The best decision I made re: the death curse was to put it on a comfortably long timer, a year before everyone starts dying from the time they heard of it, but it debilitated them nearly instantly (explaining why all the heroes dont go fix the problem) - but it depends on the table, my players like to faff about
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
I think my LFG post on Reddit just gave me a chance to start a second group. Do I want to run a second group? Not really. Do these people want to tabletop? Yes.
My SO already thinks I spent 90% of my time on the hobby already.
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Mostlyjoe13Evil, Evil, Jump for joy!Registered Userregular
I was thinking about running Starfinder. But screw it. I'm Eberron, ALL IN. Gonna run an Eberron 5E game on Saturday nights est.
One benefit of having a boring job that doesn't take much mental effort is that it gives me plenty of time to come up with ideas for my D&D campaign. I end up coming up with enough setting detail, possible events, NPC concepts, lore, and side quests to be prepared for the players' improv.
Right now I'm considering a kind of mini game where the players can get some boggles to try and find a guy with their dimensional rift power and climbing prowess. However, much of the city is warded with door guardian spirits, so a boggle must make a save whenever they try to use their dimensional rift power, and if they fail they can't use it for 24 hours. If they succeed I'll roll on a table of possible nabbed items and witnessed events, with one possibility being that a door guardian manifests anyway to try and drive away the boggle.
Possible door guardian manifestations:
- chwinga
- debuff spell
- damaging spell
- summoning spell
I'm DMing my core groups session in September and I'll be taking another swing at Tomb of Annihilation. We had a... so-so... session last time that we all hope to recover from.
The one players who was left for dead in Hrakhamar is rolling up a Bard, so that's cool. Another player who wasn't feeling his character is rolling up a new one. No problem, now to come up with a way to have the characters meet...I had really wanted a simple travel montage from Hrakhamer back up to Camp Vengeance where I would link old characters and new... during which a Mosasaur was going to attack the canoes and gloriously eat the ranger, fulfilling two things: 1) Getting rid of a character who no longer had a player, and 2) Letting me eat someone with a terrible marine reptile a la that scene in Jurrasic World. (My 6yo son would be quick to correct me that Mosasaurs did not live in rivers, but I don't care).
Now I'm having a sad yet proud feeling that I won't be able to do that. Instead in talking to my player who wants to swap characters, he's going to RP his loner elf ranger dude as fed up with a party who would leave a downed comrade to die in a dungeon and walk off into the jungle in a huff! One of my players is going to scold the rest of the party, in character, and it was HIS idea! I am unreasonably happy about this.
Instead, I'm thinking I'm going to give the two players with new PC's their own adventuring montage, arriving in Chult...picking up some side-quests that the original party passed on and closing those openings with a recap. Losing a couple of their party members along the way and probably ending up captured by pirates in Jakhara Anchorage where the original party will stumble upon them and free them. Yay!
Speaking of..... how long would it take to sail around Chult? From the south, back to Port Nyanzaru? Not that it matters, I suppose? I feel like I'm struggling to really sell the time sensitive nature of the whole Death Curse thing since none the players have any personal stake in it.
A suggestion for having new PCs showing up:
The player's party is not the only group of adventurers in Chult. You can encounter other groups of adventurers that aren't immediately hostile towards the players, and by only describing some of the members of those parties, you can have new PCs introduced as survivors of a group when they encountered some terrible monster or trap, or a member who left after being dissatisfied with decisions being made by other group members, or even maybe they join because they feel that it'd be more lucrative to hang out with these people instead.
Also if you have any NPCs from these groups that your players end up liking or hating, you can have them show up again later to emphasize the danger or tension of a situation. Like, haha, this guy we hated is dead, but we still know he was competent, so if they all died here, what the hell happened? Or, oh shit, that group of monsters has kidnapped that awesome guy, we should try and save him!
Well, yeah. The new characters are going to be part of one of those many other adventuring parties consisting of them and some NPCs. As part of the introductory montage I'm going to summarize the adventures this party has had in Chult, using side-quests that the main party overlooked and that I have no desire to send them back to Port Nyanzaru just to pick up (key ones being Fort Belurian shenanigans and Zindar's pirate hunting)...I plan on doing a parallel montage with the two parties doing things (Old party humping through the jungle mostly, and the new party finding dirt on the Flaming Fist and trying & failing to catch pirates) and will end that montage with the old party knocking down the door to the Pirate Haven for shits and giggles, with the remains of the new party. In the ensuing fracas, all unnecessary NPC's will die and the players will make friends and then be ready to go off and continue the adventure together!
Another idea: a decadent city whose nobles are so concerned with keeping up appearances that they use magic to enhance their appearance, spy on their rivals, and give themselves the edge in social interactions. Everybody whose anybody either has a warlock linked to a charismatic patron (like the archfey called the Prince of Hearts, or the archdevil Fierna, or the demon lord Graz'zt) on their payroll or is a warlock themself.
