So I initially wasn't interested in the newly announced D&D book, Candlekeep Mysteries, because it's being billed as an anthology of 17 mystery-based adventures. However, I just found out that all those adventures are written by people whose work hasn't been featured in official D&D publications before.
I'm still not interested in an adventure anthology, but I am glad to see something other than the same handful of names that have been on practically every D&D product for the last ten years.
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
My party failed to secure the last dragon masks. The boss got away after both of his big damage spells were counterspelled by the bard. Of course, he conveniently pointed the party to the ritual of the masks before fleeing and being devoured by the spiders pouring out of the dimensional tear into the spider dimension.
(Also, my party poked what they shouldn't have poked so they tore a dimensional tear into the spider dimension. Where the spiders are made of fractally more spiders. It is now slowly growing.)
What I haven't told my players is that each dragon mask is going to form a part of !Voltron. Debating what the two missing masks should be. Thinking maybe they'll be missing the head and the left leg.
So I'm working on a thing, and have a weird request.
Can any of you think of types of Birds that have the word Bird right in their name? Whether it's a an individual species or a larger category, whether taxonomically formal or informal. What I'm ultimately looking for are types of birds that would be good names for branches of an authoritarian Techno-Fantasy Sky City government. In this case BIRD is an acronym for the Buer-Illiaster Research Directorate, the government of Wizards who rule the floating Netherese city of Illiaster and the Buer valley region below. My ideas for the individual branches of BIRD are something like this:
- BlueBIRD: The public face and diplomatic branch of the Directorate, handling negotiations with rival Netherese cities or with any surface culture powerful enough that Illiaster can't just take what they want from them.
- SongBIRD: The culture and propaganda branch, keeping the deeply exploited Buer valley laborers pacified.
- SeaBIRD: The logistical and economic branch, responsible for acquiring and distributing resources, whether through their fleet of trade vessels, or through their many (ecologically devastating) magical essence extraction sites on the planet's surface.
- HummingBIRD: The common laborers who handle cleaning and mundane maintenance, so named because they have to stay busy busy busy busy, flitting from task to task, or they'll be replaced by one of the thousands of Buer residents eager for a job in Illiaster proper.
- BlackBIRD: Of course they've got some kind of spying/espionage branch, and that's all I'll say about it.
- MockingBIRD: More of a rumor than a certainty, there may be a dark conspiracy at the heart of BIRD subverting the city's research towards a purpose even the more decadent and jaded mage lords would find unwholesome.
This is for a short intermission game for one of my D&D groups. Probably a couple months of weekly games, 7-8 sessions at most. We have two linked campaigns with two DMs and switch between them a couple times a year, but while the current Group 1 arc is wrapping up, the Group 2 DM won't be ready to take over, so I've offered to run this as a filler game to keep the momentum going. And it's set in my character's place of origin, which has become sort of important to the Group 1 story, but the DM (who was new to D&D entirely when he started running this game two years ago) has expressed some worries about getting it right, even with the... extensive... background notes I provided him.
So, we'll be flashing back to the final days of Illiaster, almost two millennia before the modern campaign. Illiaster is my own invention, a homebrew addition to the Netherese city states. Illiaster actually self-destructed under suspicious circumstances more than a decade before the overall fall of Netheril, and should have served as a cautionary tale to the other cities, but instead just helped ramp up their paranoia leading to the decision to try to kill and usurp the goddess of magic, which ultimately doomed them all. And then 18 centuries or so later, my Warforged Paladin from the Group 1 game was recovered from the wreckage, reactivated, and taught the rudiments of ethics and moral philosophy by my Human Wizard character from the Group 2 game, himself a descendant of Illiaster's leaders, come to follow a lead in a distant ancestor's partially reconstructed research.
Major influences will include:
-Chrono Trigger (The stark difference between the Enlightened Ones of the floating kingdom of Zeal and the Earthbound Ones who lived in the ice age wasteland below. Also the name of the Blackbird Sky Fortress. Also Illiaster was founded in the first place to research a mysterious meteorite, whose secrets, once unlocked, ultimately destroyed it.)
