I've being on a really big cyberpunk kick lately and also reading through The Veil and its expansions. If anyone would have an interest in a drop in/drop out game of it? Basically just intermittent slice of life set ups and junk with no set schedule.
Would probably primarily use my dumb flooded world set up.
The wannabe highwayman will have a chance meeting with a red-headed stranger who is the highwaymeister for the region
He used to ride on the coach road, sword and pistol by his side, but now he sorts out the local politics and support networks
He spends the rest of the time in the tavern with a sailor who was presumed killed when he was lost over the side while fixing the mainsail in a blow, and a Dwarf engineer who used to work on the mountain dams
They leave one chair free at their table, as they had a shared vision that it will be filled one day by a man all in black
Because I have no idea how to fit a starship captain into the WFRP world
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
The wannabe highwayman will have a chance meeting with a red-headed stranger who is the highwaymeister for the region
He used to ride on the coach road, sword and pistol by his side, but now he sorts out the local politics and support networks
He spends the rest of the time in the tavern with a sailor who was presumed killed when he was lost over the side while fixing the mainsail in a blow, and a Dwarf engineer who used to work on the mountain dams
They leave one chair free at their table, as they had a shared vision that it will be filled one day by a man all in black
Because I have no idea how to fit a starship captain into the WFRP world
Starship captain in that particular universe is clearly a buff-as-hell maniac who believes in some sort of wizard-emperor entombed in a golden throne who hates everything that isn't human. Brother Cash is presumably unstoppable in battle.
E: Actually, Rogue Trader Cash makes way more sense.
I've being on a really big cyberpunk kick lately and also reading through The Veil and its expansions. If anyone would have an interest in a drop in/drop out game of it? Basically just intermittent slice of life set ups and junk with no set schedule.
Would probably primarily use my dumb flooded world set up.
mmmyes please
Obvious answer is what sort of playbooks people want. I'll start working on the setting fluff to blurt it out but it does help to be aware of what archetypes are gonna be roaming around.
I’ve read the rules for the veil and really want to run it but my schedule is fucked right now.
Basically make sure to log your game in some way that I may view it.
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Goose!That's me, honeyShow me the way home, honeyRegistered Userregular
My favorite D&D death was also my first: when I was playing in a game at school, run by a teacher. I played a Dwarf, and critted on a melee stab of an owlbear in the stomach, killing it, then the teacher said "roll a reflex save" and I failed it, the thing collapsed on me and suffocated me before the party could get to me.
I’ve read the rules for the veil and really want to run it but my schedule is fucked right now.
Basically make sure to log your game in some way that I may view it.
It'd probably have a thread for lore/current events/chatter and scheduling and then actually play on Roll20. I'm not super interested in running a PbP to be honest.
I came to a realization the other night after finishing an amazing session of Tomb of Annihilation as a player, and when I mentioned it everyone else agreed.
If an NPC has a name, they are going to be a tougher fight than you might expect from a random member of that society or race. And if it's a monster with a name? That's even worse news.
I came to a realization the other night after finishing an amazing session of Tomb of Annihilation as a player, and when I mentioned it everyone else agreed.
If an NPC has a name, they are going to be a tougher fight than you might expect from a random member of that society or race. And if it's a monster with a name? That's even worse news.
Ohhhhhhhh yeah.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I always liked Stephen King's Poppet.
The short TV miniseries was rad.
Oh shit, did I recreate a thing that King has already done? Or did he steal Neal Gaiman's dream-form to haunt my sleep instead? I've read very little King, but absorbed knowledge of a fair amount of his work due to its cultural ubiquity, so I wouldn't be surprised if something of his was rattling around the back of my brain waiting to convince me it was my own new thing.
Naw, it was just super evocative.
I could imagine that style of television for it, and was goofing on it.
That's a rad original dream monster ya got there.
I should really get around to posting some Tomb of Annihilation session reports, now that the previous session filled my first notebook.
I uh, kind of took blow-by-blow combat notes for a while. I'm trying to cut down on that now, only really noting when something gets killed or an especially good attack happens.
This gave me an idea that I think would be pretty cool.
