Havelock3.0What are you?Some kind of half-assed astronaut?Registered Userregular
edited June 2024
Ok if I ever get my group up and running I’m going to use clocks because I have some stuff in game to track that’s not player-facing but it would greatly benefit from it
Havelock3.0 on
You go in the cage, cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water, our shark.
This is of course all hypothetical for you D&Ders out there. I would, naturally, use a clocks.
I've never played BitD, but I had heard about the concept of clocks from a TTRPG podcast I listen to and am curious about it. The hosts of that podcast seemed to be a bit confused on how to use them when running the game, though.
Are they essentially like skill challenges from D&D 4E?
All presentation aside, yes. A clock is just a new way to visualize a skill challenge.
One of the things that the games which use clocks have done well is by providing ways to advance them other than just skill checks (for example, fill a tick on the stealth clock when the players make a lot of noise), but at their core, it's just counting X good things before Y bad things and providing a useful data visualization to make it more intuitive.
Pathfinder uses skill challenge stuff like the infiltration rules for non-combat stealth. Basically racing a success clock against a failure clock.
0
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited June 2024
Yeah, using the clocks kind of language is more formalizing and codifying the abstraction of RPGs into something easily understandable and recognizable(and for the DMs, malleable into the narrative), rather than something absolutely new.
Fencingsax on
+4
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
The thing I would note about Blades (et al) clocks as compared to skill challenges is that there's much less of a set scale for a roll in those games. A roll is a narrative beat, and that can be zoomed in to a single punch or zoomed out to a gauntlet of bare knuckle boxing matches, depending on where the focus is appropriate. Skill challenges typically work on a tighter focus still, in my experience, as part of a simulation forward versus narrative forward approach.
This is of course all hypothetical for you D&Ders out there. I would, naturally, use a clocks.
I've never played BitD, but I had heard about the concept of clocks from a TTRPG podcast I listen to and am curious about it. The hosts of that podcast seemed to be a bit confused on how to use them when running the game, though.
Are they essentially like skill challenges from D&D 4E?
Basically yes. It's taking the idea of the skill challenge and making it disassociated from "skills" so you can use them for whatever, but the same basic idea.
The thing I would note about Blades (et al) clocks as compared to skill challenges is that there's much less of a set scale for a roll in those games. A roll is a narrative beat, and that can be zoomed in to a single punch or zoomed out to a gauntlet of bare knuckle boxing matches, depending on where the focus is appropriate. Skill challenges typically work on a tighter focus still, in my experience, as part of a simulation forward versus narrative forward approach.
As an example of this, here's a Blades job that I came up with to demonstrate.
A wealthy Iruvian noble is hosting a martial arts tournament at his estate to demonstrate traditional Iruvian martial arts to the elite of Duskwall. This is, understandably, a private event - only members of the Iruvian aristocracy are allowed to participate. The crew wants to get in to try and steal an arcane treasure he's rumored to possess, so Ilya (the Cutter) embarks on a tournament of underground street fights while Threnody (the Spider) starts spreading rumors in the bars around town that there's an Iruvian noble slumming it as a street fighter and Griggs (the Lurk) breaks into the Iruvian Embassy in order to steal false credentials for Ilya to use.
Those could all be part of the same clock, everyone working towards a singular goal, told as a sort of montage.
Fast forward to the end of the job, and Ilya is struggling to stay on their feet in the final round of the competition, going blow for blow with the Iruvian champion to keep everyone focused on the fights, while Griggs is trying to make it through the security measures set up in the noble's office and Threnody is busy flirting with some guards in order to keep them from noticing that Griggs left every door in his wake wide open.
Those might all be separate clocks, either connected to each other (one filling could cause another to start moving) or completely disconnected. Or not clocks at all, of course, they're a largely optional system.
And then at the end, after they steal the arcane artifact, you might create the long term clocks of Ilya's Adoring Fans and The Iruvian Embassy's Paperwork, which are now tracking major world events and might only tick once a session.
You could run it in reverse too if it’s easier to get your head around; then it becomes Hit Points for Plot.
The party is hoping to convince the king to help them. This plot has 3/3 HP.
The Dwarf rolls a 10 against a target number of 10 to introduce themselves with proper etiquette. Good enough. 2/3 HP.
The Thief rolls a 1 to bend the truth about the situation, angering the king, which keeps the plot going. 3/3 HP.
