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Dinos and Druids, A Tasty Romp through Table Top Games

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Posts

  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    Apparently the next D&D adventure is going to be revealed at an event called "The Descent" next month.

    thdmivigflro.jpg

    No idea what kind of angel that is, but it looks like this may be Nine Hells related.

  • ButlerButler 89 episodes or bust Registered User regular
    Zonugal wrote: »
    Melding wrote: »
    so, i'm still not over stabbing trolls.

    how are you all doing?

    Yesterday I either grabbed from the internet or created whole-cloth the following cleric sub-classes for my D&D campaign setting: Air domain, Artifice Domain, Earth Domain, Evil Domain, Fire Domain, Sea Domain, and Water Domain

    What about Public Domain, for clerics who champion the abolishment of intellectual property laws?

  • Metzger MeisterMetzger Meister It Gets Worse before it gets any better.Registered User regular
    forgotten realms is a nice setting because everyone knows whats up already. like even if you've never played an rpg ever, you're like "oh yeah fantasy stuff, i got you"

    except for some of the stranger lore but we don't talk about that.

    which is a nice way of saying it's boring, but then, that just comes down to what the DM is doing. even a comparatively more interesting setting could be dull as dishwater if you're not telling your story right.

  • ToxTox I kill threads he/himRegistered User regular
    So gonna point out the D&D Law/Chaos axis is not about legal systems so much as it is the values of collective conformity with accepted norms versus individual liberty.

    Someone on twitter posted a chart outlining the alignments of each alignment:

    9aumlzj9ogvl.jpg

    Twitter! | Dilige, et quod vis fac
  • SnowbearSnowbear Registered User regular
    What could Drop and other UnderDark residents uses to pull chariots and wagons? I know horses are the easy answer but I'm not as well versed in that ecology. Is there some subterranean horror that could be used as beasts of burden?

    Trying to devise a chase scene after.my characters break out of prison and are pursued by their captors

    8EVmPzM.jpg
  • PlatyPlaty Registered User regular
    There are those lizards the Drow use

    You could also make up some cross between dripping slimy fungus and a mastodon

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Of like, real world animals, you'd want something small and sure-footed to deal with uneven ground and cramped spaces. So goats.

    Of course, a chariot might not do so hot with that uneven ground. But drow are good at magic, right? What about a hovering chariot platform, pulled by flying bats?

  • Metzger MeisterMetzger Meister It Gets Worse before it gets any better.Registered User regular
    edited April 2019
    ambulatory armored land-cephalopods with like, 2-3 person baskets on the backs of their mantle with riders inside like a battle elephant.

    edit: wait are we just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks or are we actually trying to answer a question because i'm worthless for that second thing

    Metzger Meister on
  • NarbusNarbus Registered User regular
    edited April 2019
    Near as I can tell their big beast of burden is a giant spider. Can manuever anywhere, oddly strong, good in a fight, maintains their whole "uber-goth" thing...

    Narbus on
  • Duke 2.0Duke 2.0 Time Trash Cat Registered User regular
    Acid resistant platform atop a gelatinous cube

    Metzger’s cephalopod, but it exclusively moves on the Cave ceiling and the harness hangs from it

    Those cave worms that make silk/slime lines to catch prey, but domesticated giant worms that carry you through their miles long slimy tunnels

    VRXwDW7.png
  • Metzger MeisterMetzger Meister It Gets Worse before it gets any better.Registered User regular
    edited April 2019
    OH YEAH BABEY CAPHALOPOID BOMBER SQUADS

    mages or even just people with pots of naphtha or whatever dropping firebombs and spells as they dangle from long tentacles

    spiders are the obvious one for drow, of course, but drow do have a ton of regional variability even in basic FR canon, forest drow and coastal cave drow etc, so i don't see a reason to stick strictly to spiders.

    they are friggin cool though, giant spiders. just really evocative and spooky. odds are at least 1 player at the table hates them too, so. i actually had to limit my glee (and meanness) when i discovered that one of my players was deathly afraid of zombies cuz my whole campaign was undead and liches controlling them and stuff so i had to at least limit my descriptions a bit, and use a lot of non-humanoid zombies cuz those weren't as bad.

    anyway. battle-topus. wait, if they cling to the ceiling, they'd be a ROCKTOPUS.

    edit: glowing, slimy, disgusting, but extremely useful worms would be funny too. "is there, literally, any other way to get through this section of the underdark?" "you could go through Aboleth Abyss and into the Catacombs of the Mindeaters, but then you'd have to get through Hook Horror Hollow and that place is-" "Alright FINE."