In Godbound, you gain a Fact when you gain a level. It's been a while since I read Fate but my recollection is that Fate Aspects work in a fairly similar way; a quick description of a thing relevant to your character. I'm sure there are other systems that do something similar as well.
What if instead of it being a short description, or a Fact or an Aspect or whatever, you expressed it in the form of a Name?
So let's say we have Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, who spent the last level killing dragons and wants to pick up the Fact/Aspect/what have you "I am a trained dragonslayer." Instead of that, he would add onto his Name, and become Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, Dragonslayer. (The mechanics would be identical for whatever system you were using).
A high level character might be something like Archmage of the Fifth Circle Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, Dragonslayer, Hero of White Foal Pass, Born Under The Sign of Conquest, Who Is Multitudes.
(This also maps pretty well to Wheel of Time characters, who have a reasonable correlation between "number of names" and "power level".)
My opponent was using PanO and had Jean D'Arc, an artificial superhuman who was built to be a living weapon of the church in the form of an idealised concept of the historical character, as their LT
Anyway Jean got into combat with one of my Reverend Healer-Killers, which is expected to be rather one-sided
Instead, Jean got her face well and truly smashed in by my trusty psychotic doctor. Happy face!
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Gennenalyse RuebenThe Prettiest Boy is Ridiculously PrettyRegistered Userregular
I ran my first sessions in the collaborative D&D 5e campaign that my friends and I have been playing. We're all taking turns making our own adventures and running them, it's pretty casual. This whole thing is set up in a universe that was pitched as "kind of like Treasure Planet" with everyone's characters being part of a ship's crew. Up to this point our adventures had been, uh, not necessarily standard D&D fare but definitely not anything that made heavy usage of the set up involving a sailing space ship. I decided to fix that.
The crew of our intrepid little ship got caught up in an aetheric cyclone, basically a magical space hurricane. They had to keep the ship steady while dealing with the various bizarre and dangerous kinds of weather I was rolling for to throw at them. I'm sad that I didn't get to use some of the crazier ones I'd come up with (like ember rain or rocks) but hey, at least I rolled up acid rain! Oh yeah, also they had to fight man-sized space lampreys that thought the ship was a space whale caught in the storm. Also got to freak the players out by showing a picture of a lamprey's maw!
Eventually they escape the storm and it turns out they've been blown within visual range of an old derelict space-galley. And of course the ship's captain sees dollar signs and says "time to board and loot--I mean, salvage", so everybody piles on to the rotting old galley to explore. There's a shit-ton of skeletons down in the hold but nobody detected any undead or magic in general so they weren't particularly worried about pretty much anything. They jumped down into the hold with all the stealth of an elephant and alerted the 200-year-old clockwork robots that were down there in sleep mode. Most of them were just slightly modified skeletons and the boss was a fairly simple "big bulky thing with multiattack", but the boss was my own design and was a big threat without being insurmountable. Also I got to shoot the players with a laser!
This was my first time running anything in any variant of D&D so the fact that 1) everybody enjoyed it and 2) my original enemies weren't so unbalanced that they either died immediately or annihilated the party have left me feeling pretty good about the whole thing
So we hit level 4 at the end of the last session of Tomb of Annihilation.
I'm playing a Halfling Drunken Master Monk, and after a lot of deliberation, I have settled on taking the Martial Adept feat. It gives me access to two of the Battle Master moves from the Fighter archetype, and basically I get one use of either of them and then it has to recharge with a short or long rest.
There are a lot of Battle Master moves to choose from, but I chose Parry and Pushing Attack.
Parry lets me reduce the damage I take when hit with a melee attack, which is great and thematic.
Pushing Attack has the enemy make a Strength saving throw if they are Large or smaller. If they fail, I can push them up to 15 feet away from me, which is even more thematic, because it sounds like something out of a kung-fu movie... or Dragonball Z.
So awhile back I asked for rules clarification regarding 5e because of the game I'm participating in. Good news! Apparently the DM had been eager to get the show going and didn't read the 5e rules in depth and was leaning on his 4e knowledge to get him through the first few sessions. After a few weeks off, and his regular life settling down, things are running smoother. Not much has happened gameplay wise other than we raised an old step pyramid out of a swamp.