Another idea: a decadent city whose nobles are so concerned with keeping up appearances that they use magic to enhance their appearance, spy on their rivals, and give themselves the edge in social interactions. Everybody whose anybody either has a warlock linked to a charismatic patron (like the archfey called the Prince of Hearts, or the archdevil Fierna, or the demon lord Graz'zt) on their payroll or is a warlock themself.
This is essentially where dragonborn are headed in my setting.
Like i'm actually trying to figure out the motivations of the outsiders, and how they interact with the motivations of the normal royal court.
Another idea: a decadent city whose nobles are so concerned with keeping up appearances that they use magic to enhance their appearance, spy on their rivals, and give themselves the edge in social interactions. Everybody whose anybody either has a warlock linked to a charismatic patron (like the archfey called the Prince of Hearts, or the archdevil Fierna, or the demon lord Graz'zt) on their payroll or is a warlock themself.
This is essentially where dragonborn are headed in my setting.
Like i'm actually trying to figure out the motivations of the outsiders, and how they interact with the motivations of the normal royal court.
Honestly I’m not especially concerned with the patrons’ motivations because individual warlocks could just be small pawns in games that stretch several human lifetimes (or one half-elf lifetime).
I’d be interested to hear what you’ve come up with, though.
Another idea: a decadent city whose nobles are so concerned with keeping up appearances that they use magic to enhance their appearance, spy on their rivals, and give themselves the edge in social interactions. Everybody whose anybody either has a warlock linked to a charismatic patron (like the archfey called the Prince of Hearts, or the archdevil Fierna, or the demon lord Graz'zt) on their payroll or is a warlock themself.
This is essentially where dragonborn are headed in my setting.
Like i'm actually trying to figure out the motivations of the outsiders, and how they interact with the motivations of the normal royal court.
Honestly I’m not especially concerned with the patrons’ motivations because individual warlocks could just be small pawns in games that stretch several human lifetimes (or one half-elf lifetime).
I’d be interested to hear what you’ve come up with, though.
That's mostly where i'm ending up is with the idea that the patron's aims aren't always necessarily... known. Like warlocks, are often left wondering why their patrons are asking them to do anything they are doing, and the devils and infernal representatives some folks interact with don't generally reveal why they are offering to help folks even.
Like there's no specifically known reason why the devil's are backing one royal house over another, or what their end game in it actually is.
The dragon party just knows that the very devilish guys with them (divine soul tiefling sorc, that leans hard into the demon thing especially with thaumaturgy cantrip, and a half orc Assassin that just made a blade pact with the essence of an erinyes) are seemingly cool with the current status quo of the city state, and haven't done anything incredibly out of line for the noble court's or legal structure in the land they currently occupy, and that the infernal emissaries the one particular house is seemingly dealing with keeps trying to fuck up their merchant caravan.
Sleep on
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
Main group finally sat down to start Lost Mine of Phandelver. Goblin Ambush went fine. The snare and pit trap both triggered but heroics kept them moving.
When they got to the Goblin Blind, both bards were singing and playing music, so I doubled the amount of goblins and ran them using the hide and disengage heavily. The group still made short work of them.
Inside Cragmaw Hideout, they slay the wolves, the halfling, with the help from our half-orc fighter goes up the shaft in the kennel room. Halfling wants to attack the huge monster (bugbear) once he gets to the top of the shaft. Ultimately decided against it.
Once back down with the party the halfling and the half-orc, who've become close on this excursion, try and scale the rubble to the living quarters. Of course the half-orc is too heavy so the floor gives way but the halfling swiftly saves on his Dex and makes it to the top of the tunnel.
Alone in the dark with no way to see what's going on around him, the halfling stops moving to scout while the party moves forward.
The party fails to be quiet moving up the passage along the stream, the goblin on the bridge sees them, calls for the flood water, everyone saves except the cleric. Cleric goes down from the concussive force of the water while also letting Illmater take the wheel to save him.
Cleric gets washed out of Cragmaw, is stabilized then healed but immediately has a crisis of faith, renounces Illmater, throws away his holy accoutrements, and we end the session because of time with this dwarf broken on the banks of the stream.
This party didn't get much done but it included two completely new people to the group so it was fun watching them figure each other at the table. The player of the cleric is deadset on keeping to his crisis of faith because he thought it would be fun to RP.
The game I run devolved into PvP today. During our Session 0 we had talked about PvP and decided as a group to avoid it as a rule and only let it happen when it made sense to the story and everyone was okay with it, and today it happened! I learned a few things:
1. A cleric can totally wreck the entire party if he wants to hard enough.
2. My players can be trusted to beat the tar out of eachother and make up.
The story fallout of this is that they realized the cleric was under the influence of an evil entity and managed to cast Protection from Evil on him which cleared his mind enough for him to remove the invisible ring that was causing his slow descent into evil.
Unfortunately removing the ring has only slowed the thing down, he was wearing it for over a year and whatever was in it has moved into him! Now they're going to need to find a way to cleanse his mind before the entity assumes total control.
When everyone rolled initiative my first thought was "Welp this campaign is over." But then everything went better than expected!
My niece just helped me build a rooster cow. Think a hippogriff but with a rooster head, cow horns, rooster wings, cow forelegs rooster hind legs.