    Metzger Meister on
  • ArdentArdent Down UpsideRegistered User regular
    Tox wrote: »
    So gonna point out the D&D Law/Chaos axis is not about legal systems so much as it is the values of collective conformity with accepted norms versus individual liberty.

    Someone on twitter posted a chart outlining the alignments of each alignment:
    Okay that's amusing.

    My LE characters do tend to be very pragmatic.

    Steam ID | Origin ID: ArdentX | Uplay ID: theardent | Battle.net: Ardent#11476
  • descdesc Goretexing to death Registered User regular
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    I mean it wouldn't kill anyone to play something not-D&D every so often

    That’s not what hundreds of posts on assorted forums by dozens of cranks have told me over the years

  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    Hexmage-PA wrote: »
    Apparently the next D&D adventure is going to be revealed at an event called "The Descent" next month.

    thdmivigflro.jpg

    No idea what kind of angel that is, but it looks like this may be Nine Hells related.

    based on the motif, I can safely say that it's an adventure about


    fire emblem awakening

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • SleepSleep Registered User regular
    Hexmage-PA wrote: »
    Apparently the next D&D adventure is going to be revealed at an event called "The Descent" next month.

    thdmivigflro.jpg

    No idea what kind of angel that is, but it looks like this may be Nine Hells related.

    That all looks like content I can use.

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Can we date the angel

  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    Angel is not a wheel covered in eyes nor is it seventy burning wings 3/10.

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Angel is not a wheel covered in eyes nor is it seventy burning wings 3/10.

    Haven't unlocked their final form yet.

  • AuralynxAuralynx Darkness is a perspective Watching the ego workRegistered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Can we date the angel

    That angel looks like it's got a lot on its plate; probably no time for love there.

    kshu0oba7xnr.png

  • DoobhDoobh She/Her, Ace Pan/Bisexual 8-) What's up, bootlickers?Registered User regular
    that's a picture of the average woman browsing the average dating site

    Miss me? Find me on:

    Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
    Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
  • ArdentArdent Down UpsideRegistered User regular
    That's not even an angel. It's a fairy.

    Steam ID | Origin ID: ArdentX | Uplay ID: theardent | Battle.net: Ardent#11476
  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    Ardent wrote: »
    That's not even an angel. It's a fairy.

    Yeah, I'm not certain what exactly that creature is. It doesn't match any other angels so far and looks kinda elfy, but even celestial eladrin don't have wings. A lillend would have been cool as a returning Chaotic Good celestial.

  • SCREECH OF THE FARGSCREECH OF THE FARG #1 PARROTHEAD margaritavilleRegistered User regular
    obviously it's a servant of a great old one

    gcum67ktu9e4.pngimg
  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    Today's session was pretty great! It mostly concerned a garden party at Glasya's palace in Malbolge with games that built up points towards winning a small treasure horde taken from the keep of the wizard Bzallin, who worked for the lesser demon lord J'zzhalshrak.

    The enchanter wizard cheated a devil out of its business expenses account of 100,000 GP at the Bank of Mammon and used Planar Binding to press the minor archdevil Alloces into service, tasking him with devising a plan to kill one of the paladin PCs. Said paladin had a private audience with Mephistopheles, then walked with Glasya through her Garden of Delights before dancing with her in the exhibition hall of her palace (not wanting to be embarassed by the paladin in case he was a bad dancer, she used magic to give him both advantage and a plus 5 bonus to Performance checks). The paladin willingly consented to Glasya's magic being worked upon him; unbeknownst to him, said magic also included a Dominate Monster effect that she could invoke within the next 8 hours...

    With all that and more accomplished, the party was tasked by Glasya with infiltrating the tower in Nessus where Levistus' true name is recorded. The enchanter, having secretly been given knowledge as to how to replace Levistus' true name with his own and take Levistus' place as an archdevil, ponders whether to make use of this knowledge or try another path.

  • ShadowenShadowen Snores in the morning LoserdomRegistered User regular
    Narbus wrote: »
    Near as I can tell their big beast of burden is a giant spider. Can manuever anywhere, oddly strong, good in a fight, maintains their whole "uber-goth" thing...