So, vague Veil setting stuff for people interested:
The setting is the city of Phoenix York, more commonly known as New New York, the largest city in the loose corporate alliance that makes up the Incorporated States of America.
Hundreds of years into the future the world's climate went to hell and now pretty much everywhere's flooded. Corporate entities and private fleets soon dominated over national interests. Coalescing into large political and military blocs such as the ISA, the Russo-Nordic Oil Pact and China, the Last Nation. For the ISA most of their efforts pooled into creating floating cities, mostly self sustaining operations that vary in size designed to house and feed the employees in luxury and facilitate large scale docking and mooring of fleets for logistics and survival purposes.
New New York is both the oldest and largest of such facilities. The gleaming white towers of its core able to house ten thousand permanent residents in addition to hosting retail parks, business centers and accommodations for easily one thousand valued customers craving luxury shore leave along with hydroponic farms that even host some of the few livestock still alive after the flooding.
Extending out from the central hub are four piers, each roughly a mile in length and acting as the main clean method of transportation and unloading goods. At least in theory, in reality all of the quadrants between the piers but one have long since being home to slums made up of old, rusting ships crammed in and moored up against eachother. Each quadrant alone having roughly thirty thousand people attempting to eek out a living. Such transgressions on the original plan for New New York are tolerated both because of some small level of compassion and because they actually provide New New York's primary export: Skilled labour hungry for any work going. Plus, many corporate folk are either intertwined with or addicted to the product of one of the many gangs that have taken root in the slums.
The Veil itself in this setting is something that primarily came about to solve the largest problem the new world was facing: limited space. As a result it's primary function is that of 'shortening' a process by which tampered neural feedback, advanced AR and a highly interconnected society have allowed for rooms to appear larger than life. Many cafes in the central hub appear three times their actual size, with neurochips (given reasonably cheaply by the corporations in exchange for people's privacy) rendering the experience of strolling through a large room. In reality said customers are actually shuffling in place. With the virtual reality only having to break its spell in case of the risk of collisions or the customer is reaching for a physical item that is out of reach.
However the technology is getting better year over year, with the first tennis world championships of the flooded world held entirely within a virtual court last year. Out in the slums, where positional data and cameras are less precisely controlled, the Veil is significantly messier. Most people get their device to portray a virtual mask over their property to render it appearing something more pleasant than a rusted ship but numerous health hazards and hap hazard code jockeys often mean such illusions falter or overlap each other. Advertisements and virtual graffiti are near everywhere without C-Sec policing the dataspheres. A blaring array of noise, lights and imagery all crafted to drag the users attention to them.
On a personal level the growing ubiquity of neurochips (or, at least AR enabled glasses and contacts) has given rise to digital fashion trends. Both Haute Couture appearances for the elite and loud, emblematic digital masks for the punk, criminal or dissident. The increasing digital noise of such things has drawn most modern phones to start including greater blocking, content filtering and other such features. All for the low price of a few dollars a month to secure peace of mind from the noise of the world.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
gonna play some 5e tomorrow, excited because we stopped on a very nice cliffhanger
okay so a black dragon and some cultists have turned my character's entire like, culture or society or people or whatever, into zombies and are causin' trouble
my character, a while back, got a Greatsword of Dragonslaying
we're doing our adventuring business, killing shit, when the black dragon shows up, hovering just past the cliff we were on, just doing the villain "you'll never stop me etc etc" thing. We were, I think, supposed to run away, but my guy (bard/barbarian, kind of a lorekeeper for his tribe) goes bananas at this dragon, this dragon made his people extinct.
trigger my Rage and leapt clean off the cliff at the dragon, with my Dragonslayer out, shouting my vengeance at this fuckin' dragon
thanks to my Rage giving me advantage on str checks, I crit on Athletics to make the jump, and then crit on both my reckless attacks
and we stopped playing right before I roll damage
so with both attacks, 8d6 + 12 + the 6d6 12d6 from the Dragonslaying
I am gonna fucking wreck this dragon and probably ride it to my death 200 feet down
I would like to know more about this bardbarian.
