Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
I decided to do a small little project for my character.
Ben don't look because I want to finish it before I reveal it in person.
Basically part of the reason I struggle with character sheets is that I firstly never remember where anything is, and secondly I am really bad at remember how numbers are generated (for example, how armour is calculated) so I thought, I might sit down and think what I use a lot, and why I think it is useful and how it all is all laid out.
But I figure, if I am going to sit down and make a new sheet, why not make it dope as fuck and add in a bunch of lift flaps for information I need but it probably doesn't need to be front and centre all of the time. So here are the first two parts I've made and I guess it'll take a while but I think building it from scratch is helping me learn the systems, and remember where everything is as well.
If anyone has any real suggestions or anything can you please pop them into spoilers because like I said, I kind of want to complete it before I show my DnD group and a few may end up in this thread.
(and yes you will note if you add up those numbers on my armour rating I am two short, that is because I don't equip my shield.
I decided to do a small little project for my character.
Ben don't look because I want to finish it before I reveal it in person.
Basically part of the reason I struggle with character sheets is that I firstly never remember where anything is, and secondly I am really bad at remember how numbers are generated (for example, how armour is calculated) so I thought, I might sit down and think what I use a lot, and why I think it is useful and how it all is all laid out.
But I figure, if I am going to sit down and make a new sheet, why not make it dope as fuck and add in a bunch of lift flaps for information I need but it probably doesn't need to be front and centre all of the time. So here are the first two parts I've made and I guess it'll take a while but I think building it from scratch is helping me learn the systems, and remember where everything is as well.
If anyone has any real suggestions or anything can you please pop them into spoilers because like I said, I kind of want to complete it before I show my DnD group and a few may end up in this thread.
(and yes you will note if you add up those numbers on my armour rating I am two short, that is because I don't equip my shield.
My friend is running a D&D one shot campaign to test out a module before he runs it for a group of friends, and you know what that means, time to bust out the dumb one shot character ideas!
I'm thinking a Tortle Fighter (Roman Legionnaire) named Testudo Graeca, with a big ole plumed red helm, short sword, big shield, few javelin (pilum) tucked into there, and just all about war and campaigning and building massive earthworks of defense.
It's a level 1 character so can't do too much exciting in the way of mechanics so, I might as well have fun with the concept.
I decided to do a small little project for my character.
Ben don't look because I want to finish it before I reveal it in person.
Basically part of the reason I struggle with character sheets is that I firstly never remember where anything is, and secondly I am really bad at remember how numbers are generated (for example, how armour is calculated) so I thought, I might sit down and think what I use a lot, and why I think it is useful and how it all is all laid out.
But I figure, if I am going to sit down and make a new sheet, why not make it dope as fuck and add in a bunch of lift flaps for information I need but it probably doesn't need to be front and centre all of the time. So here are the first two parts I've made and I guess it'll take a while but I think building it from scratch is helping me learn the systems, and remember where everything is as well.
If anyone has any real suggestions or anything can you please pop them into spoilers because like I said, I kind of want to complete it before I show my DnD group and a few may end up in this thread.
(and yes you will note if you add up those numbers on my armour rating I am two short, that is because I don't equip my shield.
So. My group is in the middle of the erstwhile evacuation of Dantooine. They've discovered Imperial Storm commandos observing the base, dispatched most of them, discovered there's a traitor in the Rebel forces (of course!), and busied themselves overseeing the loading of critical equipment and personnel into starships.
My intention for the next session is just to have them run a blockade past a task force comprised of Daala's Gorgon, two Lancers, and an Acclamator. They're leaving with a handful of light freighters, most of Green Squadron in X-Wings, a GR-75, and their GR-105 (heavily modified now). I'm thinking about having a Nebulon-B arrive with a task force of corvettes and Orange Squadron to even the odds up a bit as everyone moves to make their escape.
Am I missing a trick here? It's too early for the Rebels to have a cruiser show up to make the fight more even, but I'm thinking a little bit of help will change the flow.
Their GR-105 is about as well armed as a light frigate now and may actually be able to trade some blows with the ISD.
But I want them to come off the session feeling like they scraped by on the seat on their pants, not feeling really up about how they stuck it to the (wo)man.
I've made it clear when my group has faced off against something too big, that even when they roll the best result they've ever seen it results in a scorch mark on the opposing ship. They take a hit or two and realize they should be fleeing, not facing down a Star Destroyer.