- Final Fantasy 7 (Player characters will be explicitly involved with an ecoterrorist revolutionary faction, having to make regular incursions between the impoverished surface and the city above. And also this will be a more SciFi flavor of Fantasy than they've encountered so far in the modern Forgotten Realms setting.)
- The Bioshock series (Specifically the element of entering a deeply flawed utopia right as the cracks are getting too big to cover up, and seeing it when the whole thing is tearing itself apart. And also the aspect of eventually being cut off from resources deep in enemy territory, and having to take advantage of Weird Science to survive.)
- Rogue One (The element of the players knowing before we even start playing that there will be no survivors, because we've already seen the parts of the story that happen immediately afterwards.)
- Darksun (The way Arcane Magic strips the earth of vitality in that setting seems like a good model for the ecological devastation the canonical Netherese caused to fuel their sky cities.)
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
So I just came out of a particularly uncomfortable D&D session. Long story short, the DM put us in a position where the entire party had to either to accept a quest or die. One player didn't think his character would accept such an ultimatum and would rather die, but that would have killed the other three PCs (myself included). The DM also informed us we'd have to start over from 1st-level when the group was at 13th-level if that player's PC didn't comply.
Eventually the player relented, but followed that up by saying he wasn't sure he'd be back next week.
The entire set of circumstances was bizarre and railroad-y, TBH.
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
edited January 2021
That's horrible.
edit: What was the quest and how does this NPC kill a group of 13th level characters?
I had an NPC put a geas on the party once in an attempt to make them do something for him... But the party also knew of a way to get rid of the geas, and it was meant to turn that NPC into a villain once they understood just what would happen if they complied with the "request", so while it kinda forced their hand towards certain options it gave them a much more personal connection to what they decided to do.
If you want to railroad the players that bad (which sometimes you might!) and there's a conflict then just pull back the curtain a bit and have the players help figure out what would narratively make sense. Making a live or die ultimatum is anti fun, and threatening to tank the whole campaign basically seems like a declaration that you don't want players
So I just came out of a particularly uncomfortable D&D session. Long story short, the DM put us in a position where the entire party had to either to accept a quest or die. One player didn't think his character would accept such an ultimatum and would rather die, but that would have killed the other three PCs (myself included). The DM also informed us we'd have to start over from 1st-level when the group was at 13th-level if that player's PC didn't comply.
Eventually the player relented, but followed that up by saying he wasn't sure he'd be back next week.
The entire set of circumstances was bizarre and railroad-y, TBH.
I've been in this kind of session before. It sucks. I'm still friends with the DM but I don't play in his games anymore and I'm happier for it
Adventures you really want the party to go on are what
- magic books that lead to another world
- night hags that can conjure a world in their dreams
- fortresses stuck in the past during a pivotal battle
- crystal balls that show what might happen
- passing comets that alter reality for a single night
are for.
If you don’t mind it not going as planned, and you should, just try to put it out there organically and work with what your friends do.
You can also just do a one-shot. People like making disposable characters. Carla wants to be a gothic elf bard call Bjorn Sorrowmeet, but like, only for 4 hours.
Okay you guys fucked up repeatedly and now you should be dead, really, but if you accept this mission then you can live. Like shit a TPK will happen... okay the Lich says how about I don't kill you and you serve me
edit: What was the quest and how does this NPC kill a group of 13th level characters?
It's honestly been a very strange situation. The simplified version is an NPC who'd been traveling with us for a while suddenly assassinated a politically-important NPC with some kind of instant kill magic arrow out of nowhere (as in this NPC literally had left her magic bow behind when we went to go see the other NPC, but somehow it appeared in her hand). Further, the NPC seemed to have been under unsubtle mind control when this happened.
The rest of the party was put on trial to see if we were accomplices to the murder. We were forced to accept magical tracking devices that could be used to spy on us and could instantly kill us if we did something worthy of execution.
Honestly, the trial part was kind of fun, but then we got to the end and the ultimatum was presented. The tracking insta-kill bracelets are still on our person, and one PC died towards the end of the session trying to remove it.
To make things particularly strange, the NPC who actually committed the murder (you know, the one who the rest of the party was threatened with death for possibly being accomplices to her crime) has for some reason not only not been punished, but seems to be being trained as a special agent of the state (the same state we just saved from a dracolich and its dragon army, btw).