The Ranger doesn’t roll, but decides they’ll have to offer up the party’s gold to smooth things over. That was exactly the right move, as we’ve previously established the king lusts for gold. 1/3 HP.
The Dwarf seals the deal by honestly explaining what’s up. 0/3 HP, the plot is defeated!
———
It wasn’t “roll 3 Persuasion checks well”, it was a mix of player rolls and choices, each selected by them based on what they wanted to do. The game host is essentially using the clock to remind themself when to move the plot forward in the way that play has determined. You can definitely run games without them, but they’re a fun tool.
idk if anyone ever played on Storium, but it worked a bit like this, it was basically a play by post site with built in card mechanics
each challenge had a number of hp and the players would play their positive nd negative cards until they ran out, determining if the challenge has a good, neutral, or bad outcome
And with that settled, now let’s talk about hex flowers.
Nah for real though, does anyone have any funky rules or systems they always use, that aren’t common?
Never heard of the concept, but I love hexes and I also love flowers so I checked it out. It's fucking rad. I also love randomized tables and hex grids so it's just a big fuck yes for me all around.
Speaking of, I recently got an email from Inkwell Ideas, the people who make the Worldographer software I use to make hex grid maps, that they're launching a crowdfunding campaign next month to allow them to work on a large update to it. Since it released several years ago they've been releasing small updates every couple months but now they want to work on things that will take a bit more time like an updated UI, better and faster terrain generation, etc. I'm pretty excited about it since it's already a pretty great hex map making program
+5
NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
Oh, damn! I'm still using Hexographer 2, so this is awesome news!
Oh, damn! I'm still using Hexographer 2, so this is awesome news!
Unfortunately owners of the current version of Worldographer will have to purchase an upgrade license for the new version, dunno if it's cheaper than buying the license new though. They did say that anyone that's bought Worldographer since the beginning of this year will get a heavy discount so that's nice of them (I purchased it a year or two ago but that's okay, I don't mind supporting them)
0
NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
Honestly I'd love to upgrade to any modern mapping program, but been hesitant because 1) I've got Hexographer and Hex Kit for drawing regional/local hexmaps, and 2) I've been dabbling with Inkscape and GIMP for making a proper-drawn world map. And I'm stubborn and cheap.
My only problems are that Hexographer is old as dirt and behaves like a Windows 3.1 program, and Hex Kit is super lightweight but doesn't scale well to "big" regions. So something modern to replace Hexographer, bonus if it can read my old files, would be nice.
How do you like Worldographer? It always struck me as trying to do too much, to compete with Fantasy Grounds and the like, and I just want something that's straightforward and does one thing well.
Had a Session Zero last week for the Eberron for Savage Worlds campaign I'm starting, and introduced the players to safety tools (most of them are friends I've known for in some cases a quarter of a century or more, but I still wanted to implement them); things were going great, we went over X cards and lines and veils. After agreeing on some of the common ones (no SA, no child endangerment, etc.) one of them threw out "no football (soccer) references" out of spite. I hadn't planned on making any, but I had been watching Euro 2024 matches all day and had started idly wondering what soccer teams for the various nation-states of Eberron would look like (Is Aundair's team a perpetual finalist that can never seal the deal? Does Thrane bore everyone to tears with incessant passing and nothing else? Was Cyre dominant in the sport but left a power vacuum in the wake of the Day of Mourning?), and that jerk went ahead and cut me off at the pass. In order to set a proper example, I've had to honor that request. ...damnit.
Joke's on them, though; that's just more motivation for me to put their characters through the wringer in revenge. We'll see how that works out for me in our first session later this week.
Alright I'm finally finishing up my Pathfinder intro thing with my neighbors and I have a rather silly hankering to try some other TTRPG systems. I'm already running an occasional game of Heart so I want to try non-horror stuff. Anyone have a favorite system they think would be fun for people who generally liked Pathfinder but seem a bit less combat-inclined?
I'm going to check in with them after the session this weekend with a few different options, including just doing a less fighty Pathfinder campaign.
I think ultimately the system doesn't matter as much as what you want to do. Savage Worlds Pathfinder is simpler. D&D 5E is simpler. MorkBorg is way simpler.
Nailing down my 5e Dwarf Monk decisions for my upcoming have
The backstory is that he's from the Firediamond Clan, who started off as the masons and structural engineers responsible for mine safety, and gradually developed a form of martial arts around masonry, carpentry, and checking for firedamp
Path of the Kensai for the option of +2AC, and a focus on hammers and the sling
It's not mechanically optimal, but it's a largely novice party so we're not going to be an optimal group in the first place
1st stretch goal unlocked! Hooray for paying artists!