I don't care greatly for the ship combat so far, the silhouette difficulty changes and some of the turbolaser stats seem off. However, they're about to face a Star Destroyer in a heavily disabled Nebulon B frigate so that will be interesting.
If it's too early for the rebels to have a cruiser show up, maybe weaken the Imperials a bit?
Maybe they've been on a long campaign themselves trying to hunt down this rebel cell and have taken some damage over the course of it. Not enough to abandon their mission for repair, but enough so they're not running at 100%. So, while the Destroyer is still a threat, it's had some of it's teeth pulled, maybe the lancers are moving slower due to rationed energy reserves or aren't firing at 100% capacity due to casualties they've taken.
Maybe the Gorgon only shows up after a certain number of the rebel ships have hyper spaced away? It's got a slower hyperdrive or whatever. But it shows up and starts dumping TIEs everywhere, not just Fighters, but Bombers and Interceptors. Make it very clear that this is the signal that it's time to leave, and if the players fail to take the message they don't make it out. They may be able to trade blows with an ISD, but they shouldn't be able to fight off an ISD's full fighter compliment while they're doing it, especially if they're also supposed to be providing escort to the less modified freighters.
I think the lancers and the acclamator should be pretty punishing up against a handful of running freighters with a partial squadron of X-wings flying cover, even if they're backed up by some heavily modified freighters, and the ISD showing up should tip that balance substantially to the Imperial's favor.
If you want to drive home that they just barely made it out, maybe there's one last transport on the surface that had to delay it's launch and now can't make it out past the blockade and gets destroyed, either as the players enter hyperspace saving themselves or as they try and provide cover for late freighter. If you've got any NPCs that the players are fond of but you don't particularly need, maybe that was their ride. If the NPCs need to come back, then they got taken prisoner and now they've got a jailbreak to plan.
I don't know if I'd have rebel reinforcements show up to cover the evacuation of the base. I mean, nobody showed up at Hoth to help them out there, and that was after a massive victory for the Rebellion that should have brought all the secret supporters out of the wood work.
I think the question to ask is: if the rebels had a consolidated fleet to use, would they use it to save your players and the dozen fighters at this point in time? Or would they pull back to find a less dangerous way of needling the empire?
Most of the crew was dealing with boat and ghost boat issues while trying to smuggle some family relics across the city.
Meanwhile, our Spider is on some Prestige TV bullshit stepping on hands and wringing money from the desperate refugee family trying to get a hold of the relics.
Finished up the next leg of GURPS Fantasy this weekend in the Crawling City Khaodarin. To recap, Khaodarin was originally built in a naturally-occurring zone of benevolent magic that keeps Void Monsters from manifesting, but over time the magic zone started to drift, and the Gremlins redesigned their city to be portable, so they could constantly be disassembling the city at the trailing edge of the safe zone and reassembling it at the leading edge. In doing so, they scooped up a bunch of mystically significant structures that were part of the ancient Human ruins that they build Khaodarin on top of. My players were tasked with locating a specific crypt in the Khaodarin cemetery, that could be found by referencing the the locations of other landmarks in the old city, which have obviously been shuffled around to god only knows where in the current configuration of the new city.
Breaking the Puzzle
I had a whole thing set up with puzzle pieces and records detailing what parts went where in notation based roughly on play-by-mail chess games. I spent weeks agonizing over this puzzle, testing and tweaking it until the difficulty was right about where my GURPS players like it... and of course, they figured out a way to sidestep the whole thing. I'm kind of proud of them, underneath all the anger.
Instead of trying to unravel the city's original configuration based on the records, they borrowed some maps from the Gremlin cartographers, went to the original site of Old Khaodarin before it started crawling away, and used divination magic to figure out exactly where the cemetery was originally, then cast their vision back in time to see what the skyline around that original location would have been (first GM mistake - it never occurred to me that they would use the Old City site as a resource). Then they went back to New Khaodarin and offered proof to the Gremlins that they were directly in the employ of the Eidolon of Swords, the de facto God of Death in this world (second GM mistake - their affiliation with one of the Eidolons has to be kept secret from Humans, but the Gremlins don't give a fuck). The Gremlins, suitably impressed, and also generously compensated out of the Eidolon of Sword's operational budget (third GM mistake - I forgot that the God of Death and Metal is also the God of Wealth) agreed to uproot the three ancient landmarks that the party had identified from their divination and move them around until they were in the correct position relative to the cemetery for the PCs to triangulate the Crypt location.
