Okay folks so here's the deal: I've presented my players with a big quest to go on and would like help on actually, you know, making it a big quest.''
The game is Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and the mission is this: The players, along with two NPC crews, have been given the task of finding and retrieving lost capital warships in a vast ship graveyard in the Core, recently discovered by happenstance.
Here's the steps to the mission they've been told so far:
First, they have to go meet with someone who will rig their ship with a spoofing rig so that if their ship gets inspected by any authorities, their hyperspace computer will not reveal that they have gone into this highly illegal area.
Second, they will deliver some mundane and legal cargo to another contact, who will in turn provide them with supplies and software necessary to crack through security systems and slave the ships systems so that only a few people can control a capital ship for a bit.
Third, they have to jump into the Core, and then make a series of jumps within that space to get to the graveyard while having avoided checkpoints and patrols.
Fourth, once inside the graveyard they will have to access the ships there to find one that is still in good enough condition to travel through hyperspace. They will have to board it, deactivate any automated defenses still online, and slave the systems so they can jump the ship out of the Core and to designated coordinates where the ships can be retrieved.
The pay for the job is going to vary based on what sort of ship gets brought back and what all is on-board it, so the majority of their pay is TBD but they've been promised 25k credits and any repairs covered for damages incurred on their own ship.
So give me some ideas for all kinds of nasty stuff I can throw at them to find when boarding old abandoned starships, or obstacles I can throw at them along the way.
KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
The raptor people that use souls to power their ships
These things I made called the White Ones for DH that my friend converted to EoE I believe. They’re blind mutated aliens with razor sharp talons and teeth but they only really perceive sound and the force. So jedi and force sensitives are like giant klaxons to them.
Big old broken down war bots with extremely deadly weaponry but with very poor perception so they can break down walls and stomp about the place but they have to catch the characters first.
Okay folks so here's the deal: I've presented my players with a big quest to go on and would like help on actually, you know, making it a big quest.''
The game is Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and the mission is this: The players, along with two NPC crews, have been given the task of finding and retrieving lost capital warships in a vast ship graveyard in the Core, recently discovered by happenstance.
Here's the steps to the mission they've been told so far:
First, they have to go meet with someone who will rig their ship with a spoofing rig so that if their ship gets inspected by any authorities, their hyperspace computer will not reveal that they have gone into this highly illegal area.
Second, they will deliver some mundane and legal cargo to another contact, who will in turn provide them with supplies and software necessary to crack through security systems and slave the ships systems so that only a few people can control a capital ship for a bit.
Third, they have to jump into the Core, and then make a series of jumps within that space to get to the graveyard while having avoided checkpoints and patrols.
Fourth, once inside the graveyard they will have to access the ships there to find one that is still in good enough condition to travel through hyperspace. They will have to board it, deactivate any automated defenses still online, and slave the systems so they can jump the ship out of the Core and to designated coordinates where the ships can be retrieved.
The pay for the job is going to vary based on what sort of ship gets brought back and what all is on-board it, so the majority of their pay is TBD but they've been promised 25k credits and any repairs covered for damages incurred on their own ship.
So give me some ideas for all kinds of nasty stuff I can throw at them to find when boarding old abandoned starships, or obstacles I can throw at them along the way.
A rival crew that comes upon them when half of them have boarded some ship who are trying to do the same thing and want to take out the competition. Best if you introduce them early and have them screw them over along the way a couple times (maybe they don't sneak past the authorities very well and they are on alert when our heroes come through) or they actively try to sabotage them by reporting them to the fuzz.
Also depending on how old the ships are and what conflict they range from having the hypercompetant soldier who doesn't know the war is over and wont listen (maybe at first maybe ever) is great that they accidentally wake up.
Similarly having a trap that they trigger and a warhead or something that they need to find and deactivate before it add them to the ship graveyard is good.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Okay folks so here's the deal: I've presented my players with a big quest to go on and would like help on actually, you know, making it a big quest.''
The game is Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and the mission is this: The players, along with two NPC crews, have been given the task of finding and retrieving lost capital warships in a vast ship graveyard in the Core, recently discovered by happenstance.
Here's the steps to the mission they've been told so far:
First, they have to go meet with someone who will rig their ship with a spoofing rig so that if their ship gets inspected by any authorities, their hyperspace computer will not reveal that they have gone into this highly illegal area.
Second, they will deliver some mundane and legal cargo to another contact, who will in turn provide them with supplies and software necessary to crack through security systems and slave the ships systems so that only a few people can control a capital ship for a bit.
Third, they have to jump into the Core, and then make a series of jumps within that space to get to the graveyard while having avoided checkpoints and patrols.
Fourth, once inside the graveyard they will have to access the ships there to find one that is still in good enough condition to travel through hyperspace. They will have to board it, deactivate any automated defenses still online, and slave the systems so they can jump the ship out of the Core and to designated coordinates where the ships can be retrieved.
The pay for the job is going to vary based on what sort of ship gets brought back and what all is on-board it, so the majority of their pay is TBD but they've been promised 25k credits and any repairs covered for damages incurred on their own ship.
So give me some ideas for all kinds of nasty stuff I can throw at them to find when boarding old abandoned starships, or obstacles I can throw at them along the way.
