To be clear, they are drow, it's just that they're the more noble Aevndrow as opposed to those Udadrow commoners (or those tree hugging hippy jungle lorendrow).
Also I just love the idea that a city that is super isolated under a glacier with no one ever coming or going has a 40% bigger population then waterdeep, which is a major trading port on the surface, incredibly cosmopolitan and principally populated by humans who propagate much faster then elves.
But how are they drow? They tell me one book prior that drow are specifically a group of war refugees who lost a war on behalf of Lolth against the forces of Corellon, and fled into the underdark for sanctuary - any drow that did not do this were exterminated in a genocide
But these guys are also drow, who never went into the underdark and have never lived underground nor were ever allied with the spider queen
It's like Salvatore forgot that Drow are elves and not their own completely novel race of people within the span of 6 months
It'd be like they have the game of thrones episode showing where the white walkers come from and how they reproduce and then 2 episodes later visit a kingdom of white walkers that are like "yeah we never worshipped the forest spirits or had anything to do with them", also they don't look like white walkers, dont raise the dead, don't have the whole cold thing going on, but everyone just calls them white walkers for some reason
To be clear, they are drow, it's just that they're the more noble Aevndrow as opposed to those Udadrow commoners (or those tree hugging hippy jungle lorendrow).
Also I just love the idea that a city that is super isolated under a glacier with no one ever coming or going has a 40% bigger population then waterdeep, which is a major trading port on the surface, incredibly cosmopolitan and principally populated by humans who propagate much faster then elves.
But how are they drow? They tell me one book prior that drow are specifically a group of war refugees who lost a war on behalf of Lolth against the forces of Corellon, and fled into the underdark for sanctuary - any drow that did not do this were exterminated in a genocide
But these guys are also drow, who never went into the underdark and have never lived underground nor were ever allied with the spider queen
It's like Salvatore forgot that Drow are elves and not their own completely novel race of people within the span of 6 months
Maybe we're looking at this from the wrong perspective; Like Sal has been writing about his penis Drizzt for 34 years now, a character who has seen almost no real growth ssince he first debut'd in 1988, and yet people still buy his books in droves.
Maybe this whole thing is just him seeing what his fans will mindlessly shell out money for as long as it talks about how amazing salvatore's penis Drizzt's web of steel is. Like he's sitting there with some buddies giggling away when he sees where his new releases are placing on the best sellers list.
Since apparently me and Kime have acived Common ground regarding Drizzt, I figured I might as well toss out the exact moment I gave up on Salvatore as an author.
I had been working my way through the hunters blade trilogy, which had been building up an opponent who would be powerful enough that even Drizzt should be credibly challenged by (an orcish king who was effectively an exarch of Gruumsh), and 'ol Bob had hinted that this trilogy would change things. I worked my way through the book, rolled my eyes at how comically inept the various enemies came up against the companions, the bullshittery of how bruenor was able to just go "nah fam" to a mortal wound... all of it would be worth it for when he went up against Obould Many-arrows.
The fight kicks off at the climax of the third novel, drizzt being desperate enough that he was willing to utilize an insane homicidal sentient weapon to help him take down this demigod, I'm reading through it, figuring that the best way they can narratively resolve this is that drizzt is able to kill Obould, but it coming at the cost of an arm which would have given the character an opportunity to overcome a limitation on himself since he'd always been this dual wielding ninny... and instead the fight ends because drizzt runs away because obould can't match his skills or speed but he sure can regenerate faster then drizzt can inflict damage.
Just... wow. Holy shit Bob, you ended a 3 book climax with a draw and none of the characters growing in any meaningful way.
So fuck 'em. Better writers have come long in the meantime.
