As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/

Scorpions and Shujenga: Tabletop Games Folded 1000 Times

18990929495100

Posts

  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    I’ve never really done that kinda thing. It’s never a secret when they die. I don’t keep the sheets anyway.

    Still, it can be all in good humour, it’s no biggie.



    In other news my current group has been texting me all day about how they plan to help, hinder, marry, kill each other and it’s awesome. They’re mostly new to roleplaying too!

  • DepressperadoDepressperado I just wanted to see you laughing in the pizza rainRegistered User regular
    Gog, my revolutionary paladin very nearly died last night

    but Half-Orcs can go to 1 HP when they're reduced to 0, and I managed to go the rest of the battle without getting hit thanks to good ol' Shield of Faith

    I go through characters like one goes through tissues, but I was like "Gog die? no!"

    He's a lot of fun and I get to do spy stuff and subterfuge and guerrilla warfare with him. (He's not too smart, but if you got some asymmetrical warfare, he's the guy you want)

  • AnzekayAnzekay Registered User regular
    I've done the "give me your character sheet" thing before, but only in Tenra Bansho Zero where I then set it next to my notes behind my GM screen and scribbled some stuff onto it because said character had just turned into an Asura and turned on the party

    so I gave him like +8 to every stat and turned him against them

    after two rounds I gave the sheet back to the player, so that he could then play his asura character until he died hahaha

  • Grey GhostGrey Ghost Registered User regular
    Gog, my revolutionary paladin very nearly died last night

    but Half-Orcs can go to 1 HP when they're reduced to 0, and I managed to go the rest of the battle without getting hit thanks to good ol' Shield of Faith

    I go through characters like one goes through tissues, but I was like "Gog die? no!"

    He's a lot of fun and I get to do spy stuff and subterfuge and guerrilla warfare with him. (He's not too smart, but if you got some asymmetrical warfare, he's the guy you want)

    ooh, can you tell me more about Gog

  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    Delduwath wrote: »
    MsAnthropy wrote: »
    Solar wrote: »
    Delduwath wrote: »
    This has been covered before, but the Date After Which You Can't Do Anything About It is almost here, so I just wanted to remind anyone who's interested: The One Ring roleplaying game, published by Cubicle 7, is about to disappear into the aether because Cubicle 7's license for that material is about to expire.

    I was reminded of this because earlier today I got an email from Cubicle 7 by way of DriveThruRPG, saying this:
    Hi all,

    This is an important announcement regarding The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™, Cubicle 7 products you currently own.

    Wednesday 27 May 2020 marks the end date for Cubicle 7 to be able to sell PDF products of The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™. We would encourage those who would like to complete their PDF collections to do so before this date. Currently, the easiest way to complete your collection is via the bundles linked below. We will also reduce the price of individual PDF products later on today for the final week of their availability. (Reflecting the same level of discount as the bundles.)

    ONE RING BUNDLE at 50% off

    AIME BUNDLE at 30% off

    What happens after Wednesday 27 May 2020?

    After this date we will mark all The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™ products as inactive. This means they will no longer be available to purchase, but all previously purchased PDFs will remain in your Drive Thru RPG libraries.

    After Wednesday 27 May 2020: we will no longer have any say about what happens to these files – they may remain inactive forever or even be removed from Drive Thru RPG. This is up to the licence holder: Sophisticated Games.

    We strongly encourage you to download and create a backup of these files — just in case they are removed — as we wouldn’t want you to lose access to a product that you already purchased and own.

    As a final note, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, our loyal customers for your continued support over the years.

    Dom and the Cubicle 7 team.
    I got all these PDFs from a Bundle of Holding not long ago, but I thought "Oh, maybe I'll go grab a hard copy of the core rulebook, just to have, before it disappears". Well, I guess it's already too late for that, because it doesn't seem to be in stock everywhere, and copies are selling for like... hundreds of dollars. I guess it's been out of print for a while? Bummer.

    I hundred percent recommend anyone to pick this up. It's a fantastically written and made game, and all the products are beautiful

    Also

    it is a CRIME that it is getting canned

    IIRC another company has picked up the license with terms that allow them to use the same rule set without issue. They also have tagged the original lead developer C7 worked with to work on any new material.
    So Cubicle 7 developed a ruleset, lost their license, and now another company is getting the license instead and they get to just make full use of the stuff Cubicle 7 already developed? I guess that's good for fans, who already have the old books and will have new books that are compatible with them, but... feels kinda crummy for Cubicle 7?

    Also, they were just about to release The One Ring version 2, weren't they? That double-sucks.

    It's one of those things...I feel bad for Cubicle 7 but it's also the case that they've seemed kind of out to lunch for a while, as publishers. Their website and forum just stopped working for a few months when the GDPR went into effect, and they weren't taking customers' or tetailers' calls. RPG.net had a few threads of people like "??? Cubicle 7 out of business???" because the company wasn't communicating with them on any level. They also have just quietly dropped support for a lot of their gamelines, with forthcoming products falling off the schedule, never to be seen again.

    Maybe it's purely circumstances and they're blameless, or maybe they're just terribly inept or have awful turnover or something. My guess, based on nothing other than watching this hobby for years, is that it's probably a bit of both. A lot of these publishers are essentially one- or two-man shops making extensive use of freelancers and operating on razor-thin margins so that if a single check doesn't clear at the wrong time, suddenly everything just bottlenecks and shuts down for months. For all we know it could simply be a case of the LOTR licensor tried to get a hold of them, couldn't, and was like "...yeah, we're going elsewhere for this."