A rival crew that comes upon them when half of them have boarded some ship who are trying to do the same thing and want to take out the competition. Best if you introduce them early and have them screw them over along the way a couple times (maybe they don't sneak past the authorities very well and they are on alert when our heroes come through) or they actively try to sabotage them by reporting them to the fuzz.
Also depending on how old the ships are and what conflict they range from having the hypercompetant soldier who doesn't know the war is over and wont listen (maybe at first maybe ever) is great that they accidentally wake up.
Similarly having a trap that they trigger and a warhead or something that they need to find and deactivate before it add them to the ship graveyard is good.
Could easily be some old battle droid or something.
My mind also immediately went to Alien-like horror elements as well.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
First Only War beastman session tonight, pretty great. Felt Apocalypse Now-like with a lot of it traversing water having to deal with different obstacles and dilemmas.
When we had a medicae heal up some damage done to a foxman (who kept getting the best rolls with his gun including two consecutive crits even missing an eye and sustaining cranial damage), I had my hyenaman genuinely ask the pure human medicae if he had veterinarian knowledge since he helped the beastman a lot.
The dude just looks at me and soberly says, “no.”
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
Good shit with vigilante campaign tonight. Got to give them all a taste of their civilian lives along with secretly introducing new important characters and opening up their path forward. They also essentially made a new path I hadn’t thought of that made total sense and I quickly modified a map for. Made a confidential informant that I hadn’t thought of before but which also made sense. Cornered and interrogated a dude that would have been a tough sniper boss fight if they hadn’t acted smart.
I could not have done this campaign without the five years experience of GMing and playing and the confidence built to improvise on the fly and have a foundation as a backup.
Holy crap, we had a good time just making characters and a ship last night.
The ship-making was an hour long bartering process between the members of the party to figure out how much debt we wanted to be in compared to how capable we wanted our ship to be. We went from a freighter-sized ship to a corvette and back, and each changed sides on different gear/equipment debates. It was hilarious.
And to.think, nobody took me up on the offer to have a smaller ship than either of those and only sleep in little coffin-sized cabins. Luckily they were into the idea of an unreliable AI as our ship's flaw instead of the others. Having watched Dark Matter in the last year, and them mentioning Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide, i think we'll have fun with it.
Because my character is a pilot they made me throw scribe for the Ship Sheet. So. Much. Erasing.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
On that DnD PC to DH villain conversion, the tiefling paladin has gathered a “warband” of bandits and orcs in our DnD game. They’ve been pretty helpful in that game.
In DH I’m going to turn them into gangers and the rare khornate orks as his minions.
Also unlike the DnD Paladin of Conquest who cares so much about what his orcs think that he won’t let gobbos into the warband and constantly asks if they’re okay with magic, this Paladin of Chaos Undivided does not give a shit what they think and uses his powers openly and will beat the ones that complain.
I actually kind of depowered the Unexpectables conversion for the Malice campaign because the stand in for Remy the Eldritch Knight was a Khornate like his master, the prophet of the brass prince, and I realized, “fuck he can’t use smite now lorewise.”
Still a good fight with not-Task pulling weight and not-Panic memorably getting psychic phenomena on like every roll.
i thought we'd make our Exalted characters in 4 hours together, leaving 2-ish hours for a prologue
with me having completed mine BEFORE the session to help, it still took 8 hours
i forgot the cronch
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
The vigilantes have chosen their names and costumes.
Death Rattle - Felinid morticator (mortician) by day, gas mask and trenchcoat-wearing marksman by night.
Blue Wing - Cabaret dancer by day, blue-and-black armoured domino-wearing acrobatic investigator and melee specialist by night.
Dr. Mercy - Back-alley chymist and chirurgeon by day, brutal hand-to-hand and toxin using fighter with an intimidating dark outfit with a sack bag on his head and slipknot around his throat by night.
Pomp Punk - Grocery store attendant by day, fancy hooded and scarfed silver-tongued brawler by night.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
Y’all ever seen that disturbing gory claymation video of the Simpsons getting murdered? It was just randomly in my twitter feed one day near Halloween last year and it kind of fucked me up for like two nights after I saw it. I would not recommend it if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing.
Anyway, for DH I think the way to raise their fervor in their vigilante work is going to emulate the threat of that video happening with the regular group of NPCs at their favorite bar. They have heard a group has been picking people off the street and testing some drug that has been leaving them convulsive messes they throw in the gutter. That group, unfortunately, chooses the bar the players go to at a quieter time. They come in silently with sound suppressive devices when the group is upstairs with an NPC helping them figure out a weird cipher. When they come down they find a chilling scene.
The difference between that video and the game being they can save everyone.
The players haven’t quite had it hit home yet the type of people they fight and why they need to do this. They know vaguely they need to cause trouble as their personas to distract the shadowy archvillain from their civilian selves by giving him a bigger more prominent target. They haven’t quite had their picnic in the park or burning dog house moment.
That and I’ll reward them in the form of equipment upgrades and two free cars the kidnappers’ corpses are leaving behind. Also money.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
So me and my friend who’s the GM who made the beastman auxilia rules try to make new different types of animal beastmen and give them their own bonuses and maluses, special abilities,starting skills, and the like.
We came up with one for Red Pandamen and it’s the only one with maluses outweighing the bonuses.
