I think probably my favorite thing about DMing is brainstorming ideas and considering how the PCs' actions can be incorporated.
I bring this up now because I've decided there's going to be a sudden onslaught of kruthiks (basically horse-sized insect/reptile hybrids) in an Underdark slum the dragonborn sorcerer PC has just entered for the purpose of ensuring a wererat keeps a deal that he made with another NPC. Said dragonborn has just started a mine as a subsidiary of a dwarf-owned company, and the slums he's just entered are close to territory controlled by a duergar company.
Following the resolution of the kruthik onslaught accusations will be leveled by the duergar that the dragonborn PC was only allowed to open a mine with the dwarf-owned company (which until now had only allowed dwarf and gnome mine leaders) because he agreed to provoke the kruthiks (possibly with the aid of wererats) into destabilizing the area near the duergar territory.
The dragonborn sorcerer obviously had nothing to do with the kruthiks, but the dwarf-owned company (or at least a member of it) may have carefully arranged circumstances to provoke the kruthiks and make the dragonborn sorcerer a suspect. This could lead to the sorcerer wanting to attack the duergar, which could lead to the duergar being defeated (benefiting the dwarves) or to the dragonborn sorcerer dying and being replaced as the head of the new mine (benefiting the dwarves, who allowed the PC to keep an unusually large percentage of the profits).
Alternatively, maybe the duergar provoked the kruthiks themselves, using the chaos to capture people to use as slaves. Maybe they also have a spy among the dwarves?
Or maybe a third party did it for an unknown reason? Keeping the dead from the kruthik attack laying around could attract scavengers such as carrion crawlers. Maybe someone needs a lot of corpses very quickly?
I think probably my favorite thing about DMing is brainstorming ideas and considering how the PCs' actions can be incorporated.
I bring this up now because I've decided there's going to be a sudden onslaught of kruthiks (basically horse-sized insect/reptile hybrids) in an Underdark slum the dragonborn sorcerer PC has just entered for the purpose of ensuring a wererat keeps a deal that he made with another NPC. Said dragonborn has just started a mine as a subsidiary of a dwarf-owned company, and the slums he's just entered are close to territory controlled by a duergar company.
Following the resolution of the kruthik onslaught accusations will be leveled by the duergar that the dragonborn PC was only allowed to open a mine with the dwarf-owned company (which until now had only allowed dwarf and gnome mine leaders) because he agreed to provoke the kruthiks (possibly with the aid of wererats) into destabilizing the area near the duergar territory.
The dragonborn sorcerer obviously had nothing to do with the kruthiks, but the dwarf-owned company (or at least a member of it) may have carefully arranged circumstances to provoke the kruthiks and make the dragonborn sorcerer a suspect. This could lead to the sorcerer wanting to attack the duergar, which would benefit the dwarves. Alternatively, maybe the duergar provoked the kruthiks themselves, using the chaos to capture people to use as slaves. Or maybe a third party did it for an unknown reason?
Sounds like it'll be a clusterfuck, keep us updated lol
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Everyone in our group is a huge fan of Shadowrun's setting, but repeat attempts to actually run the system for more than a session have failed. We've successfully run Hero System and Starfinder, but Shadowrun just ends up with all of frustrated as we spend hours building just a single character and trying to hunt and peck all the rules for this one thing across the entire book in the middle of combat.
The PbtA game The Sprawl scratched the Shadowrun itch for me
I think probably my favorite thing about DMing is brainstorming ideas and considering how the PCs' actions can be incorporated.
I bring this up now because I've decided there's going to be a sudden onslaught of kruthiks (basically horse-sized insect/reptile hybrids) in an Underdark slum the dragonborn sorcerer PC has just entered for the purpose of ensuring a wererat keeps a deal that he made with another NPC. Said dragonborn has just started a mine as a subsidiary of a dwarf-owned company, and the slums he's just entered are close to territory controlled by a duergar company.
Following the resolution of the kruthik onslaught accusations will be leveled by the duergar that the dragonborn PC was only allowed to open a mine with the dwarf-owned company (which until now had only allowed dwarf and gnome mine leaders) because he agreed to provoke the kruthiks (possibly with the aid of wererats) into destabilizing the area near the duergar territory.
The dragonborn sorcerer obviously had nothing to do with the kruthiks, but the dwarf-owned company (or at least a member of it) may have carefully arranged circumstances to provoke the kruthiks and make the dragonborn sorcerer a suspect. This could lead to the sorcerer wanting to attack the duergar, which would benefit the dwarves. Alternatively, maybe the duergar provoked the kruthiks themselves, using the chaos to capture people to use as slaves. Or maybe a third party did it for an unknown reason?
Sounds like it'll be a clusterfuck, keep us updated lol
Another fun detail I might use in the future:
It's already been established that the reclusive wizard who protects the central hub area of the campaign openly uses modify memory on people for various reasons. Sometimes it's as a punishment, sometimes it's to remove a painful memory from a key individual that contributes to the area so they'll keep functioning (most recently by changing a grieving merchant's memory so that he now thinks his spouse was a hated enemy), and sometimes it's seemingly pointless (such as an individual having a curse removed also discovering that a memory of their's had been altered as well). This is already scary enough, but other learned mages in the area recognize that the wizard's usage of modify memory to change details that happened many years ago is indicative that they are an extremely powerful spellcaster (it takes the highest level casting of modify memory to change a memory from more than a year ago).
However, I came upon a homebrew item that stores memories in a fashion unlike how modify memory works. The only way to get a memory back is by using a special command word. I've decided my wizard should have that, too.
Most people in the area who know someone's memory has been altered by the wizard dare not cast remove curse on that individual for any reason for fear that they'll be punished (though many wealthy people could be paying to have remove curse cast upon them often, just in case). What if somebody tried anyway, though, and it failed to restore the target's true memories? Everybody knows the wizard uses modify memory and that remove curse undoes that spell, but no one knows about the special memory-storing item. How would people react if it became public knowledge that someone everyone knows had their memory modified didn't have it restored with remove curse? Would they then be forced to assume that the wizard had actually cast modify memory on everyone else to make them think that one person had their memory modified when they actually hadn't?
I'm trying to think how modify memory could hypothetically be used to fuck with the PCs. Maybe I could plan a certain event that later on the PCs can find no evidence it ever transpired. Maybe I could play out each session and then decide later that certain things never actually happened or happened differently. I'd need to keep it limited, though, as I wouldn't want to end up confusing myself as to what actually happened and what was a false memory.
I need to put some more thought into how a secluded society in these conditions would develop. Would some people start lying about having their memories modified or knowing someone else's memory was modified? Would some people refuse to believe that their memory hasn't been modified even if a casting of remove curse did nothing? Would people obsessively keep very detailed notes and journals, and would there be some people so paranoid that they believe the wizard can even alter the contents of said journals?
I have already decided that the proprietress of the inn the characters are staying believes her sister died and that she's looking after her nephew, but in reality the nephew is her son, she never had a sister, and the fake sister's name is her real name.
Hell, maybe some of the events during the kruthik attack in my next session can later be revealed to have been false memories.