I did not read any of that part, I did like the war of the silver marches though
Oddly companions onward is I think better because Drizzt is a bit player in it
Drizzt, by the way, is not in the book I mentioned, and the newest book with the Aevendrow only has Drizzt ocassionally monologuing about how the gods probably aren't real, but he isn't physically present, its about his wife and jarlaxle (the 2 hour long book One Eyed Jax about Jarlaxle and Regis is pretty good, if a bit rushed, Drizzt only shows up to get shot and whine about guns being unfair)
I really liked the break between secular and fundamentalist drow that Salvatore introduced in 2020, the sides make sense, their reasoning makes sense, and the revelation that Lolth doesn't care about sacrifices or pageantry doesn't break canon. There was an entire book he wrote about the drow commoners and how their lives are often much happier than the lives of the nobles who we had, until that moment, only ever talked about - I have fondness for the stories about Drizzt's father and his girlfriend getting high and debating the spider queen and whether she even cares about the Drow
and then right as the Drow houses draw the battle lines, Drizzt is firmly put out of the story because he's got a new daughter and his wife has a full time job as an archmage of the host tower, there is a record scratch and the books rush off to the Aevendrow - who have mostly never even heard of the spider queen, or human beings for that matter (lol)
It's like if right when the orc army arrives in Rohan, we cut to a story about Frodo going on a boat across the sea and all new characters are introduced and we just spend the entire book not talking about the ring or the war
Regardless, the setting of Obould IV regaining control of Many arrows and having a hostile peace with the dwarves after the war of the silver marshes (with the priests of Gruumsh still wanting war despite the disastrous results), the drow homeland about to erupt in flames, these are great settings for a campaign and my players are super excited to go there
I did not read any of that part, I did like the war of the silver marches though
Oddly companions onward is I think better because Drizzt is a bit player in it
Drizzt, by the way, is not in the book I mentioned, and the newest book with the Aevendrow only has Drizzt ocassionally monologuing about how the gods probably aren't real, but he isn't physically present, its about his wife and jarlaxle (the 2 hour long book One Eyed Jax about Jarlaxle and Regis is pretty good, if a bit rushed, Drizzt only shows up to get shot and whine about guns being unfair)
I really liked the break between secular and fundamentalist drow that Salvatore introduced in 2020, the sides make sense, their reasoning makes sense, and the revelation that Lolth doesn't care about sacrifices or pageantry doesn't break canon. There was an entire book he wrote about the drow commoners and how their lives are often much happier than the lives of the nobles who we had, until that moment, only ever talked about - I have fondness for the stories about Drizzt's father and his girlfriend getting high and debating the spider queen and whether she even cares about the Drow
and then right as the Drow houses draw the battle lines, Drizzt is firmly put out of the story because he's got a new daughter and his wife has a full time job as an archmage of the host tower, there is a record scratch and the books rush off to the Aevendrow - who have mostly never even heard of the spider queen, or human beings for that matter (lol)
It's like if right when the orc army arrives in Rohan, we cut to a story about Frodo going on a boat across the sea and all new characters are introduced and we just spend the entire book not talking about the ring or the war
Regardless, the setting of Obould IV regaining control of Many arrows and having a hostile peace with the dwarves after the war of the silver marshes (with the priests of Gruumsh still wanting war despite the disastrous results), the drow homeland about to erupt in flames, these are great settings for a campaign and my players are super excited to go there
Apparently theres another book coming out pretty soon, By all means go ahead and give us the coles notes on it.
Despite my bitching, I like the Aevendrow and Callidae, it just desperately feels like a story that had nothing to do with the drow and someone said "wait, back the fuck up, these people are drow" - they have literally no connection to anything going in in any previously written D&D property
If it was the same story, but instead of Jarlaxle looking for an edge in the war of the spider queen by seeking "good drow", but being done just because Jarlaxle is seeking leads on cool new magic items to help, and dragging Cattie Brie along because she never gets to leave the house, and Artemis along because he thinks Artemis and Cattie Brie need to make up since they haven't talked since he kidnapped her when she was 19, all of that works great
The new villains introduced (Slaadi) leading a plot against this glacier city, all this stuff is good, I like their special spells and equipment, it's all great stuff if not for this being billed as a continuation of the previous book's story - which ended pretty much on a cliffhanger
So like, the book is good except for Salvatore using Drizzt as a self insert to complain about the catholic church Mielikki, and I can actually recommend it if you haven't read the previous one. Like if I view it as something more standalone instead of part of a series - it's a solid 7/10 and I will read the sequel, despite my gripes
Salvatore's writing has a massive slump around the tail end of the 3.5 era, and the 4e era of writing has some good moments, but good fucking god is it dark, child rape as a core plot point? Yikes! The Companions trilogy kicks it off with some good stuff again, and finds energy in not having Drizzt be The Only Important Character - and most importantly, half the books center around Jarlaxle, who I like a lot more than Drizzt.
I'm going to be running a time loop for the very first quest of my new campaign after the session zero introduction (starting out everyone 10 years before the campaign in the siege of Sundabar for the "Session zero")
Everyone signed their forms of what kind of horrific content they're okay with so gonna borrow a bit from Friday Black by Nana Kwami Adjei-Brenyah (if you've read it, its kind of dark!), since the party will be stepping into a groundhog day time loop that's been going on for many, many years and it's going to be dark af and if everyone's still okay by the end of session 1 (I'll encourage them to message me in private if any content is concerning) then I know we'll be good for the later parts of the campaign with the neo-con version of the drow being the baddies
currently they've got everything on the table that isn't going into law and order SVU territory so well see (I'm also going to stick clear of violence against children of any kind of the time being because of recent events and how upsetting they are)
So Critical Role is currently airing the first episode of its mini-series about the high magic civilization that existed 1000 years before the present day of the Exandria setting.
Sam Riegel is playing a 14th-level changeling warlock news anchor whose broadcast goes out on magical crystal screens across the city. It's glorious.
So Critical Role is currently airing the first episode of its mini-series about the high magic civilization that existed 1000 years before the present day of the Exandria setting.
Sam Riegel is playing a 14th-level changeling warlock news anchor whose broadcast goes out on magical crystal screens across the city. It's glorious.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is wonderful and so far this one shot is fantastic
I should expect nothing else from the DM that gave us a gender swapped samwise gamgee with the stat block of a storm giant
Giant Options! Includes new subclasses for Barbarian (Become Huge!), Druid (Dino Druid!), and Wizard (Rune Stuff!), plus some interesting feats.