Penalty to Intelligence, penalty to Toughness, bonus to Fellowship
Has two special traits
Too Cute to let Die: Other characters gain bonuses on rolling medicae tests to treat this character.
Too Stupid to Live: Red Pandamen gain the Curious talent that has them roll willpower to not investigate new things.
I would say there’s a strong split between Too Stupid to Live and Too Paranoid to Accomplish Anything.
I’m definitely Too Stupid to Live.
I used to be the latter.
I had a GM chastise me for it. He was right I was being a bit of a coward at a point.
Now I'm like in the direct middle.
I charge and scream at orks to shoot at my hyenaman to draw their fire from wounded comrades.
When those like 9 ghouls, 9 skellymans, and 9 zombies in waves attacked our tiefling paladin I literally was like "tag me in, coach!" and tried to draw their attacks to my gnoll monk.
Matrix jumped over a bunch of bugbears in a tight corridor to save a friend and got downed for it.
Brazenly walked disguised right with a heretek that hated me as my feudal knight and lost my face because I took my time relishing my kill since she slipped from me the first time we met. She recognized the scratches she made on my shield.
Used my psychic powers in the middle of a crowded port in a panic to prove something as my cryomancer temp replacement, rolled psychic phenomena, made everyone see shadow daemons, and got shot by 30 different lasguns for my trouble.
Walked right up to a giant garden snake with an open oil can as my CoC investigator to see how it would react. Took pictures of it to sell to National Geographic.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
New guy joined us in DH, came to us running like he was an anime character with toast in his mouth, and almost shouted out loud that he was fellow inquisition during our covert mission.
My scarred and jaded Darth Vader-looking veteran knight had to give his character the most disappointed fatherly look of, “oh honey, no,” while shushing him and moving somewhere private to explain.
The guy and his character is great by the way. The naivety built in to his character really enhances his roleplaying and lack of knowledge of 40k lore complements that.
(exalted session 1 was last weekend and super fun, tomorrow is session 2, it's going a lot better than my first dance where the GM didn't learn the rules)
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
In our Only War Beastman campaign:
I am half-literally the teacher's pet.
I keep following the pure-human lieutenant's orders as my hyena beastman to the point I have lashed another soldier (I tried to go as light as I could).
I narc'd on a mutiny attempt against him.
I am Russel Crowe in American Gangster not taking the corrupt cop take and now everyone is going to hate me.
I just don't want to get shot for being an uncooperative non-pure abhuman in the Imperium, I'm not a boot licker!
edit: I burnt fate and my comrade is dead. I had a thing planned with them, too. Dammit.
Edit 2: but now I get to bring out my sassy Red Panda Beastwoman heavy gunner with her atrocious Joisey/Brooklynite accent, yay!
Glad I made her in a whim and then just kind of fell into using her.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
Ok, so in my Dark Heresy Vigilante game, one of my players had a dalliance of sorts. So, early on in the game they shot a guy on instinct who was running away from them. The guy turned out to be a vigilante type like them who was something of a veteran. The dude is essentially dressed like a blue-coated Rorscharch with a white face mask. One of the players lifted their face mask and realized it was a lady that the other player had asked out. Everyone had figured it out who this person was after all the hints I gave. Except for the guy.
I keep drawing gigantic hints. The person's outfit was weirdly unisex and had a strange barrel-chested effect almost like they were trying to hide something. They did not get it from that. The guy called this person and they said they wanted to meet at their place. I added this person was grunting from pain and they succeeded in their checks in realizing that's what they were hearing. They did not get it from that. They asked how they got hurt and the person said they fell down some stairs which was really bad excuse. They did not get it from that. Later, when they went over to their home, they clearly had a gunshot wound on the side that the player's ally had shot before. They did not get this. They asked about how they got it and even got to look at it with some charm. It was clearly a healing gunshot wound in the side their ally had shot. They did not get it from that. They then later looked in this person's canvass bag when they were distracted, and found the hand cannon they had on them when the players checked up on them and realized they were a fellow vigilante. They still did not get it. This dude went the entire session and didn't realize they had brought essentially female Rorschach home.
Everyone burst in laughter when I finally revealed who she was to the only player who still didn't get it.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited September 2019
Btw, this story is not told to belittle my player or insult him.
I actually love it as a combination of in-game roleplaying and real-life stuff that came together.
Meta-wise, the others figured it out because they know tropes and the like but possibly wouldn't have known in-character who it was except for the one who pulled up the mask to give the No-Show (that's her persona) essentially an inhaler puff of adrenaline to get them back up (after shooting and almost killing her). While all of them knew about the handcannon and the other equipment, since they searched through her equipment when the felinid player shot her (and also applied his role bonus extra damage) before they realized who she was, in-game none of them would really know who she is without seeing under the mask. Well, maybe if they put together the 6'5" woman in the bar might be the same person as the 6'5" masked man in the park. I did privately hint to one that I went with the player wanting to pursue an unplanned dalliance because it would be a great way to foreshadow their future involvement through little info drops by her here and there. Along with that, except the sniper-sized gunshot he saw which was the gigantic giveaway, she actually was keeping her secret pretty well. The design of the suit, the voice modulator she carried, the sunglasses she carried to hide a shiner she earned working the night she came into the bar, and her general demeanor change between her civilian identity and her vigilante persona wouldn't have given many hints. The player misread her shiftiness as her being abused by someone rather than a mixture of protecting her secret, being suspicious about another NPC genuinely (which he misread as romantic interest), and making sure this guy she did kind of go to the home of not knowing him very well wasn't a psycho. Which was mutual because the player was suspicious the whole time that she was going to kill him.