Inside the Crypt
The Crypt itself was a gateway to a pocket dimension where an ancient spirit was sealed, having been part of the early experiments of the first generation of Gods in the manufacture of Souls. It was a unique entity more closely related to the Angels than any of the mortal races, although unlike the Angels it had a material body, even if it was a weird monster body. A large part of why it was sealed away was that the apparatus of death and reincarnation wasn't prepared to deal with it. Where would it go? Who could it become in a new life? If they tried to shove it into a human-shaped body, would it be able to live a comfortable life, or would there be some fundamental incompatibility between its soul and body that would drive it mad, or even cause its very existence to warp reality? So instead of dealing with these concerns, the Gods put this thing in stasis.
However, being subject to the laws of an earlier iteration of this universe, being placed outside of time and space hadn't actually stopped it from interacting with those principles (central theme of Aclodoc, the GURPS Fantasy setting - the Gods were kind of dumb amateurs who had no business creating or managing a Universe). It had grown to fill its prison, and started to extrude 'limbs' into other places. Where these limbs touched down, trunks of dusty grey flesh emerging from caves and clouds and holes in the ground, a person could climb along them until they found that limb connecting to some other place, including some making bridges between the worlds of the living and the dead. This was the reason the Eidolon of Swords was interested - some of his Goblin servants had found one such passage, which might have allowed Ghosts to escape the Underworld if it wasn't contained. But travelling across its limbs in different worlds wouldn't permit access to the core of the entity, which is why the PCs were sent looking for the entry to its original prison.
Once they gained access, the PCs had some kind of complicated fights with parasites occupying this entity's weird monster body. It was your standard "the monster's guts are a dungeon" type design, but with an MC Escher twist,
since this entity is free to set its own relationships with space and gravity. After they killed a bunch of its parasites, the Entity was willing to communicate with them, and agreed to retract all of its limbs that breached the borders between worlds, only growing limbs into the Material Realm from now on, provided the Eidolon of Sword sent regular teams in to check for any future infestation and eliminate it. That was easy enough to arrange, so it was all a mission success.
No PC fatalities for three weeks in a row! But one character did get his sword arm torn off at the shoulder, which is a disadvantage not easily remedied by the healing magic of this setting. He'll probably have to get some kind of prosthetic, and spend a while out of regular play while he recovers and learns to use it.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
I'm thinking maybe nix the Neb-B and just have two CR90s and a CC-7700.
About this time Profundity has just left the Mon Cal shipyards as a fully operational battle cruiser. So, yeah, the Rebels don't really have a whole lot by way of cruiser-class vessels to swoop in and save the day here.
I don't care greatly for the ship combat so far, the silhouette difficulty changes and some of the turbolaser stats seem off. However, they're about to face a Star Destroyer in a heavily disabled Nebulon B frigate so that will be interesting.
That sucks. I found FFG's starship combat to be relatively quick and intuitive, but not nearly as robust as D6 (which is what we're playing, more or less). But we weren't really doing capital-scale engagements in FFG which, I think, is part of why Armada is a separate game.
The Imps are fresh because it's the first time Daala has left the Maw to go after the group. She's actually chasing down the BX commando droid; the Rebels are just incidental to the real goal. Daala believes (wrongly, I'm pretty sure) that this particular BX will have information about Jedi survivors she can use to curry favor with Darth Vader. Plus she bought his paperwork, so she technically owns him.
My plan is for the NPC ships to bail as soon as it seems reasonable for them to do so. I suspect the (PC) Captain will try to do the same with their transport, but I can't be certain.
Acclamators are just troop delivery ships, really. They have some anti-fighter capability but it's there to underline that Dantooine Base is lost as Stormtroopers pour into it and begin blasting.
I like the late transport idea. I'll introduce that wrinkle at the beginning of the next session.
As far as whether the Alliance High Command is risking a fleet action the answer is emphatically no. Sending a task force to help cover an exit? Sure. But they won't mass a fleet until Scarif. Maybe just a single CC-7700 and Orange Squadron show up.