I ran two one-shots yesterday, one in the morning and one in the evening! The morning game was in person and the other was online, and whew I'm mentally exhausted from them! I didn't do much prep for either, instead pulling random monsters from Mordenkainen's and using my Dungeon Morphs dice for the first game, and doing the second game mostly in theatre of the mind with a crudely drawn battlemap towards the end. They both turned out pretty good I think!
The first game was set in a swamp leading to a temple, and both of my players was controlling two level 5 characters. They mowed down the kruthiks and corpse flower I threw at them outside, but inside there were quite a few traps that hurt them some but not much. Mostly they were there to discourage them from retreating. They then wandered into a maze-like section and went around a tight spiral coming up on a creature crouched down, which they promptly attacked and ran away from to draw it out in a slightly more open area. Well they didn't run far enough, because it was a bonelord and it caught up then started stabbing and teleporting around and shrugging off their attacks lol. They eventually brought it down after it KO'd two of them and nearly got the remaining two, and none of them brought a healer so they took their loot (a magic wardrobe like a bag of holding but bigger, with 10,000 gold pieces inside. They loaded that heavy sumbitch up on a Tenser's floating disk like a fridge into a truck lol) and ran. If they had continued they would have faced a two-headed cyclops that fired lasers from it's eyes, and then later a sibriex with bulezau minions as the final boss
The second game I had the party start on the second highest floating island from the Overlight TTRPG and gave em a very brief, basic rundown of the world and said they were country bumpkins that didn't know shit about fuck but got a case of wanderlust. So they hired a guy with a flying cloud to take em to the island below, then they murdered him by pretending that he threw one of them off the island (the PC was an aasimar with wings, so he really just jumped off and flew back up to safety) so the others threw HIM off, then they took his cloud as their own and got some work from the local adventurer's guild to help a nearby village of goblins fight off some large, intelligent velociraptors. They set up an ambush with spike pits, an unseen servant wearing goblin clothes as a decoy, and the wizard sitting in the cloud 50 feet up in the air. It was a pretty cool setup, but they still barely survived those dickhead dinosaurs leaping 30 feet, multiattacks, and pack tactics giving them all advantage lol
I’m planning on running a game of A Quiet Year soon, does anyone know of any RPG podcasts or streams that have played it? I know Friends at the Table has at least two episodes featuring it.
Everyone in our group is a huge fan of Shadowrun's setting, but repeat attempts to actually run the system for more than a session have failed. We've successfully run Hero System and Starfinder, but Shadowrun just ends up with all of frustrated as we spend hours building just a single character and trying to hunt and peck all the rules for this one thing across the entire book in the middle of combat.
I'm pretty sure that if I ever run Shadowrun, I'll be using the lore and tossing the rule book out the window in favor of, like, WoD homebrew or something.
I've mentioned it before but I'm the weirdo who could take or leave the setting for some other urban science fantasy stuff but desperately wish there was something salvageable out of the mess of a rules book they posted.
So one of my players can't come often but has always wanted to play a wererat, so I let him use the stat block straight out of the Monster Manual and introduced a scenario where the halfling proprietress of an inn hired him to get a halfling wererat she knew before he was cursed to come see her. Two of the normal PCs accompanied him to see that the PC wererat kept his word. The halfling wererat confronted the other PCs, initially saying that he didn't want to see the proprietress and angrily growled that if she cared so much she and her nephew should come to the wererat warren so they could be infected and join him "so they could be a family again."
The PC wererat bolted off at this statement and remained absent until the end of the session.
The halfling wererat finally admitted that he was the halfling women's husband and that her nephew is actually their son. He once tried to steal a piece of jewelry to give to her as a gift, but when he next saw his wife and child they only thought of him as a good friend and his son was suddenly the halfling woman's nephew. Convinced the reclusive wizard altered his family's memories as punishment for committing a serious theft in his domain and appalled that the citizenry in general just shrugged and played along with this new truth the wizard had created the halfling man fled to the nearby slums and was infected by a wererat, choosing to join their warren. The sorcerer PC managed to wear the halfling wererat down, getting him to promise that he'd come visit the inn tomorrow morning.
Our game session normally ends at 8 PM, and one player had to leave. It was at this moment that the player running the other wererat piped up after about an hour of watching a number of combats against insectlike monsters. The other two players stayed to watch and see what he had in mind.
The PC wererat went to the inn in human form and convinced the halfling proprietress and her "nephew" that the halfling wererat wanted to meet with them right now. Against her better judgement the halfling woman agreed to come, and the wandering kruthiks in the tunnels didn't give her a chance to change her mind and go back. Finally the PC wererat led the halflings into the pitch black warren and attacked them, knocking both the woman and child unconscious (though the halfling woman put up a fight with a silvered dagger and a specially commissioned anti-lycanthrope magic item) before lightly biting both several times to infect them with wererat lycanthropy. The player explained that his PC believed he was doing what the halfling wererat would want.
This resulted in a situation where all the players but one know the secret of what happened, but none of the characters other than the wererat know. The other players were confident that the player of the PC wererat wouldn't get away with this as the people he's abducted are well known, with one being the proprietress of the area's most popular inn.
Imagine the players' surprise when they get back to the inn and find the halfling proprietress and her "nephew" there. They're going to be imposters placed there by the wizard, obviously, but what kind of creatures they're going to be is yet to be decided. I have decided that the halfling wererat isn't going back to the warren to rest and will be very surprised and disturbed to meet with one set of his family members at the inn and another set back at the warren. I'm going to try and keep the player who left early out of the loop and the other players (whose characters don't know about the abduction) quiet about it.
This all happened in one session? It literally took our party yesterday an hour to stop wasting time and start the mission they'd already decided to do one session prior.
Our last session of Torchbearer was 3 hours long and, I shit you not, got us through one room of the dungeon and a camp phase.
To be fair it was all gold. Half the group got possessed, not smart rats though, she just handed the orc a rope to help restrain the paladin.
Then I pilfered a large ewer that took up my whole satchel. So I gave my thieves tools to the orc and poured what was left of my wine bottle into the freshly looted black metal pitcher. Which isn't a health and safety issue because adventurers are gross creatures.
Then someone asked if the water in the horrific basin was drinkable, I fucked up a tremendously easy test checking and we had to flee from a large, acidic ooze that 100% would have killed us if we fought. The wizard cast the spell to make us Equal in Might to the ooze. Which is hilarious in the context of not so heroically running the fuck away.
The fight had the ooze kill us by turn two but I used my nature skulking and the ever useful rope and grappling hook to roll a collosal 7 successes. Causing a tie where both sides had to take major compromises.
In our negatives everyone came out of that fight either exhausted, angry or injured. On the positives: More loot (two slightly melted helmets and a treasure map) and a safe alcove to pitch camp.
In camp I tried to use my nature to get out of being injured (my rat is literally incapable of doing it by default with how low her Health stat is) and failed. So chose to suck it up. When you suck it up the GM picks your health stat, your nature stat or one of your health skills and permanently reduces it by one.
So now in a game where the average good skill is 3 and most dice pools want to hit at least 4 I get to roll 1 dice for fighting.
This will be fine I'm sure, fightings what Guide Rocksworn brought these other bozos along for.