    At least since most of the work is done by freelancers there's no reason that the new publisher can't just rehire most/all of the old team and keep on trucking. They've already confirmed that lead dev Francisco Napolitano (sp? I might be butchering his name) is moving forward with them. That's heartening to me.

    rRwz9.gif
  • DepressperadoDepressperado I just wanted to see you laughing in the pizza rainRegistered User regular
    Grey Ghost wrote: »
    Gog, my revolutionary paladin very nearly died last night

    but Half-Orcs can go to 1 HP when they're reduced to 0, and I managed to go the rest of the battle without getting hit thanks to good ol' Shield of Faith

    I go through characters like one goes through tissues, but I was like "Gog die? no!"

    He's a lot of fun and I get to do spy stuff and subterfuge and guerrilla warfare with him. (He's not too smart, but if you got some asymmetrical warfare, he's the guy you want)

    ooh, can you tell me more about Gog

    oh buddy can I.

    He's Gog from Magog, an Oath of the Common Man paladin who travels the realms, helping the smallfolk, fomenting revolutions against greedy barons and stuff, helping set up co-ops. Kinda dim, but he's been training in survival and strategy since he was a kid. Some raiders had enslaved his people, so he kinda had to learn as he went.

    He eventually ended up in Gauntylgrym 'cause he was nearby and they told him about the Underdark and he decided that it could use his brand o' freedom.

  • DepressperadoDepressperado I just wanted to see you laughing in the pizza rainRegistered User regular
    edited May 2020
    the town we're in now, Gog & Friends convinced a dragon that all the In Charge factions were plotting against it, so it wrecked some of the town, devastated the ruling groups, and then was overwhelmed and killed.

    Had the local thieves guild come out to provide relief to people whose houses had been destroyed and stuff, hearts and minds, and convinced a mob that the Families that controlled the town's forges and smithies had upset the dragon and that's why he went nuts.

    they, naturally, dragged the rich bastards out of their houses and lynched them up and Gog was like "ah, dead rich people, nothin' like it."

    Depressperado on
  • SolarSolar Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    3clipse wrote: »
    Blake T wrote: »
    Oh hi dnd thread. It has been a while, you know how I said I killed one of my students characters? And I did it by asking for hid character sheet because I had to check something and tore his sheet in half

    Well yesterday, I killed another character at school, it was the same kid.

    He failed his death saving throw, and said, “here you go mister” and he gave me his character sheet. I tore it in half and I gave it back to him and said, “here you go, I think this is yours”

    Why rip up the sheet? Just insult to injury at that point if it was a character he was attached to.

    It's the australian way

    Solar on
  • TynnanTynnan seldom correct, never unsure Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    The Tomb of Annihilation game I'm running has finally jumped all the way off the published tracks and has veered into homebrew narrative land, and all my players and I are pretty excited about that. I had been struggling with how to run TOA as written, because the module doesn't attempt to make the Big Bad's Evil Plot relevant to the players in any way. They're hired to save their employer's life from a wasting disease and some dude with a cool ring is traipsing around the continent. Who gives a shit? While preparing to run the game starting last summer, I also read Graeme Barber's excellent analysis of 5e Chult and I wanted to make the game a bit less, ah, colonial. The changes I made and the plot I'm going with are under the spoiler.
    As written, TOA drops the players into a mysterious land whose grand civilizations have fallen to ruin. They're there because some rich lady has a wasting disease and wants to not have the wasting disease. No attempt is made to make this personally relevant to the players, there's just a text box that says this mysterious plague is the talk of the town. She teleports them to Port Nyanzaru, so there's no buildup of anticipation or expectation, just bam - sunshine and dinosaurs. There's a wilderness hexcrawl with scattered clues for the party to find, but I struggled to figure out how to give them plot crumbs to care about. What's worse, in my opinion, is that the interesting stuff about Omu and Mezro and the old conflicts that caused the continent to be depopulated aren't really emphasized in the plot, and the players aren't given a reason to care about Acererak until they at least arrive at Omu (spooky vision) or afterwards. So, I decided to change a few things.

    First, I wanted to make the game less about colonialism, for the game to be less about Things Happening To Chultans and more about Chultans Having Agency. If you haven't read Graeme Barber's three articles on it, check out that link above. So I changed their sponsor to be a Chultan ex-pat who hired the party to essentially be surveyors. A century before the game starts, war between the Omuan city-states ended in calamity and caused massive depopulation and a scattering of Chultans across Faerûn. Hordes of undead in the jungles have made it impossible to restore this civilization so far, and prominent members of the Chultan diaspora want to change that. So, they hire the players to be a lightweight scouting party to assess the condition of the old cities and help determine how to return there. Rather than teleport the players there, I had them ride a sailing vessel two weeks from Baldur's Gate towards Chult. They got to meet Aremag, fended off a pirate attack, and then were shipwrecked north of Port Nyanzaru due to damage sustained in the pirate attack. They made an overland trek to safety, essentially bushwhacking their way to Port Nyanzaru over about a week in-game. This reinforced that the players are a long way from home, in a dangerous land (with dinosaurs! some are herbivores! some are... not!). On that trek, their sponsor became severely fatigued (early signs of the Death Curse. I've kept the Soulmonger, but repurposed it. More on that later.)

    I've adjusted some history of Chult as background: in my game, up until about one hundred years before the game, Mezro was a major Chultan state and the city of Omu was its vassal. Those Chultans worshiped the primordial god, Ubtao. Omu rebelled, destroying Ubtao's shrines and adopting the worship of the trickster gods. In the ensuing war, Mezro's forces were close to victory when Omu allied with the Yuan-ti of Hisari and drove back the Mezroan army. A key betrayal in the Mezroan ranks by a duke, Ras Nsi, swung the balance of power even further against Mezro. On the brink of being overrun by hordes of undead raised by the Omu/Hisari/Nsi coalition, Mezroan arcanists worked around the clock to access a material demiplane for Mezro to escape into. At the last moment, they succeeded, teleporting Mezro and its nearby land into the demiplane and leaving behind a vacant copy of the city. They also left behind volunteer Mezroans, transformed into small elemental-like creatures wearing white masks, to keep watch on Chult while Mezro was sequestered.