If it hits with its gore attack it can use its beak attack as a bonus action... it eats things skewered on its horns. It can multiattack with the claws on its hind legs.
It's probably going to be a quick but decisive battle when the party encounters these ornery abominations. They can do a good bit of damage on their round, but only have 22 hit points behind a 12 ac.
Party's gonna get jumped by a few of them.
Now I just gotta figure out where these aberrant mutations came from... it feels alot like some kind of mad wizard territory.
What are some cool concepts introduced in your home settings?
Me and the guys I’m gonna DM for later this year have chatted about it today and pinned down the following:
Orcs and half-orcs all have vitiligo (patches of different skin tones) by default. Think green and grey, two shades of blue or several shades of green. Albinism is most common with orcs too.
Tieflings are more commonly purple, from light lilac to deep indigo, making them visually different to the demons they’re related to. They can also be pink, red, orange, bronze or jet black though. The shape of horns indicates their lineage.
Elves are rolled back into one race. Elves bodies and minds are so in balance when they choose a life path their outer form follows suit; a high elf can go native and physically become a wood elf for a few hundred years if they like. They’re genderless too, no one knows what goes on down stairs, it’s rude to ask.
Goblins aren’t a thing. It’s just a lazy nickname for the many, many small sized almost-races that lurk out in the wilderness. Bat-headed robbers, cannibal halflings, cunning mud-men, chivalrous mouse knights, goat-headed cultists...
Dwarves are wildly successful, turns out being technologically advanced and working hard works on some worlds. Many of them live in “China towns” in other races cities, and they run everyone’s postal services and much of their night watches. Nothing will stop a dwarf on a delivery run, not even a blizzard or horde of undead. If you find a pack of dead monsters, a dwarf needed to get somewhere and they were not going around the long way!
There are not, strictly speaking, humans. Sure there are millions of beings that call themselves human, but they’re not core D&D humans. Instead there’s the fire gensai nation, the half-elf nation, the necromancy nation, the extra strong viking nation and so on.
I got the complication for low class carousing on my pixie and ended up married to some dolt
I dumped him at the temple of sune with a bunch of money so they could gussy him up and made him manager of the casino portion of the party's bar, I'm a fey sorcerer the hell if my husband's going to be a drover! The DM was going to have me make persuasion but when he found out the random inebriated human he married was a shapeshifted magical creature who just dumped ten platinum into his hands to buy a new wardrobe, none was needed
I give this poor NPC a life expectancy of one full game session
I planned a lot for today's session only for things to go wildly off the rails very quickly when one PC attacked an important NPC for being rude and killed three of his guards with a single spell. The party is in a city where I had planned for them to stay for a while, so I had to spend most of the rest of the session justifying why the party wasn't immediately run out of town or imprisoned or executed. Fortunately another player cast Crown of Madness on a guard riding a dire wolf, which caused the guard to attack her mount screaming that it was a hell hound while civilians (who hadn't seen the other guards get killed) watched, meaning that the party was seen by many as heroes for stopping the senseless beating of a loyal dire wolf by a mad guard.
Not certain what to do about the initial NPC who was attacked, though...
I planned a lot for today's session only for things to go wildly off the rails very quickly when one PC attacked an important NPC for being rude and killed three of his guards with a single spell. The party is in a city where I had planned for them to stay for a while, so I had to spend most of the rest of the session justifying why the party wasn't immediately run out of town or imprisoned or executed. Fortunately another player cast Crown of Madness on a guard riding a dire wolf, which caused the guard to attack her mount screaming that it was a hell hound while civilians (who hadn't seen the other guards get killed) watched, meaning that the party was seen by many as heroes for stopping the senseless beating of a loyal dire wolf by a mad guard.
Not certain what to do about the initial NPC who was attacked, though...
Surprise twin of the original NPC who is just mortified at his brothers lack of decorum, but fortunately has all the relevant plot coupons on hand so let's never talk about that ugliness with NPC1 again?
Shady nobleman Lord Daggerstab appears, slow claps and thanks the party for ridding them of Sir Goodings Niceguy, or at least putting them in hospital for a long time, depending how it went down.
Lord Daggerstab now has access to everything the dead/incapacitated fellow had, but Lord Daggerstab is a level 14 rogue with two very kind respectable tiefling secretaries that follow him everywhere and might, if you listen to rumour, actually be genuine demons. Oh, plus, Lord Daggerstab is very good friends with the guard captain, some say he takes such an interest in the city’s justice system that he runs the watch! What a good joke that is!
He’s glad to help the party in exactly the same way, but I’d be careful who was rude to who.
Best part about a 6 year old that wants to play, but really doesnt have the attention span... Dramatic entrances!
She really really really wanted to play with me and her brothers, so I rolled her up a Druid, because ANIMALS!
So the boys are lost in the woods searching for a goblin camp, and who shows up at the table just in time? A little Halfling Druid that just so happens to have seen some goblins down the game trail! what luck! She stays just long enough to show the way, help kill a sentry before ADHDing out to go play with her friends.