His people are Elves, they used to worship dragons, and still worship the Dragonborn that are occasionally born among them, but most of them modernized and moved to cities when the Humans moved in. He comes from one of the wilder tribes, and was a Bard, apprentice to the Teller, who keeps the Histories and recites the Stories. He's not very smart at all, but damn can he memorize, which kind of makes him the perfect Teller.
Unrelated, he had a lot of anger problems, and one of the tribe's warriors saw the Beast in him and taught him how to harness it with Barbarian training.
so he kind of became a hands-on Teller, he would go on hunts and witness heroic deeds firsthand. After one of these hunts, for a mythic hart that had been sighted nearby, the hunting party and him returned to their village and found that everyone there was a zombie now.
so they escape into the woods, and every village they travel to, zombies. One by one, the hunting party is taken out by the zombies, and eventually, for like, a while, it's just him, alone in the primeval forest.
He began narrating his own Story, to try and keep his sanity, but it just made him crazy. So now he trusts in the Stories, and thinks that if he can keep his life exciting and dangerous enough, the Gods will leave him alive so they can see how his Story goes.
he's currently split evenly between Totem Barbarian (Eagle) and College of Lore Bard
The wannabe highwayman will have a chance meeting with a red-headed stranger who is the highwaymeister for the region
He used to ride on the coach road, sword and pistol by his side, but now he sorts out the local politics and support networks
He spends the rest of the time in the tavern with a sailor who was presumed killed when he was lost over the side while fixing the mainsail in a blow, and a Dwarf engineer who used to work on the mountain dams
They leave one chair free at their table, as they had a shared vision that it will be filled one day by a man all in black
Because I have no idea how to fit a starship captain into the WFRP world
Starship captain in that particular universe is clearly a buff-as-hell maniac who believes in some sort of wizard-emperor entombed in a golden throne who hates everything that isn't human. Brother Cash is presumably unstoppable in battle.
E: Actually, Rogue Trader Cash makes way more sense.
That's perfect - I'm going with the (probably non-canon) idea of the WFRP world being a planet in the 40k universe that regressed in technology after the first Human expansion
Cash is a Rogue Trader whose ship was caught in a warp rift - in his desperation, he took a drop pod in the hopes that it would have enough oomph to escape, but he was pulled into the Warp and spat out into The Empire.
Addled by the Warp and unable to express his experience in the local language, he is reduced to muttering about Golden Thrones, flying ships and gravity wells
It's a lot of backstory for a guy who will be in the background of a scene intended for flavour text, but if the group decide to move on to Rogue Trader after this campaign, I've got one hell of a tie in
This week in our blades campaign actually attempted some smuggling. We picked up family jewels(which are actually jewels containing ghosts of family members) from our supplier.
We find or normal route has been boarded up by gates blocking our canals. Sneaking past bluecoats goes pretty well until we got
This gave me an idea that I think would be pretty cool.
In Godbound, you gain a Fact when you gain a level. It's been a while since I read Fate but my recollection is that Fate Aspects work in a fairly similar way; a quick description of a thing relevant to your character. I'm sure there are other systems that do something similar as well.
What if instead of it being a short description, or a Fact or an Aspect or whatever, you expressed it in the form of a Name?
So let's say we have Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, who spent the last level killing dragons and wants to pick up the Fact/Aspect/what have you "I am a trained dragonslayer." Instead of that, he would add onto his Name, and become Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, Dragonslayer. (The mechanics would be identical for whatever system you were using).
A high level character might be something like Archmage of the Fifth Circle Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, Dragonslayer, Hero of White Foal Pass, Born Under The Sign of Conquest, Who Is Multitudes.
(This also maps pretty well to Wheel of Time characters, who have a reasonable correlation between "number of names" and "power level".)
I've had this idea for the longest time.
Just slowly getting defined by your deeds, abilities, and adventures.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
The wannabe highwayman will have a chance meeting with a red-headed stranger who is the highwaymeister for the region
He used to ride on the coach road, sword and pistol by his side, but now he sorts out the local politics and support networks
He spends the rest of the time in the tavern with a sailor who was presumed killed when he was lost over the side while fixing the mainsail in a blow, and a Dwarf engineer who used to work on the mountain dams
They leave one chair free at their table, as they had a shared vision that it will be filled one day by a man all in black
Because I have no idea how to fit a starship captain into the WFRP world
Starship captain in that particular universe is clearly a buff-as-hell maniac who believes in some sort of wizard-emperor entombed in a golden throne who hates everything that isn't human. Brother Cash is presumably unstoppable in battle.