    Mezro intended to stay in that demiplane for twenty years and then return. Unbeknownst to them, however, the Hisari Yuan-ti identified what had happened and created a device, the Soulmonger, to seal them there. The Soulmonger has been siphoning vital force from this demiplane and feeding it into an Atropal, which is the nascent form of Dendar the Night Serpent, Ubtao's primordial deity sibling. I'm borrowing a mechanic from the MTG setting of Theros for divinity, which is that a deity is granted their status by the act of being worshiped. People can believe a deity into being, and if that belief wanes, so too does the deity's power. Since Mezro is no longer present in Chult, that power base for Ubtao's divinity is also absent, causing Ubtao's power to wane across the continent aside from isolated pockets. That power vacuum allowed Dendar to flourish, and the Yuan-ti are working to provide her with corporeal form via the Soulmonger.

    At this point, my players have reached Mezro-in-Chult and found the vacant city being ransacked by a contingent of Flaming Fist mercenaries. They explored one of the buildings in a university district and found laboratory journals with evidence of the planar experimentation that enabled Mezro's escape, as well as some margin notes on events during the Mezro-Omu-Hisari war. They've just been attacked at their woods camp by a contingent of Yuan-ti intent on stealing those journals.

    Tynnan on
  • SCREECH OF THE FARGSCREECH OF THE FARG #1 PARROTHEAD margaritavilleRegistered User regular
    bad news: mike mearls isn't actually out, he's back working on d&d. everyones favorite bad game designer/friend-to-rapists is back baby!!!

    gcum67ktu9e4.pngimg
  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    Delduwath wrote: »
    MsAnthropy wrote: »
    Solar wrote: »
    Delduwath wrote: »
    This has been covered before, but the Date After Which You Can't Do Anything About It is almost here, so I just wanted to remind anyone who's interested: The One Ring roleplaying game, published by Cubicle 7, is about to disappear into the aether because Cubicle 7's license for that material is about to expire.

    I was reminded of this because earlier today I got an email from Cubicle 7 by way of DriveThruRPG, saying this:
    Hi all,

    This is an important announcement regarding The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™, Cubicle 7 products you currently own.

    Wednesday 27 May 2020 marks the end date for Cubicle 7 to be able to sell PDF products of The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™. We would encourage those who would like to complete their PDF collections to do so before this date. Currently, the easiest way to complete your collection is via the bundles linked below. We will also reduce the price of individual PDF products later on today for the final week of their availability. (Reflecting the same level of discount as the bundles.)

    ONE RING BUNDLE at 50% off

    AIME BUNDLE at 30% off

    What happens after Wednesday 27 May 2020?

    After this date we will mark all The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™ products as inactive. This means they will no longer be available to purchase, but all previously purchased PDFs will remain in your Drive Thru RPG libraries.

    After Wednesday 27 May 2020: we will no longer have any say about what happens to these files – they may remain inactive forever or even be removed from Drive Thru RPG. This is up to the licence holder: Sophisticated Games.

    We strongly encourage you to download and create a backup of these files — just in case they are removed — as we wouldn’t want you to lose access to a product that you already purchased and own.

    As a final note, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, our loyal customers for your continued support over the years.

    Dom and the Cubicle 7 team.
    I got all these PDFs from a Bundle of Holding not long ago, but I thought "Oh, maybe I'll go grab a hard copy of the core rulebook, just to have, before it disappears". Well, I guess it's already too late for that, because it doesn't seem to be in stock everywhere, and copies are selling for like... hundreds of dollars. I guess it's been out of print for a while? Bummer.

    I hundred percent recommend anyone to pick this up. It's a fantastically written and made game, and all the products are beautiful

    Also

    it is a CRIME that it is getting canned

    IIRC another company has picked up the license with terms that allow them to use the same rule set without issue. They also have tagged the original lead developer C7 worked with to work on any new material.
    So Cubicle 7 developed a ruleset, lost their license, and now another company is getting the license instead and they get to just make full use of the stuff Cubicle 7 already developed? I guess that's good for fans, who already have the old books and will have new books that are compatible with them, but... feels kinda crummy for Cubicle 7?

    Also, they were just about to release The One Ring version 2, weren't they? That double-sucks.

    It's one of those things...I feel bad for Cubicle 7 but it's also the case that they've seemed kind of out to lunch for a while, as publishers. Their website and forum just stopped working for a few months when the GDPR went into effect, and they weren't taking customers' or tetailers' calls. RPG.net had a few threads of people like "??? Cubicle 7 out of business???" because the company wasn't communicating with them on any level. They also have just quietly dropped support for a lot of their gamelines, with forthcoming products falling off the schedule, never to be seen again.

    Maybe it's purely circumstances and they're blameless, or maybe they're just terribly inept or have awful turnover or something. My guess, based on nothing other than watching this hobby for years, is that it's probably a bit of both. A lot of these publishers are essentially one- or two-man shops making extensive use of freelancers and operating on razor-thin margins so that if a single check doesn't clear at the wrong time, suddenly everything just bottlenecks and shuts down for months. For all we know it could simply be a case of the LOTR licensor tried to get a hold of them, couldn't, and was like "...yeah, we're going elsewhere for this."

    At least since most of the work is done by freelancers there's no reason that the new publisher can't just rehire most/all of the old team and keep on trucking. They've already confirmed that lead dev Francisco Napolitano (sp? I might be butchering his name) is moving forward with them. That's heartening to me.
    OK, that's fair enough. I don't actually know anything about Cubicle 7, but everything you've described sounds extremely familiar based on other happenings in the industry, past and present.