That might have been dispelled by a certain box on top of the handcannon in her canvass bag. Also, the fade-to-black right after she pulled him into his shower.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
Oh my god.
One of my players, in preparation for a date with an NPC, made a list in his journal section about all the things he has to find out, buy, and do for the date.
This list is placed in an entry called "Items on (Character's) Agenda; Highest to Lowest" and the date section is ranked above finding a cure for an experimental serum that makes victims OD.
This is incredibly endearing.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
In three sessions I have made these players invested in NPCs in a way that I could not for four years.
I'm very happy with them and the campaign.
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WACriminalDying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered Userregular
This year's "Mega RPG Jam" on itch.io has finished the 48-hour submission phase and entered final voting to determine the jam's overall winner. There are 46 entries this year.
The Mega RPG Jam is a competition in which participants are challenged to "create the most complete tabletop Role-Playing Game you can in just 48 hours!" This year's theme was, "You are not the hero".
An example of some kinds of things that were submitted this year:
The Wisdom of Our Elders -- An RPG where you play as the long dead mentors of the Chosen One. Artifacts of the Tarot -- An RPG where the players take on the role of intellegent items trying to exert their will on the world. Chosen One -- A comedy RPG for disaffected dungeon masters. The Shopkeeper -- Play as everyone's favorite NPC, sell things to adventuring parties, try not to get robbed.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited October 2019
I was hashing out background stuff for my felinid player in Vigilante when off of the prompt of him having no last name because he never knew his dad and his relationship with his mom is poor, I offered the idea of his mom being this wide-framed, rough-and-tumble, shotgun-wieldin', moonshine-makin', Margo Martindale-esque countryside hick farmer of a felinid.
She is perfectly content running a hunting lodge the Dog and Pony with her best friend Jeb the dog beastman who acts like an Elquon Manhound pet and bartender so he doesn't get lynched by the locals. She don't need her good-fer-nothin' son either who decided to run away and root around in dead bodies during the day (he's a morticator). He had no meat on them bones and weren't no good for farmwork and couldn't hold his rotgut at 7 nor his shine at 9 so what were he? This also insinuates the precise-spoken unemotive felinid character suppresses a thick country accent where the twist is it sounds like a country singer with the voice of honey. Also an embarassing last name (that gets worse with the twist with his dad).
He loved it.
During their vigilante patrols, an interrogation might lead them to a sadistic chemist's deal out in the sticks with the Drukhari at a coal farm for an ingredient that will fix a narcotic formula he's been trying to hash out. The closest inn near that place? The Dog and Pony.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
Even though in the moment I was silently like "what the fuck, dude," for my felinid player shooting the disguised veteran vigilante after definitely hearing about them in that same session including what they looked like in-costume, it has surprisingly led to a lot of character development, exposition, foreshadowing, and cool character moments for all of them.
So I guess thanks for shooting her, bud
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dresdenphileWatch out for snakes!Registered Userregular
KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited October 2019
The komododragon beastman in the OW Beastman campaign convinced traitor guardsmen looking right at him that he was a crocodile-adjacent animal when he failed three stealth tests and finally succeeded a final opposed one. He was in a river.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I think I'm going to start running quarterly one shots of all these different games I have. I'm a DM in one group and a player in another and right now it's all 5e, and theres just all these systems that cry out to be played. I figure I'll extend the invitation out to both groups and see who can play and pick the game based on who wants to come. I ran it by one of my players who DMs his own group, and he was super down for it.
KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited October 2019
Played out two dates tonight in DH.
One player learned that his new goth catboy boyfriend is a published writer of poetry and short stories under a pen name that hangs out in a cemetery. After that, they went to a pet cafe that held miniature wyverns and six-legged bears (both of those are canon in 40k) along with an assortment of puppies and kittens. Also two marrus, winged lion-sized feline creatures (that are also canon) that tried to headbutt him. Then a jokaero sneakily stole his gun and made it better. Playing out the felinid nervously asking him to go out was great.
Another intimidated a dude being really loud and racist at his felinid date for blocking a movie screen with her ears. This was the one who made the list of things for the date. He learned she really wants to go to his home continent to map out the parts of basically not-Australia that they can't get via satellite. She has to get past the cartography guild first though. (This is basically a way of getting to his epilogue to this adventure where they travel together to do that).
Also, that felinid character is going home because they found out about the drukhari dealing with the local underworld in a secretive meeting a kilometer away from his home. I am going to introduce his dad he never knew that actually came back to his mom after the PC ran away from home at some point in the middle of the next session. With two of his brothers and a sister all whom he never knew he had.
Also, they're finally fighting dudes who wanted to steal a kid's unique bionic heart to save a dying guildmaster.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Contrasting one of your recent DH posts with one of your older DH posts gives a real strong "what happened here?" element. I love it!
Contrasting one of your recent DH posts with one of your older DH posts gives a real strong "what happened here?" element. I love it!