E: Actually, Rogue Trader Cash makes way more sense.
That's perfect - I'm going with the (probably non-canon) idea of the WFRP world being a planet in the 40k universe that regressed in technology after the first Human expansion
Cash is a Rogue Trader whose ship was caught in a warp rift - in his desperation, he took a drop pod in the hopes that it would have enough oomph to escape, but he was pulled into the Warp and spat out into The Empire.
Addled by the Warp and unable to express his experience in the local language, he is reduced to muttering about Golden Thrones, flying ships and gravity wells
It's a lot of backstory for a guy who will be in the background of a scene intended for flavour text, but if the group decide to move on to Rogue Trader after this campaign, I've got one hell of a tie in
Make sure he tells them to let that space cocaine be, too.
gonna play some 5e tomorrow, excited because we stopped on a very nice cliffhanger
okay so a black dragon and some cultists have turned my character's entire like, culture or society or people or whatever, into zombies and are causin' trouble
my character, a while back, got a Greatsword of Dragonslaying
we're doing our adventuring business, killing shit, when the black dragon shows up, hovering just past the cliff we were on, just doing the villain "you'll never stop me etc etc" thing. We were, I think, supposed to run away, but my guy (bard/barbarian, kind of a lorekeeper for his tribe) goes bananas at this dragon, this dragon made his people extinct.
trigger my Rage and leapt clean off the cliff at the dragon, with my Dragonslayer out, shouting my vengeance at this fuckin' dragon
thanks to my Rage giving me advantage on str checks, I crit on Athletics to make the jump, and then crit on both my reckless attacks
and we stopped playing right before I roll damage
so with both attacks, 8d6 + 12 + the 6d6 12d6 from the Dragonslaying
I am gonna fucking wreck this dragon and probably ride it to my death 200 feet down
So? How did it go?!?
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
Okay, so if I can get any names/last minute comments I'll write up an OP and set up a Roll20 for the drop in/drop out game.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
I did like, 120 damage to it, and then rode it to the ground
it's cool, I jumped right before it hit the ground, tuck and roll
the fall technically killed it, not me, but it still worked out Pretty Good
afterwards, we butchered it, and took all its best scales and fanciest teeth
I was gonna eat its heart to gain its power, but realized the potion of acid immunity I had would probably wear off before I had finished digesting it and it would just melt my insides, so I didn't
Yeah, I'm pretty sure a dragons type of resistances/breath weapon doesn't actually impart that to it's organs anymore than a spitting cobras venom makes its blood poisonous.
In short, Rainfalls right, always be eating them hearts.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
So I play a game called Kriegsspiel, I’ve mentioned it before. War game, three maps (one for each side plus GM), write orders in character, game plays out in 15 minute turns typically, based on Napoleonic warfare.
Well my friend is DMing some DnD and has his characters involved in a war and I joked that he should use Kriegsspiel to resolve the combat. But we have since become enameled with the idea of DnD warfare, and plan to sit down soon and hash out the basics of what we are calling Spellkrieg.
I figure the two most important things to get right in any wargame are movement and command and control. Getting your troops places and getting them to do what you want. I figure we’ll need to hash out basic land speeds for each race and have some conditional modifiers (elves not as slowed by forests).
Command and control gets interesting because traditionally controlling medieval armies was a god damned mess but DnD has literal magic, but not every unit is going to have access to magical communication.
Played Starfinder Society for the first time last night. My slightly-dim-but-good-natured Vesk Armor Storm Soldier, Cpl. Zog "Zoggy" Grav, learned several good lessons, like, "you can charge at one person with a gun, but you can't charge at TWO people with guns without getting shot."
Anyway, I enjoyed it enough despite the FLGS noise that I'll try it again in a few weeks. Interesting seeing how society play works.
There's been a number of attempts to make D&D wargames, and I'm not really sure which one works the best. It's definitely an interesting topic, though.