MIGHTY IMPEL
10th-Level Path of the Giant Feature
Your connection to giant strength now allows you to hurl
both allies and enemies on the battlefield. As a bonus
action while raging, you can choose one Medium or
smaller creature within your reach and move it to an
unoccupied space you can see within 30 feet of yourself.
An unwilling creature must succeed on a Strength saving
throw (DC equals 8 + your proficiency bonus + your
Strength modifier) to avoid the effect.
If, at the end of this movement, the thrown creature isn’t
on a surface or liquid that can support it, the creature falls,
taking damage as normal and landing prone.
I like the idea of a Barbarian yeeting themselves an additional 30 feet as a bonus action.
Just have to set things up so you're in a hallway or something when you rage so you don't grow to large size.
Ahh yes natural language. "hurl allies and enemies" implies that they must be an ally or an enemy and not yourself. But it also says you chose a medium or smaller creature within your reach and move it...
However normally you will not be able to do this to yourself because you will not me a medium or smaller creature
When raging
Giant Stature. Your reach increases by 5 feet, and if you
are smaller than Large, you become Large, along with
anything you are wearing. If there isn’t enough room for
you to become Large, your size doesn’t change
But if you are shrunk OR if there isn't enough room for you to be large. You would remain medium or smaller and so could throw yourself
I mean if this was 4th where facts and logic aren't allowed past the bouncer I'd say have at it, but in 5th their is just a bit more adherence to comprehensible reality.
I mean, I am my own worst enemy.
I'm always within reach of myself.
It's just that little bit about not being small enough to throw myself across the room, and we cleared that by hiding the barbarian inside a box until it's time to rage.
Put the box on a catapult and fire it into the enemy lines. As the box makes its terminal approach, the barbarian within uses Mighty Impel to correct their trajectory by up to 30 feet in any direction before kicking open the box and Getting Large. Precision munitions!
I mean if this was 4th where facts and logic aren't allowed past the bouncer I'd say have at it, but in 5th their is just a bit more adherence to comprehensible reality.
My brother in Pelor it's a game of pretend elves throwing fireballs that I play to get away from facts and logic.
I mean if this was 4th where facts and logic aren't allowed past the bouncer I'd say have at it, but in 5th their is just a bit more adherence to comprehensible reality.
My brother in Pelor it's a game of pretend elves throwing fireballs that I play to get away from facts and logic.
Yeah, but the thing is in 5e you have to explain how you are "throwing" yourself as opposed to just... jumping.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I mean, in 4e the ability would just not have the "Self" keyword and that would be the end of it. No muss no fuss.
I mean if this was 4th where facts and logic aren't allowed past the bouncer I'd say have at it, but in 5th their is just a bit more adherence to comprehensible reality.
My brother in Pelor it's a game of pretend elves throwing fireballs that I play to get away from facts and logic.
Yeah, but the thing is in 5e you have to explain how you are "throwing" yourself as opposed to just... jumping.
Oh, I totally agree with your physics where hurling somebody 30 feet in less than six seconds where they suffer absolutely no ill effects from is totally A Real Thing™ and not at all like you just quickly jumping 30 feet which is clearly preposterous!
Especially after you had previously increased your mass by up to a factor of 60!
I spent 9 straight hours working on the time loop quest but the party didn't get there because they spent a very long time talking to each other, which is great! Everyone's characters have a lot of chemistry
First session was 70% 10 years in the past at the start of the war of the silver marches, each getting their own trauma, except the goblin demonologist who is just happy to be here and the sorcerer, they're just kind of trying to find themselves and got stuck in a war
the half-orc saw his father kill himself to collapse a tunnel and stop the orc army from killing fleeing refugees, the witch saw her guardian berserker throw himself into a dragon's path so she could run, and the artificer accidentally killed an allied member of bregen'dearth who was there to help them (and took his gun!)
they rescued a handful of guards too and took them with, and I decided rather than just narrate how this level 0 group managed to make it to safety I would roll on my actual underdark random encounters table and just have a guard or two die horribly on each thing
melted, eaten by cloaker, mind sucked by an illithid, and a crazy beholder versus the last guard, a young woman who knew she was wearing a red shirt in a Star Trek TOS episode and rolled 3 successful saves against beholder rays with +0 as they ran from it and escaped
and so began the legendary story of Random_Guard_3 *random name generator* Lisa Lightspear
The session ended after a brief rundown of their 10 years of downtime (individually played out in advanced), one of them got married and had kids, but ultimately, all received a note with a customized invite compelling an audience with Zardoz Zord, the mysterious carnival owner. He hired them to do a simple mission back to where they all met, to scope out a lost village near Sundabar because "some weird things" are happening
*travel montage* 3 weeks later, they walk into the swamp and.... find themselves suddenly transposed from winter to spring, in a sunny village, the first day of the pudding faire 1485dr, 10 years prior... 15 hours before orcs destroyed this town that they now stand in, and ended it there
Very successful start, I'm astounded by how much everyone's characters click or bounce off each other, even the ones that have animosity towards each other are keeping it catty and fun, its great!