The boys slowly clear out the small dungeon before the 2 man party dead ends into the boss lair containing a very frightened Goblin Boss, a Hobgoblin Captain and 2 Hobgoblin mooks. A tough fight, but they might be able to handle it. So what does one of the boys do? Sinks a crossbow bolt into the side of the Hobbo Captain, only scratching him in the process. His brother is almost as effective Ice Bolting one of the mooks half to death. But that still leaves a gobbo boss and a hobbo captain with 30+ HP left, a fresh mook and a half dead mook. And these two young adventurers are learning the hard way that resting really should be done at some point since a prior encounter left them bloodied.
So as things start to look bleak after round 2, they hear a little pitter patter coming down the hall. Its the Druid! (their sisters friends had to go in, so shes back to play). Shes in the fight! Rushes down the hall, transforms into a Panther, leaps over both boys and fiercely mauls a hobbo mook with her claws, dropping him to the floor and fiendishly ripps out his throat with her piercing mandibles. Luckily shes swift enough that she dodges all incomming attacks, dispatches the second mook and turns on the goblin boss with the Sorcerer close behind while the Fighter closes with the Captain. The panther Druid rips the Goblin Boss to pieces in one savage attack. Seeing this the Captain decides to make a swift exit and sprints for the only tunnel out of the lair. The Sorceror manages to slow him down a bit with Ice Bolt, and the Fighter sprints after him, just barely missing a tackle to take him down. The Sorcerer barely misses an Ice Bolt to slow him down enough next round to prevent him from escaping, and unfortunately the Panther Druid couldnt catch up in the narrow tunnel. As soon as the Captain turned the corner he was gone with no trace.
All in all it worked out OK for them
Bonus is they were able to interrogate what was left of the Goblin Boss and gathered vital information to further the plot. They now know a long thought dead goblin king is trying to unite/take over all the local goblin tribes. the 10 year old was able to (correctly) make the connection maybe its the guy from the tomb they desecrated, but the 13 year old shot that down. The big clue was the 10 year old showed the goblin boss the small crown he stole from the tomb. The Bosses eyes grew wide, then glazed over as he faded off to death.
Shady nobleman Lord Daggerstab appears, slow claps and thanks the party for ridding them of Sir Goodings Niceguy, or at least putting them in hospital for a long time, depending how it went down.
Lord Daggerstab now has access to everything the dead/incapacitated fellow had, but Lord Daggerstab is a level 14 rogue with two very kind respectable tiefling secretaries that follow him everywhere and might, if you listen to rumour, actually be genuine demons. Oh, plus, Lord Daggerstab is very good friends with the guard captain, some say he takes such an interest in the city’s justice system that he runs the watch! What a good joke that is!
He’s glad to help the party in exactly the same way, but I’d be careful who was rude to who.
My niece just helped me build a rooster cow. Think a hippogriff but with a rooster head, cow horns, rooster wings, cow forelegs rooster hind legs.
If it hits with its gore attack it can use its beak attack as a bonus action... it eats things skewered on its horns. It can multiattack with the claws on its hind legs.
It's probably going to be a quick but decisive battle when the party encounters these ornery abominations. They can do a good bit of damage on their round, but only have 22 hit points behind a 12 ac.
Party's gonna get jumped by a few of them.
Now I just gotta figure out where these aberrant mutations came from... it feels alot like some kind of mad wizard territory.
I'm a big fan of stuff like this for crazy wizard experiments
my players ended up resolving the situation of being trapped in a doomed city thousands of years in the past in the bodies of randos:
-Convincing a single public official the world was going to end
-Stealing a scroll of Sequester by murdering the owner and hiding his body
-Freeing a captive beholder, polymorphing it into a frog, and taking it to the mountains up against the doomed city
-Releasing the beholder after pledging fealty to it and it maniacally burrowed back to its subterranean home, the party widened the cavern just to deep enough where they were pretty sure this part of the land wasn't wrecked in the disaster
-Bought the largest container they could find and paid a bunch of laborers to drag it up to the mountain and into the beholder hole
-The official they convinced directed two classes of kids and their teachers to come up to the beholder hole, once they were up there the party just used threats of violence to get them into the container (instead of their much higher persuasion checks)
-They bought 10 slaves from the market and convinced a few randos that were nice to them to join them up in the hills and shoved them in the container, slammed it shut, arcane locked it, and sequestered the entire thing, buried it
They confronted the hag, who was matrix'd into a high priestess there, one of them got cut in half, one got thrown to his death off the mountainside, one got stuck in a sphere of vacuum and suffocated. The bard ended up being the only one alive to loot the area and figure out how the hag's spell worked, including how to let her friends wake up in the present despite them dying here. She figured out how to return to the present and bring stuff with her, and manipulate the hag's magic so that the hag herself would NOT wake up in the present
Back in the present: the now conscious party broke into the night hag's place of power in her demiplane only to find her having a seizure. They rescued the bard's soul from the hag's collection and took the hag out to the villagers she has prisoner here and let them hack her to pieces, and showed them all how to leave
Now the lost ruins of oralanga are full of formerly kidnapped humans and the party has an invisible underground cargo container full of people from a dead civilization (and a bunch of stuff they stole) to dig up from under the mountains. Also lots of fun hag loot like a decanter of endless cats and a magical compass that casts find the path but gives them the most kafkaesque directions possible to their destination