I'm trying to guess what the DM's plan was here. Best I can guess is that the group that forced our party into this situation secretly wanted that other NPC dead but used the threat of execution for supposedly being accomplices in the assassination to force us into being pawns who have to obey or be killed by our tracking bracelets.
I get the feeling the DM may backtrack on at least some of this, and my main concern was that one of my fellow players was very displeased by this stripping of agency. I myself feel my character would want revenge for this, but seeing as the DM has introduced magic surveillance/remote execution bracelets into the mix it wouldn't surprise me if an attempt at revenge would be met with similarly overpowered resistance.
That’s some serious my dad is bigger than your dad energy there. I think I would have pulled out my bat-anti-braclet bomb spray and called up Commissioner Gordon for back-up.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I personally like the idea of a suicide squad setup, but having it be a frame job that gets you into it and also having it be a weird all or nothing situation where if one person refuses then everyone dies? It feels like a bit much. Go for one or the other - having it be a legal arrest of some sort kind of goes with what Solar was saying, or just have the characters arrested and they have the option of either taking this mission or rotting in jail (breaking out of jail).
That said, I would also assume that part of the plan is that you are supposed to be getting out of this eventually in some way, most likely with the desire to commit revenge intact. Even if the GM wasn't expecting the full extent to which the players resisted, I can't imagine they didn't know this was going to be a thing, and it feels to me like they're setting up some powerful villains in both the person who was traveling with you (or whoever impersonated them) and the organization forcing you to work on their behalf.
It sounds to me like the GM and the players had different ideas about how the game should be going, and rather than talking about it with the players the GM decided to force the players to either engage in the campaign they wanted to run... or start a new campaign.
edit: What was the quest and how does this NPC kill a group of 13th level characters?
It's honestly been a very strange situation. The simplified version is an NPC who'd been traveling with us for a while suddenly assassinated a politically-important NPC with some kind of instant kill magic arrow out of nowhere (as in this NPC literally had left her magic bow behind when we went to go see the other NPC, but somehow it appeared in her hand).
This is, like, the least objectionable part of the whole thing, since "teleports to my hand" is a commonish, though far from universal, feature of magic weapons.
edit: What was the quest and how does this NPC kill a group of 13th level characters?
It's honestly been a very strange situation. The simplified version is an NPC who'd been traveling with us for a while suddenly assassinated a politically-important NPC with some kind of instant kill magic arrow out of nowhere (as in this NPC literally had left her magic bow behind when we went to go see the other NPC, but somehow it appeared in her hand).
This is, like, the least objectionable part of the whole thing, since "teleports to my hand" is a commonish, though far from universal, feature of magic weapons.
One of my players has a homebrew ancestral feat where if he reaches behind him, he will always grab something that can be used as an improvised weapon
If he's in a forest, it'll be a tree branch or old bone; if it's indoors, a bottle (bludgeoning first attack, slashing on subsequent attacks)
He's yet to use it, but eventually he'll be in a situation where the party is unarmed for some reason
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I personally like the idea of a suicide squad setup, but having it be a frame job that gets you into it and also having it be a weird all or nothing situation where if one person refuses then everyone dies? It feels like a bit much. Go for one or the other - having it be a legal arrest of some sort kind of goes with what Solar was saying, or just have the characters arrested and they have the option of either taking this mission or rotting in jail (breaking out of jail).
That said, I would also assume that part of the plan is that you are supposed to be getting out of this eventually in some way, most likely with the desire to commit revenge intact. Even if the GM wasn't expecting the full extent to which the players resisted, I can't imagine they didn't know this was going to be a thing, and it feels to me like they're setting up some powerful villains in both the person who was traveling with you (or whoever impersonated them) and the organization forcing you to work on their behalf.
Suicide Squad is a solid campaign concept but you have to go into it with the consent of your players.
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Yeah, there seems to be just a big overall mismatch between GM type and player type. Although I'm not used to seeing "Consequences are consequences" GM being the same person as "My story or else" GM - it's not unheard of, but usually the former shows up with more open-world oriented stuff.