This all happened in one session? It literally took our party yesterday an hour to stop wasting time and start the mission they'd already decided to do one session prior.
Actually, one player was thirty minutes late, so it was a two and a half hour session instead of my normal three hour one.
I've got two main tricks for saving time:
- Preroll damage for the attacks of creatures you expect the party to fight
- If the party is taking too long to come to a decision (or a roleplaying scene between two party members is dragging on a bit too long) have something interrupt them. For example, at one point when the PC wererat and the sorcerer were arguing with no clear resolution in sight I had a troll NPC I'd already prepared show up to sneak up and grapple the sorcerer for the benefit of the wererat (the sorcerer and the troll actually ended up getting along in the end, as said troll is unusual in that he's started a food vending business).
Hexmage-PA on
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
This all happened in one session? It literally took our party yesterday an hour to stop wasting time and start the mission they'd already decided to do one session prior.
Actually, one player was thirty minutes late, so it was a two and a half hour session instead of my normal three hour one.
I've come two main tricks for saving time:
- Preroll damage for the attacks of creatures you expect the party to fight
- If the party is taking too long to come to a decision (or a roleplaying scene between two party members is dragging on a bit too long) have something interrupt them. For example, at one point when the PC wererat and the sorcerer were arguing with no clear resolution in sight I had a troll NPC I'd already prepared show up to sneak up and grapple the sorcerer for the benefit of the wererat (the sorcerer and the troll actually ended up getting along in the end, as said troll is unusual in that he's started a food vending business).
Pre-rolling damage or using average damage is a super time saver, as well as pre-rolling initiatives and stuff like that.
So my plan for my current D&D campaign is shaping up to be one in which multiple factions are going to be vying for control of a thriving Underdark outpost, one whose wizard overlord has frankly grown tired of managing as its grown larger and more populous than they intended it to. They want to soon leave it behind to explore deeper into the Underdark using the resources they've gained from twenty years of taxes and trade.
The major factions so far are dwarf representatives of a mountain stronghold and duergar representatives of an Underdark stronghold who have had to follow a non-aggression pact to operate in the outpost, but eventually that pact will be a thing of the past. There's also a temple to the Raven Queen that has fallen to a violent heretical sect, a large myconid colony that secretly hides demonic mind-altering fungi, a nearby colony of deep gnomes, and a portal in an ancient ruin to a kingdom of the ghouls in the Shadowfell. Plus there could be secret aberrations in hiding.
I kinda want to throw an anarchist group in there somewhere, although how well anarchists would fare against these many other factions seeking domination is questionable.
EDIT: Just discovered there's an anarchist/anti-capitalist adventure anthology available on DM's Guild called Eat the Rich. I'm gonna have to check this out, even if it is a bit weird that they're charging $20 for a PDF about anti-capitalism.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Anti-capitalists also have to pay for food and rent. That’s kind of why we’re anti-capitalists.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Also, despite the crushing illiteracy that makes me want to vomit in people's - fascists and some leftists alike - mouths like a mother bird feeding her young except the barf doesn't stop, it doesn't ever stop, and the person beneath me's eyes widen in terror as they kick frantically trying to get away but they can't, and where is all this barf even coming from, it's more than any human stomach could hold oh god, "capitalism" and "money" or even "greed for money" are not synonyms, money has been around for multiple thousands of years and industrial capitalism has barely been around for 300
Caught this egregious example of Palladium's complete lack of editing or research or sanity checking last night while reading a Nightbane book.
The is a sourcebook that covers the Astral plane. It has rules for permanently spending P.P.E. (i.e Mana points) to create your own astral domain, including classes that specialize in it. After you spend P.P.E., you get creation points that you use to buy size, entry methods, defenses, a working biosphere, etc.
The size one apparently didn't get looked at.
100 Cubic feet is about the interior space of a midsize SUV. Assuming an 8' ceiling, you could have a 3 foot by 4 foot room, aka a closet. There is no world in which this qualifies as a "domain".
So you spend a little to get the next size up, 300 cubic feet. A standard prison cell is about 400 cubic feet. Still very bad!
The next size up is "1000 feet" (they dropped the cubic). Assuming they meant 1000 cubic feet, you now have a 10'x10' room with a nice 10 foot ceiling. My (small) home is probably 11,000 cubic feet though. This is an "average" size domain.
Spending just a bit more, you get bumped up to 1 cubic mile. Now, I guess CJ Carella figured he's been increasing by about 3x for each step, let's just round up 3000 feet to a mile. Well, a cubic mile is not 5280 cubic feet. A cubic mile is 147 billion cubic feet. Instead of a roughly 5-fold increase in space, you're getting a hundred million-fold increase. Pretty good deal! A couple square miles of space, if you have a generous 1000 foot ceiling.
However, I can do one better. They say "The same size can be purchased more than once to make the domain bigger." On its face, this is pretty worthless, because every step is equal to or less than double the cost of the previous step. I suppose you could purchase 100 cubic miles multiple times. But a true power player will notice that 100 cubic feet costs 0 creation points. So, I can purchase 100 cubic feet, I dunno, a trillion times? The size of my domain is actually unlimited.
Edit: Just noticed they screwed up the cubic miles to cubic kilometers conversion for good measure.
It follows the same rules as smoke grenades being 'free' in Fragged Empire: The Gm gets to slap you for every instance of it you bring over the limit of what's sensible.
Obviously
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GrogMy sword is only steelin a useful shape.Registered Userregular
@Jacobkosh didn't you posit in one of your AP threads that Phil Collins is Awakened?
I went ahead and bought that "Eat the Rich" DMsGuild adventure anthology. I've scanned through the first seven or so adventures and unless something later on really wows me I don't think I can recommend it (at least at a $20 price point), despite one standout scenario so far.
The first adventure is extremely simplistic. The premise is that a town relies on a magic stone to enhance their crop yields but has to pay a tax for the privilege to use it, a tax that has steadily increased. The keeper of the stone claims the magic is a limited resource that must be conserved. The town mayor wants the stone, the stone's keeper brought back alive, and none of the guards harmed. As written, the party encounters a few plant monsters, a lone guard who is willing to to help the party find the secret clearing where the stone is (killing her or knocking her unconscious in fact causes four hostile guards to appear at the clearing), and the stone's keeper. The keeper fights, and even if he is captured instead of killed the adventure conclusion text describes a trial being held for him that ends in his execution (Where the fuck are this guy's guards and allies? How has he been in control for so long if this is all it takes to depose him???). Also, the magic stone fortunately has limitless power to enrich the soil and increase crop yields.
A later adventure involves the party being turned into rats as part of a plan to convince the local food-hoarding nobles that they have an infestation in the castle, at which point the party returns to offer their services as rat catchers in exchange for enough food to feed a village (bwuh???). The players must go through a certain number of rooms in rat form without being killed by anyone. The daughter of the lord is in on the plan, and luckily even if the party fails she just tells her dad he's being a dick and leaves for the village, making the lord feel bad enough that he brings food to the village anyway.