I got more comfortable, adjusted my expectations accordingly, clearly communicated with my players, and also got a lot more practice playing out personal relationships and women. I realized I like this stuff because it builds up stakes and investment in the players rather than having a thing where they go place to place with no connections.
Mind you, for playing women I keep having to put an accent on or some sort of tilt to feel good with it. I do Irish, Scottish, English, Joisey, and actually my Kae’Arh Ess’Wunn voice, who is a female gnoll, is kind of based of a voice of an African American player in my undergrad so I got a lot more comfortable doing that (also doing black voices in general without sounding like a caricature).
I’m also not franticly throwing everything I like at a wall and hoping it sticks and have a better framework to work with. 5 years of experience helps with that.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
Oh! One of my favorite parts of the night other than the felinid player being giddy about his new gun upgrades: I did the three panel Hellboy bit with the Jokaero and some pedestrians. “Is that monkey?” “He’s got a gun!” “*Bang!**Bang!*”
Although the *bang* was his climbing up a pipe with a clang.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
If you want a blast from the past post for me though I did have to yell at the players that interrogations require questions to be asked which they still haven't gotten for a couple of sessions and that intimidating someone is, in fact, an intimidation test and not a charm test. Sometimes they do not understand very simple things and I don't mean game rules or that you should probably pick up bullets if you're hiding a crime scene but just like common sense stuff.
That and I had a big heart to heart with a veteran player about two weekends ago about him hurting my feelings that for the past year or so even into the vanilla Dark Heresy campaign it feels like he hadn't been paying attention. Where big revelations and surprises would happen and he would almost invariably say, "sorry, what happened again?" and I'd make a big disappointed sigh and repeat myself. This would come after me calling it to his attention by calling out his or his character's name and then waiting through seconds of silence. My issue not being that sometimes people zone out or are just naturally passive players. My issue is that I put 110% into his games, add content to them, and am extremely active and attentive and put in a lot of input into his games and I wasn't receiving output or what felt like the mutual bare minimum in my games. He's also basically been roleplaying with me since near the beginning, is the most knowledgable about the game, and we talk about it all the time along with other stuff.
He did apologize and promised to be better and to be honest, he was this last session except for one point of the night he did it again (during his date) and the other players recognizing my frustration repeated what I said for him. I asked them if they liked roleplaying out the dates and they both were really happy with it so it wasn't that. Having a bit of behind the screen syndrome plus using faceless discord but one told me they were smiling the entire time and the other was basically like their character at the end of it. We are not in the habit of lying to each other to spare feelings and are both extremely honest with each other to the point of in the past saying to each others' faces that a certain encounter sucked, took way too long, was way too unfair, took us out of our comfort zone, and both of us changed stuff to fix it.
Still kind of hurts but it hurts thinking about it and not as a continuous feeling in the game. Right before the game Friday thinking about it I got kind of depressed thinking about it happening in the past and happening again. I really love this stuff, put a lot of time into it writing, finding maps, making characters, thinking out scenarios, and the like. My time during grad school is exceptionally precious where I work all week so I can save up time for the weekend and just let go for a bit. So when that time feels squandered or wasted I feel bad and shitty and unappreciated. I'd rather someone who had a problem that wouldn't be up to fixing it or compromising or just not having a great time to just leave.
The reason I really like this guy is he is also very honest about his weaknesses as much as I am with mine. I can communicate with this dude when I couldn't with the last like four people who had a problem that left without worrying about a confrontation or making things sour by just telling the truth of how we feel.
So that's kind of why the majority of my newer posts have been pretty happy or just recounting fun tidbits that happened. There is so much less bullshit bubbling beneath the surface from my side or others. My philosophy now is be true and fuck 'em if they don't like it. By "fuck 'em" I truly mean make an honest attempt to reconcile problems and if that doesn't work amicably leave the games without a fuss and let it be clear it wouldn't hurt your personal relationship to do so but still.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
There aren't many worse feelings than a player just not paying attention. A lot of my players sit on their phones when they aren't active (we play combat-light games with a lot of spotlight switching) which bugs me, but when focus switches to them they react quickly and are usually aware of what's been going on. If that trend shifted we would need to have some talks.
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The game is Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and the mission is this: The players, along with two NPC crews, have been given the task of finding and retrieving lost capital warships in a vast ship graveyard in the Core, recently discovered by happenstance.
Here's the steps to the mission they've been told so far:
First, they have to go meet with someone who will rig their ship with a spoofing rig so that if their ship gets inspected by any authorities, their hyperspace computer will not reveal that they have gone into this highly illegal area.
Second, they will deliver some mundane and legal cargo to another contact, who will in turn provide them with supplies and software necessary to crack through security systems and slave the ships systems so that only a few people can control a capital ship for a bit.
Third, they have to jump into the Core, and then make a series of jumps within that space to get to the graveyard while having avoided checkpoints and patrols.
Fourth, once inside the graveyard they will have to access the ships there to find one that is still in good enough condition to travel through hyperspace. They will have to board it, deactivate any automated defenses still online, and slave the systems so they can jump the ship out of the Core and to designated coordinates where the ships can be retrieved.
The pay for the job is going to vary based on what sort of ship gets brought back and what all is on-board it, so the majority of their pay is TBD but they've been promised 25k credits and any repairs covered for damages incurred on their own ship.