  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    Tynnan wrote: »
    The Tomb of Annihilation game I'm running has finally jumped all the way off the published tracks and has veered into homebrew narrative land, and all my players and I are pretty excited about that. I had been struggling with how to run TOA as written, because the module doesn't attempt to make the Big Bad's Evil Plot relevant to the players in any way. They're hired to save their employer's life from a wasting disease and some dude with a cool ring is traipsing around the continent. Who gives a shit? While preparing to run the game starting last summer, I also read Graeme Barber's excellent analysis of 5e Chult and I wanted to make the game a bit less, ah, colonial. The changes I made and the plot I'm going with are under the spoiler.
    As written, TOA drops the players into a mysterious land whose grand civilizations have fallen to ruin. They're there because some rich lady has a wasting disease and wants to not have the wasting disease. No attempt is made to make this personally relevant to the players, there's just a text box that says this mysterious plague is the talk of the town. She teleports them to Port Nyanzaru, so there's no buildup of anticipation or expectation, just bam - sunshine and dinosaurs. There's a wilderness hexcrawl with scattered clues for the party to find, but I struggled to figure out how to give them plot crumbs to care about. What's worse, in my opinion, is that the interesting stuff about Omu and Mezro and the old conflicts that caused the continent to be depopulated aren't really emphasized in the plot, and the players aren't given a reason to care about Acererak until they at least arrive at Omu (spooky vision) or afterwards. So, I decided to change a few things.

    First, I wanted to make the game less about colonialism, for the game to be less about Things Happening To Chultans and more about Chultans Having Agency. If you haven't read Graeme Barber's three articles on it, check out that link above. So I changed their sponsor to be a Chultan ex-pat who hired the party to essentially be surveyors. A century before the game starts, war between the Omuan city-states ended in calamity and caused massive depopulation and a scattering of Chultans across Faerûn. Hordes of undead in the jungles have made it impossible to restore this civilization so far, and prominent members of the Chultan diaspora want to change that. So, they hire the players to be a lightweight scouting party to assess the condition of the old cities and help determine how to return there. Rather than teleport the players there, I had them ride a sailing vessel two weeks from Baldur's Gate towards Chult. They got to meet Aremag, fended off a pirate attack, and then were shipwrecked north of Port Nyanzaru due to damage sustained in the pirate attack. They made an overland trek to safety, essentially bushwhacking their way to Port Nyanzaru over about a week in-game. This reinforced that the players are a long way from home, in a dangerous land (with dinosaurs! some are herbivores! some are... not!). On that trek, their sponsor became severely fatigued (early signs of the Death Curse. I've kept the Soulmonger, but repurposed it. More on that later.)

    History of Chult background for my game: up until about one hundred years before the game, Mezro was a major Chultan state and the city of Omu was its vassal. Those Chultans worshiped the primordial god, Ubtao. Omu rebelled, destroying Ubtao's shrines and adopting the worship of the trickster gods. In the ensuing war, Mezro's forces were close to victory when Omu allied with the Yuan-ti of Hisari and drove back the Mezroan army. A key betrayal in the Mezroan ranks by a duke, Ras Nsi, swung the balance of power even further against Mezro. On the brink of being overrun by hordes of undead raised by the Omu/Hisari/Nsi coalition, Mezroan arcanists worked around the clock to access a material demiplane for Mezro to escape into. At the last moment, they succeeded, teleporting Mezro and its nearby land into the demiplane and leaving behind a vacant copy of the city. They also left behind volunteer Mezroans, transformed into small elemental-like creatures wearing white masks, to keep watch on Chult while Mezro was sequestered.

    Mezro intended to stay in that demiplane for twenty years and then return. Unbeknownst to them, however, the Hisari Yuan-ti identified what had happened and created a device, the Soulmonger, to seal them there. The Soulmonger has been siphoning vital force from this demiplane and feeding it into an Atropal, which is the nascent form of Dendar the Night Serpent, Ubtao's primordial deity sibling. I'm borrowing a mechanic from the MTG setting of Theros for divinity, which is that a deity is granted their status by the act of being worshiped. People can believe a deity into being, and if that belief wanes, so too does the deity's power. Since Mezro is no longer present in Chult, that power base for Ubtao's divinity is also absent, causing Ubtao's power to wane across the continent aside from isolated pockets. That power vacuum allowed Dendar to flourish, and the Yuan-ti are working to provide her with corporeal form via the Soulmonger.

    At this point, my players have reached Mezro-in-Chult and found the vacant city being ransacked by a contingent of Flaming Fist mercenaries. They explored one of the buildings in a university district and found laboratory journals with evidence of the planar experimentation that enabled Mezro's escape, as well as some margin notes on events during the Mezro-Omu-Hisari war. They've just been attacked at their woods camp by a contingent of Yuan-ti intent on stealing those journals.

    I read those articles you linked a while ago. It's interesting seeing how you altered ToA in response to them.

  • SolarSolar Registered User regular
    Delduwath wrote: »
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    Delduwath wrote: »
    MsAnthropy wrote: »
    Solar wrote: »
    Delduwath wrote: »
    This has been covered before, but the Date After Which You Can't Do Anything About It is almost here, so I just wanted to remind anyone who's interested: The One Ring roleplaying game, published by Cubicle 7, is about to disappear into the aether because Cubicle 7's license for that material is about to expire.

    I was reminded of this because earlier today I got an email from Cubicle 7 by way of DriveThruRPG, saying this:
    Hi all,

    This is an important announcement regarding The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™, Cubicle 7 products you currently own.

    Wednesday 27 May 2020 marks the end date for Cubicle 7 to be able to sell PDF products of The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™. We would encourage those who would like to complete their PDF collections to do so before this date. Currently, the easiest way to complete your collection is via the bundles linked below. We will also reduce the price of individual PDF products later on today for the final week of their availability. (Reflecting the same level of discount as the bundles.)