(If it hasn't been clear this campaign started ~2BBY and has now progressed to the point where the Alliance High Command is really beginning to coalesce. Scarif isn't far off, but I don't think the PCs will be there. They'll be helping to set up Yavin Base, I suspect.)
Most of the crew was dealing with boat and ghost boat issues while trying to smuggle some family relics across the city.
Meanwhile, our Spider is on some Prestige TV bullshit stepping on hands and wringing money from the desperate refugee family trying to get a hold of the relics.
if I can't do something absolutely stupid with magic at least once a session, then I'm failing as a player
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Most of the crew was dealing with boat and ghost boat issues while trying to smuggle some family relics across the city.
Meanwhile, our Spider is on some Prestige TV bullshit stepping on hands and wringing money from the desperate refugee family trying to get a hold of the relics.
I had a weirdass dream last night that Neil Gaiman popped into the forums to write personalized monsters for people based on their handle and avatar. This isn't the first time I've had giant dork dreams where Neil Gaiman was my friend and wanted to write things for me, but it is the first time where the dream wasn't about the frustration of being unable in the dream-space to comprehend the words written on the page.
Anyway, he wrote monsters for a bunch of us, but I remember clearly noticing that he tagged our names with a # instead of an @, and being concerned that nobody else would get an alert in their dreams because of it.
The critter he made for me worked like this:
Stage One: The Poppet
There is a little man the size of a child's doll, made out of coarse sack cloth, with cracked elk horn buttons for eyes, with tarnished brass rings at the end of four stumpy little limbs in place of hands or feet, with no mouth or nose or other decorations, and with yarn stitching colored with a rare and expensive blue dye. This dye is one of the ways a particularly learned character can recognize him, as it is a pigment that was only produced for royalty in a long-ago fallen realm. Sometimes someone will find the little sackcloth man stored away in an attic, or abandoned by the side of a road, and there will always be a string of gifts, exchanges, and strange coincidences that result in someone with a very specific set of skills possessing the sackcloth man. Usually a carpenter, sometimes a metalworker or other skilled craftsman. Always someone with the necessary skills, tools, and access to raw materials to assemble the Apparatus.
Stage Two: The Apparatus
The notion of the Apparatus will come to them while they sleep, and the artisan will wake next to a set of notes written in their own handwriting detailing its manufacture. And from there, they will experience a compulsion to build it, growing from a curious side project at first to an all-consuming obsession the longer they try to delay it. The purpose of the Apparatus isn't clear from these notes. It's like the offspring of an orrery, a loom, a windmill, and a sailing ship. The Apparatus is resplendent with colorful fans and sails to catch the wind, shifting levers and turning gears, which make hollow spheres move about inside, rotating around each other in a complex dance that shifts the web of threads that crisscross the interior, but somehow manages to avoid getting tangled in them. If the artisan is able to complete the Apparatus, they will perceive that there is a place where the Poppet could fit, with the threads woven through the brass rings on its limbs.
Then, when the wind shifts the spheres and the spheres shift the thread, the thread will shift the Poppet and it will seem to dance.
Stage Three: The Gathering
Thus far, the artisan has labored in secret. The Apparatus occupies a cave, a cellar, a barn... and yet, its parts are still moved by a spectral wind occasionally. Once the Poppet is joined to it, the artisan will desire greatly to move it outdoors, to the highest point they can reasonably reassemble it. The artisan will experience unnatural vigor allowing them to move the Apparatus piece by piece to its new roost in a single night. This will be accompanied by omens:
- The night will be completely overcast, with no stars or moon visible. There will be thunder and lightning in the far distance, but never near enough to pierce the gloom where the Apparatus is being raised. The wind will gust fitfully from many directions, but won't pick up to a continuous howl until the Apparatus is almost done, at which point it will be intense enough that it is quite mad to be out in it at all.
- Carrion birds will gather in unprecedented numbers. They will not act to hinder or help the artisan, they just seem to want to observe.
- Anyone in the community who knows the artisan or lives within a small radius of them, who are proficient with musical instruments or with singing, will experience a compulsion to gather at the site where the Apparatus is being rebuilt, where they will sing and play. They will know the song. They will always have known the song.
- If there is a church in the community, its bells will refuse to ring, its candles will refuse to light, and its doors will slam shut and refuse to open.