I'm not aware of anything in particular that's been made for 3E onwards, but if you play TSR D&D I've heard decent things about BATTLESYSTEM(TM)? Chainmail's also somewhat interesting and far more simple, but lacks most of the units you'd find in typical D&D and has a lot less in the way of magic.
Just stapling fantasy rules onto the wargame of your choice is probably going to be the best, I suspect.
Posts
mmmyes please
The wannabe highwayman will have a chance meeting with a red-headed stranger who is the highwaymeister for the region
He used to ride on the coach road, sword and pistol by his side, but now he sorts out the local politics and support networks
He spends the rest of the time in the tavern with a sailor who was presumed killed when he was lost over the side while fixing the mainsail in a blow, and a Dwarf engineer who used to work on the mountain dams
They leave one chair free at their table, as they had a shared vision that it will be filled one day by a man all in black
Starship captain in that particular universe is clearly a buff-as-hell maniac who believes in some sort of wizard-emperor entombed in a golden throne who hates everything that isn't human. Brother Cash is presumably unstoppable in battle.
E: Actually, Rogue Trader Cash makes way more sense.
Obvious answer is what sort of playbooks people want. I'll start working on the setting fluff to blurt it out but it does help to be aware of what archetypes are gonna be roaming around.
Basically make sure to log your game in some way that I may view it.
It'd probably have a thread for lore/current events/chatter and scheduling and then actually play on Roll20. I'm not super interested in running a PbP to be honest.
If an NPC has a name, they are going to be a tougher fight than you might expect from a random member of that society or race. And if it's a monster with a name? That's even worse news.
Ohhhhhhhh yeah.
Naw, it was just super evocative.
I could imagine that style of television for it, and was goofing on it.
That's a rad original dream monster ya got there.
I uh, kind of took blow-by-blow combat notes for a while. I'm trying to cut down on that now, only really noting when something gets killed or an especially good attack happens.
This gave me an idea that I think would be pretty cool.
In Godbound, you gain a Fact when you gain a level. It's been a while since I read Fate but my recollection is that Fate Aspects work in a fairly similar way; a quick description of a thing relevant to your character. I'm sure there are other systems that do something similar as well.
What if instead of it being a short description, or a Fact or an Aspect or whatever, you expressed it in the form of a Name?
So let's say we have Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, who spent the last level killing dragons and wants to pick up the Fact/Aspect/what have you "I am a trained dragonslayer." Instead of that, he would add onto his Name, and become Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, Dragonslayer. (The mechanics would be identical for whatever system you were using).
A high level character might be something like Archmage of the Fifth Circle Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabbadoo, Dragonslayer, Hero of White Foal Pass, Born Under The Sign of Conquest, Who Is Multitudes.
(This also maps pretty well to Wheel of Time characters, who have a reasonable correlation between "number of names" and "power level".)
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Having no name at all and being a thing you don't even recognize gives whatever it is inverse power, also.
My opponent was using PanO and had Jean D'Arc, an artificial superhuman who was built to be a living weapon of the church in the form of an idealised concept of the historical character, as their LT
Anyway Jean got into combat with one of my Reverend Healer-Killers, which is expected to be rather one-sided
Instead, Jean got her face well and truly smashed in by my trusty psychotic doctor. Happy face!
The crew of our intrepid little ship got caught up in an aetheric cyclone, basically a magical space hurricane. They had to keep the ship steady while dealing with the various bizarre and dangerous kinds of weather I was rolling for to throw at them. I'm sad that I didn't get to use some of the crazier ones I'd come up with (like ember rain or rocks) but hey, at least I rolled up acid rain! Oh yeah, also they had to fight man-sized space lampreys that thought the ship was a space whale caught in the storm. Also got to freak the players out by showing a picture of a lamprey's maw!
Eventually they escape the storm and it turns out they've been blown within visual range of an old derelict space-galley. And of course the ship's captain sees dollar signs and says "time to board and loot--I mean, salvage", so everybody piles on to the rotting old galley to explore. There's a shit-ton of skeletons down in the hold but nobody detected any undead or magic in general so they weren't particularly worried about pretty much anything. They jumped down into the hold with all the stealth of an elephant and alerted the 200-year-old clockwork robots that were down there in sleep mode. Most of them were just slightly modified skeletons and the boss was a fairly simple "big bulky thing with multiattack", but the boss was my own design and was a big threat without being insurmountable. Also I got to shoot the players with a laser!