Edit: And the greatest gift a DM could have, nobody in the party has more than +2 to perception
I find garbage insight more amusing because an ambush is one thing but all the players knowing an NPC is full of shit painfully groaning at their gullible PCs who are eating up the BS is quite another.
There is nothing quite like it when an NPC becomes billy badass in a campaign; I had a halforc fighter GMPC that I plugged into a campaign to be a bricky frontliner (since the party didn't have anyone who could really fulfil the role and I like my players to play what they want as opposed to worrying about party comp) and the game decided to troll the shit out of me by having that character crit shit the bed; Like there was just a string of fucking crits that were happening with him and it was putting me in an awkward position of having to plead with them that this wasn't me being an vain glorious asshole but rather the dice gods trolling the shit out of me. Even when I was rolling the dice directly in front of them it kept happening so that he had multiple 20's per melee..
I lucked out with that shit, since the players wound up rolling with it and Braelyn (a surly former town guard in a Podunk village in the middle of nowhere) got to become a fucking memelord legend.
So.. the “solution” to this is to not have NPCs roll.
The point of rolling is effectively conflict resolution. When there is a conflict between what the DM wants and what the players want, when there is a challenge that needs to be overcome and failure would be impactful.
So if it’s the DM playing with their NPCs against their monsters… why are you rolling?
So.. the “solution” to this is to not have NPCs roll.
The point of rolling is effectively conflict resolution. When there is a conflict between what the DM wants and what the players want, when there is a challenge that needs to be overcome and failure would be impactful.
So if it’s the DM playing with their NPCs against their monsters… why are you rolling?
I very frequently roll NPCs versus other NPCs when I don't want the outcome to be prescripted, it can be heavily weighted, like here, but that makes it all the better when the unlikely happens
The players enjoyed that they got one of them through long odds, the fact that I don't hide my rolls gives a sense of tension to the world because even I don't know exactly what is going to happen
Whenever I have NPCs with the party I just make a small statblock with one or two abilities and an attack, and give it to my players to run in combat. and then as dm is just roleplay that character out of combat situations.
but that's because my players just like rolling dice, that's the thing why they're at the table, fight, roll dice and get loot. and I don't want to take away oppertunities for my players to slay things by having the npc do it. so when they run the npc it feels like the player accomplished the thing, and that works for us.
this was a session 0.5 , there was no real combat, although there were rolls, the NPC guards existed to die in place of players when they did something that would result in combat, although it wasn't assured: they had guard statblocks and I played them as very much trying to live as well, but doing their duty to protect the civilians escaping the city (most of the players were either children or teenagers in this "Flashback" session zero), the players did find things along the way to help, for example the artificer cobbled together a bomb from sparking underdark crystals and used it to dissuade a purple worm that picked up their vibrations, the monk made an animal handling check to make himself big and stompy and loud at a bulette convincing it to go find an easier meal, etc. Every NPC with them was led to this escape route by them because they found it during the siege
I had a few options for each encounter in the underdark during their months long travel montage, things to let them get away scott free, but they often made their own solutions and I was running this first session pretty loose (since the whole point is we're building backstories!). Each player got a free feat that was related to something they did during the escape and long journey to safety
Whenever nobody had a good solution or the rolls couldn't work I had a guard charge the threat while the rest ran and try and hold it off for a round or two before also running - in most cases this meant the guard died, but the beholder encounter was a beholder screaming about how the bats want its eyes and burrowing past the party, the party choose to try to slingshot its central eye and scream about bats to play on its fear but rolled very bad with both attack and charisma rolls, so the final guard on the final encounter just charged in stabbed the beholder (and hit) and then dodged 3 rays as it continued to run from bats that didn't exist
then the party made it to safety and I let each of them give a summary of their lives over the next 10 years before they all got a summons to meet back up, with a promise of property. The guard isn't hanging out with them, they just saved her life, but I'll definitely have her show up as like a knight-captain of silverymoon or something in the future so they can be like HEY ITS THAT PERSON WE SAVED
Whenever I have NPCs with the party I just make a small statblock with one or two abilities and an attack, and give it to my players to run in combat. and then as dm is just roleplay that character out of combat situations.
but that's because my players just like rolling dice, that's the thing why they're at the table, fight, roll dice and get loot. and I don't want to take away oppertunities for my players to slay things by having the npc do it. so when they run the npc it feels like the player accomplished the thing, and that works for us.
They're strong enough to help, but weak enough that they don't command the stage, and simple enough that I can just assign one or two of them to players and they don't take a lot of thought to play.