Regardless, they're both built on a sort of adversarial GM-player relationship, and I think having an out-of-character/out-of-session conversation with your GM about their plans for the campaign would be a good step forward. I'm guessing they won't want to tip their hand too much, based on everything else, but if you're being backed into a corner with regards to your decisions and doing things that would be otherwise out of character, it feels like a fair compromise to have them reveal a bit more of their secret plan in turn. You're ultimately still people who are playing a game together, and shouldn't be working against each other - if you're supposed to (or not supposed to) be talking opportunities to push back and rebel against your new masters, you should be aware of that out-of-character, regardless of what your character decides to pursue.
edit: What was the quest and how does this NPC kill a group of 13th level characters?
It's honestly been a very strange situation. The simplified version is an NPC who'd been traveling with us for a while suddenly assassinated a politically-important NPC with some kind of instant kill magic arrow out of nowhere (as in this NPC literally had left her magic bow behind when we went to go see the other NPC, but somehow it appeared in her hand).
This is, like, the least objectionable part of the whole thing, since "teleports to my hand" is a commonish, though far from universal, feature of magic weapons.
One of my players has a homebrew ancestral feat where if he reaches behind him, he will always grab something that can be used as an improvised weapon
If he's in a forest, it'll be a tree branch or old bone; if it's indoors, a bottle (bludgeoning first attack, slashing on subsequent attacks)
He's yet to use it, but eventually he'll be in a situation where the party is unarmed for some reason
The DM in the game I was talking about earlier sent out a text to explain a bit of his reasoning behind what transpired in last night's session, but not all of it. The reason why the one NPC killed the other was made clear, and he apparently rolled to see what different members of the group deciding whether the party should be executed or not chose (although these rolls all resulted in execution). The NPC who actually performed the assassination got off scottfree because the other NPC was secretly evil and the bow was using the first NPC to kill the other. However, the NPC that was killed was seen as a hero by the local populace, so the group that sentenced our party essentially wanted scapegoats while the NPC who actually committed the assassination is going off to do their own thing.
Phrased like that I can understand the DMs thought process more, but as things were presented last night it just felt like the party was being treated like shit for some unknown reason.
The DM in the game I was talking about earlier sent out a text to explain a bit of his reasoning behind what transpired in last night's session, but not all of it. The reason why the one NPC killed the other was made clear, and he apparently rolled to see what different members of the group deciding whether the party should be executed or not chose (although these rolls all resulted in execution). The NPC who actually performed the assassination got off scottfree because the other NPC was secretly evil and the bow was using the first NPC to kill the other. However, the NPC that was killed was seen as a hero by the local populace, so the group that sentenced our party essentially wanted scapegoats while the NPC who actually committed the assassination is going off to do their own thing.
Phrased like that I can understand the DMs thought process more, but as things were presented last night it just felt like the party was being treated like shit for some unknown reason.
This isn't entirely uncommon where the DM puts together a complex set of relationships that result in a consequence and goes, "yes, that's perfectly logical" but tell none of it to their players because that would spoil the surprise. So then the surprise happens and it's not a surprise so much as a gigantic What The Fuck?
It's a branch of "being precious with your secrets", which is something I try to actively push against in my own games because all your clever secrets are meaningless if they stay secrets.
It doesn't really matter what the fictional logic was if the outcome at the table was that the players get railroaded and punished for resisting.
TTRPGs are not a simulation engine to perfectly model a fantasy world, they're a game that actual humans play to have fun.
I've honestly disagreed several times with how this DM runs things, but on the whole I've enjoyed his game. This incident was particularly egregious, though, and I fundamentally disagree with the concept of automated instakill items that can also spy on us. If we were all placed under some kind of enhanced geas spell that is unusually difficult to dispel that would be one thing. We could still choose to disobey and risk taking what could possibly be a lethal amount of damage (or at least enough to soften us up so that we'd be easier pickings unless we spent resources to heal), but it wouldn't be guaranteed death.