I would but they've got the tomb of the nine gods ahead of them and you can only throw so many beholders at a party in one campaign, instead I have other plans
I had vaguely alluded to these "red hags" having fled to the newly created land of Chult to flee some unspecified punishment by an Archfey, they built a civilization there which was doomed from the start
I also had planned an encounter with a corrupted lesser-archfey to get the ranger his leveling up artifact weapon (everyone gets one), for later on, but instead I will have a massive sickly tree growing out of the mountains in the present that wasn't there when they left. Inside of it they will find an archfey, the roots of his tree cocooned around the invisible peoplebox. He will say that he's been waiting a long time for whatever spared these ones, his sovereign had wished them dead, etc, etc, dramatic speech - but he's been here so long and the area's been so corrupted by undeath that he will be significantly weaker than he ought be - but still a hell of a fight for the party
I've still got to polish up the idea but that's the way I'm going to go
The party's current plan is to literally just give a few thousand gold to these red hags (which are super strong compared to humans, but I'm treating them as "commoners" of their own race, so CR2 for the adults) and give them a rough map to port nyanzaru, forgetting that out of the 45 individuals in there 28 of them are hag children and 5 of them are elven slave children - bite sized meals for the horrors of chult
so they're going to have to escort this movable feast hundreds of miles through the jungle, good times
Edit: my favorite part of a bunch of the items they purchased/stole is that, rationalizing that this was before the spell plague, they found spells from earlier editions of D&D like permanency, lesser globe of invulnerability, etc. They won't be compatible with any modern wizard's understanding of magic for the purposes of scribing, but they have a total of 7 spells that shouldn't exist and I've applied the "oh but I can't tell if this will work until I go to attempt it" so I can DM fiat tell them no when they try to permanency something I dont want them to
Setting 1: It produces one tabaxi, he or she just wants to help and dies after you summon another one or after they complete an appointed task. They become hostile if they fail to complete the task in 24 hours and after 48 hours will become ghouls that solely are focused on killing the summoner
Setting 2: A stream of 5 kittens per round as long as you keep it active, you can specify the kind of kittens. The kittens turn into soap bubbles after one hour.
Setting 3: A tiger is launched at incredible velocity, flying 100 feet straight forward. You have to make a strength saving throw to not be knocked back. The tiger is hostile to everyone.
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
edited August 2018
I previously mentioned one of my players, Life Domain Cleric, forsook his god. He wants to switch to Death Domain.
Here's my question. He loses the Heavy Armor bonus prof. In favor of the Martial Weapons? He doesn't get to keep both?
I previously mentioned one of my players, Life Domain Cleric, forsook his god. He wants to switch to Death Domain.
Here's my question. He loses the Heavy Armor bonus prof. In favor of the Martial Weapons? He doesn't get to keep both?
Normally you can't change domains, but I'd say you should pretty much give up all the benefits of your previous domain... death domain is the domain of death lasers, it kind of needs to be slightly squishier
I previously mentioned one of my players, Life Domain Cleric, forsook his god. He wants to switch to Death Domain.
Here's my question. He loses the Heavy Armor bonus prof. In favor of the Martial Weapons? He doesn't get to keep both?
Normally you can't change domains, but I'd say you should pretty much give up all the benefits of your previous domain... death domain is the domain of death lasers, it kind of needs to be slightly squishier
This was my train of thought as well. Take all the Life Domain goods and exchange them for Death Domain.
death domain gets the best cantrip spam in the game, even holding up with warlocks to an extent, because they get to free twin spell Toll the Dead, at 5th level if there's 2 targets alive they're just throwing out 4d12 damage a round for free
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
death domain gets the best cantrip spam in the game, even holding up with warlocks to an extent, because they get to free twin spell Toll the Dead, at 5th level if there's 2 targets alive they're just throwing out 4d12 damage a round for free
I wish I could broadcast this player. Once in a combat, pulled out his ink and paper, and using his calligraphy proficiency to write the mobs a note. On a other occasion, he attempted to burn down a cottage with his candles from his starting equipment because the poor farmers were ignoring him.
I'd be surprised if he figures out he has cantrips.
death domain gets the best cantrip spam in the game, even holding up with warlocks to an extent, because they get to free twin spell Toll the Dead, at 5th level if there's 2 targets alive they're just throwing out 4d12 damage a round for free
I wish I could broadcast this player. Once in a combat, pulled out his ink and paper, and using his calligraphy proficiency to write the mobs a note. On a other occasion, he attempted to burn down a cottage with his candles from his starting equipment because the poor farmers were ignoring him.
I'd be surprised if he figures out he has cantrips.
Setting 1: It produces one tabaxi, he or she just wants to help and dies after you summon another one or after they complete an appointed task. They become hostile if they fail to complete the task in 24 hours and after 48 hours will become ghouls that solely are focused on killing the summoner
Setting 2: A stream of 5 kittens per round as long as you keep it active, you can specify the kind of kittens. The kittens turn into soap bubbles after one hour.