We finally get to a scenario that isn't ridiculous and is much more realistic in tone with an insurgency in a dwarf city. The king has responded to an unsustainable rise in the population through draconian methods, including both food rationing and taking certain children who show promise from their parents to be trained as secret police. The party joins forces with the insurgency leader to aid in mass battles against the city's army and secret police, with the adventure text specifically mentioning that any dwarf characters in the party will find themselves facing at least one relative as an opponent (a random table decides whether the relative surrenders or attacks). The adventure also describes scattered members of the insurgency mourning for dead friends and relatives among the army they've slain. Finally, killing and decapitating the King is presented as the only way to succeed. Anything less than the execution of the king is stated in the adventure conclusion to result in the city's nobles launching their own attack and crushing the insurgency.
We've come a long way from the absurd rat scenario.
The last scenario I've looked at, "Is Dryad Property Theft?", is admittedly more morally ambiguous (and therefore more interesting). The leader of a logging company has discovered a dryad's grove where the fruits grant sentience to local animals. The party is hired by the man to defeat the intelligent animals and secure the grove so that he can use the magical fruits to create an army of intelligent war beasts (he is unaware that his intrusion will cause the magic to disappear; if told this he dismisses the claim as a lie). After setting off the party soon encounters the talking animals, who try to convince the group to speak to both the dryad and an intelligent owlbear. The dryad follows a goddess of peace and seeks a nonviolent resolution, but as an anarchist refuses to force his desires on the intelligent animals and will let any of them do as they wish without his interference. The owlbear wants to kill the logging company leader and his allies as revenge for him capturing and caging the owlbear's mate. From here the adventure assumes the party chooses one of three paths: Anarchist, Pacifist, or Tyrant. In the Anarchist path the party kills their former employer; possibilities include getting his workers to revolt, assassinating him in his office, or assassinating him at his home. The Pacifist path amounts to a guaranteed failure as the logging baron cannot be persuaded to leave the grove alone (although it should be noted the party receives no reward for following the Anarchist path but is rewarded with a magic item called the Flute of Peace in the Pacifist path conclusion). In the Tyrant's path the party fulfills their original contract to the employer and must kill twenty intelligent animals (the party also receives over 1000 gp as payment).
Again, much better than the rat scenario (which I'm assuming the author must have written with children in mind as the players).
I'll update if I stumble upon anything else interesting.
Hexmage-PA on
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
So, a couple more sessions into MOUNT GHIDORAH, I have the party face Jet Jaguar. For those of you who actually know tokusatsu films, Jet Jaguar is a heroic robot most notable for showing up in an MST3K and for "programming himself bigger" to fight alongside Godzilla.
I had his boss fight be a borg rip off. With every attack, he adapted. The bard naturally started with shatter; first attack fine. Then the disadvantage for a metal man vanished. Then resistance to thunder. Then immunity to thunder! How were they to defeat this impervious machine that grew impervious to every attack?
I went ahead and bought that "Eat the Rich" DMsGuild adventure anthology. I've scanned through the first seven or so adventures and unless something later on really wows me I don't think I can recommend it (at least at a $20 price point), despite one standout scenario so far.
...
The last scenario I've looked at, "Is Dryad Property Theft?", is admittedly more morally ambiguous (and therefore more interesting). The leader of a logging company has discovered a dryad's grove where the fruits grant sentience to local animals. The party is hired by the man to defeat the intelligent animals and secure the grove so that he can use the magical fruits to create an army of intelligent war beasts (he is unaware that his intrusion will cause the magic to disappear; if told this he dismisses the claim as a lie). After setting off the party soon encounters the talking animals, who try to convince the group to speak to both the dryad and an intelligent owlbear. The dryad follows a goddess of peace and seeks a nonviolent resolution, but as an anarchist refuses to force his desires on the intelligent animals and will let any of them do as they wish without his interference. The owlbear wants to kill the logging company leader and his allies as revenge for him capturing and caging the owlbear's mate. From here the adventure assumes the party chooses one of three paths: Anarchist, Pacifist, or Tyrant. In the Anarchist path the party kills their former employer; possibilities include getting his workers to revolt, assassinating him in his office, or assassinating him at his home. The Pacifist path amounts to a guaranteed failure as the logging baron cannot be persuaded to leave the grove alone (although it should be noted the party receives no reward for following the Anarchist path but is rewarded with a magic item called the Flute of Peace in the Pacifist path conclusion). In the Tyrant's path the party fulfills their original contract to the employer and must kill twenty intelligent animals (the party also receives over 1000 gp as payment).
...
I really appreciate that doing the right thing isn't really rewarding outside of having done the right thing.
We've got a group of 4 so far, and i'd really like to hit 5 or 6 for that properly madcap energy that a Mega-dungeon clearly needs.
I also cannot wait to throw crazy magic items and weird enemies at the party - Drifting Blades, Coin-Operated Spellbooks, Tactical Skeletons, it's gonna be great.
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Also running terra incongita is going really well.
Right now i'm mentally trying to solve whether a wheelchair for a Satyr would look different to one for a human. I've decided that the ruler of the Ilary Satyrs is wheelchair bound, because dammit, disability representation is important.
Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure a wheel chair for digitrade legs and hooves would be /that/ different (other, than obviously, needing a lot of hoofcare sicne they're not getting worn down by walking... interesting question, do satyrs get their feet shod? I have to think on this!), but i also feel like i'm maybe missing something.
I’m planning on running a game of A Quiet Year soon, does anyone know of any RPG podcasts or streams that have played it? I know Friends at the Table has at least two episodes featuring it.
A few off the top of my head:
Heart Points
What Am I Rolling?
Party Of One
From The Jackals To The Shepherds (which was a serialized, one-turn-a-week playthrough of the game)
We've got a group of 4 so far, and i'd really like to hit 5 or 6 for that properly madcap energy that a Mega-dungeon clearly needs.
I also cannot wait to throw crazy magic items and weird enemies at the party - Drifting Blades, Coin-Operated Spellbooks, Tactical Skeletons, it's gonna be great.
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Also running terra incongita is going really well.
Right now i'm mentally trying to solve whether a wheelchair for a Satyr would look different to one for a human. I've decided that the ruler of the Ilary Satyrs is wheelchair bound, because dammit, disability representation is important.
Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure a wheel chair for digitrade legs and hooves would be /that/ different (other, than obviously, needing a lot of hoofcare sicne they're not getting worn down by walking... interesting question, do satyrs get their feet shod? I have to think on this!), but i also feel like i'm maybe missing something.
Satyrs have goat hooves, right? I don't think they'd need shoes if their natural environment is mountains. I think we shoe domesticated horses because they spend a lot more time walking on hard surfaces than they would in the wild, but that's just a guess.
I don't think a wheelchair would need to be that different, but the question reminded me of this article on designing a wheelchair for use in developing countries. It had to be able to handle rugged terrain while being simple enough that it could be repaired with the tools and materials available in, e.g., a poor, rural village without modern infrastructure. The solution they came up with is pretty cool, imho!
I remember you saying that satyr cities have a lot of verticality, so a wheelchair that lets you use mechanical advantage to go uphill seems like it would be useful!