Next one is what the nerds probably really want: a monster pamphlet with one from the Vast Grimm guy (Brian rules, for real).
I put up a poll for the $9k stretch goal, and currently the mission generator is in the lead by a comfortable margin. Maybe not surprising after I posted some fiction using it.
The metrics suggest that I probably won't make much more than $9k, but, well, they've been wrong before. I'll keep proposing goals until I stop achieving them.
Also: finished the first draft of the sequel to Enter the Dismal Armory. Clocking in at a page longer than EtDA, which may be a problem if we continue using the 12 page A5 format.
I haven't played D&D in ages. I am building an artificer, and I think I want battle-smith so I can just sit back and shoot with a crossbow.
He is just a combination of Hiccup and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. He's a birdman who wants to be able to fly with his flock. So he's building a DaVincian jetpack of sorts to make that happen. Very earnest, wants to help, but wants to keep all the money he can to fund his project. Tempted to make him a kenku whose egg was put into an aaracokra's nest, so he was never meant to fly and they just don't have the heart to tell him.
I haven't played D&D in ages. I am building an artificer, and I think I want battle-smith so I can just sit back and shoot with a crossbow.
He is just a combination of Hiccup and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. He's a birdman who wants to be able to fly with his flock. So he's building a DaVincian jetpack of sorts to make that happen. Very earnest, wants to help, but wants to keep all the money he can to fund his project. Tempted to make him a kenku whose egg was put into an aaracokra's nest, so he was never meant to fly and they just don't have the heart to tell him.
Cuckoos just sliding their eggs into other birds' nests will never not be darkly hilarious. You could play up that one of the aarakokra's eggs went missing when the kenku egg was dropped off, and finding this switched at birth birdie brother could be a plot point. Then eventually you both find "mom" and are like, "what the hell?"
I haven't played D&D in ages. I am building an artificer, and I think I want battle-smith so I can just sit back and shoot with a crossbow.
He is just a combination of Hiccup and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. He's a birdman who wants to be able to fly with his flock. So he's building a DaVincian jetpack of sorts to make that happen. Very earnest, wants to help, but wants to keep all the money he can to fund his project. Tempted to make him a kenku whose egg was put into an aaracokra's nest, so he was never meant to fly and they just don't have the heart to tell him.
If it were me, I would go the Armorer route and become Iron (Bird)Man. You get a pew pew laz0r beam with the Infiltrator armor and then later at level 10 you can tack on the infusion of Winged Boots onto the armor (by that point, you can enchant separate portions of your Iron Man armor, level 9) to be the final culmination of your flight project.
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QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
I feel like you could do a fun thing with kenku as brood parasites, where while it's partially based around getting others to raise their young, it's also focusing on providing an opportunity, because being raised by other kenku is just a photocopy of a photocopy, and being raised by another species will allow you to learn more language that you can use
Seems like an opportunity to blend in some hag/changeling stuff.
Maybe a personal nemesis.
Incenjucar on
+3
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
If I were building my own fantasy setting I'd probably be thinking about a cross between the D&D changeling and the kenku as a more traditional fairy lore changeling. Probably play into it almost as the tiefling equivalent for the realm of Faerie (I also sometimes do similar stuff for the fey descended goblins and elves, but this would be a more active connection than that I reckon).
Session 1 of Eberron: Oracle of War via Savage Worlds went off generally without a hitch tonight (one person's potato of a laptop choking hard on Foundry being the exception). We had to wrap a bit early when one player had to leave, just as we were drawing cards for initiative for the first combat of the session. Hopefully this gives them something to look forward to over the next three weeks.
We've got a towering warforged artificer who has a chip on their shoulder when it comes to fleshy beings, a gregarious orc Gatekeeper druid, a 'marked elven spy torn between her loyalties to House Phiarlan and the Valenar, a dinosaur riding Talentan halfling with an odd obsession with warforged and becoming one himself, and a meatshield of a dwarf who is literally not smart enough to realize when he's been hurt and should be bleeding out on the floor.
One nice thing about Savage World's Interludes system is that in addition to using it for mid-game Bennie refreshment, it'll help us retroactively flesh out their character backstories and connections as we go along the railroad-y nature of this adventure series.