So give me some ideas for all kinds of nasty stuff I can throw at them to find when boarding old abandoned starships, or obstacles I can throw at them along the way.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
These things I made called the White Ones for DH that my friend converted to EoE I believe. They’re blind mutated aliens with razor sharp talons and teeth but they only really perceive sound and the force. So jedi and force sensitives are like giant klaxons to them.
Big old broken down war bots with extremely deadly weaponry but with very poor perception so they can break down walls and stomp about the place but they have to catch the characters first.
A rival crew that comes upon them when half of them have boarded some ship who are trying to do the same thing and want to take out the competition. Best if you introduce them early and have them screw them over along the way a couple times (maybe they don't sneak past the authorities very well and they are on alert when our heroes come through) or they actively try to sabotage them by reporting them to the fuzz.
Also depending on how old the ships are and what conflict they range from having the hypercompetant soldier who doesn't know the war is over and wont listen (maybe at first maybe ever) is great that they accidentally wake up.
Similarly having a trap that they trigger and a warhead or something that they need to find and deactivate before it add them to the ship graveyard is good.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Could easily be some old battle droid or something.
My mind also immediately went to Alien-like horror elements as well.
When we had a medicae heal up some damage done to a foxman (who kept getting the best rolls with his gun including two consecutive crits even missing an eye and sustaining cranial damage), I had my hyenaman genuinely ask the pure human medicae if he had veterinarian knowledge since he helped the beastman a lot.
The dude just looks at me and soberly says, “no.”
I could not have done this campaign without the five years experience of GMing and playing and the confidence built to improvise on the fly and have a foundation as a backup.
Holy crap, we had a good time just making characters and a ship last night.
The ship-making was an hour long bartering process between the members of the party to figure out how much debt we wanted to be in compared to how capable we wanted our ship to be. We went from a freighter-sized ship to a corvette and back, and each changed sides on different gear/equipment debates. It was hilarious.
And to.think, nobody took me up on the offer to have a smaller ship than either of those and only sleep in little coffin-sized cabins. Luckily they were into the idea of an unreliable AI as our ship's flaw instead of the others. Having watched Dark Matter in the last year, and them mentioning Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide, i think we'll have fun with it.
Because my character is a pilot they made me throw scribe for the Ship Sheet. So. Much. Erasing.
In DH I’m going to turn them into gangers and the rare khornate orks as his minions.
Also unlike the DnD Paladin of Conquest who cares so much about what his orcs think that he won’t let gobbos into the warband and constantly asks if they’re okay with magic, this Paladin of Chaos Undivided does not give a shit what they think and uses his powers openly and will beat the ones that complain.
I actually kind of depowered the Unexpectables conversion for the Malice campaign because the stand in for Remy the Eldritch Knight was a Khornate like his master, the prophet of the brass prince, and I realized, “fuck he can’t use smite now lorewise.”
Still a good fight with not-Task pulling weight and not-Panic memorably getting psychic phenomena on like every roll.
with me having completed mine BEFORE the session to help, it still took 8 hours
i forgot the cronch
Death Rattle - Felinid morticator (mortician) by day, gas mask and trenchcoat-wearing marksman by night.
Blue Wing - Cabaret dancer by day, blue-and-black armoured domino-wearing acrobatic investigator and melee specialist by night.
Dr. Mercy - Back-alley chymist and chirurgeon by day, brutal hand-to-hand and toxin using fighter with an intimidating dark outfit with a sack bag on his head and slipknot around his throat by night.
Pomp Punk - Grocery store attendant by day, fancy hooded and scarfed silver-tongued brawler by night.
Anyway, for DH I think the way to raise their fervor in their vigilante work is going to emulate the threat of that video happening with the regular group of NPCs at their favorite bar. They have heard a group has been picking people off the street and testing some drug that has been leaving them convulsive messes they throw in the gutter. That group, unfortunately, chooses the bar the players go to at a quieter time. They come in silently with sound suppressive devices when the group is upstairs with an NPC helping them figure out a weird cipher. When they come down they find a chilling scene.
The difference between that video and the game being they can save everyone.
The players haven’t quite had it hit home yet the type of people they fight and why they need to do this. They know vaguely they need to cause trouble as their personas to distract the shadowy archvillain from their civilian selves by giving him a bigger more prominent target. They haven’t quite had their picnic in the park or burning dog house moment.
That and I’ll reward them in the form of equipment upgrades and two free cars the kidnappers’ corpses are leaving behind. Also money.
We came up with one for Red Pandamen and it’s the only one with maluses outweighing the bonuses.
Penalty to Intelligence, penalty to Toughness, bonus to Fellowship
Has two special traits
Too Cute to let Die: Other characters gain bonuses on rolling medicae tests to treat this character.
Too Stupid to Live: Red Pandamen gain the Curious talent that has them roll willpower to not investigate new things.
Starting Skills:
Charm
Starting Wounds: -1 to roll
and that’s all they get.
I’m definitely Too Stupid to Live.
I used to be the latter.
I had a GM chastise me for it. He was right I was being a bit of a coward at a point.
Now I'm like in the direct middle.
I charge and scream at orks to shoot at my hyenaman to draw their fire from wounded comrades.