Setting 3: A tiger is launched at incredible velocity, flying 100 feet straight forward. You have to make a strength saving throw to not be knocked back. The tiger is hostile to everyone.
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My SO already thinks I spent 90% of my time on the hobby already.
Right now I'm considering a kind of mini game where the players can get some boggles to try and find a guy with their dimensional rift power and climbing prowess. However, much of the city is warded with door guardian spirits, so a boggle must make a save whenever they try to use their dimensional rift power, and if they fail they can't use it for 24 hours. If they succeed I'll roll on a table of possible nabbed items and witnessed events, with one possibility being that a door guardian manifests anyway to try and drive away the boggle.
Possible door guardian manifestations:
- chwinga
- debuff spell
- damaging spell
- summoning spell
Well, yeah. The new characters are going to be part of one of those many other adventuring parties consisting of them and some NPCs. As part of the introductory montage I'm going to summarize the adventures this party has had in Chult, using side-quests that the main party overlooked and that I have no desire to send them back to Port Nyanzaru just to pick up (key ones being Fort Belurian shenanigans and Zindar's pirate hunting)...I plan on doing a parallel montage with the two parties doing things (Old party humping through the jungle mostly, and the new party finding dirt on the Flaming Fist and trying & failing to catch pirates) and will end that montage with the old party knocking down the door to the Pirate Haven for shits and giggles, with the remains of the new party. In the ensuing fracas, all unnecessary NPC's will die and the players will make friends and then be ready to go off and continue the adventure together!
That's the plan, anyway.
This is essentially where dragonborn are headed in my setting.
Like i'm actually trying to figure out the motivations of the outsiders, and how they interact with the motivations of the normal royal court.
Honestly I’m not especially concerned with the patrons’ motivations because individual warlocks could just be small pawns in games that stretch several human lifetimes (or one half-elf lifetime).
I’d be interested to hear what you’ve come up with, though.
That's mostly where i'm ending up is with the idea that the patron's aims aren't always necessarily... known. Like warlocks, are often left wondering why their patrons are asking them to do anything they are doing, and the devils and infernal representatives some folks interact with don't generally reveal why they are offering to help folks even.
Like there's no specifically known reason why the devil's are backing one royal house over another, or what their end game in it actually is.
The dragon party just knows that the very devilish guys with them (divine soul tiefling sorc, that leans hard into the demon thing especially with thaumaturgy cantrip, and a half orc Assassin that just made a blade pact with the essence of an erinyes) are seemingly cool with the current status quo of the city state, and haven't done anything incredibly out of line for the noble court's or legal structure in the land they currently occupy, and that the infernal emissaries the one particular house is seemingly dealing with keeps trying to fuck up their merchant caravan.
When they got to the Goblin Blind, both bards were singing and playing music, so I doubled the amount of goblins and ran them using the hide and disengage heavily. The group still made short work of them.
Inside Cragmaw Hideout, they slay the wolves, the halfling, with the help from our half-orc fighter goes up the shaft in the kennel room. Halfling wants to attack the huge monster (bugbear) once he gets to the top of the shaft. Ultimately decided against it.
Once back down with the party the halfling and the half-orc, who've become close on this excursion, try and scale the rubble to the living quarters. Of course the half-orc is too heavy so the floor gives way but the halfling swiftly saves on his Dex and makes it to the top of the tunnel.
Alone in the dark with no way to see what's going on around him, the halfling stops moving to scout while the party moves forward.
The party fails to be quiet moving up the passage along the stream, the goblin on the bridge sees them, calls for the flood water, everyone saves except the cleric. Cleric goes down from the concussive force of the water while also letting Illmater take the wheel to save him.
Cleric gets washed out of Cragmaw, is stabilized then healed but immediately has a crisis of faith, renounces Illmater, throws away his holy accoutrements, and we end the session because of time with this dwarf broken on the banks of the stream.
This party didn't get much done but it included two completely new people to the group so it was fun watching them figure each other at the table. The player of the cleric is deadset on keeping to his crisis of faith because he thought it would be fun to RP.
1. A cleric can totally wreck the entire party if he wants to hard enough.
2. My players can be trusted to beat the tar out of eachother and make up.
The story fallout of this is that they realized the cleric was under the influence of an evil entity and managed to cast Protection from Evil on him which cleared his mind enough for him to remove the invisible ring that was causing his slow descent into evil.
Unfortunately removing the ring has only slowed the thing down, he was wearing it for over a year and whatever was in it has moved into him! Now they're going to need to find a way to cleanse his mind before the entity assumes total control.
When everyone rolled initiative my first thought was "Welp this campaign is over." But then everything went better than expected!
If it hits with its gore attack it can use its beak attack as a bonus action... it eats things skewered on its horns. It can multiattack with the claws on its hind legs.
It's probably going to be a quick but decisive battle when the party encounters these ornery abominations. They can do a good bit of damage on their round, but only have 22 hit points behind a 12 ac.