So yesterday we finally managed to play a game of D&D after a several month hiatus and it was a lot of fun! I got to play my wizard/arcana cleric again and it was a blast trying to get into the mindset of a nerdy teenage girl that loves magic. Then I got to thinking about making a custom named spell like Bigby's Hand or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, Tasha's Caustic Brew, etc.
I wanted a name with alliteration and that was kinda silly so I started looking at words, then I worked from there to come up with a reaction spell that reduces the damage you take from an attack and pushes you away from the source of damage and also pushes the source away if they fail a STR saving throw. I'm not sure about the math for what level spell slot it'd use, it's range, and distance pushed. I copied the distance and reaction trigger from Hellish Rebuke, the resistance from Absorb Elements, while the pushing was my own. I'll throw the full spell text in a spoiler and would appreciate any feedback (even if it's just to say the spell idea itself is flawed)
Pure's Pusillanimous Push
Level: 2
School: Abjuration
Casting time: 1 reaction, which you take in response to being damaged by a creature within 60 feet of you that you can see
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous
Classes: Wizard
Description: You instinctively attempt to push yourself away from danger with a blast of water. You have resistance to the triggering attack, and the attacker must succeed on a Strength saving throw or be pushed back 15 feet in a straight line away from you. You are also pushed back 15 feet in a straight line from your attacker.
And with that settled, now let’s talk about hex flowers.
Nah for real though, does anyone have any funky rules or systems they always use, that aren’t common?
i mean i wrote my own game : P
instead of dice it uses a deck of the major arcana tarot cards. Every stat goes between 1 and 3, and when you make an action, you draw a number of cards equal to your stat and pick one to play
each card then has a "polarity" to broadly tell the GM if it's good, bad, or neutral, and a "forecast" that gives them more specific direction in how to decide what happens next:
Positive:
The World - For just a moment, the world bends to your will.
The Sun - You are given cause to celebrate.
The Star - A new path is revealed.
The Magician - You achieve the impossible.
Strength - You triumph through force.
Neutral:
The Fool - You become what you're needed to be in this moment.
The High Priestess - The supernatural moves through you.
The Empress - You create something.
The Emperor - You break something.
The Hierophant - You discover something.
The Lovers - You are faced with two paths.
The Chariot - You exceed your limits.
Justice - The situation becomes more fair.
The Hermit - Your actions isolate you.
The Wheel of Fortune - You are at the mercy of the fates.
Death - Something ends, and something else begins.
Temperance - You are met with an equal and opposite reaction.
Negative:
The Devil - You get what you want at a price you can't afford.
The Hanged Man - You must make an impossible choice.
The Tower - Something terrible happens.
The Moon - Something unknown or unknowable interferes.
Judgment - Your past mistakes catch up to you.
The played card gets discarded, the rest go to the bottom of the deck. Or, you can send all of them to the bottom of the deck and play the top card sight unseen by spending a communal resource
At creation, characters pick a "resonant" and "dissonant" card out of the neutral cards, the card that symbolically suits their character best and the one that suits them the worst. These count as positive and negative respectively, but only for you, and get special replacement forecasts depending on your class, as well as some bonus/penalty effects.
Nailing down my 5e Dwarf Monk decisions for my upcoming have
The backstory is that he's from the Firediamond Clan, who started off as the masons and structural engineers responsible for mine safety, and gradually developed a form of martial arts around masonry, carpentry, and checking for firedamp
Path of the Kensai for the option of +2AC, and a focus on hammers and the sling
It's not mechanically optimal, but it's a largely novice party so we're not going to be an optimal group in the first place
Psst hey buddy wanna buy a feat
The Fey Touched feat from TCE gives you +1 to your INT, CHA or WIS score, a once-per-day Misty Step, and a 1st-level Enchantment or Divination spell, also once-per-day if you don't have other spell slots.
As it happens, Hunter's Mark is a 1st-level divination spell. Plant that sucker on a target and you can add 1d6 to every attack you land on them, including each hit of your Flurry of Blows since unarmed strikes count as melee weapon attacks.