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MsAnthropyThe Lady of Pain Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the RhythmThe City of FlowersRegistered Userregular
The DM in the game I was talking about earlier sent out a text to explain a bit of his reasoning behind what transpired in last night's session, but not all of it. The reason why the one NPC killed the other was made clear, and he apparently rolled to see what different members of the group deciding whether the party should be executed or not chose (although these rolls all resulted in execution). The NPC who actually performed the assassination got off scottfree because the other NPC was secretly evil and the bow was using the first NPC to kill the other. However, the NPC that was killed was seen as a hero by the local populace, so the group that sentenced our party essentially wanted scapegoats while the NPC who actually committed the assassination is going off to do their own thing.
Phrased like that I can understand the DMs thought process more, but as things were presented last night it just felt like the party was being treated like shit for some unknown reason.
This isn't entirely uncommon where the DM puts together a complex set of relationships that result in a consequence and goes, "yes, that's perfectly logical" but tell none of it to their players because that would spoil the surprise. So then the surprise happens and it's not a surprise so much as a gigantic What The Fuck?
It's a branch of "being precious with your secrets", which is something I try to actively push against in my own games because all your clever secrets are meaningless if they stay secrets.
Let’s be honest, too. Most DMs would be lucky if even a quarter of the complex set of relationships they do tell the players about end up being remembered.
Not that I am bitter or anything as someone who loves building that kind of stuff as a DM and keeping track of it as a player... :P
Are you and the other players friends with this DM? It really sounds like a situation you should all discuss together, and maybe should have asked for a 'time out' to discuss in the moment.
The white bellbird, has a loud scream of a bird call, which might be neat for a security company/alarm branch.
Bowerbirds, build platforms and invite mates in big showy display. Maybe a title among the bluebird embassy? Sounds like a fun game and setting!
This is the list I settled on:
- BlackBIRD: The covert intelligence gathering agency that controls the heavily militarized peacekeeper force.
- SnowBIRD: The agency dealing with the environmental impact of magic use. Unlike the rest of Netheril, the leaders of Illiaster freely acknowledged that their sky cities were fucking the land up BEFORE the damage got bad enough to provoke war with a bunch of underdark monsters whose homes were being destroyed. Unfortunately, their response was to just hurl more spells at the problem. We're causing Global Warming with our rampant magic abuse? Well, ok, we'll just artificially induce an Ice Age to balance that out. Also since SnowBIRD is handling other environmental stuff, they're the ones who maintain the enchantments that keep the city in the sky.
- SongBIRD: The entertainment and indoctrination branch, keeping the people loyal and pacified. In this setting, Bards and Wizards are recognized as much more closely linked, more like the difference between a STEM degree and a Liberal Arts degree, and this is where a lot of the Bards of Illiaster wind up working.
- FireBIRD: The viciously aggressive agency in charge of non-mercantile resource acquisition (raiding and conquest), the offensive counterpart to BlackBIRD's defensive force. FireBIRD has only ever been deployed abroad, and if they were ever brought back home to supplement BlackBIRD peacekeepers locally, no matter how good the justification, it would probably be unilaterally unpopular even with the Wizard Elite.
- SeaBIRD: Economics and trade, runs the merchant fleet, and also most of the labor camps and factories down on the surface where raw materials are harvested and processed. Therefore, also runs most of the less challenging to exploit means for unobserved travel between the surface and the flying city, by hiding in a cargo skyship or climbing one of the maintenance shafts in one of the elevator towers the city sometimes docks with. I've rolled the diplomatic functions of the BlueBIRD concept in here as well.
- ThunderBIRD: The agency "governing" the actual Research Wizards, officially the reason the whole rest of the city exists. All the arrogant mad scientists types toiling in their labs until they burst forth to reveal their creations and boast of their genius. And the harried support personnel who keep them coordinated, at least nominally, on working towards the shared goals of the city at large.
- HummingBIRD: Not a real agency, just a common nickname for the menial laborers who work for the Directorate. Employment as a HummingBIRD is one of the few ways non-Wizard surface folk get access to the flying city, but they're kept very very busy, so using their positions to cause mischief isn't really feasible for the Resistance. Also maybe there's something more sinister going on - I think a division in ThunderBIRD may have started implanting psionic suggestions in the city's maintenance and custodial staff, to turn them into suicidally loyal shock troops if needed.