I don't bother rolling up a special character sheet for NPCs just because they're on the same side as the party in a given combat, only if they actually are brought along with them for an extended run. In the example I was using, if they run into that guard again, 10 years having past, and are like "come help us stop Rorgar the Dark Testicle I'd give her some kind of defender companion statblock and let them control her in combat)
I've got a bunch of good sidekick supplements from DMsguild that I am making extensive use of in curse of strahd, I think they're a bit better balanced than the official ones (the spellcasters for example get far fewer spells than a regular PC would, but I let the party decide the progression of any Companion, like Arabelle as their fated ally)
I don't bother rolling up a special character sheet for NPCs just because they're on the same side as the party in a given combat, only if they actually are brought along with them for an extended run
I've got a bunch of good sidekick supplements from DMsguild that I am making extensive use of in curse of strahd, I think they're a bit better balanced than the official ones (the spellcasters for example get far fewer spells than a regular PC would, but I let the party decide the progression of any Companion, like Arabelle as their fated ally)
Oh, yeah, I only use these because my groups tend to be 2-3 players and they need a little something for the campaign to round themselves out.
I don't bother rolling up a special character sheet for NPCs just because they're on the same side as the party in a given combat, only if they actually are brought along with them for an extended run
I've got a bunch of good sidekick supplements from DMsguild that I am making extensive use of in curse of strahd, I think they're a bit better balanced than the official ones (the spellcasters for example get far fewer spells than a regular PC would, but I let the party decide the progression of any Companion, like Arabelle as their fated ally)
Oh, yeah, I only use these because my groups tend to be 2-3 players and they need a little something for the campaign to round themselves out.
yep when I started COS I didnt do that but they ended up keeping their villager friend with them and insisted she should be capable at fighting because she had weapons training so I kept giving her companion levels and letting them control her, until they got her out of Barovia anyway (hah I can't "rocks fall" kill her without it feeling cheap and the dice have always saved her, but if she can go for a swim in the lake and nope out of barovia with her sister Ireena, that's what's gonna happen!)
So I've come to the realization that I've played and ran D&D far less than I have actually spent reading and brainstorming ideas for PCs, adventures, and campaigns. I prefer to play in person and have never even played D&D with an online service. My questions are:
What is the best platform for running D&D 5E online?
How difficult is it to add homebrew content (new options for players, items, monsters, traps, etc)?
How does mapmaking work?
Are there any significant limitations to playing online versus playing in person?
Foundry is the best VTT in my opinion, bar none, but it takes the most prep for the DM
Like if the DM just has infinite time, for the player, playing their character in Foundry is a beautiful seemless thing where everything is automated from concentration to time until spells end on their own to bless to summoning spells (auto-scaling based on selected level), to moving their tokens to stairs and automatically traveling to the next floor, etc
It allows you to reframe session time dealing with niggles into prep time spent by the DM, for better or worse
hell you can even automated Minions in combat so the DM doesn't even need to do anything, they just mosie over to a nearby player and monch on their own, oh and only the DM needs to buy Foundry
Foundry is definitely better than roll20. At the very least, I don't have to reload the website because I've done too many things and had too many stat blocks up and shit and now the site is choking.
Learning how to use Foundry is by far the biggest stumbling block to using Foundry, but at least once you learn it, shit just works. Roll20 has so much inconsistent shit in it, for example:
I make a character for one of my players. They send me a file for what they want for a token. I place the token on the map, I give them control of it, I say it represents their character.
I NOW have to also go into their character sheet, with the token selected, and designate it as their token.
In addition, if I ever fiddle with the light settings or anything else with their token, I have to do this assignment process all over again.
It's so fucking un-intuitive and that's honestly a phrase I've gotten used to saying 2-3 times per session on roll20. I'll want to do something, and the system just gives me a blank stare, and I'll find the answer on some obscure forum post and they act like everyone's dumb for asking.
Roll20 is what I've used the most. It's fine, and clearly good enough to use because we still do, but it's far from ideal. After having used DndBeyond character sheets, too, you really notice how bad they are in Roll20
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Yea we used the free version of Roll20 and the Firefox plug-in that let's you use DnD beyond sheets.
For voice/video we used discord. The biggest problem with online is talking over each other and not being able to see body language.
Advantages to online is being able to get all the maps, music and tokens all squared away ahead of time. I trawl the fantasy map subreddit and sub to a handful of map patreons.
My group uses Astral for VTT, zoom for video and voice, and Discord for DM to paste in information, like when they id a magic item out what a particular scene or NPC looks like.
My group is a recent adherent to Beyond20 plug-in for Roll20 and its fucking great from a player perspective. From a DM's perspective its just another chore of populating your Roll20 page with "proper" tokens that can link to DndBeyonds combat tracker... but if you're into that extra layer of prep work (I'm not) then its also great!
I really miss rolling dice though. Clicking is not same as rolling physical dice.
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NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
edited May 2022
My groups (I'm the GM) use Roll20 (free version with no paid content) and I of course do all the mechanical work of setting up sheets, importing assets, etc.
My workflow's pretty streamlined now, so the worst of it's long done and I just need to prep for each new session (usually a map or two, some new monster statblocks, etc.) as we go. The biggest problem I've run into is the storage cap on images (again, on a free account), so I have to selectively prune old content out to continue to add new stuff as we go.