I helped my best friend DM her first game last night! Even though we were all playing on Roll20, she came over to my house so she wouldn't have to share a laptop with her husband so he couldn't see what she had planned. She arrived early so I could help her get everything setup and to go over all of her questions and stuff. I gave her advice and showed her how everything worked, and once we finally started everyone had a great time! It was a simple one-shot where we had to rescue a party member's dog, but she took my advice and made some goblins actually use hit and run tactics and hide in the trees and stuff, then we fought a blue dragon and three witches (who weren't really witches, just really buff lady bandits living in the woods) and would have died had our warlock not cast "suggestion" and had the dragon attack the witches and then fly east for as long as it could. We still barely survived as it was, but I'm glad the warlock pulled that off because he missed every single attack and failed every action the entire session besides that one spell lol
We've got a group of 4 so far, and i'd really like to hit 5 or 6 for that properly madcap energy that a Mega-dungeon clearly needs.
I also cannot wait to throw crazy magic items and weird enemies at the party - Drifting Blades, Coin-Operated Spellbooks, Tactical Skeletons, it's gonna be great.
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Also running terra incongita is going really well.
Right now i'm mentally trying to solve whether a wheelchair for a Satyr would look different to one for a human. I've decided that the ruler of the Ilary Satyrs is wheelchair bound, because dammit, disability representation is important.
Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure a wheel chair for digitrade legs and hooves would be /that/ different (other, than obviously, needing a lot of hoofcare sicne they're not getting worn down by walking... interesting question, do satyrs get their feet shod? I have to think on this!), but i also feel like i'm maybe missing something.
Satyrs have goat hooves, right? I don't think they'd need shoes if their natural environment is mountains. I think we shoe domesticated horses because they spend a lot more time walking on hard surfaces than they would in the wild, but that's just a guess.
I don't think a wheelchair would need to be that different, but the question reminded me of this article on designing a wheelchair for use in developing countries. It had to be able to handle rugged terrain while being simple enough that it could be repaired with the tools and materials available in, e.g., a poor, rural village without modern infrastructure. The solution they came up with is pretty cool, imho!
I remember you saying that satyr cities have a lot of verticality, so a wheelchair that lets you use mechanical advantage to go uphill seems like it would be useful!
Horses get horseshoes because they're more active than wild horses. That wears down the hoof faster, especially if it's being ridden with a load or is a show horse that does jumps or runs on a harder track. Those both have a chance to chip or fracture the wall of it.
It depends on how active you imagine satyrs to be. I'm skeptical to believe you would need a differently designed wheelchair without it just being something else entirely. Now...satyr mobility walkers or scooters is a fun idea...
We've got a group of 4 so far, and i'd really like to hit 5 or 6 for that properly madcap energy that a Mega-dungeon clearly needs.
I also cannot wait to throw crazy magic items and weird enemies at the party - Drifting Blades, Coin-Operated Spellbooks, Tactical Skeletons, it's gonna be great.
---
Also running terra incongita is going really well.
Right now i'm mentally trying to solve whether a wheelchair for a Satyr would look different to one for a human. I've decided that the ruler of the Ilary Satyrs is wheelchair bound, because dammit, disability representation is important.
Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure a wheel chair for digitrade legs and hooves would be /that/ different (other, than obviously, needing a lot of hoofcare sicne they're not getting worn down by walking... interesting question, do satyrs get their feet shod? I have to think on this!), but i also feel like i'm maybe missing something.
Satyrs have goat hooves, right? I don't think they'd need shoes if their natural environment is mountains. I think we shoe domesticated horses because they spend a lot more time walking on hard surfaces than they would in the wild, but that's just a guess.
I don't think a wheelchair would need to be that different, but the question reminded me of this article on designing a wheelchair for use in developing countries. It had to be able to handle rugged terrain while being simple enough that it could be repaired with the tools and materials available in, e.g., a poor, rural village without modern infrastructure. The solution they came up with is pretty cool, imho!
I remember you saying that satyr cities have a lot of verticality, so a wheelchair that lets you use mechanical advantage to go uphill seems like it would be useful!
Horses get horseshoes because they're more active than wild horses. That wears down the hoof faster, especially if it's being ridden with a load or is a show horse that does jumps or runs on a harder track. Those both have a chance to chip or fracture the wall of it.
It depends on how active you imagine satyrs to be. I'm skeptical to believe you would need a differently designed wheelchair without it just being something else entirely. Now...satyr mobility walkers or scooters is a fun idea...
Edit: That article is super cool
I feel like a wheelchair is a human-centric solution designed and suitable for a modern human urban settlement, a solution for roads and pavement, that might not necessarily reflect a fullness of fantasy solutions available to a Satyr with disability. You might get more mileage - and character development, world and/or story-building - out of thinking about the kind of design solution that would be appropriate for their environment or world.
Does the Satyr rule a sylvan kingdom from a forest treetop community? Wheelchairs would feel forced and unnatural in such an architecture. How would you cope with swing bridges and rope ladders? Or are they instead giant tree limbs, with natural slopes and ridges?
You could lean into the Greek mythic origin of the Satyr, and solve it multiple ways. You could lean into the fact that unlike our world, fantasy worlds have large beings of significant strength, such as Ogres or Minotaurs. A faithful Minotaur (literal) bodyservant to carry and act as legs would be a simple and easy solution. But why is the Minotaur a servant? Is it a slave, signifying a past victory over a rival Minotaur community? Or a loyal bondsman, who owes a family/blood debt? Either way, you'd never get lost in your own city.
Alternatively you could look into the early Greek invention of the crane (and Archimedes' large enough lever) and have the ruler ferried by a system of cranes, lifting and rising amongst the trees in a royal crane palaquin, dispensing decrees as if a literal Deus ex Machina (as its original Greek Theater usage: a literal chair that descends from aloft). He could hold court in a crane throne, swinging around an amphitheatre hoisted to speak and engage - or ignore - any petitioner or court member directly. The proximity to the King can be both a blessing, and a curse.
All of this ignores the magical options, of course. Something like a Flying Carpet would be a natural fit for a solution - Professor X that shit up, give him a flying hover chair and have him rule from there. Bonus implication: it's not a far step from flying hover chair to Prophet any number of boss fights - Dr Robonik, the Prophet of Regret, MODOK...
Of course, maybe the ruler ignores all that and just loves his wheels. Is he forcing unnatural and inconvenient impositions on his people to accommodate his desires? Where swing bridges were the norm, is he now felling ancient giant Totara at the edges of his forest to create straight smooth ramps for him to access the city? What do his people think of this 'modernisation', and what is being given up? IS there a proto-industrial revolution undercurrent to it all, with a modern merchant class gaining great personal power and wealth at the increased access, but a simmering undercurrent of resentment and resistance from traditionalists and downtrodden?
EDIT: Further thought: Satyrs are not exactly known for their self-restraint and are in fact somewhat notorious overindulgers. Is the ruler actually a noble yet disabled ruler, or do they just suffer crippling Gout from a lifetime of too much wine and rich food? Not for nothing was gout known as "the king of diseases and the disease of Kings".
Posts
I bring this up now because I've decided there's going to be a sudden onslaught of kruthiks (basically horse-sized insect/reptile hybrids) in an Underdark slum the dragonborn sorcerer PC has just entered for the purpose of ensuring a wererat keeps a deal that he made with another NPC. Said dragonborn has just started a mine as a subsidiary of a dwarf-owned company, and the slums he's just entered are close to territory controlled by a duergar company.