Stage Four: The Manifestation
Once the Apparatus is fully assembled, and the growing tempest makes the Poppet dance to the music of the enthralled villagers, the artisan will find themself growing weak and clumsy. As they attempt to maintain the creaking Apparatus in the howling gale, they will slip, and one of the shifting threads will cut them. Then another and another. Bleeding profusely, they will still work on the apparatus with manic zeal, until it's all too much and they fall unconscious. With each drop of blood spilled, the Poppet will grow to resemble the artisan more and more, sprouting yarn hair and felt facial features, and doll clothes of exquisite workmanship that are like those the artisan wears.
Shortly thereafter, Something will emerge from the Poppet, like a flood of spiders bursting out of an egg sack.
I didn't get to read in the dream far enough to see what that Something is. Honestly, I think it's more interesting if this scenario can lead to a number of potential incursions. When I write up some rules for all of this, I'll probably include a random chart for the Manifestation.
The thing in my imagination is a cloud of limbs, leathery and gaunt. Where they reach out and touch organic material, they transform it into more of themselves. If the Apparatus occupied a grassy hill or a rooftop with wooden shingles, it will rapidly spread into a thicket of grasping fingers moving about on arms with too many joints. But that's an image I came to after awake. The rest of this, with some embellishment,
was part of the dream.
Anyway, I'll get around to slapping some rules onto all that soon.
Desert Leviathan on
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
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.
Desert Leviathan on
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
edited January 2018
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
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'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.
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
You should invoke the Patrick Rothfuss rule of succeeding because it sounds cool and ride the dragon down while avoiding fall damage because you caught a tree branch and swung around like it was a chandelier.
Posts
Ben don't look because I want to finish it before I reveal it in person.
Basically part of the reason I struggle with character sheets is that I firstly never remember where anything is, and secondly I am really bad at remember how numbers are generated (for example, how armour is calculated) so I thought, I might sit down and think what I use a lot, and why I think it is useful and how it all is all laid out.
But I figure, if I am going to sit down and make a new sheet, why not make it dope as fuck and add in a bunch of lift flaps for information I need but it probably doesn't need to be front and centre all of the time. So here are the first two parts I've made and I guess it'll take a while but I think building it from scratch is helping me learn the systems, and remember where everything is as well.
If anyone has any real suggestions or anything can you please pop them into spoilers because like I said, I kind of want to complete it before I show my DnD group and a few may end up in this thread.
(and yes you will note if you add up those numbers on my armour rating I am two short, that is because I don't equip my shield.
Satans..... hints.....
Not to be a downer but I’m a player in a ToA campaign so please put this kind of stuff behind spoilers.
No problem!
I had to restrain myself but I didn't look
I'm thinking a Tortle Fighter (Roman Legionnaire) named Testudo Graeca, with a big ole plumed red helm, short sword, big shield, few javelin (pilum) tucked into there, and just all about war and campaigning and building massive earthworks of defense.
It's a level 1 character so can't do too much exciting in the way of mechanics so, I might as well have fun with the concept.
@Blake T
That sheet looks really good!
I rather enjoyed it
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
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My intention for the next session is just to have them run a blockade past a task force comprised of Daala's Gorgon, two Lancers, and an Acclamator. They're leaving with a handful of light freighters, most of Green Squadron in X-Wings, a GR-75, and their GR-105 (heavily modified now). I'm thinking about having a Nebulon-B arrive with a task force of corvettes and Orange Squadron to even the odds up a bit as everyone moves to make their escape.
Am I missing a trick here? It's too early for the Rebels to have a cruiser show up to make the fight more even, but I'm thinking a little bit of help will change the flow.
Their GR-105 is about as well armed as a light frigate now and may actually be able to trade some blows with the ISD.
But I want them to come off the session feeling like they scraped by on the seat on their pants, not feeling really up about how they stuck it to the (wo)man.
I don't care greatly for the ship combat so far, the silhouette difficulty changes and some of the turbolaser stats seem off. However, they're about to face a Star Destroyer in a heavily disabled Nebulon B frigate so that will be interesting.
Maybe they've been on a long campaign themselves trying to hunt down this rebel cell and have taken some damage over the course of it. Not enough to abandon their mission for repair, but enough so they're not running at 100%. So, while the Destroyer is still a threat, it's had some of it's teeth pulled, maybe the lancers are moving slower due to rationed energy reserves or aren't firing at 100% capacity due to casualties they've taken.