I've looked at Foundry a bunch of times, and while it looks kind of amazing I'm off-put by doing all that front loaded mechanical work again AND ALSO paying to use it. That said, they've got a 20% off 2nd Anniversary sale going now (so $40+tax), and that's almost low enough for me to take a flyer on it.
[Edit] Actually, this begs a question: how does Foundry handle art assets like maps and tokens? Is it cloud based, or local server/client, or what?
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But how are they drow? They tell me one book prior that drow are specifically a group of war refugees who lost a war on behalf of Lolth against the forces of Corellon, and fled into the underdark for sanctuary - any drow that did not do this were exterminated in a genocide
But these guys are also drow, who never went into the underdark and have never lived underground nor were ever allied with the spider queen
It's like Salvatore forgot that Drow are elves and not their own completely novel race of people within the span of 6 months
It'd be like they have the game of thrones episode showing where the white walkers come from and how they reproduce and then 2 episodes later visit a kingdom of white walkers that are like "yeah we never worshipped the forest spirits or had anything to do with them", also they don't look like white walkers, dont raise the dead, don't have the whole cold thing going on, but everyone just calls them white walkers for some reason
so at this point I'm wondering what a drow is
Maybe we're looking at this from the wrong perspective; Like Sal has been writing about his penis Drizzt for 34 years now, a character who has seen almost no real growth ssince he first debut'd in 1988, and yet people still buy his books in droves.
Maybe this whole thing is just him seeing what his fans will mindlessly shell out money for as long as it talks about how amazing salvatore's penis Drizzt's web of steel is. Like he's sitting there with some buddies giggling away when he sees where his new releases are placing on the best sellers list.
I had been working my way through the hunters blade trilogy, which had been building up an opponent who would be powerful enough that even Drizzt should be credibly challenged by (an orcish king who was effectively an exarch of Gruumsh), and 'ol Bob had hinted that this trilogy would change things. I worked my way through the book, rolled my eyes at how comically inept the various enemies came up against the companions, the bullshittery of how bruenor was able to just go "nah fam" to a mortal wound... all of it would be worth it for when he went up against Obould Many-arrows.
The fight kicks off at the climax of the third novel, drizzt being desperate enough that he was willing to utilize an insane homicidal sentient weapon to help him take down this demigod, I'm reading through it, figuring that the best way they can narratively resolve this is that drizzt is able to kill Obould, but it coming at the cost of an arm which would have given the character an opportunity to overcome a limitation on himself since he'd always been this dual wielding ninny... and instead the fight ends because drizzt runs away because obould can't match his skills or speed but he sure can regenerate faster then drizzt can inflict damage.
Just... wow. Holy shit Bob, you ended a 3 book climax with a draw and none of the characters growing in any meaningful way.
So fuck 'em. Better writers have come long in the meantime.
Golly. 15 years or so? The first few series were fun stuff for a kid, though.
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Oddly companions onward is I think better because Drizzt is a bit player in it
Drizzt, by the way, is not in the book I mentioned, and the newest book with the Aevendrow only has Drizzt ocassionally monologuing about how the gods probably aren't real, but he isn't physically present, its about his wife and jarlaxle (the 2 hour long book One Eyed Jax about Jarlaxle and Regis is pretty good, if a bit rushed, Drizzt only shows up to get shot and whine about guns being unfair)
I really liked the break between secular and fundamentalist drow that Salvatore introduced in 2020, the sides make sense, their reasoning makes sense, and the revelation that Lolth doesn't care about sacrifices or pageantry doesn't break canon. There was an entire book he wrote about the drow commoners and how their lives are often much happier than the lives of the nobles who we had, until that moment, only ever talked about - I have fondness for the stories about Drizzt's father and his girlfriend getting high and debating the spider queen and whether she even cares about the Drow
and then right as the Drow houses draw the battle lines, Drizzt is firmly put out of the story because he's got a new daughter and his wife has a full time job as an archmage of the host tower, there is a record scratch and the books rush off to the Aevendrow - who have mostly never even heard of the spider queen, or human beings for that matter (lol)
It's like if right when the orc army arrives in Rohan, we cut to a story about Frodo going on a boat across the sea and all new characters are introduced and we just spend the entire book not talking about the ring or the war
Regardless, the setting of Obould IV regaining control of Many arrows and having a hostile peace with the dwarves after the war of the silver marshes (with the priests of Gruumsh still wanting war despite the disastrous results), the drow homeland about to erupt in flames, these are great settings for a campaign and my players are super excited to go there
Apparently theres another book coming out pretty soon, By all means go ahead and give us the coles notes on it.