Nailing down my 5e Dwarf Monk decisions for my upcoming have
The backstory is that he's from the Firediamond Clan, who started off as the masons and structural engineers responsible for mine safety, and gradually developed a form of martial arts around masonry, carpentry, and checking for firedamp
Path of the Kensai for the option of +2AC, and a focus on hammers and the sling
It's not mechanically optimal, but it's a largely novice party so we're not going to be an optimal group in the first place
Psst hey buddy wanna buy a feat
The Fey Touched feat from TCE gives you +1 to your INT, CHA or WIS score, a once-per-day Misty Step, and a 1st-level Enchantment or Divination spell, also once-per-day if you don't have other spell slots.
As it happens, Hunter's Mark is a 1st-level divination spell. Plant that sucker on a target and you can add 1d6 to every attack you land on them, including each hit of your Flurry of Blows since unarmed strikes count as melee weapon attacks.
but uh youse didn't hear dis from me
In the real world mythology there are plenty of mine-based fae. I wonder if any retained fairie-hood upon translation to D&D (kobold didn't, for example).
His background is Outlander, so that would actually work; rather than travelling the Material plane to conduct health and safety assessments on remote dwarf outposts as per his training, he took a wrong turn into the Feywild for a couple of decades, helping to improve the Seelie Court's infrastructure. Upon his return, due to classic Feywild time bullshit, his old clan is long gone, so now he travels the world in search of what happened to them, helping adventuring parties along the way to stay safe in dungeons and caves when necessary
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
+9
WearingGlassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
edited June 2024
Oooh, weird brain idea:
Dwarves are small, because they're akephaloi. Their loincloths are actually their beards. They have excellent night vision, but due to being what they are, they lack peripheral vision. To compensate, they have tremorsense. They also have baggy sides, covered by their hair, because they can twist their torso 180 degrees like owls twist their heads. Their abs (especially their obliques) are hella strong.
Dwarves are small, because they're akephaloi. Their loincloths are actually their beards. They have excellent night vision, but due to being what they are, they lack peripheral vision. To compensate, they have tremorsense. They also have baggy sides, covered by their hair, because they can twist their torso 180 degrees like owls twist their heads. Their abs (especially their obliques) are hella strong.
I had a fun time with a boss fight for players in my little Pathfinder 3-shot.
It was split into two parts, and both parts managed to get players into the red on health consistently without annihilating them. A solid tense intro to fighting matched enemies, rather than random Kobolds.
And now we're moving on to just trying random 1 and 2-shots that strike our fancy, partly because we're so bad at scheduling and partly because we like doing character creation.
durandal4532 on
We're all in this together
+1
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Update on the Star Wars rip off:
We have reached the Death Star. Sorry, the "Star Crusher"
One of my rabid Wasteland Degenerates backers referred to the little tie-in fiction I've been doing to show off the random tables/mission generator as we reach backer levels as a "word burger from the history man."
I wish everyone liked Furiosa as much as this dude does; my campaign would be doing even better business.
+1
SolyspPreviously Kane Red RobeRegistered Userregular
Posts
All presentation aside, yes. A clock is just a new way to visualize a skill challenge.
One of the things that the games which use clocks have done well is by providing ways to advance them other than just skill checks (for example, fill a tick on the stealth clock when the players make a lot of noise), but at their core, it's just counting X good things before Y bad things and providing a useful data visualization to make it more intuitive.
Flames of the Meta-Dragon
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Basically yes. It's taking the idea of the skill challenge and making it disassociated from "skills" so you can use them for whatever, but the same basic idea.
Nah for real though, does anyone have any funky rules or systems they always use, that aren’t common?
As an example of this, here's a Blades job that I came up with to demonstrate.
A wealthy Iruvian noble is hosting a martial arts tournament at his estate to demonstrate traditional Iruvian martial arts to the elite of Duskwall. This is, understandably, a private event - only members of the Iruvian aristocracy are allowed to participate. The crew wants to get in to try and steal an arcane treasure he's rumored to possess, so Ilya (the Cutter) embarks on a tournament of underground street fights while Threnody (the Spider) starts spreading rumors in the bars around town that there's an Iruvian noble slumming it as a street fighter and Griggs (the Lurk) breaks into the Iruvian Embassy in order to steal false credentials for Ilya to use.
Those could all be part of the same clock, everyone working towards a singular goal, told as a sort of montage.
Fast forward to the end of the job, and Ilya is struggling to stay on their feet in the final round of the competition, going blow for blow with the Iruvian champion to keep everyone focused on the fights, while Griggs is trying to make it through the security measures set up in the noble's office and Threnody is busy flirting with some guards in order to keep them from noticing that Griggs left every door in his wake wide open.