- MockingBIRD: A popular nickname for the Resistance, not affiliated with the Illiaster government except in opposition to it.
One thing to note, there's no one clearly in command with these divisions, although several branches probably enjoy behaving as though they're pulling all the strings. Clearly, the different agencies answer to someone, but the true masters of Illiaster are a MYSTERY.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
The white bellbird, has a loud scream of a bird call, which might be neat for a security company/alarm branch.
Bowerbirds, build platforms and invite mates in big showy display. Maybe a title among the bluebird embassy? Sounds like a fun game and setting!
This is the list I settled on:
- BlackBIRD: The covert intelligence gathering agency that controls the heavily militarized peacekeeper force.
- SnowBIRD: The agency dealing with the environmental impact of magic use. Unlike the rest of Netheril, the leaders of Illiaster freely acknowledged that their sky cities were fucking the land up BEFORE the damage got bad enough to provoke war with a bunch of underdark monsters whose homes were being destroyed. Unfortunately, their response was to just hurl more spells at the problem. We're causing Global Warming with our rampant magic abuse? Well, ok, we'll just artificially induce an Ice Age to balance that out. Also since SnowBIRD is handling other environmental stuff, they're the ones who maintain the enchantments that keep the city in the sky.
- SongBIRD: The entertainment and indoctrination branch, keeping the people loyal and pacified. In this setting, Bards and Wizards are recognized as much more closely linked, more like the difference between a STEM degree and a Liberal Arts degree, and this is where a lot of the Bards of Illiaster wind up working.
- FireBIRD: The viciously aggressive agency in charge of non-mercantile resource acquisition (raiding and conquest), the offensive counterpart to BlackBIRD's defensive force. FireBIRD has only ever been deployed abroad, and if they were ever brought back home to supplement BlackBIRD peacekeepers locally, no matter how good the justification, it would probably be unilaterally unpopular even with the Wizard Elite.
- SeaBIRD: Economics and trade, runs the merchant fleet, and also most of the labor camps and factories down on the surface where raw materials are harvested and processed. Therefore, also runs most of the less challenging to exploit means for unobserved travel between the surface and the flying city, by hiding in a cargo skyship or climbing one of the maintenance shafts in one of the elevator towers the city sometimes docks with. I've rolled the diplomatic functions of the BlueBIRD concept in here as well.
- ThunderBIRD: The agency "governing" the actual Research Wizards, officially the reason the whole rest of the city exists. All the arrogant mad scientists types toiling in their labs until they burst forth to reveal their creations and boast of their genius. And the harried support personnel who keep them coordinated, at least nominally, on working towards the shared goals of the city at large.
- HummingBIRD: Not a real agency, just a common nickname for the menial laborers who work for the Directorate. Employment as a HummingBIRD is one of the few ways non-Wizard surface folk get access to the flying city, but they're kept very very busy, so using their positions to cause mischief isn't really feasible for the Resistance. Also maybe there's something more sinister going on - I think a division in ThunderBIRD may have started implanting psionic suggestions in the city's maintenance and custodial staff, to turn them into suicidally loyal shock troops if needed.
- MockingBIRD: A popular nickname for the Resistance, not affiliated with the Illiaster government except in opposition to it.
One thing to note, there's no one clearly in command with these divisions, although several branches probably enjoy behaving as though they're pulling all the strings. Clearly, the different agencies answer to someone, but the true masters of Illiaster are a MYSTERY.
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I'm still not interested in an adventure anthology, but I am glad to see something other than the same handful of names that have been on practically every D&D product for the last ten years.
(Also, my party poked what they shouldn't have poked so they tore a dimensional tear into the spider dimension. Where the spiders are made of fractally more spiders. It is now slowly growing.)
What I haven't told my players is that each dragon mask is going to form a part of !Voltron. Debating what the two missing masks should be. Thinking maybe they'll be missing the head and the left leg.
At least according to the speculation of the mage's guild. They didn't provide any evidence.
Considering the only change was one ship captain going awol two weeks ago I don't understand why they'd go through the effort.