    ONE RING BUNDLE at 50% off

    AIME BUNDLE at 30% off

    What happens after Wednesday 27 May 2020?

    After this date we will mark all The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game and Adventures in Middle-earth™ products as inactive. This means they will no longer be available to purchase, but all previously purchased PDFs will remain in your Drive Thru RPG libraries.

    After Wednesday 27 May 2020: we will no longer have any say about what happens to these files – they may remain inactive forever or even be removed from Drive Thru RPG. This is up to the licence holder: Sophisticated Games.

    We strongly encourage you to download and create a backup of these files — just in case they are removed — as we wouldn’t want you to lose access to a product that you already purchased and own.

    As a final note, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, our loyal customers for your continued support over the years.

    Dom and the Cubicle 7 team.
    I got all these PDFs from a Bundle of Holding not long ago, but I thought "Oh, maybe I'll go grab a hard copy of the core rulebook, just to have, before it disappears". Well, I guess it's already too late for that, because it doesn't seem to be in stock everywhere, and copies are selling for like... hundreds of dollars. I guess it's been out of print for a while? Bummer.

    I hundred percent recommend anyone to pick this up. It's a fantastically written and made game, and all the products are beautiful

    Also

    it is a CRIME that it is getting canned

    IIRC another company has picked up the license with terms that allow them to use the same rule set without issue. They also have tagged the original lead developer C7 worked with to work on any new material.
    So Cubicle 7 developed a ruleset, lost their license, and now another company is getting the license instead and they get to just make full use of the stuff Cubicle 7 already developed? I guess that's good for fans, who already have the old books and will have new books that are compatible with them, but... feels kinda crummy for Cubicle 7?

    Also, they were just about to release The One Ring version 2, weren't they? That double-sucks.

    It's one of those things...I feel bad for Cubicle 7 but it's also the case that they've seemed kind of out to lunch for a while, as publishers. Their website and forum just stopped working for a few months when the GDPR went into effect, and they weren't taking customers' or tetailers' calls. RPG.net had a few threads of people like "??? Cubicle 7 out of business???" because the company wasn't communicating with them on any level. They also have just quietly dropped support for a lot of their gamelines, with forthcoming products falling off the schedule, never to be seen again.

    Maybe it's purely circumstances and they're blameless, or maybe they're just terribly inept or have awful turnover or something. My guess, based on nothing other than watching this hobby for years, is that it's probably a bit of both. A lot of these publishers are essentially one- or two-man shops making extensive use of freelancers and operating on razor-thin margins so that if a single check doesn't clear at the wrong time, suddenly everything just bottlenecks and shuts down for months. For all we know it could simply be a case of the LOTR licensor tried to get a hold of them, couldn't, and was like "...yeah, we're going elsewhere for this."

    At least since most of the work is done by freelancers there's no reason that the new publisher can't just rehire most/all of the old team and keep on trucking. They've already confirmed that lead dev Francisco Napolitano (sp? I might be butchering his name) is moving forward with them. That's heartening to me.
    OK, that's fair enough. I don't actually know anything about Cubicle 7, but everything you've described sounds extremely familiar based on other happenings in the industry, past and present.

    yeah I find it 100% believable

  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    bad news: mike mearls isn't actually out, he's back working on d&d. everyones favorite bad game designer/friend-to-rapists is back baby!!!

    To sum things up, Mearls maintained radio silence for over a year, somebody a few weeks ago said Mearls hadn't been working on D&D since some time last year, and now he's announced to be back.

  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    Quoting a bit from the spoiler in your post, but removing the spoiler tag:
    Tynnan wrote: »
    I'm borrowing a mechanic from the MTG setting of Theros for divinity, which is that a deity is granted their status by the act of being worshiped.
    I think this is attested in older D&D, as well. Granted, D&D has been around for decades, has been all over the place, and - given all the different rule sets, supplements, and campaign settings - it's probably had like a dozen different views on divinity, but I'm pretty sure that particular idea was represented in Planescape at the very least.

  • DepressperadoDepressperado I just wanted to see you laughing in the pizza rainRegistered User regular
    that's the way it works in Discworld and that's good enough for me.

  • TynnanTynnan seldom correct, never unsure Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    Delduwath wrote: »
    Quoting a bit from the spoiler in your post, but removing the spoiler tag:
    Tynnan wrote: »
    I'm borrowing a mechanic from the MTG setting of Theros for divinity, which is that a deity is granted their status by the act of being worshiped.
    I think this is attested in older D&D, as well. Granted, D&D has been around for decades, has been all over the place, and - given all the different rule sets, supplements, and campaign settings - it's probably had like a dozen different views on divinity, but I'm pretty sure that particular idea was represented in Planescape at the very least.

    Yeah, it's hardly a new idea. It's more that D&D 5e specifically seems to move away from it, but I'm more interested in that model of divinity than how it works in 5e. Other members of the 5e pantheon have marginal presence in Chult but have largely left the continent alone. It's alluded that ancient dealings amongst deities led to that land being granted to Ubtao, but I wanted a few more nuts and bolts and a way to mechanically explain the Chultan divine power vacuum.

    Tynnan on
  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    I've started planning in earnest on my next campaign. The general premise is that agents of the god Zehir are making their move in Exandria under the leadership of Seghulerak, a yuan-ti abomination priestess.

    The campaign begins along the Menagerie Coast, where the yuan-ti of Urukayxl are attempting to bind the sea serpent Uk'otoa back into the service of Zehir. The sahuagin who worship Uk'otoa are preparing for war against the yuan-ti, in the process making a nuisance of themselves by abducting people to convert into sharklike hybrids for use against Zehir's followers. The government of the Menagerie Coast, the Clovis Concord, is concerned primarily with subduing the sahuagin, but would stopping the sahuagin help the yuan-ti further their own plans?