If it was the same story, but instead of Jarlaxle looking for an edge in the war of the spider queen by seeking "good drow", but being done just because Jarlaxle is seeking leads on cool new magic items to help, and dragging Cattie Brie along because she never gets to leave the house, and Artemis along because he thinks Artemis and Cattie Brie need to make up since they haven't talked since he kidnapped her when she was 19, all of that works great
The new villains introduced (Slaadi) leading a plot against this glacier city, all this stuff is good, I like their special spells and equipment, it's all great stuff if not for this being billed as a continuation of the previous book's story - which ended pretty much on a cliffhanger
So like, the book is good except for Salvatore using Drizzt as a self insert to complain about the catholic church Mielikki, and I can actually recommend it if you haven't read the previous one. Like if I view it as something more standalone instead of part of a series - it's a solid 7/10 and I will read the sequel, despite my gripes
Salvatore's writing has a massive slump around the tail end of the 3.5 era, and the 4e era of writing has some good moments, but good fucking god is it dark, child rape as a core plot point? Yikes! The Companions trilogy kicks it off with some good stuff again, and finds energy in not having Drizzt be The Only Important Character - and most importantly, half the books center around Jarlaxle, who I like a lot more than Drizzt.
Everyone signed their forms of what kind of horrific content they're okay with so gonna borrow a bit from Friday Black by Nana Kwami Adjei-Brenyah (if you've read it, its kind of dark!), since the party will be stepping into a groundhog day time loop that's been going on for many, many years and it's going to be dark af and if everyone's still okay by the end of session 1 (I'll encourage them to message me in private if any content is concerning) then I know we'll be good for the later parts of the campaign with the neo-con version of the drow being the baddies
currently they've got everything on the table that isn't going into law and order SVU territory so well see (I'm also going to stick clear of violence against children of any kind of the time being because of recent events and how upsetting they are)
Giant Options! Includes new subclasses for Barbarian (Become Huge!), Druid (Dino Druid!), and Wizard (Rune Stuff!), plus some interesting feats.
Sam Riegel is playing a 14th-level changeling warlock news anchor whose broadcast goes out on magical crystal screens across the city. It's glorious.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is wonderful and so far this one shot is fantastic
I should expect nothing else from the DM that gave us a gender swapped samwise gamgee with the stat block of a storm giant
I like the idea of a Barbarian yeeting themselves an additional 30 feet as a bonus action.
Just have to set things up so you're in a hallway or something when you rage so you don't grow to large size.
However normally you will not be able to do this to yourself because you will not me a medium or smaller creature
When raging
But if you are shrunk OR if there isn't enough room for you to be large. You would remain medium or smaller and so could throw yourself
I'm always within reach of myself.
It's just that little bit about not being small enough to throw myself across the room, and we cleared that by hiding the barbarian inside a box until it's time to rage.
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My brother in Pelor it's a game of pretend elves throwing fireballs that I play to get away from facts and logic.
Yeah, but the thing is in 5e you have to explain how you are "throwing" yourself as opposed to just... jumping.
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Oh, I totally agree with your physics where hurling somebody 30 feet in less than six seconds where they suffer absolutely no ill effects from is totally A Real Thing™ and not at all like you just quickly jumping 30 feet which is clearly preposterous!
Especially after you had previously increased your mass by up to a factor of 60!
I spent 9 straight hours working on the time loop quest but the party didn't get there because they spent a very long time talking to each other, which is great! Everyone's characters have a lot of chemistry
First session was 70% 10 years in the past at the start of the war of the silver marches, each getting their own trauma, except the goblin demonologist who is just happy to be here and the sorcerer, they're just kind of trying to find themselves and got stuck in a war
the half-orc saw his father kill himself to collapse a tunnel and stop the orc army from killing fleeing refugees, the witch saw her guardian berserker throw himself into a dragon's path so she could run, and the artificer accidentally killed an allied member of bregen'dearth who was there to help them (and took his gun!)
they rescued a handful of guards too and took them with, and I decided rather than just narrate how this level 0 group managed to make it to safety I would roll on my actual underdark random encounters table and just have a guard or two die horribly on each thing
melted, eaten by cloaker, mind sucked by an illithid, and a crazy beholder versus the last guard, a young woman who knew she was wearing a red shirt in a Star Trek TOS episode and rolled 3 successful saves against beholder rays with +0 as they ran from it and escaped
and so began the legendary story of Random_Guard_3 *random name generator* Lisa Lightspear
The session ended after a brief rundown of their 10 years of downtime (individually played out in advanced), one of them got married and had kids, but ultimately, all received a note with a customized invite compelling an audience with Zardoz Zord, the mysterious carnival owner. He hired them to do a simple mission back to where they all met, to scope out a lost village near Sundabar because "some weird things" are happening
*travel montage* 3 weeks later, they walk into the swamp and.... find themselves suddenly transposed from winter to spring, in a sunny village, the first day of the pudding faire 1485dr, 10 years prior... 15 hours before orcs destroyed this town that they now stand in, and ended it there
Very successful start, I'm astounded by how much everyone's characters click or bounce off each other, even the ones that have animosity towards each other are keeping it catty and fun, its great!
Edit: And the greatest gift a DM could have, nobody in the party has more than +2 to perception
I lucked out with that shit, since the players wound up rolling with it and Braelyn (a surly former town guard in a Podunk village in the middle of nowhere) got to become a fucking memelord legend.