Those might all be separate clocks, either connected to each other (one filling could cause another to start moving) or completely disconnected. Or not clocks at all, of course, they're a largely optional system.
And then at the end, after they steal the arcane artifact, you might create the long term clocks of Ilya's Adoring Fans and The Iruvian Embassy's Paperwork, which are now tracking major world events and might only tick once a session.
Fun thoughts: Using Spell Storing ring to stock up all the utility stuff.
Funnier thoughts: Wait attunement only takes ten minutes
Funniest thought: My coward wizard can literally just give their spell slots to other people and then go on a smoke break.
idk if anyone ever played on Storium, but it worked a bit like this, it was basically a play by post site with built in card mechanics
each challenge had a number of hp and the players would play their positive nd negative cards until they ran out, determining if the challenge has a good, neutral, or bad outcome
Never heard of the concept, but I love hexes and I also love flowers so I checked it out. It's fucking rad. I also love randomized tables and hex grids so it's just a big fuck yes for me all around.
Speaking of, I recently got an email from Inkwell Ideas, the people who make the Worldographer software I use to make hex grid maps, that they're launching a crowdfunding campaign next month to allow them to work on a large update to it. Since it released several years ago they've been releasing small updates every couple months but now they want to work on things that will take a bit more time like an updated UI, better and faster terrain generation, etc. I'm pretty excited about it since it's already a pretty great hex map making program
Unfortunately owners of the current version of Worldographer will have to purchase an upgrade license for the new version, dunno if it's cheaper than buying the license new though. They did say that anyone that's bought Worldographer since the beginning of this year will get a heavy discount so that's nice of them (I purchased it a year or two ago but that's okay, I don't mind supporting them)
My only problems are that Hexographer is old as dirt and behaves like a Windows 3.1 program, and Hex Kit is super lightweight but doesn't scale well to "big" regions. So something modern to replace Hexographer, bonus if it can read my old files, would be nice.
How do you like Worldographer? It always struck me as trying to do too much, to compete with Fantasy Grounds and the like, and I just want something that's straightforward and does one thing well.
Joke's on them, though; that's just more motivation for me to put their characters through the wringer in revenge. We'll see how that works out for me in our first session later this week.
I'm going to check in with them after the session this weekend with a few different options, including just doing a less fighty Pathfinder campaign.
The backstory is that he's from the Firediamond Clan, who started off as the masons and structural engineers responsible for mine safety, and gradually developed a form of martial arts around masonry, carpentry, and checking for firedamp
Path of the Kensai for the option of +2AC, and a focus on hammers and the sling
It's not mechanically optimal, but it's a largely novice party so we're not going to be an optimal group in the first place
Next one is what the nerds probably really want: a monster pamphlet with one from the Vast Grimm guy (Brian rules, for real).
I put up a poll for the $9k stretch goal, and currently the mission generator is in the lead by a comfortable margin. Maybe not surprising after I posted some fiction using it.
The metrics suggest that I probably won't make much more than $9k, but, well, they've been wrong before. I'll keep proposing goals until I stop achieving them.
Also: finished the first draft of the sequel to Enter the Dismal Armory. Clocking in at a page longer than EtDA, which may be a problem if we continue using the 12 page A5 format.
He is just a combination of Hiccup and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. He's a birdman who wants to be able to fly with his flock. So he's building a DaVincian jetpack of sorts to make that happen. Very earnest, wants to help, but wants to keep all the money he can to fund his project. Tempted to make him a kenku whose egg was put into an aaracokra's nest, so he was never meant to fly and they just don't have the heart to tell him.
Cuckoos just sliding their eggs into other birds' nests will never not be darkly hilarious. You could play up that one of the aarakokra's eggs went missing when the kenku egg was dropped off, and finding this switched at birth birdie brother could be a plot point. Then eventually you both find "mom" and are like, "what the hell?"
Maybe a personal nemesis.
We've got a towering warforged artificer who has a chip on their shoulder when it comes to fleshy beings, a gregarious orc Gatekeeper druid, a 'marked elven spy torn between her loyalties to House Phiarlan and the Valenar, a dinosaur riding Talentan halfling with an odd obsession with warforged and becoming one himself, and a meatshield of a dwarf who is literally not smart enough to realize when he's been hurt and should be bleeding out on the floor.