    Unlike my previous campaign, which had me homebrewing almost everything, I'm looking to adapt published material as much as possible to reduce my own workload and learn from professional designers. For example, I plan to lift from Ghosts of Saltmarsh's "The Final Enemy" for the sahuagin's base of operations and Tomb of Annihilation's "Fane of the Night Serpent" for Urukayxl.

    BTW, I've also been researching named yuan-ti from past D&D products. Here's a few of the ones I've found if anyone is in need of yuan-ti names:

    - Domino
    - Iphariul
    - Issiel
    - Oolhihlisu
    - Orhosvis
    - Sacharlim
    - Sachnos
    - Sissika
    - Sseselheve
    - Ssratauroch
    - Stri'isn
    - Sulvaugren
    - Thohsvohs
    - Venomblack
    - Vsolt
    - Yensurros
    - Zoldathra

  • Blake TBlake T Do you have enemies then? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered User regular
    3clipse wrote: »
    Blake T wrote: »
    Oh hi dnd thread. It has been a while, you know how I said I killed one of my students characters? And I did it by asking for hid character sheet because I had to check something and tore his sheet in half

    Well yesterday, I killed another character at school, it was the same kid.

    He failed his death saving throw, and said, “here you go mister” and he gave me his character sheet. I tore it in half and I gave it back to him and said, “here you go, I think this is yours”

    Why rip up the sheet? Just insult to injury at that point if it was a character he was attached to.

    Much like many things context matters, and this kid is mature enough to find it funny.

  • Blake TBlake T Do you have enemies then? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered User regular
    Oh they also buried his last character in the cursed part of the school so it came back to life, so I asked him to get up and come over here for a second and set him up with ghoul stat block and let him do whatever he wanted to for a bit.

  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    ...

    I think I might go laminate my character sheets before we get back to our regular 5th ed sessions...

  • DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    So I'm sure I can come up with something, but my next Spelljammer session is next week, and I wanted to pick y'alls brains for ideas. Sooooo please help,
    our last session ended in the middle of a dungeon. They'll finish it off, and then I plan to give our paladin a vision during their next long rest afterwards. See, she's an aasimar with a celestial guardian, and before our adventures she already knew our fighter. They worked together as friends for one of the Lords of Waterdeep or something (IRL they're married), and at some point during a mission he was murdered. She prayed to anyone, her guardian included, to bring him back. He was, and she was surprised because she's obviously just a lowly paladin. However, he's now a hollow one, like from the Wildemount book, and he has no recollection of his former life and only knows what the paladin has told him and he trusts her. Luckily for him, she's very honest and truthful. Her vision is going to be a dream from her solar guardian telling her she needs to go back to Toril and discover who his murderer is and bring them to justice. However, I have next to zero (if not fuckin negative) knowledge of how to do a sort of murder mystery sort of game (the paladin's player, when talking about it, said she envisioned it like a game of Clue?) and I wanted to know if y'all had any thoughts on it, because that would be rad and I'd love to do it but I want ideas on how to do it. I can just google for them, but those can be hit or miss so I figured I'd ask y'all first

    JtgVX0H.png
  • ButlerButler 89 episodes or bust Registered User regular
    Solar wrote: »
    3clipse wrote: »
    Blake T wrote: »
    Oh hi dnd thread. It has been a while, you know how I said I killed one of my students characters? And I did it by asking for hid character sheet because I had to check something and tore his sheet in half

    Well yesterday, I killed another character at school, it was the same kid.

    He failed his death saving throw, and said, “here you go mister” and he gave me his character sheet. I tore it in half and I gave it back to him and said, “here you go, I think this is yours”

    Why rip up the sheet? Just insult to injury at that point if it was a character he was attached to.

    It's the australian way

    I'd object but

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfSHhWo4eyY

  • AnzekayAnzekay Registered User regular
    ...

    I think I might go laminate my character sheets before we get back to our regular 5th ed sessions...

    I still have Robin's character sheet!

  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Anzekay wrote: »
    ...

    I think I might go laminate my character sheets before we get back to our regular 5th ed sessions...

    I still have Robin's character sheet!

    Yeah I know, but Blake likes you!

    I give him entirely too much shit for my sheets to be safe... :-D

  • KincaidKincaid You're standing on my neck KuwaitRegistered User regular
    Implying that anything is going to stop Blake.

  • Blake TBlake T Do you have enemies then? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered User regular
  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Shit.

    I'll be back in a few, folks, I gotta go look into getting some things etched into sheets of silicon carbide...

  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    Important updates!!

    In my current game the baby (called Baby), can walk now. I had the berserker mother roll for his first word and it was “No.”

    The bastard prince attempted to poison the giant eagle with poisoned meat, but the eagle knew this because the blind (false) seer revealed his plan. After playing dead the eagle torn the guts out of the prince, forcing the eagle to leave the tribe as the people armed themselves before they could explain.

    The eagle has flown ahead as they still intend to protect the tribe, and as the land turned to desert they saw the first scouts of the Tongueless Army.

    Meanwhile the blind seer has fallen into the position of a prophet with a sizeable following... but the chief’s wife now knows the truth, the seer doesn’t know where the tribe is heading, the Promised Land was her creation.

    Meeting with the philosopher monk, who himself has a growing following, though for more practical reasons, she hopes to have the chief’s wife and the chief assassinated. Little does she know the monk is intending to take over, and has long known she’s no prophet...

    So yeah, this is all gonna end in tears and it rocks!

    Edit: Maybe more importantly the baby isn’t human, and Death told the mother it would bring ruin. Cute though.