The point of rolling is effectively conflict resolution. When there is a conflict between what the DM wants and what the players want, when there is a challenge that needs to be overcome and failure would be impactful.
So if it’s the DM playing with their NPCs against their monsters… why are you rolling?
I very frequently roll NPCs versus other NPCs when I don't want the outcome to be prescripted, it can be heavily weighted, like here, but that makes it all the better when the unlikely happens
The players enjoyed that they got one of them through long odds, the fact that I don't hide my rolls gives a sense of tension to the world because even I don't know exactly what is going to happen
but that's because my players just like rolling dice, that's the thing why they're at the table, fight, roll dice and get loot. and I don't want to take away oppertunities for my players to slay things by having the npc do it. so when they run the npc it feels like the player accomplished the thing, and that works for us.
I had a few options for each encounter in the underdark during their months long travel montage, things to let them get away scott free, but they often made their own solutions and I was running this first session pretty loose (since the whole point is we're building backstories!). Each player got a free feat that was related to something they did during the escape and long journey to safety
Whenever nobody had a good solution or the rolls couldn't work I had a guard charge the threat while the rest ran and try and hold it off for a round or two before also running - in most cases this meant the guard died, but the beholder encounter was a beholder screaming about how the bats want its eyes and burrowing past the party, the party choose to try to slingshot its central eye and scream about bats to play on its fear but rolled very bad with both attack and charisma rolls, so the final guard on the final encounter just charged in stabbed the beholder (and hit) and then dodged 3 rays as it continued to run from bats that didn't exist
then the party made it to safety and I let each of them give a summary of their lives over the next 10 years before they all got a summons to meet back up, with a promise of property. The guard isn't hanging out with them, they just saved her life, but I'll definitely have her show up as like a knight-captain of silverymoon or something in the future so they can be like HEY ITS THAT PERSON WE SAVED
I've been using these in my campaigns:
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Companion_Characters_(5e_Other)
They're strong enough to help, but weak enough that they don't command the stage, and simple enough that I can just assign one or two of them to players and they don't take a lot of thought to play.
I've got a bunch of good sidekick supplements from DMsguild that I am making extensive use of in curse of strahd, I think they're a bit better balanced than the official ones (the spellcasters for example get far fewer spells than a regular PC would, but I let the party decide the progression of any Companion, like Arabelle as their fated ally)
Oh, yeah, I only use these because my groups tend to be 2-3 players and they need a little something for the campaign to round themselves out.
yep when I started COS I didnt do that but they ended up keeping their villager friend with them and insisted she should be capable at fighting because she had weapons training so I kept giving her companion levels and letting them control her, until they got her out of Barovia anyway (hah I can't "rocks fall" kill her without it feeling cheap and the dice have always saved her, but if she can go for a swim in the lake and nope out of barovia with her sister Ireena, that's what's gonna happen!)
Like if the DM just has infinite time, for the player, playing their character in Foundry is a beautiful seemless thing where everything is automated from concentration to time until spells end on their own to bless to summoning spells (auto-scaling based on selected level), to moving their tokens to stairs and automatically traveling to the next floor, etc
It allows you to reframe session time dealing with niggles into prep time spent by the DM, for better or worse
hell you can even automated Minions in combat so the DM doesn't even need to do anything, they just mosie over to a nearby player and monch on their own, oh and only the DM needs to buy Foundry
Learning how to use Foundry is by far the biggest stumbling block to using Foundry, but at least once you learn it, shit just works. Roll20 has so much inconsistent shit in it, for example:
I make a character for one of my players. They send me a file for what they want for a token. I place the token on the map, I give them control of it, I say it represents their character.
I NOW have to also go into their character sheet, with the token selected, and designate it as their token.
In addition, if I ever fiddle with the light settings or anything else with their token, I have to do this assignment process all over again.
It's so fucking un-intuitive and that's honestly a phrase I've gotten used to saying 2-3 times per session on roll20. I'll want to do something, and the system just gives me a blank stare, and I'll find the answer on some obscure forum post and they act like everyone's dumb for asking.
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For voice/video we used discord. The biggest problem with online is talking over each other and not being able to see body language.
Advantages to online is being able to get all the maps, music and tokens all squared away ahead of time. I trawl the fantasy map subreddit and sub to a handful of map patreons.
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I really miss rolling dice though. Clicking is not same as rolling physical dice.
My workflow's pretty streamlined now, so the worst of it's long done and I just need to prep for each new session (usually a map or two, some new monster statblocks, etc.) as we go. The biggest problem I've run into is the storage cap on images (again, on a free account), so I have to selectively prune old content out to continue to add new stuff as we go.
I've looked at Foundry a bunch of times, and while it looks kind of amazing I'm off-put by doing all that front loaded mechanical work again AND ALSO paying to use it. That said, they've got a 20% off 2nd Anniversary sale going now (so $40+tax), and that's almost low enough for me to take a flyer on it.
[Edit] Actually, this begs a question: how does Foundry handle art assets like maps and tokens? Is it cloud based, or local server/client, or what?