Maybe the Gorgon only shows up after a certain number of the rebel ships have hyper spaced away? It's got a slower hyperdrive or whatever. But it shows up and starts dumping TIEs everywhere, not just Fighters, but Bombers and Interceptors. Make it very clear that this is the signal that it's time to leave, and if the players fail to take the message they don't make it out. They may be able to trade blows with an ISD, but they shouldn't be able to fight off an ISD's full fighter compliment while they're doing it, especially if they're also supposed to be providing escort to the less modified freighters.
I think the lancers and the acclamator should be pretty punishing up against a handful of running freighters with a partial squadron of X-wings flying cover, even if they're backed up by some heavily modified freighters, and the ISD showing up should tip that balance substantially to the Imperial's favor.
If you want to drive home that they just barely made it out, maybe there's one last transport on the surface that had to delay it's launch and now can't make it out past the blockade and gets destroyed, either as the players enter hyperspace saving themselves or as they try and provide cover for late freighter. If you've got any NPCs that the players are fond of but you don't particularly need, maybe that was their ride. If the NPCs need to come back, then they got taken prisoner and now they've got a jailbreak to plan.
I don't know if I'd have rebel reinforcements show up to cover the evacuation of the base. I mean, nobody showed up at Hoth to help them out there, and that was after a massive victory for the Rebellion that should have brought all the secret supporters out of the wood work.
I think the question to ask is: if the rebels had a consolidated fleet to use, would they use it to save your players and the dozen fighters at this point in time? Or would they pull back to find a less dangerous way of needling the empire?
Most of the crew was dealing with boat and ghost boat issues while trying to smuggle some family relics across the city.
Meanwhile, our Spider is on some Prestige TV bullshit stepping on hands and wringing money from the desperate refugee family trying to get a hold of the relics.
Breaking the Puzzle
Instead of trying to unravel the city's original configuration based on the records, they borrowed some maps from the Gremlin cartographers, went to the original site of Old Khaodarin before it started crawling away, and used divination magic to figure out exactly where the cemetery was originally, then cast their vision back in time to see what the skyline around that original location would have been (first GM mistake - it never occurred to me that they would use the Old City site as a resource). Then they went back to New Khaodarin and offered proof to the Gremlins that they were directly in the employ of the Eidolon of Swords, the de facto God of Death in this world (second GM mistake - their affiliation with one of the Eidolons has to be kept secret from Humans, but the Gremlins don't give a fuck). The Gremlins, suitably impressed, and also generously compensated out of the Eidolon of Sword's operational budget (third GM mistake - I forgot that the God of Death and Metal is also the God of Wealth) agreed to uproot the three ancient landmarks that the party had identified from their divination and move them around until they were in the correct position relative to the cemetery for the PCs to triangulate the Crypt location.
Inside the Crypt
However, being subject to the laws of an earlier iteration of this universe, being placed outside of time and space hadn't actually stopped it from interacting with those principles (central theme of Aclodoc, the GURPS Fantasy setting - the Gods were kind of dumb amateurs who had no business creating or managing a Universe). It had grown to fill its prison, and started to extrude 'limbs' into other places. Where these limbs touched down, trunks of dusty grey flesh emerging from caves and clouds and holes in the ground, a person could climb along them until they found that limb connecting to some other place, including some making bridges between the worlds of the living and the dead. This was the reason the Eidolon of Swords was interested - some of his Goblin servants had found one such passage, which might have allowed Ghosts to escape the Underworld if it wasn't contained. But travelling across its limbs in different worlds wouldn't permit access to the core of the entity, which is why the PCs were sent looking for the entry to its original prison.
Once they gained access, the PCs had some kind of complicated fights with parasites occupying this entity's weird monster body. It was your standard "the monster's guts are a dungeon" type design, but with an MC Escher twist,
since this entity is free to set its own relationships with space and gravity. After they killed a bunch of its parasites, the Entity was willing to communicate with them, and agreed to retract all of its limbs that breached the borders between worlds, only growing limbs into the Material Realm from now on, provided the Eidolon of Sword sent regular teams in to check for any future infestation and eliminate it. That was easy enough to arrange, so it was all a mission success.
No PC fatalities for three weeks in a row! But one character did get his sword arm torn off at the shoulder, which is a disadvantage not easily remedied by the healing magic of this setting. He'll probably have to get some kind of prosthetic, and spend a while out of regular play while he recovers and learns to use it.