    Endless_Serpents on
  • ElvenshaeElvenshae Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    @Darmak

    RPG murder mystery “pro” tips:

    1. Never make the players roll to find a clue. They’ll biff them and then be unable to solve the mystery. Instead, they always discover the clue with the bare minimum amount of looking for it and they roll to see if they can get “bonus” information that makes things easier. If they fail that, then make sure there’s someone knowledgeable they can ask. This allows you to introduce / make use of helpful / not-so-helpful NPCs.

    2. Always have about 3x the number of clues you think will be necessary. The players will tangent and miss some of them, even if they’re blindingly obvious to you.

    3. Be flexible with the actual whodunnit. Chances are you aren’t a world-class writer of mysteries, so it’s unlikely you’ll have exactly the clues and investigation path laid out to lead to the actual criminal and noone else. Having flexibility built in means that if your players lay out the clues and - to them - it points to a viable suspect and you actually like the idea, you can do the old magician’s switch and surprise! They were the villain all along.

    4. Don’t go crazy with the above, though - like, while random chance causing an out-of-control carriage to run down the Mr. Boddy is realistic, or random-no one just deciding to knife the next guy who walks by and it was the victim, or the players totally asspull that it was THE BUTLER, they’re not satisfying endings.

    5. Don’t put in more than one red herring, if that. Your players will red herring gleefully all on their own with the actual clues.

    Ed: Autocorrect is a harsh mistress.

    Elvenshae on
  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    I'm glad to see more eating at a restaurant LARPs, personally

    Nothing will take the crown from When You're Here, You're Family though

  • ZonugalZonugal (He/Him) The Holiday Armadillo I'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered User regular
  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Zonugal wrote: »

    Shh, Zon, don't tell these nerds that we've tricked them into playing theatre games with us for all these years

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Zonugal wrote: »

    The line between "improv game" and "roleplaying game" is ephemeral, and it doesn't mean "has dice in it."

  • EtchwartsEtchwarts Eyes Up Registered User regular
    Straightzi wrote: »
    Zonugal wrote: »

    Shh, Zon, don't tell these nerds that we've tricked them into playing theatre games with us for all these years

    Oh no

    The theater kid is coming from inside the house

  • DepressperadoDepressperado I just wanted to see you laughing in the pizza rainRegistered User regular
    I had a dream last night that I was someone's D&D character

    they directed me to hold back a Balor, some LotR "fly, you fools!" shit, and I was like "I'm only level 2, oh god I'm so fucked oh god"

  • never dienever die Registered User regular
    Straightzi wrote: »
    Zonugal wrote: »

    Shh, Zon, don't tell these nerds that we've tricked them into playing theatre games with us for all these years

    Oh no

    The theater kid is coming from inside the house

    If my school had been big enough to have a theater department, I 100% would have been a part of it.

  • TynnanTynnan seldom correct, never unsure Registered User regular
    Hexmage-PA wrote: »
    Tynnan wrote: »
    The Tomb of Annihilation game I'm running has finally jumped all the way off the published tracks and has veered into homebrew narrative land, and all my players and I are pretty excited about that. I had been struggling with how to run TOA as written, because the module doesn't attempt to make the Big Bad's Evil Plot relevant to the players in any way. They're hired to save their employer's life from a wasting disease and some dude with a cool ring is traipsing around the continent. Who gives a shit? While preparing to run the game starting last summer, I also read Graeme Barber's excellent analysis of 5e Chult and I wanted to make the game a bit less, ah, colonial. The changes I made and the plot I'm going with are under the spoiler.
    As written, TOA drops the players into a mysterious land whose grand civilizations have fallen to ruin. They're there because some rich lady has a wasting disease and wants to not have the wasting disease. No attempt is made to make this personally relevant to the players, there's just a text box that says this mysterious plague is the talk of the town. She teleports them to Port Nyanzaru, so there's no buildup of anticipation or expectation, just bam - sunshine and dinosaurs. There's a wilderness hexcrawl with scattered clues for the party to find, but I struggled to figure out how to give them plot crumbs to care about. What's worse, in my opinion, is that the interesting stuff about Omu and Mezro and the old conflicts that caused the continent to be depopulated aren't really emphasized in the plot, and the players aren't given a reason to care about Acererak until they at least arrive at Omu (spooky vision) or afterwards. So, I decided to change a few things.

    First, I wanted to make the game less about colonialism, for the game to be less about Things Happening To Chultans and more about Chultans Having Agency. If you haven't read Graeme Barber's three articles on it, check out that link above. So I changed their sponsor to be a Chultan ex-pat who hired the party to essentially be surveyors. A century before the game starts, war between the Omuan city-states ended in calamity and caused massive depopulation and a scattering of Chultans across Faerûn. Hordes of undead in the jungles have made it impossible to restore this civilization so far, and prominent members of the Chultan diaspora want to change that. So, they hire the players to be a lightweight scouting party to assess the condition of the old cities and help determine how to return there. Rather than teleport the players there, I had them ride a sailing vessel two weeks from Baldur's Gate towards Chult. They got to meet Aremag, fended off a pirate attack, and then were shipwrecked north of Port Nyanzaru due to damage sustained in the pirate attack. They made an overland trek to safety, essentially bushwhacking their way to Port Nyanzaru over about a week in-game. This reinforced that the players are a long way from home, in a dangerous land (with dinosaurs! some are herbivores! some are... not!). On that trek, their sponsor became severely fatigued (early signs of the Death Curse. I've kept the Soulmonger, but repurposed it. More on that later.)