Following the resolution of the kruthik onslaught accusations will be leveled by the duergar that the dragonborn PC was only allowed to open a mine with the dwarf-owned company (which until now had only allowed dwarf and gnome mine leaders) because he agreed to provoke the kruthiks (possibly with the aid of wererats) into destabilizing the area near the duergar territory.
The dragonborn sorcerer obviously had nothing to do with the kruthiks, but the dwarf-owned company (or at least a member of it) may have carefully arranged circumstances to provoke the kruthiks and make the dragonborn sorcerer a suspect. This could lead to the sorcerer wanting to attack the duergar, which could lead to the duergar being defeated (benefiting the dwarves) or to the dragonborn sorcerer dying and being replaced as the head of the new mine (benefiting the dwarves, who allowed the PC to keep an unusually large percentage of the profits).
Alternatively, maybe the duergar provoked the kruthiks themselves, using the chaos to capture people to use as slaves. Maybe they also have a spy among the dwarves?
Or maybe a third party did it for an unknown reason? Keeping the dead from the kruthik attack laying around could attract scavengers such as carrion crawlers. Maybe someone needs a lot of corpses very quickly?
Sounds like it'll be a clusterfuck, keep us updated lol
The PbtA game The Sprawl scratched the Shadowrun itch for me
Another fun detail I might use in the future:
It's already been established that the reclusive wizard who protects the central hub area of the campaign openly uses modify memory on people for various reasons. Sometimes it's as a punishment, sometimes it's to remove a painful memory from a key individual that contributes to the area so they'll keep functioning (most recently by changing a grieving merchant's memory so that he now thinks his spouse was a hated enemy), and sometimes it's seemingly pointless (such as an individual having a curse removed also discovering that a memory of their's had been altered as well). This is already scary enough, but other learned mages in the area recognize that the wizard's usage of modify memory to change details that happened many years ago is indicative that they are an extremely powerful spellcaster (it takes the highest level casting of modify memory to change a memory from more than a year ago).
However, I came upon a homebrew item that stores memories in a fashion unlike how modify memory works. The only way to get a memory back is by using a special command word. I've decided my wizard should have that, too.
Most people in the area who know someone's memory has been altered by the wizard dare not cast remove curse on that individual for any reason for fear that they'll be punished (though many wealthy people could be paying to have remove curse cast upon them often, just in case). What if somebody tried anyway, though, and it failed to restore the target's true memories? Everybody knows the wizard uses modify memory and that remove curse undoes that spell, but no one knows about the special memory-storing item. How would people react if it became public knowledge that someone everyone knows had their memory modified didn't have it restored with remove curse? Would they then be forced to assume that the wizard had actually cast modify memory on everyone else to make them think that one person had their memory modified when they actually hadn't?
I'm trying to think how modify memory could hypothetically be used to fuck with the PCs. Maybe I could plan a certain event that later on the PCs can find no evidence it ever transpired. Maybe I could play out each session and then decide later that certain things never actually happened or happened differently. I'd need to keep it limited, though, as I wouldn't want to end up confusing myself as to what actually happened and what was a false memory.
I need to put some more thought into how a secluded society in these conditions would develop. Would some people start lying about having their memories modified or knowing someone else's memory was modified? Would some people refuse to believe that their memory hasn't been modified even if a casting of remove curse did nothing? Would people obsessively keep very detailed notes and journals, and would there be some people so paranoid that they believe the wizard can even alter the contents of said journals?
I have already decided that the proprietress of the inn the characters are staying believes her sister died and that she's looking after her nephew, but in reality the nephew is her son, she never had a sister, and the fake sister's name is her real name.
Hell, maybe some of the events during the kruthik attack in my next session can later be revealed to have been false memories.
The first game was set in a swamp leading to a temple, and both of my players was controlling two level 5 characters. They mowed down the kruthiks and corpse flower I threw at them outside, but inside there were quite a few traps that hurt them some but not much. Mostly they were there to discourage them from retreating. They then wandered into a maze-like section and went around a tight spiral coming up on a creature crouched down, which they promptly attacked and ran away from to draw it out in a slightly more open area. Well they didn't run far enough, because it was a bonelord and it caught up then started stabbing and teleporting around and shrugging off their attacks lol. They eventually brought it down after it KO'd two of them and nearly got the remaining two, and none of them brought a healer so they took their loot (a magic wardrobe like a bag of holding but bigger, with 10,000 gold pieces inside. They loaded that heavy sumbitch up on a Tenser's floating disk like a fridge into a truck lol) and ran. If they had continued they would have faced a two-headed cyclops that fired lasers from it's eyes, and then later a sibriex with bulezau minions as the final boss
The second game I had the party start on the second highest floating island from the Overlight TTRPG and gave em a very brief, basic rundown of the world and said they were country bumpkins that didn't know shit about fuck but got a case of wanderlust. So they hired a guy with a flying cloud to take em to the island below, then they murdered him by pretending that he threw one of them off the island (the PC was an aasimar with wings, so he really just jumped off and flew back up to safety) so the others threw HIM off, then they took his cloud as their own and got some work from the local adventurer's guild to help a nearby village of goblins fight off some large, intelligent velociraptors. They set up an ambush with spike pits, an unseen servant wearing goblin clothes as a decoy, and the wizard sitting in the cloud 50 feet up in the air. It was a pretty cool setup, but they still barely survived those dickhead dinosaurs leaping 30 feet, multiattacks, and pack tactics giving them all advantage lol
Also being playing Torchbearer and this games rad as hell.
I'm pretty sure that if I ever run Shadowrun, I'll be using the lore and tossing the rule book out the window in favor of, like, WoD homebrew or something.
The PC wererat bolted off at this statement and remained absent until the end of the session.
The halfling wererat finally admitted that he was the halfling women's husband and that her nephew is actually their son. He once tried to steal a piece of jewelry to give to her as a gift, but when he next saw his wife and child they only thought of him as a good friend and his son was suddenly the halfling woman's nephew. Convinced the reclusive wizard altered his family's memories as punishment for committing a serious theft in his domain and appalled that the citizenry in general just shrugged and played along with this new truth the wizard had created the halfling man fled to the nearby slums and was infected by a wererat, choosing to join their warren. The sorcerer PC managed to wear the halfling wererat down, getting him to promise that he'd come visit the inn tomorrow morning.
Our game session normally ends at 8 PM, and one player had to leave. It was at this moment that the player running the other wererat piped up after about an hour of watching a number of combats against insectlike monsters. The other two players stayed to watch and see what he had in mind.
The PC wererat went to the inn in human form and convinced the halfling proprietress and her "nephew" that the halfling wererat wanted to meet with them right now. Against her better judgement the halfling woman agreed to come, and the wandering kruthiks in the tunnels didn't give her a chance to change her mind and go back. Finally the PC wererat led the halflings into the pitch black warren and attacked them, knocking both the woman and child unconscious (though the halfling woman put up a fight with a silvered dagger and a specially commissioned anti-lycanthrope magic item) before lightly biting both several times to infect them with wererat lycanthropy. The player explained that his PC believed he was doing what the halfling wererat would want.