About this time Profundity has just left the Mon Cal shipyards as a fully operational battle cruiser. So, yeah, the Rebels don't really have a whole lot by way of cruiser-class vessels to swoop in and save the day here.
That sucks. I found FFG's starship combat to be relatively quick and intuitive, but not nearly as robust as D6 (which is what we're playing, more or less). But we weren't really doing capital-scale engagements in FFG which, I think, is part of why Armada is a separate game.
The Imps are fresh because it's the first time Daala has left the Maw to go after the group. She's actually chasing down the BX commando droid; the Rebels are just incidental to the real goal. Daala believes (wrongly, I'm pretty sure) that this particular BX will have information about Jedi survivors she can use to curry favor with Darth Vader. Plus she bought his paperwork, so she technically owns him.
My plan is for the NPC ships to bail as soon as it seems reasonable for them to do so. I suspect the (PC) Captain will try to do the same with their transport, but I can't be certain.
Acclamators are just troop delivery ships, really. They have some anti-fighter capability but it's there to underline that Dantooine Base is lost as Stormtroopers pour into it and begin blasting.
I like the late transport idea. I'll introduce that wrinkle at the beginning of the next session.
As far as whether the Alliance High Command is risking a fleet action the answer is emphatically no. Sending a task force to help cover an exit? Sure. But they won't mass a fleet until Scarif. Maybe just a single CC-7700 and Orange Squadron show up.
(If it hasn't been clear this campaign started ~2BBY and has now progressed to the point where the Alliance High Command is really beginning to coalesce. Scarif isn't far off, but I don't think the PCs will be there. They'll be helping to set up Yavin Base, I suspect.)
if I can't do something absolutely stupid with magic at least once a session, then I'm failing as a player
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
And I finally got to shoot people with bullets!
I was very happy about it!
https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/comments/32ds5k/doodles_dragons_a_5e_dd_supplement_for_monster/
Someone made a monster hunter module
It was time-consuming but will be worth it in the long run to not have to dig through plastic baggies or fish through the box
It was actually kind of soothing and relaxing to assemble
Anyway, he wrote monsters for a bunch of us, but I remember clearly noticing that he tagged our names with a # instead of an @, and being concerned that nobody else would get an alert in their dreams because of it.
The critter he made for me worked like this:
Stage Two: The Apparatus
Then, when the wind shifts the spheres and the spheres shift the thread, the thread will shift the Poppet and it will seem to dance.
Stage Three: The Gathering
- The night will be completely overcast, with no stars or moon visible. There will be thunder and lightning in the far distance, but never near enough to pierce the gloom where the Apparatus is being raised. The wind will gust fitfully from many directions, but won't pick up to a continuous howl until the Apparatus is almost done, at which point it will be intense enough that it is quite mad to be out in it at all.
- Carrion birds will gather in unprecedented numbers. They will not act to hinder or help the artisan, they just seem to want to observe.
- Anyone in the community who knows the artisan or lives within a small radius of them, who are proficient with musical instruments or with singing, will experience a compulsion to gather at the site where the Apparatus is being rebuilt, where they will sing and play. They will know the song. They will always have known the song.
- If there is a church in the community, its bells will refuse to ring, its candles will refuse to light, and its doors will slam shut and refuse to open.
Stage Four: The Manifestation
Shortly thereafter, Something will emerge from the Poppet, like a flood of spiders bursting out of an egg sack.
I didn't get to read in the dream far enough to see what that Something is. Honestly, I think it's more interesting if this scenario can lead to a number of potential incursions. When I write up some rules for all of this, I'll probably include a random chart for the Manifestation.
The thing in my imagination is a cloud of limbs, leathery and gaunt. Where they reach out and touch organic material, they transform it into more of themselves. If the Apparatus occupied a grassy hill or a rooftop with wooden shingles, it will rapidly spread into a thicket of grasping fingers moving about on arms with too many joints. But that's an image I came to after awake. The rest of this, with some embellishment,
was part of the dream.
Anyway, I'll get around to slapping some rules onto all that soon.
The short TV miniseries was rad.
Which would have been the classiest way to introduce them to the group.
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.
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
omg
omg
*if they're still raging.
I think this is a very good death.
Would probably primarily use my dumb flooded world set up.
I would like to know more about this bardbarian.