Party's gonna get jumped by a few of them.
Now I just gotta figure out where these aberrant mutations came from... it feels alot like some kind of mad wizard territory.
Me and the guys I’m gonna DM for later this year have chatted about it today and pinned down the following:
Orcs and half-orcs all have vitiligo (patches of different skin tones) by default. Think green and grey, two shades of blue or several shades of green. Albinism is most common with orcs too.
Tieflings are more commonly purple, from light lilac to deep indigo, making them visually different to the demons they’re related to. They can also be pink, red, orange, bronze or jet black though. The shape of horns indicates their lineage.
Elves are rolled back into one race. Elves bodies and minds are so in balance when they choose a life path their outer form follows suit; a high elf can go native and physically become a wood elf for a few hundred years if they like. They’re genderless too, no one knows what goes on down stairs, it’s rude to ask.
Goblins aren’t a thing. It’s just a lazy nickname for the many, many small sized almost-races that lurk out in the wilderness. Bat-headed robbers, cannibal halflings, cunning mud-men, chivalrous mouse knights, goat-headed cultists...
Dwarves are wildly successful, turns out being technologically advanced and working hard works on some worlds. Many of them live in “China towns” in other races cities, and they run everyone’s postal services and much of their night watches. Nothing will stop a dwarf on a delivery run, not even a blizzard or horde of undead. If you find a pack of dead monsters, a dwarf needed to get somewhere and they were not going around the long way!
There are not, strictly speaking, humans. Sure there are millions of beings that call themselves human, but they’re not core D&D humans. Instead there’s the fire gensai nation, the half-elf nation, the necromancy nation, the extra strong viking nation and so on.
I dumped him at the temple of sune with a bunch of money so they could gussy him up and made him manager of the casino portion of the party's bar, I'm a fey sorcerer the hell if my husband's going to be a drover! The DM was going to have me make persuasion but when he found out the random inebriated human he married was a shapeshifted magical creature who just dumped ten platinum into his hands to buy a new wardrobe, none was needed
I give this poor NPC a life expectancy of one full game session
Not certain what to do about the initial NPC who was attacked, though...
player characters
Surprise twin of the original NPC who is just mortified at his brothers lack of decorum, but fortunately has all the relevant plot coupons on hand so let's never talk about that ugliness with NPC1 again?
Lord Daggerstab now has access to everything the dead/incapacitated fellow had, but Lord Daggerstab is a level 14 rogue with two very kind respectable tiefling secretaries that follow him everywhere and might, if you listen to rumour, actually be genuine demons. Oh, plus, Lord Daggerstab is very good friends with the guard captain, some say he takes such an interest in the city’s justice system that he runs the watch! What a good joke that is!
He’s glad to help the party in exactly the same way, but I’d be careful who was rude to who.
She really really really wanted to play with me and her brothers, so I rolled her up a Druid, because ANIMALS!
So the boys are lost in the woods searching for a goblin camp, and who shows up at the table just in time? A little Halfling Druid that just so happens to have seen some goblins down the game trail! what luck! She stays just long enough to show the way, help kill a sentry before ADHDing out to go play with her friends.
The boys slowly clear out the small dungeon before the 2 man party dead ends into the boss lair containing a very frightened Goblin Boss, a Hobgoblin Captain and 2 Hobgoblin mooks. A tough fight, but they might be able to handle it. So what does one of the boys do? Sinks a crossbow bolt into the side of the Hobbo Captain, only scratching him in the process. His brother is almost as effective Ice Bolting one of the mooks half to death. But that still leaves a gobbo boss and a hobbo captain with 30+ HP left, a fresh mook and a half dead mook. And these two young adventurers are learning the hard way that resting really should be done at some point since a prior encounter left them bloodied.
So as things start to look bleak after round 2, they hear a little pitter patter coming down the hall. Its the Druid! (their sisters friends had to go in, so shes back to play). Shes in the fight! Rushes down the hall, transforms into a Panther, leaps over both boys and fiercely mauls a hobbo mook with her claws, dropping him to the floor and fiendishly ripps out his throat with her piercing mandibles. Luckily shes swift enough that she dodges all incomming attacks, dispatches the second mook and turns on the goblin boss with the Sorcerer close behind while the Fighter closes with the Captain. The panther Druid rips the Goblin Boss to pieces in one savage attack. Seeing this the Captain decides to make a swift exit and sprints for the only tunnel out of the lair. The Sorceror manages to slow him down a bit with Ice Bolt, and the Fighter sprints after him, just barely missing a tackle to take him down. The Sorcerer barely misses an Ice Bolt to slow him down enough next round to prevent him from escaping, and unfortunately the Panther Druid couldnt catch up in the narrow tunnel. As soon as the Captain turned the corner he was gone with no trace.
All in all it worked out OK for them
Bonus is they were able to interrogate what was left of the Goblin Boss and gathered vital information to further the plot. They now know a long thought dead goblin king is trying to unite/take over all the local goblin tribes. the 10 year old was able to (correctly) make the connection maybe its the guy from the tomb they desecrated, but the 13 year old shot that down. The big clue was the 10 year old showed the goblin boss the small crown he stole from the tomb. The Bosses eyes grew wide, then glazed over as he faded off to death.