When those like 9 ghouls, 9 skellymans, and 9 zombies in waves attacked our tiefling paladin I literally was like "tag me in, coach!" and tried to draw their attacks to my gnoll monk.
Matrix jumped over a bunch of bugbears in a tight corridor to save a friend and got downed for it.
Brazenly walked disguised right with a heretek that hated me as my feudal knight and lost my face because I took my time relishing my kill since she slipped from me the first time we met. She recognized the scratches she made on my shield.
Used my psychic powers in the middle of a crowded port in a panic to prove something as my cryomancer temp replacement, rolled psychic phenomena, made everyone see shadow daemons, and got shot by 30 different lasguns for my trouble.
Walked right up to a giant garden snake with an open oil can as my CoC investigator to see how it would react. Took pictures of it to sell to National Geographic.
My scarred and jaded Darth Vader-looking veteran knight had to give his character the most disappointed fatherly look of, “oh honey, no,” while shushing him and moving somewhere private to explain.
The guy and his character is great by the way. The naivety built in to his character really enhances his roleplaying and lack of knowledge of 40k lore complements that.
https://www.lotcastingatemi.com/ makes exalted character management... manageable? wh
(exalted session 1 was last weekend and super fun, tomorrow is session 2, it's going a lot better than my first dance where the GM didn't learn the rules)
I am half-literally the teacher's pet.
I keep following the pure-human lieutenant's orders as my hyena beastman to the point I have lashed another soldier (I tried to go as light as I could).
I narc'd on a mutiny attempt against him.
I am Russel Crowe in American Gangster not taking the corrupt cop take and now everyone is going to hate me.
I just don't want to get shot for being an uncooperative non-pure abhuman in the Imperium, I'm not a boot licker!
edit: I burnt fate and my comrade is dead. I had a thing planned with them, too. Dammit.
Edit 2: but now I get to bring out my sassy Red Panda Beastwoman heavy gunner with her atrocious Joisey/Brooklynite accent, yay!
Glad I made her in a whim and then just kind of fell into using her.
I keep drawing gigantic hints. The person's outfit was weirdly unisex and had a strange barrel-chested effect almost like they were trying to hide something. They did not get it from that. The guy called this person and they said they wanted to meet at their place. I added this person was grunting from pain and they succeeded in their checks in realizing that's what they were hearing. They did not get it from that. They asked how they got hurt and the person said they fell down some stairs which was really bad excuse. They did not get it from that. Later, when they went over to their home, they clearly had a gunshot wound on the side that the player's ally had shot before. They did not get this. They asked about how they got it and even got to look at it with some charm. It was clearly a healing gunshot wound in the side their ally had shot. They did not get it from that. They then later looked in this person's canvass bag when they were distracted, and found the hand cannon they had on them when the players checked up on them and realized they were a fellow vigilante. They still did not get it. This dude went the entire session and didn't realize they had brought essentially female Rorschach home.
Everyone burst in laughter when I finally revealed who she was to the only player who still didn't get it.
I actually love it as a combination of in-game roleplaying and real-life stuff that came together.
Meta-wise, the others figured it out because they know tropes and the like but possibly wouldn't have known in-character who it was except for the one who pulled up the mask to give the No-Show (that's her persona) essentially an inhaler puff of adrenaline to get them back up (after shooting and almost killing her). While all of them knew about the handcannon and the other equipment, since they searched through her equipment when the felinid player shot her (and also applied his role bonus extra damage) before they realized who she was, in-game none of them would really know who she is without seeing under the mask. Well, maybe if they put together the 6'5" woman in the bar might be the same person as the 6'5" masked man in the park. I did privately hint to one that I went with the player wanting to pursue an unplanned dalliance because it would be a great way to foreshadow their future involvement through little info drops by her here and there. Along with that, except the sniper-sized gunshot he saw which was the gigantic giveaway, she actually was keeping her secret pretty well. The design of the suit, the voice modulator she carried, the sunglasses she carried to hide a shiner she earned working the night she came into the bar, and her general demeanor change between her civilian identity and her vigilante persona wouldn't have given many hints. The player misread her shiftiness as her being abused by someone rather than a mixture of protecting her secret, being suspicious about another NPC genuinely (which he misread as romantic interest), and making sure this guy she did kind of go to the home of not knowing him very well wasn't a psycho. Which was mutual because the player was suspicious the whole time that she was going to kill him.
That might have been dispelled by a certain box on top of the handcannon in her canvass bag. Also, the fade-to-black right after she pulled him into his shower.
One of my players, in preparation for a date with an NPC, made a list in his journal section about all the things he has to find out, buy, and do for the date.
This list is placed in an entry called "Items on (Character's) Agenda; Highest to Lowest" and the date section is ranked above finding a cure for an experimental serum that makes victims OD.
This is incredibly endearing.
I'm very happy with them and the campaign.
She is perfectly content running a hunting lodge the Dog and Pony with her best friend Jeb the dog beastman who acts like an Elquon Manhound pet and bartender so he doesn't get lynched by the locals. She don't need her good-fer-nothin' son either who decided to run away and root around in dead bodies during the day (he's a morticator). He had no meat on them bones and weren't no good for farmwork and couldn't hold his rotgut at 7 nor his shine at 9 so what were he? This also insinuates the precise-spoken unemotive felinid character suppresses a thick country accent where the twist is it sounds like a country singer with the voice of honey. Also an embarassing last name (that gets worse with the twist with his dad).