    There are, in-canon, muskox the size of a quarterhorse called rothé, which have a pony-sized Underdark subspecies called deep rothé.

    Because everything in FR has an Underdark subspecies.

    (Though deep rothé are more commonly used as food rather than beasts of burden, I don't doubt someone uses them as beasts of burden first and food second.)

  • ButlerButler 89 episodes or bust Registered User regular
    Doobh wrote: »
    that's a picture of the average woman browsing the average dating site

    But none of those grasping hands are holding up fish they've caught!

  • AuralynxAuralynx Darkness is a perspective Watching the ego workRegistered User regular
    Shadowen wrote: »
    Narbus wrote: »
    Near as I can tell their big beast of burden is a giant spider. Can manuever anywhere, oddly strong, good in a fight, maintains their whole "uber-goth" thing...

    There are, in-canon, muskox the size of a quarterhorse called rothé, which have a pony-sized Underdark subspecies called deep rothé.

    Because everything in FR has an Underdark subspecies.

    (Though deep rothé are more commonly used as food rather than beasts of burden, I don't doubt someone uses them as beasts of burden first and food second.)

    In a way, it is a relief that we can have this debate today, as opposed to 15 years ago or so when we'd all know the answer from R.A. Salvatore novels.

    kshu0oba7xnr.png

  • WACriminalWACriminal Dying Is Easy, Young Man Living Is HarderRegistered User regular
    edited April 2019
    @SirEtchwarts I know this is a page later but the idea just hit me while I was taking a nap this afternoon:

    If you do end up running your Agents of SHIELD game with Monster of the Week, you need to rename the Mundane playbook to "The Rookie".

    EDIT: Also running a SHIELD game with MotW is basically all I can think about now? Which is a problem because I absolutely don't have time to run two campaigns at once.

    WACriminal on
  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    I'm planning a new game of Star Trek Adventures to begin next month and I'm pretty nervous but also pretty excited. This weekend I got together with a bunch of the players and went through character creation and I'm really happy with what came out of that.

    We have
    - A human captain who, influenced by Captain Pike in Discovery, is like the Platonic ideal of a Starfleet officer: authoritative but warm, daring but thoughtful. He has a high Conn (piloting) skill and is kind of a cocky hot-dog, always wanting to go faster. His player described him to me as "like if Steve Rogers and Dominic Toretto had some kind of Tuvix-style transporter accident."

    - A human first officer who was one of the movie-era crew who came to the TNG future with Captain Kelsey Grammer in "Cause and Effect." She had to adjust to life in a future where her friends and family were dead and chose to go back to the Academy to get recertified, then her career took another detour during the Dominion War. Now she's 40 and finally back on the bridge of a starship with another chance to prove it's where she belongs.

    - A grizzled Betazoid security officer who was groomed to be one of her planet's matriarchal rulers but ended up a guerilla defending it against the Dominion invasion, then joined Starfleet after the war. Now she's the chief of security and is giving the side-eye to

    - A young, enthusiastic Cardassian science officer and former Obsidian Order cadet who's part of a new generation of Cardassians joining Starfleet after the war. He is affable and curious but thanks to his upbringing suffers from a bad case of "resting supervillain face" - he just can't help sounding sinister, meeting people in darkened rooms with his face lit from beneath, etc. But he really does mean well!

    - An imperious Trill chief medical officer who has a secret and may not mean well at all, and

    - A liberated Borg engineer who has kind of transferred his dependence on, and devotion to, his old hive to his new surroundings. He has the value "My Crew is My Collective."

    Even when you know the players and have gamed with them for years, the early stages of planning a campaign can feel a little detached and bloodless , like you're writing a module for Joe and Jane EveryPC. You're creating NPCs and settings and situations but you can't really see how they'll play out in your head yet.

    But once you know who the actual characters are gonna be, suddenly that lifeless lump of a campaign begins coming to life before your eyes, and all these fun little connections and possibilities start suggesting themselves. It's incredibly exciting and invigorating, and it's totally happened here and given me the energy to keep working on the fiddly details.

    rRwz9.gif
  • SnowbearSnowbear Registered User regular
    Thanks for the ideas all!