Brothers. hah.
elmdor, is that you?
I'm a big fan of stuff like this for crazy wizard experiments
-Convincing a single public official the world was going to end
-Stealing a scroll of Sequester by murdering the owner and hiding his body
-Freeing a captive beholder, polymorphing it into a frog, and taking it to the mountains up against the doomed city
-Releasing the beholder after pledging fealty to it and it maniacally burrowed back to its subterranean home, the party widened the cavern just to deep enough where they were pretty sure this part of the land wasn't wrecked in the disaster
-Bought the largest container they could find and paid a bunch of laborers to drag it up to the mountain and into the beholder hole
-The official they convinced directed two classes of kids and their teachers to come up to the beholder hole, once they were up there the party just used threats of violence to get them into the container (instead of their much higher persuasion checks)
-They bought 10 slaves from the market and convinced a few randos that were nice to them to join them up in the hills and shoved them in the container, slammed it shut, arcane locked it, and sequestered the entire thing, buried it
They confronted the hag, who was matrix'd into a high priestess there, one of them got cut in half, one got thrown to his death off the mountainside, one got stuck in a sphere of vacuum and suffocated. The bard ended up being the only one alive to loot the area and figure out how the hag's spell worked, including how to let her friends wake up in the present despite them dying here. She figured out how to return to the present and bring stuff with her, and manipulate the hag's magic so that the hag herself would NOT wake up in the present
Back in the present: the now conscious party broke into the night hag's place of power in her demiplane only to find her having a seizure. They rescued the bard's soul from the hag's collection and took the hag out to the villagers she has prisoner here and let them hack her to pieces, and showed them all how to leave
Now the lost ruins of oralanga are full of formerly kidnapped humans and the party has an invisible underground cargo container full of people from a dead civilization (and a bunch of stuff they stole) to dig up from under the mountains. Also lots of fun hag loot like a decanter of endless cats and a magical compass that casts find the path but gives them the most kafkaesque directions possible to their destination
creative
This is a good idea right here.
I had vaguely alluded to these "red hags" having fled to the newly created land of Chult to flee some unspecified punishment by an Archfey, they built a civilization there which was doomed from the start
I also had planned an encounter with a corrupted lesser-archfey to get the ranger his leveling up artifact weapon (everyone gets one), for later on, but instead I will have a massive sickly tree growing out of the mountains in the present that wasn't there when they left. Inside of it they will find an archfey, the roots of his tree cocooned around the invisible peoplebox. He will say that he's been waiting a long time for whatever spared these ones, his sovereign had wished them dead, etc, etc, dramatic speech - but he's been here so long and the area's been so corrupted by undeath that he will be significantly weaker than he ought be - but still a hell of a fight for the party
I've still got to polish up the idea but that's the way I'm going to go
The party's current plan is to literally just give a few thousand gold to these red hags (which are super strong compared to humans, but I'm treating them as "commoners" of their own race, so CR2 for the adults) and give them a rough map to port nyanzaru, forgetting that out of the 45 individuals in there 28 of them are hag children and 5 of them are elven slave children - bite sized meals for the horrors of chult
so they're going to have to escort this movable feast hundreds of miles through the jungle, good times
Edit: my favorite part of a bunch of the items they purchased/stole is that, rationalizing that this was before the spell plague, they found spells from earlier editions of D&D like permanency, lesser globe of invulnerability, etc. They won't be compatible with any modern wizard's understanding of magic for the purposes of scribing, but they have a total of 7 spells that shouldn't exist and I've applied the "oh but I can't tell if this will work until I go to attempt it" so I can DM fiat tell them no when they try to permanency something I dont want them to
Setting 1: It produces one tabaxi, he or she just wants to help and dies after you summon another one or after they complete an appointed task. They become hostile if they fail to complete the task in 24 hours and after 48 hours will become ghouls that solely are focused on killing the summoner
Setting 2: A stream of 5 kittens per round as long as you keep it active, you can specify the kind of kittens. The kittens turn into soap bubbles after one hour.
Setting 3: A tiger is launched at incredible velocity, flying 100 feet straight forward. You have to make a strength saving throw to not be knocked back. The tiger is hostile to everyone.
Here's my question. He loses the Heavy Armor bonus prof. In favor of the Martial Weapons? He doesn't get to keep both?
Normally you can't change domains, but I'd say you should pretty much give up all the benefits of your previous domain... death domain is the domain of death lasers, it kind of needs to be slightly squishier
Tomb of Annihilation session notes.
We're almost done.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
This was my train of thought as well. Take all the Life Domain goods and exchange them for Death Domain.
I wish I could broadcast this player. Once in a combat, pulled out his ink and paper, and using his calligraphy proficiency to write the mobs a note. On a other occasion, he attempted to burn down a cottage with his candles from his starting equipment because the poor farmers were ignoring him.
I'd be surprised if he figures out he has cantrips.
Was it a...death note?
So I get 1 and 3. What is 2 a reference to?
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