He loved it.
During their vigilante patrols, an interrogation might lead them to a sadistic chemist's deal out in the sticks with the Drukhari at a coal farm for an ingredient that will fix a narcotic formula he's been trying to hash out. The closest inn near that place? The Dog and Pony.
So I guess thanks for shooting her, bud
https://www.feastoflegends.com/
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I'll catch it on the podcast, and I'll try real hard not to crash on my commute as Sam is the DM and hes fucking hilarious.
But Wendy's is paying them to play it, yes? Its sponsored content?
OK. I think I answered my own question...
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
One player learned that his new goth catboy boyfriend is a published writer of poetry and short stories under a pen name that hangs out in a cemetery. After that, they went to a pet cafe that held miniature wyverns and six-legged bears (both of those are canon in 40k) along with an assortment of puppies and kittens. Also two marrus, winged lion-sized feline creatures (that are also canon) that tried to headbutt him. Then a jokaero sneakily stole his gun and made it better. Playing out the felinid nervously asking him to go out was great.
Another intimidated a dude being really loud and racist at his felinid date for blocking a movie screen with her ears. This was the one who made the list of things for the date. He learned she really wants to go to his home continent to map out the parts of basically not-Australia that they can't get via satellite. She has to get past the cartography guild first though. (This is basically a way of getting to his epilogue to this adventure where they travel together to do that).
Also, that felinid character is going home because they found out about the drukhari dealing with the local underworld in a secretive meeting a kilometer away from his home. I am going to introduce his dad he never knew that actually came back to his mom after the PC ran away from home at some point in the middle of the next session. With two of his brothers and a sister all whom he never knew he had.
Also, they're finally fighting dudes who wanted to steal a kid's unique bionic heart to save a dying guildmaster.
I got more comfortable, adjusted my expectations accordingly, clearly communicated with my players, and also got a lot more practice playing out personal relationships and women. I realized I like this stuff because it builds up stakes and investment in the players rather than having a thing where they go place to place with no connections.
Mind you, for playing women I keep having to put an accent on or some sort of tilt to feel good with it. I do Irish, Scottish, English, Joisey, and actually my Kae’Arh Ess’Wunn voice, who is a female gnoll, is kind of based of a voice of an African American player in my undergrad so I got a lot more comfortable doing that (also doing black voices in general without sounding like a caricature).
I’m also not franticly throwing everything I like at a wall and hoping it sticks and have a better framework to work with. 5 years of experience helps with that.
Although the *bang* was his climbing up a pipe with a clang.
That and I had a big heart to heart with a veteran player about two weekends ago about him hurting my feelings that for the past year or so even into the vanilla Dark Heresy campaign it feels like he hadn't been paying attention. Where big revelations and surprises would happen and he would almost invariably say, "sorry, what happened again?" and I'd make a big disappointed sigh and repeat myself. This would come after me calling it to his attention by calling out his or his character's name and then waiting through seconds of silence. My issue not being that sometimes people zone out or are just naturally passive players. My issue is that I put 110% into his games, add content to them, and am extremely active and attentive and put in a lot of input into his games and I wasn't receiving output or what felt like the mutual bare minimum in my games. He's also basically been roleplaying with me since near the beginning, is the most knowledgable about the game, and we talk about it all the time along with other stuff.
He did apologize and promised to be better and to be honest, he was this last session except for one point of the night he did it again (during his date) and the other players recognizing my frustration repeated what I said for him. I asked them if they liked roleplaying out the dates and they both were really happy with it so it wasn't that. Having a bit of behind the screen syndrome plus using faceless discord but one told me they were smiling the entire time and the other was basically like their character at the end of it. We are not in the habit of lying to each other to spare feelings and are both extremely honest with each other to the point of in the past saying to each others' faces that a certain encounter sucked, took way too long, was way too unfair, took us out of our comfort zone, and both of us changed stuff to fix it.
Still kind of hurts but it hurts thinking about it and not as a continuous feeling in the game. Right before the game Friday thinking about it I got kind of depressed thinking about it happening in the past and happening again. I really love this stuff, put a lot of time into it writing, finding maps, making characters, thinking out scenarios, and the like. My time during grad school is exceptionally precious where I work all week so I can save up time for the weekend and just let go for a bit. So when that time feels squandered or wasted I feel bad and shitty and unappreciated. I'd rather someone who had a problem that wouldn't be up to fixing it or compromising or just not having a great time to just leave.
The reason I really like this guy is he is also very honest about his weaknesses as much as I am with mine. I can communicate with this dude when I couldn't with the last like four people who had a problem that left without worrying about a confrontation or making things sour by just telling the truth of how we feel.
So that's kind of why the majority of my newer posts have been pretty happy or just recounting fun tidbits that happened. There is so much less bullshit bubbling beneath the surface from my side or others. My philosophy now is be true and fuck 'em if they don't like it. By "fuck 'em" I truly mean make an honest attempt to reconcile problems and if that doesn't work amicably leave the games without a fuss and let it be clear it wouldn't hurt your personal relationship to do so but still.