This resulted in a situation where all the players but one know the secret of what happened, but none of the characters other than the wererat know. The other players were confident that the player of the PC wererat wouldn't get away with this as the people he's abducted are well known, with one being the proprietress of the area's most popular inn.
Imagine the players' surprise when they get back to the inn and find the halfling proprietress and her "nephew" there. They're going to be imposters placed there by the wizard, obviously, but what kind of creatures they're going to be is yet to be decided. I have decided that the halfling wererat isn't going back to the warren to rest and will be very surprised and disturbed to meet with one set of his family members at the inn and another set back at the warren. I'm going to try and keep the player who left early out of the loop and the other players (whose characters don't know about the abduction) quiet about it.
To be fair it was all gold. Half the group got possessed, not smart rats though, she just handed the orc a rope to help restrain the paladin.
Then I pilfered a large ewer that took up my whole satchel. So I gave my thieves tools to the orc and poured what was left of my wine bottle into the freshly looted black metal pitcher. Which isn't a health and safety issue because adventurers are gross creatures.
Then someone asked if the water in the horrific basin was drinkable, I fucked up a tremendously easy test checking and we had to flee from a large, acidic ooze that 100% would have killed us if we fought. The wizard cast the spell to make us Equal in Might to the ooze. Which is hilarious in the context of not so heroically running the fuck away.
The fight had the ooze kill us by turn two but I used my nature skulking and the ever useful rope and grappling hook to roll a collosal 7 successes. Causing a tie where both sides had to take major compromises.
In our negatives everyone came out of that fight either exhausted, angry or injured. On the positives: More loot (two slightly melted helmets and a treasure map) and a safe alcove to pitch camp.
In camp I tried to use my nature to get out of being injured (my rat is literally incapable of doing it by default with how low her Health stat is) and failed. So chose to suck it up. When you suck it up the GM picks your health stat, your nature stat or one of your health skills and permanently reduces it by one.
So now in a game where the average good skill is 3 and most dice pools want to hit at least 4 I get to roll 1 dice for fighting.
This will be fine I'm sure, fightings what Guide Rocksworn brought these other bozos along for.
Actually, one player was thirty minutes late, so it was a two and a half hour session instead of my normal three hour one.
I've got two main tricks for saving time:
- Preroll damage for the attacks of creatures you expect the party to fight
- If the party is taking too long to come to a decision (or a roleplaying scene between two party members is dragging on a bit too long) have something interrupt them. For example, at one point when the PC wererat and the sorcerer were arguing with no clear resolution in sight I had a troll NPC I'd already prepared show up to sneak up and grapple the sorcerer for the benefit of the wererat (the sorcerer and the troll actually ended up getting along in the end, as said troll is unusual in that he's started a food vending business).
Pre-rolling damage or using average damage is a super time saver, as well as pre-rolling initiatives and stuff like that.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I just let everyone level up to fifth in the meantime while I organized my own things better.
*facepalm*
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The major factions so far are dwarf representatives of a mountain stronghold and duergar representatives of an Underdark stronghold who have had to follow a non-aggression pact to operate in the outpost, but eventually that pact will be a thing of the past. There's also a temple to the Raven Queen that has fallen to a violent heretical sect, a large myconid colony that secretly hides demonic mind-altering fungi, a nearby colony of deep gnomes, and a portal in an ancient ruin to a kingdom of the ghouls in the Shadowfell. Plus there could be secret aberrations in hiding.
I kinda want to throw an anarchist group in there somewhere, although how well anarchists would fare against these many other factions seeking domination is questionable.
EDIT: Just discovered there's an anarchist/anti-capitalist adventure anthology available on DM's Guild called Eat the Rich. I'm gonna have to check this out, even if it is a bit weird that they're charging $20 for a PDF about anti-capitalism.
The is a sourcebook that covers the Astral plane. It has rules for permanently spending P.P.E. (i.e Mana points) to create your own astral domain, including classes that specialize in it. After you spend P.P.E., you get creation points that you use to buy size, entry methods, defenses, a working biosphere, etc.
The size one apparently didn't get looked at.
100 Cubic feet is about the interior space of a midsize SUV. Assuming an 8' ceiling, you could have a 3 foot by 4 foot room, aka a closet. There is no world in which this qualifies as a "domain".
So you spend a little to get the next size up, 300 cubic feet. A standard prison cell is about 400 cubic feet. Still very bad!
The next size up is "1000 feet" (they dropped the cubic). Assuming they meant 1000 cubic feet, you now have a 10'x10' room with a nice 10 foot ceiling. My (small) home is probably 11,000 cubic feet though. This is an "average" size domain.
Spending just a bit more, you get bumped up to 1 cubic mile. Now, I guess CJ Carella figured he's been increasing by about 3x for each step, let's just round up 3000 feet to a mile. Well, a cubic mile is not 5280 cubic feet. A cubic mile is 147 billion cubic feet. Instead of a roughly 5-fold increase in space, you're getting a hundred million-fold increase. Pretty good deal! A couple square miles of space, if you have a generous 1000 foot ceiling.
However, I can do one better. They say "The same size can be purchased more than once to make the domain bigger." On its face, this is pretty worthless, because every step is equal to or less than double the cost of the previous step. I suppose you could purchase 100 cubic miles multiple times. But a true power player will notice that 100 cubic feet costs 0 creation points. So, I can purchase 100 cubic feet, I dunno, a trillion times? The size of my domain is actually unlimited.
Edit: Just noticed they screwed up the cubic miles to cubic kilometers conversion for good measure.
Obviously
Yes, and he was meant to feature in my Miami-set Vampire game, and it turns out that's where his mansion is? Wtf
The first adventure is extremely simplistic. The premise is that a town relies on a magic stone to enhance their crop yields but has to pay a tax for the privilege to use it, a tax that has steadily increased. The keeper of the stone claims the magic is a limited resource that must be conserved. The town mayor wants the stone, the stone's keeper brought back alive, and none of the guards harmed. As written, the party encounters a few plant monsters, a lone guard who is willing to to help the party find the secret clearing where the stone is (killing her or knocking her unconscious in fact causes four hostile guards to appear at the clearing), and the stone's keeper. The keeper fights, and even if he is captured instead of killed the adventure conclusion text describes a trial being held for him that ends in his execution (Where the fuck are this guy's guards and allies? How has he been in control for so long if this is all it takes to depose him???). Also, the magic stone fortunately has limitless power to enrich the soil and increase crop yields.
A later adventure involves the party being turned into rats as part of a plan to convince the local food-hoarding nobles that they have an infestation in the castle, at which point the party returns to offer their services as rat catchers in exchange for enough food to feed a village (bwuh???). The players must go through a certain number of rooms in rat form without being killed by anyone. The daughter of the lord is in on the plan, and luckily even if the party fails she just tells her dad he's being a dick and leaves for the village, making the lord feel bad enough that he brings food to the village anyway.