This was my first time running anything in any variant of D&D so the fact that 1) everybody enjoyed it and 2) my original enemies weren't so unbalanced that they either died immediately or annihilated the party have left me feeling pretty good about the whole thing
I'm playing a Halfling Drunken Master Monk, and after a lot of deliberation, I have settled on taking the Martial Adept feat. It gives me access to two of the Battle Master moves from the Fighter archetype, and basically I get one use of either of them and then it has to recharge with a short or long rest.
There are a lot of Battle Master moves to choose from, but I chose Parry and Pushing Attack.
Parry lets me reduce the damage I take when hit with a melee attack, which is great and thematic.
Pushing Attack has the enemy make a Strength saving throw if they are Large or smaller. If they fail, I can push them up to 15 feet away from me, which is even more thematic, because it sounds like something out of a kung-fu movie... or Dragonball Z.
The setting is the city of Phoenix York, more commonly known as New New York, the largest city in the loose corporate alliance that makes up the Incorporated States of America.
Hundreds of years into the future the world's climate went to hell and now pretty much everywhere's flooded. Corporate entities and private fleets soon dominated over national interests. Coalescing into large political and military blocs such as the ISA, the Russo-Nordic Oil Pact and China, the Last Nation. For the ISA most of their efforts pooled into creating floating cities, mostly self sustaining operations that vary in size designed to house and feed the employees in luxury and facilitate large scale docking and mooring of fleets for logistics and survival purposes.
New New York is both the oldest and largest of such facilities. The gleaming white towers of its core able to house ten thousand permanent residents in addition to hosting retail parks, business centers and accommodations for easily one thousand valued customers craving luxury shore leave along with hydroponic farms that even host some of the few livestock still alive after the flooding.
Extending out from the central hub are four piers, each roughly a mile in length and acting as the main clean method of transportation and unloading goods. At least in theory, in reality all of the quadrants between the piers but one have long since being home to slums made up of old, rusting ships crammed in and moored up against eachother. Each quadrant alone having roughly thirty thousand people attempting to eek out a living. Such transgressions on the original plan for New New York are tolerated both because of some small level of compassion and because they actually provide New New York's primary export: Skilled labour hungry for any work going. Plus, many corporate folk are either intertwined with or addicted to the product of one of the many gangs that have taken root in the slums.
The Veil itself in this setting is something that primarily came about to solve the largest problem the new world was facing: limited space. As a result it's primary function is that of 'shortening' a process by which tampered neural feedback, advanced AR and a highly interconnected society have allowed for rooms to appear larger than life. Many cafes in the central hub appear three times their actual size, with neurochips (given reasonably cheaply by the corporations in exchange for people's privacy) rendering the experience of strolling through a large room. In reality said customers are actually shuffling in place. With the virtual reality only having to break its spell in case of the risk of collisions or the customer is reaching for a physical item that is out of reach.
However the technology is getting better year over year, with the first tennis world championships of the flooded world held entirely within a virtual court last year. Out in the slums, where positional data and cameras are less precisely controlled, the Veil is significantly messier. Most people get their device to portray a virtual mask over their property to render it appearing something more pleasant than a rusted ship but numerous health hazards and hap hazard code jockeys often mean such illusions falter or overlap each other. Advertisements and virtual graffiti are near everywhere without C-Sec policing the dataspheres. A blaring array of noise, lights and imagery all crafted to drag the users attention to them.
On a personal level the growing ubiquity of neurochips (or, at least AR enabled glasses and contacts) has given rise to digital fashion trends. Both Haute Couture appearances for the elite and loud, emblematic digital masks for the punk, criminal or dissident. The increasing digital noise of such things has drawn most modern phones to start including greater blocking, content filtering and other such features. All for the low price of a few dollars a month to secure peace of mind from the noise of the world.