    8EVmPzM.jpg
  • MatevMatev Cero Miedo Registered User regular
    edited April 2019
    Um....holy shit. I went to today's Deadlands session thinking they'd putter around a little more and set up for the endgame next session. Silly me. Strap on your six-shooters, here's the story of the Flood finale.
    Tonight, on Deadlands, the posse freed the angel Sabtabiel. It judged them all as sinners and attempted to smite them from the earth. After a skirmish in the heart of it's prison, it was banished and the final petroglyph needed for their ritual was revealed. Upon marking the glyph, the posse debated the next course of action.

    It was decided to follow the fleeing members of the Cult of Lost Angels. This lead the group to a seemingly abandoned chapel. A quick search found a secret tunnel beneath the altar.

    Traveling in the long dark, the posse could tell they were passing under Santa Anna's occupying Mexican army, which explained how the cultists could leave the city under siege.

    The Tunnel emerged in the Deadland formerly known as Ghost Town, ever burning from Dr. Darius Hellstromme's Ghostfire bombs dropped at the start of the campaign. Knowing they were running out of time, and that another opportunity may not arise, the posse elected to trek through the burning hot terrorscape to steal into Lost Angels. Several heat surges and run ins with the burnin dead later, the posse found a way into the city, but had lost one of their Blessed, Isadora to a particularly fiendish and hulking flaming corpse

    After recuperating and preparing, the Posse used the stolen robes of Guardian Angels to infiltrate the Cathedral of Lost Angels at the appointed time and confronted Reverend Ezekiah Grimme and his 13 'Ghouls', his original flock who had cannibalized his 1st incarnation during the Great Quake of 68.

    Carter the blind martial artist cut himself open and spilled blood on the ground, sundering the Cathedral and beginning the Flood Ritual. A heated, pitched battle ensued, with Grimme and the 13 unleashing all their unholy might to stop the ritual, and on the other side, the posse bring everything they had and more to bear.

    The 13 were wiped out by a well placed bundle of sanctified smiting dynamite, and Angel of Death felled by a sniper shot. John Henry, the silver tongued former Bayou Vermillion Engineer, bought Carter precious seconds taunting Grimme and paid for it by having his soul whupped out of him by the Right Reverend's signature hickory stick.

    By hook, crook, and Huckster Cecilia Whatley clinging to the Leader of the Lost's robes, the Flood crashed down on the City of Lost Angels, washing it all away in a mighty deluge.

    The surviving posse members had only minutes to celebrate once they found they had miraculously survived the Flood, when a pale gunslinger in a longcoat covered in shot Sheriff stars appeared, taunting them that it was the end of the line. A valiant fight was put up, with Carter finally calling the seemingly unkillable creature into a duel. All of the drifter's victims were shot through the head in the end, but the Maze had been saved from a great evil.....

    It's my first campaign I've actually run to completion and I'm both sad and happy. Everyone loved it and can't wait for our next dip into the setting.

    Matev on
    "Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
    Hail Hydra
  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun

    Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job

    It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?

    @SirEtchwarts NICE! I, too, am playing in an Agents of Shield game and it rules.

    We're using a homebrew system cooked up by a forumer. It's a really rules-light system because we play over Discord and typing out lots of dice rolls can eat up a lot of time, so it might not be best for your situation. But you have options. Off the top of my head, there's

    Icons - the premier FATE superhero game. If you've ever played a FATE game, you know basically what to expect; Icons has all the advantages of FATE (it easily handles power disparities between characters, because characters are balanced not by the strength of their powers but by their Aspects. there's a reasonable amount of customization and crunch) and all the disadvantages of FATE (the fact that everything you do in the game is, when boiled down, just adding or subtracting Aspects to or from a scene to fill up an enemy's Stress track can end up feeling kind of disconnected and bloodless).

    Worlds in Peril - a Powered by the Apocalypse superhero game. Again, if you've played PbtA, you know what to expect: characters are definied by their narrative Moves rather than how good they throw a rock or whatever. The game enables big-time superhero action but keeps the focus on the emotions of the team and their interplay.

    Masks: A New Generation - another PbtA superhero game, this one specifically about teen superheroes. Where Worlds in Peril is meant to let you play basically anything/anyone, Masks is built from the ground up around the teen theme and characters suffering unrequited love, fits of impulsive anger or jealousy, and having a great deal of influence on each other (to the point that your teammates can actually change things on your character sheet, in certain conditions). It'd still work well for SHIELD if you wanted to do a very, like, CW take with a lot of jealousy and betrayal.

