gods. Understandable! Soniel was brought up in the religious underground and is a definite idealist. He's smuggled people and goods, had to do some B&E, stuff like that, but all for the sake of helping people. Honest! Not everyone in the religious underground is actually all that good a person, of course, but Soniel has a bit of a blind spot there. Besides, it's obviously only the extremity of the situation that pushes some of his fellows to more questionable deeds! He knows that, he lives that! If the faithful could come out from hiding then such wouldn't be necessary anymore just for them to protect themselves. He's used his thiefy skills and divine powers to help solve a murder, overthrow a corrupt water cartel, free hundreds from debt-bondage, and maybe accidentally sell a dude into slavery. Look, we took a captive while overthrowing the water cartel and then had to get him out of the way for a few days because he saw our faces. Soniel is sure Brother Umos is treating him well! Character 3 is still a bit up in the air. No name yet, but I'm intending on making a harengon soulknife rogue, continuing the theme as a jackrabbit. Her psychic blades will manifest as antlers just to also make her a jackalope, because it amuses me. Yes, I will still obey the rules about needing hands free to manifest the blades. I'm actually more stringent about these things when it comes to changes for flavor than my GM is.
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Jan 7, 2024 06:32
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Castellan is a Runefolk, a race of artificial humanoids who aren't born so much as decanted full-grown from a Magitech device called a Generator. Unfortunately, when Castellan climbed out of the underground bunker where his Generator was hidden, he found that his entire remote village had been slaughtered by monsters. Worse, most of the Magitech devices which would have educated him for the first year of his life had been stolen or destroyed, and the area around his birthplace teemed with goblins and ogres. So Castellan lived a Tarzan-like existence, learning how to fight and forage while skirmishing with the Barbarous hordes nearby. After a couple years, wandering Human adventurers found him and returned him to civilization. Other Runefolk helped fill in the gaps in his learning, but he sometimes has flashbacks to his feral life, especially in combat or stressful situations. Here's the kicker: Originally Castellan had been created to be a diplomat, not a fighter. His underlying programming constantly prompts him to be polite, helpful, and obsequious. This combination of nature and nurture has turned Castellan into a murder ninja with C-3PO's personality, constantly apologizing to the monsters he slays.
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Jan 7, 2024 08:22
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