    History of Chult background for my game: up until about one hundred years before the game, Mezro was a major Chultan state and the city of Omu was its vassal. Those Chultans worshiped the primordial god, Ubtao. Omu rebelled, destroying Ubtao's shrines and adopting the worship of the trickster gods. In the ensuing war, Mezro's forces were close to victory when Omu allied with the Yuan-ti of Hisari and drove back the Mezroan army. A key betrayal in the Mezroan ranks by a duke, Ras Nsi, swung the balance of power even further against Mezro. On the brink of being overrun by hordes of undead raised by the Omu/Hisari/Nsi coalition, Mezroan arcanists worked around the clock to access a material demiplane for Mezro to escape into. At the last moment, they succeeded, teleporting Mezro and its nearby land into the demiplane and leaving behind a vacant copy of the city. They also left behind volunteer Mezroans, transformed into small elemental-like creatures wearing white masks, to keep watch on Chult while Mezro was sequestered.

    Mezro intended to stay in that demiplane for twenty years and then return. Unbeknownst to them, however, the Hisari Yuan-ti identified what had happened and created a device, the Soulmonger, to seal them there. The Soulmonger has been siphoning vital force from this demiplane and feeding it into an Atropal, which is the nascent form of Dendar the Night Serpent, Ubtao's primordial deity sibling. I'm borrowing a mechanic from the MTG setting of Theros for divinity, which is that a deity is granted their status by the act of being worshiped. People can believe a deity into being, and if that belief wanes, so too does the deity's power. Since Mezro is no longer present in Chult, that power base for Ubtao's divinity is also absent, causing Ubtao's power to wane across the continent aside from isolated pockets. That power vacuum allowed Dendar to flourish, and the Yuan-ti are working to provide her with corporeal form via the Soulmonger.

    At this point, my players have reached Mezro-in-Chult and found the vacant city being ransacked by a contingent of Flaming Fist mercenaries. They explored one of the buildings in a university district and found laboratory journals with evidence of the planar experimentation that enabled Mezro's escape, as well as some margin notes on events during the Mezro-Omu-Hisari war. They've just been attacked at their woods camp by a contingent of Yuan-ti intent on stealing those journals.

    I read those articles you linked a while ago. It's interesting seeing how you altered ToA in response to them.

    Thanks! I felt that the TOA adventure suffered as-written because it was trying to be both a setting sourcebook and an adventure at the same time. I also felt like it leaned heavily on fuck-you traps and while it put in place a lot of interesting individual things, it didn't tie things together or justify its happenings very well. But the setting is really cool! It made sense to take that together with wanting to change the Chultan narrative a bit and do my own thing with the game.

    The other thing to mention about TOA as written is that it leans heavily on a naive idea of what jungle actually is. Jungle isn't all super-dense forest and tall canopies. There's wide variety among tropical biomes depending on regional and local climate patterns. The idea that tropical jungle is all dense underbrush may originate from the accounts of explorers who mostly navigated by river - the riverbanks were dense and so they may have assumed it continued that way throughout the forest. This reddit post goes into a lot of great detail on that, and it was really useful for me in describing the world for my players. The peninsulas north of Port Nyanzaru, I decided, would be more of a scrubland/cerrado biome - dry, thorny scrub with interspersed trees and herds of herbivorous dinosaurs rearing back to pluck fruit from wickedly thorny branches.

  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    I'm working on the backstory for my new PC, Nefelus Dunerain. In addition to the tables in Xanathar's and Wildemount I also consulted an article called Building Character from Dragon 422.

    The results were...interesting.

    - Nefelus was born in prison, the child of a wicked villain and an accomplice former-diplomat slated for execution. A couple of executioners (who would eventually end the lives of Nefelus' birth parents) adopted him as their own, never telling the boy the truth.
    - Though he had a stable home life, Nefelus was often ostracized by other children because of his adopted parents' grisly profession. Eventually his parents incurred a great debt from a noble named Lord Fairbrand who would only forgive it if Nefelus came to live and work with him.
    - Lord Fairbrand turned out to be quite fond of Nefelus and eventually threw him a surprise party in his feast hall. Unfortunately, a freak accident led to Nefelus accidentally burning down the feast hall and getting Lord Fairbrand burned alive. The late noble's family was furious and sought a harsh punishment for Nefelus, prompting the boy to flee.
    - Afraid to return to his adopted parents' home, Nefelus found himself forced to live on the streets with a rough group of thieving orphans. He never fit in with these new compatriots, and before long they set him up as a scapegoat in one of their schemes. To make matters worse, the guard who caught Nefelus was corrupt and sold the young man to slavers.
    - Though he was enslaved and forced to work in a remote mining encampment, Nefelus did come upon a stroke of luck during this time. His digging eventually unearthed the tomb of a long-forgotten hero named Honorus, whose restless spirit longed to have his name known throughout the land once again. Nefelus made a warlock pact with Honorus, and with his new magical power the young man managed to organize a successful slave revolt that saw himself and many other slaves escaping to freedom.
    - Unfortunately for Nefelus it wouldn't be long before he lost his freedom again. Agents working for the late Lord Fairbrand's family found him and dragged him back to his home city to stand trial. After a short trial presided over by a bribed judge Nefelus was sentenced to be executed, by his own adopted parents no less.
    - Desperate to escape this fate and to keep his parents from having to put their own son to death, Nefelus begged for mercy from Lord Fairbrand's daughter Aella. After seeing potential in Nefelus' magical abilities and judging the young man to not be the sort to seek violent revenge Aella agreed to bail him out, though on condition he work for her faithfully as an indentured servant until his debt was repaid.

    So, to recap, Nefelus' birth parents were villains who were executed by his adopted parents, his services were used as payment to a noble, he accidentally got the noble killed, he joined a bad crowd until they sold him out, he was enslaved, escaped, was apprehended and put on trial, and sold himself into indentured servitude to avoid execution.

    Oh, and he also recently contracted wererat lycanthropy.

    And he's prophesied to one day provoke the undying wrath of a dragon.

    Hexmage-PA on
This discussion has been closed.