    Marvel Heroic Roleplaying - This game is out of print (though not hard to find; it only went OOP a couple years ago). And it's worth tracking down, as it's a very highly-regarded game if you're able to come to grips with somewhat abstracted rules. I wouldn't call it a "narrative" system in the way that PbtA is, but powers and so forth are all phrased in relative rather than absolute terms: for instance, characters have different power levels if they're solo versus on a team. Some people find it a hard game to wrap their heads around but if you can, it solves a lot of the potential problems with superhero gaming in an elegant and original way.

    Mutants and Masterminds, 3rd Edition - the premier traditional superhero game. The basic resolution mechanics will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played a lot of D&D and the gameplay at the table is immediately accessible. What isn't accessible is the fiddly nature of building your characters in the first place; the entire system is point-buy, with superhero powers and powersets constructed out of lots of individual bits and pieces, each with a cost. You need patience and a spreadsheet to make an M&M character, and the GM needs to supervise the process to steer players away from making overpowered fuckbeasts of characters (someone who dumps all their points into being able to teleport people beyond the orbit of Pluto, so they freeze and suffocate to death with no hope of return) or a useless wtf character (like the forumer here who, many years ago, made a haunted chandelier. Yes. It was a chandelier possessed by a ghost, and the ghost had the Intangible and Invisible properties so nobody could see or hear it and it couldn't actually move the chandelier. You'd think this was a joke, except he got mad when the other players didn't interact with him during the game - he thought they should buy telepathy to talk to him!).

    Another option, as someone mentioned, would be to use The Chronicles of Darkness and the Hunter: the Vigil splatbook, since those games are explicitly about ordinary humans going up against super-powered menaces. (The dude who's running the SHIELD game I'm in actually ran an abortive DC universe Checkmate game this way several years ago, and that game kind of led to our current one.)

    rRwz9.gif
  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    Matev wrote: »
    Um....holy shit. I went to today's Deadlands session thinking they'd putter around a little more and set up for the endgame next session. Silly me. Strap on your six-shooters, here's the story of the Flood finale.
    Tonight, on Deadlands, the posse freed the angel Sabtabiel. It judged them all as sinners and attempted to smite them from the earth. After a skirmish in the heart of it's prison, it was banished and the final glyph was revealed. Upon marking the glyph, the posse debated the next course of action.

    It was decided to follow the fleeing members of the Cult of Lost Angels. This lead the group to a seemingly abandoned chapel. A quick search found a secret tunnel beneath the altar.

    Traveling in the long dark, the posse could tell they were passing under the occupying Mexican army, which explained how the cultists could leave the city under siege.

    The Tunnel emerged in the Deadland formerly known as Ghost Town. Knowing they were running out of time, and that another opportunity may not arise, the posse elected to trek through the burning hot hellscape to steal into Lost Angels. Several heat surges and run ins with the burnin dead later, the posse found a way into the city, but had lost one of their Blessed, Isadora.

    Recuperating and preparing, the Posse used the stolen robes of Guardian Angels to infiltrate the Cathedral of Lost Angels at the appointed time and confronted Grimme and his 13 Ghouls.

    Carter cut himself open and spilled blood on the ground, sundering the Cathedral and beginning the Flood. A heated, pitched battle ensued, with Grimme and the 13 unleashing all their unholy might to stop the ritual, and on the other side, the posse bring everything they had and more to bear.

    The 13 were wiped out by a well placed bundle of sanctified smiting dynamite, and the Angel of Death felled by a sniper shot. John Henry, the silver tongued former Bayou Vermillion Engineer, bought Carter precious seconds taunting Grimmer, and paid for it by having his soul whupped out of him by the Right Reverend's signature hickory stick.

    By hook, crook, and Cecilia Whatley clinging to the Leader of the Lost's robes, the Flood crashed down on the City of Lost Angels, washing it all away in a mighty flood.

    The surviving posse members had only minutes to celebrate once they found they had miraculously survived the Flood, when a pale gunslinger in a longcoat covered in Sheriff stars appeared, taunting them that it was the end of the line. A valiant fight was put up, with Carter finally calling the seemingly unkillable creature into a duel. All of the drifter's victims were shot through the head in the end, but the Maze had been saved from a great evil.....

    It's my first campaign I've actually run to completion and I'm both sad and happy. Everyone loved it and can't wait for our next dip into the setting.

    I've never played Deadlands and only understood about 60% of this but from what I can tell it sounds hardcore. What a rad conclusion.

    rRwz9.gif
  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
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