One nice thing about Savage World's Interludes system is that in addition to using it for mid-game Bennie refreshment, it'll help us retroactively flesh out their character backstories and connections as we go along the railroad-y nature of this adventure series.
I wanted a name with alliteration and that was kinda silly so I started looking at words, then I worked from there to come up with a reaction spell that reduces the damage you take from an attack and pushes you away from the source of damage and also pushes the source away if they fail a STR saving throw. I'm not sure about the math for what level spell slot it'd use, it's range, and distance pushed. I copied the distance and reaction trigger from Hellish Rebuke, the resistance from Absorb Elements, while the pushing was my own. I'll throw the full spell text in a spoiler and would appreciate any feedback (even if it's just to say the spell idea itself is flawed)
Level: 2
School: Abjuration
Casting time: 1 reaction, which you take in response to being damaged by a creature within 60 feet of you that you can see
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous
Classes: Wizard
Description: You instinctively attempt to push yourself away from danger with a blast of water. You have resistance to the triggering attack, and the attacker must succeed on a Strength saving throw or be pushed back 15 feet in a straight line away from you. You are also pushed back 15 feet in a straight line from your attacker.
i mean i wrote my own game : P
instead of dice it uses a deck of the major arcana tarot cards. Every stat goes between 1 and 3, and when you make an action, you draw a number of cards equal to your stat and pick one to play
each card then has a "polarity" to broadly tell the GM if it's good, bad, or neutral, and a "forecast" that gives them more specific direction in how to decide what happens next:
The World - For just a moment, the world bends to your will.
The Sun - You are given cause to celebrate.
The Star - A new path is revealed.
The Magician - You achieve the impossible.
Strength - You triumph through force.
Neutral:
The Fool - You become what you're needed to be in this moment.
The High Priestess - The supernatural moves through you.
The Empress - You create something.
The Emperor - You break something.
The Hierophant - You discover something.
The Lovers - You are faced with two paths.
The Chariot - You exceed your limits.
Justice - The situation becomes more fair.
The Hermit - Your actions isolate you.
The Wheel of Fortune - You are at the mercy of the fates.
Death - Something ends, and something else begins.
Temperance - You are met with an equal and opposite reaction.
Negative:
The Devil - You get what you want at a price you can't afford.
The Hanged Man - You must make an impossible choice.
The Tower - Something terrible happens.
The Moon - Something unknown or unknowable interferes.
Judgment - Your past mistakes catch up to you.
The played card gets discarded, the rest go to the bottom of the deck. Or, you can send all of them to the bottom of the deck and play the top card sight unseen by spending a communal resource
At creation, characters pick a "resonant" and "dissonant" card out of the neutral cards, the card that symbolically suits their character best and the one that suits them the worst. These count as positive and negative respectively, but only for you, and get special replacement forecasts depending on your class, as well as some bonus/penalty effects.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Psst hey buddy wanna buy a feat
As it happens, Hunter's Mark is a 1st-level divination spell. Plant that sucker on a target and you can add 1d6 to every attack you land on them, including each hit of your Flurry of Blows since unarmed strikes count as melee weapon attacks.
but uh youse didn't hear dis from me
In the real world mythology there are plenty of mine-based fae. I wonder if any retained fairie-hood upon translation to D&D (kobold didn't, for example).
His background is Outlander, so that would actually work; rather than travelling the Material plane to conduct health and safety assessments on remote dwarf outposts as per his training, he took a wrong turn into the Feywild for a couple of decades, helping to improve the Seelie Court's infrastructure. Upon his return, due to classic Feywild time bullshit, his old clan is long gone, so now he travels the world in search of what happened to them, helping adventuring parties along the way to stay safe in dungeons and caves when necessary
Dwarves are small, because they're akephaloi. Their loincloths are actually their beards. They have excellent night vision, but due to being what they are, they lack peripheral vision. To compensate, they have tremorsense. They also have baggy sides, covered by their hair, because they can twist their torso 180 degrees like owls twist their heads. Their abs (especially their obliques) are hella strong.
It was split into two parts, and both parts managed to get players into the red on health consistently without annihilating them. A solid tense intro to fighting matched enemies, rather than random Kobolds.
And now we're moving on to just trying random 1 and 2-shots that strike our fancy, partly because we're so bad at scheduling and partly because we like doing character creation.
I wish everyone liked Furiosa as much as this dude does; my campaign would be doing even better business.
Isn't the "Star Crusher" already a thing in Star Wars?