His people are Elves, they used to worship dragons, and still worship the Dragonborn that are occasionally born among them, but most of them modernized and moved to cities when the Humans moved in. He comes from one of the wilder tribes, and was a Bard, apprentice to the Teller, who keeps the Histories and recites the Stories. He's not very smart at all, but damn can he memorize, which kind of makes him the perfect Teller.
Unrelated, he had a lot of anger problems, and one of the tribe's warriors saw the Beast in him and taught him how to harness it with Barbarian training.
so he kind of became a hands-on Teller, he would go on hunts and witness heroic deeds firsthand. After one of these hunts, for a mythic hart that had been sighted nearby, the hunting party and him returned to their village and found that everyone there was a zombie now.
so they escape into the woods, and every village they travel to, zombies. One by one, the hunting party is taken out by the zombies, and eventually, for like, a while, it's just him, alone in the primeval forest.
He began narrating his own Story, to try and keep his sanity, but it just made him crazy. So now he trusts in the Stories, and thinks that if he can keep his life exciting and dangerous enough, the Gods will leave him alive so they can see how his Story goes.
he's currently split evenly between Totem Barbarian (Eagle) and College of Lore Bard
That's perfect - I'm going with the (probably non-canon) idea of the WFRP world being a planet in the 40k universe that regressed in technology after the first Human expansion
Cash is a Rogue Trader whose ship was caught in a warp rift - in his desperation, he took a drop pod in the hopes that it would have enough oomph to escape, but he was pulled into the Warp and spat out into The Empire.
Addled by the Warp and unable to express his experience in the local language, he is reduced to muttering about Golden Thrones, flying ships and gravity wells
It's a lot of backstory for a guy who will be in the background of a scene intended for flavour text, but if the group decide to move on to Rogue Trader after this campaign, I've got one hell of a tie in
We find or normal route has been boarded up by gates blocking our canals. Sneaking past bluecoats goes pretty well until we got
I've had this idea for the longest time.
Just slowly getting defined by your deeds, abilities, and adventures.
Make sure he tells them to let that space cocaine be, too.
Came back with Codenames, Codenames Pictures, a Rogue Trader pre-gen adventure compendium, and Blades in the Dark
So? How did it go?!?
it's cool, I jumped right before it hit the ground, tuck and roll
the fall technically killed it, not me, but it still worked out Pretty Good
afterwards, we butchered it, and took all its best scales and fanciest teeth
I was gonna eat its heart to gain its power, but realized the potion of acid immunity I had would probably wear off before I had finished digesting it and it would just melt my insides, so I didn't
In short, Rainfalls right, always be eating them hearts.
But also power(at the price of an attunement slot)
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It was just a young dragon, doesnt count.
Well my friend is DMing some DnD and has his characters involved in a war and I joked that he should use Kriegsspiel to resolve the combat. But we have since become enameled with the idea of DnD warfare, and plan to sit down soon and hash out the basics of what we are calling Spellkrieg.
I figure the two most important things to get right in any wargame are movement and command and control. Getting your troops places and getting them to do what you want. I figure we’ll need to hash out basic land speeds for each race and have some conditional modifiers (elves not as slowed by forests).
Command and control gets interesting because traditionally controlling medieval armies was a god damned mess but DnD has literal magic, but not every unit is going to have access to magical communication.
sounds like excuses 2 me
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Always wanted to play these classic wargames they use at military academies and such
Mmmm dragon veal.
So tender.
Played Starfinder Society for the first time last night. My slightly-dim-but-good-natured Vesk Armor Storm Soldier, Cpl. Zog "Zoggy" Grav, learned several good lessons, like, "you can charge at one person with a gun, but you can't charge at TWO people with guns without getting shot."
Anyway, I enjoyed it enough despite the FLGS noise that I'll try it again in a few weeks. Interesting seeing how society play works.
Gotta kill big dragons to get big energy.
I'm not aware of anything in particular that's been made for 3E onwards, but if you play TSR D&D I've heard decent things about BATTLESYSTEM(TM)?
Chainmail's also somewhat interesting and far more simple, but lacks most of the units you'd find in typical D&D and has a lot less in the way of magic.
Just stapling fantasy rules onto the wargame of your choice is probably going to be the best, I suspect.
I dunno, man, things didn't end well for Sigurd.