We finally get to a scenario that isn't ridiculous and is much more realistic in tone with an insurgency in a dwarf city. The king has responded to an unsustainable rise in the population through draconian methods, including both food rationing and taking certain children who show promise from their parents to be trained as secret police. The party joins forces with the insurgency leader to aid in mass battles against the city's army and secret police, with the adventure text specifically mentioning that any dwarf characters in the party will find themselves facing at least one relative as an opponent (a random table decides whether the relative surrenders or attacks). The adventure also describes scattered members of the insurgency mourning for dead friends and relatives among the army they've slain. Finally, killing and decapitating the King is presented as the only way to succeed. Anything less than the execution of the king is stated in the adventure conclusion to result in the city's nobles launching their own attack and crushing the insurgency.
We've come a long way from the absurd rat scenario.
The last scenario I've looked at, "Is Dryad Property Theft?", is admittedly more morally ambiguous (and therefore more interesting). The leader of a logging company has discovered a dryad's grove where the fruits grant sentience to local animals. The party is hired by the man to defeat the intelligent animals and secure the grove so that he can use the magical fruits to create an army of intelligent war beasts (he is unaware that his intrusion will cause the magic to disappear; if told this he dismisses the claim as a lie). After setting off the party soon encounters the talking animals, who try to convince the group to speak to both the dryad and an intelligent owlbear. The dryad follows a goddess of peace and seeks a nonviolent resolution, but as an anarchist refuses to force his desires on the intelligent animals and will let any of them do as they wish without his interference. The owlbear wants to kill the logging company leader and his allies as revenge for him capturing and caging the owlbear's mate. From here the adventure assumes the party chooses one of three paths: Anarchist, Pacifist, or Tyrant. In the Anarchist path the party kills their former employer; possibilities include getting his workers to revolt, assassinating him in his office, or assassinating him at his home. The Pacifist path amounts to a guaranteed failure as the logging baron cannot be persuaded to leave the grove alone (although it should be noted the party receives no reward for following the Anarchist path but is rewarded with a magic item called the Flute of Peace in the Pacifist path conclusion). In the Tyrant's path the party fulfills their original contract to the employer and must kill twenty intelligent animals (the party also receives over 1000 gp as payment).
Again, much better than the rat scenario (which I'm assuming the author must have written with children in mind as the players).
I'll update if I stumble upon anything else interesting.
I had his boss fight be a borg rip off. With every attack, he adapted. The bard naturally started with shatter; first attack fine. Then the disadvantage for a metal man vanished. Then resistance to thunder. Then immunity to thunder! How were they to defeat this impervious machine that grew impervious to every attack?
Yeah, turned out LORD GHIDORAH had flipped a switch, and they needed to flip it back:
Still looking for a couple more people for my mega dungeon if any of you are interested.
We've got a group of 4 so far, and i'd really like to hit 5 or 6 for that properly madcap energy that a Mega-dungeon clearly needs.
I also cannot wait to throw crazy magic items and weird enemies at the party - Drifting Blades, Coin-Operated Spellbooks, Tactical Skeletons, it's gonna be great.
---
Also running terra incongita is going really well.
Right now i'm mentally trying to solve whether a wheelchair for a Satyr would look different to one for a human. I've decided that the ruler of the Ilary Satyrs is wheelchair bound, because dammit, disability representation is important.
Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure a wheel chair for digitrade legs and hooves would be /that/ different (other, than obviously, needing a lot of hoofcare sicne they're not getting worn down by walking... interesting question, do satyrs get their feet shod? I have to think on this!), but i also feel like i'm maybe missing something.
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A few off the top of my head:
Heart Points
What Am I Rolling?
Party Of One
From The Jackals To The Shepherds (which was a serialized, one-turn-a-week playthrough of the game)
Satyrs have goat hooves, right? I don't think they'd need shoes if their natural environment is mountains. I think we shoe domesticated horses because they spend a lot more time walking on hard surfaces than they would in the wild, but that's just a guess.
I don't think a wheelchair would need to be that different, but the question reminded me of this article on designing a wheelchair for use in developing countries. It had to be able to handle rugged terrain while being simple enough that it could be repaired with the tools and materials available in, e.g., a poor, rural village without modern infrastructure. The solution they came up with is pretty cool, imho!
I remember you saying that satyr cities have a lot of verticality, so a wheelchair that lets you use mechanical advantage to go uphill seems like it would be useful!
Horses get horseshoes because they're more active than wild horses. That wears down the hoof faster, especially if it's being ridden with a load or is a show horse that does jumps or runs on a harder track. Those both have a chance to chip or fracture the wall of it.
It depends on how active you imagine satyrs to be. I'm skeptical to believe you would need a differently designed wheelchair without it just being something else entirely. Now...satyr mobility walkers or scooters is a fun idea...
Edit: That article is super cool
Ah. Laissez-faire capitalism.
I feel like a wheelchair is a human-centric solution designed and suitable for a modern human urban settlement, a solution for roads and pavement, that might not necessarily reflect a fullness of fantasy solutions available to a Satyr with disability. You might get more mileage - and character development, world and/or story-building - out of thinking about the kind of design solution that would be appropriate for their environment or world.
Does the Satyr rule a sylvan kingdom from a forest treetop community? Wheelchairs would feel forced and unnatural in such an architecture. How would you cope with swing bridges and rope ladders? Or are they instead giant tree limbs, with natural slopes and ridges?
You could lean into the Greek mythic origin of the Satyr, and solve it multiple ways. You could lean into the fact that unlike our world, fantasy worlds have large beings of significant strength, such as Ogres or Minotaurs. A faithful Minotaur (literal) bodyservant to carry and act as legs would be a simple and easy solution. But why is the Minotaur a servant? Is it a slave, signifying a past victory over a rival Minotaur community? Or a loyal bondsman, who owes a family/blood debt? Either way, you'd never get lost in your own city.
Alternatively you could look into the early Greek invention of the crane (and Archimedes' large enough lever) and have the ruler ferried by a system of cranes, lifting and rising amongst the trees in a royal crane palaquin, dispensing decrees as if a literal Deus ex Machina (as its original Greek Theater usage: a literal chair that descends from aloft). He could hold court in a crane throne, swinging around an amphitheatre hoisted to speak and engage - or ignore - any petitioner or court member directly. The proximity to the King can be both a blessing, and a curse.
All of this ignores the magical options, of course. Something like a Flying Carpet would be a natural fit for a solution - Professor X that shit up, give him a flying hover chair and have him rule from there. Bonus implication: it's not a far step from flying hover chair to Prophet any number of boss fights - Dr Robonik, the Prophet of Regret, MODOK...
Of course, maybe the ruler ignores all that and just loves his wheels. Is he forcing unnatural and inconvenient impositions on his people to accommodate his desires? Where swing bridges were the norm, is he now felling ancient giant Totara at the edges of his forest to create straight smooth ramps for him to access the city? What do his people think of this 'modernisation', and what is being given up? IS there a proto-industrial revolution undercurrent to it all, with a modern merchant class gaining great personal power and wealth at the increased access, but a simmering undercurrent of resentment and resistance from traditionalists and downtrodden?
EDIT: Further thought: Satyrs are not exactly known for their self-restraint and are in fact somewhat notorious overindulgers. Is the ruler actually a noble yet disabled ruler, or do they just suffer crippling Gout from a lifetime of too much wine and rich food? Not for nothing was gout known as "the king of diseases and the disease of Kings".