Can any of you think of types of Birds that have the word Bird right in their name? Whether it's a an individual species or a larger category, whether taxonomically formal or informal. What I'm ultimately looking for are types of birds that would be good names for branches of an authoritarian Techno-Fantasy Sky City government. In this case BIRD is an acronym for the Buer-Illiaster Research Directorate, the government of Wizards who rule the floating Netherese city of Illiaster and the Buer valley region below. My ideas for the individual branches of BIRD are something like this:
- BlueBIRD: The public face and diplomatic branch of the Directorate, handling negotiations with rival Netherese cities or with any surface culture powerful enough that Illiaster can't just take what they want from them.
- SongBIRD: The culture and propaganda branch, keeping the deeply exploited Buer valley laborers pacified.
- SeaBIRD: The logistical and economic branch, responsible for acquiring and distributing resources, whether through their fleet of trade vessels, or through their many (ecologically devastating) magical essence extraction sites on the planet's surface.
- HummingBIRD: The common laborers who handle cleaning and mundane maintenance, so named because they have to stay busy busy busy busy, flitting from task to task, or they'll be replaced by one of the thousands of Buer residents eager for a job in Illiaster proper.
- BlackBIRD: Of course they've got some kind of spying/espionage branch, and that's all I'll say about it.
- MockingBIRD: More of a rumor than a certainty, there may be a dark conspiracy at the heart of BIRD subverting the city's research towards a purpose even the more decadent and jaded mage lords would find unwholesome.
This is for a short intermission game for one of my D&D groups. Probably a couple months of weekly games, 7-8 sessions at most. We have two linked campaigns with two DMs and switch between them a couple times a year, but while the current Group 1 arc is wrapping up, the Group 2 DM won't be ready to take over, so I've offered to run this as a filler game to keep the momentum going. And it's set in my character's place of origin, which has become sort of important to the Group 1 story, but the DM (who was new to D&D entirely when he started running this game two years ago) has expressed some worries about getting it right, even with the... extensive... background notes I provided him.
So, we'll be flashing back to the final days of Illiaster, almost two millennia before the modern campaign. Illiaster is my own invention, a homebrew addition to the Netherese city states. Illiaster actually self-destructed under suspicious circumstances more than a decade before the overall fall of Netheril, and should have served as a cautionary tale to the other cities, but instead just helped ramp up their paranoia leading to the decision to try to kill and usurp the goddess of magic, which ultimately doomed them all. And then 18 centuries or so later, my Warforged Paladin from the Group 1 game was recovered from the wreckage, reactivated, and taught the rudiments of ethics and moral philosophy by my Human Wizard character from the Group 2 game, himself a descendant of Illiaster's leaders, come to follow a lead in a distant ancestor's partially reconstructed research.
Major influences will include:
-Chrono Trigger (The stark difference between the Enlightened Ones of the floating kingdom of Zeal and the Earthbound Ones who lived in the ice age wasteland below. Also the name of the Blackbird Sky Fortress. Also Illiaster was founded in the first place to research a mysterious meteorite, whose secrets, once unlocked, ultimately destroyed it.)
- Final Fantasy 7 (Player characters will be explicitly involved with an ecoterrorist revolutionary faction, having to make regular incursions between the impoverished surface and the city above. And also this will be a more SciFi flavor of Fantasy than they've encountered so far in the modern Forgotten Realms setting.)
- The Bioshock series (Specifically the element of entering a deeply flawed utopia right as the cracks are getting too big to cover up, and seeing it when the whole thing is tearing itself apart. And also the aspect of eventually being cut off from resources deep in enemy territory, and having to take advantage of Weird Science to survive.)
- Rogue One (The element of the players knowing before we even start playing that there will be no survivors, because we've already seen the parts of the story that happen immediately afterwards.)
- Darksun (The way Arcane Magic strips the earth of vitality in that setting seems like a good model for the ecological devastation the canonical Netherese caused to fuel their sky cities.)
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-containing-bird
Eventually the player relented, but followed that up by saying he wasn't sure he'd be back next week.
The entire set of circumstances was bizarre and railroad-y, TBH.
edit: What was the quest and how does this NPC kill a group of 13th level characters?
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I've been in this kind of session before. It sucks. I'm still friends with the DM but I don't play in his games anymore and I'm happier for it
- magic books that lead to another world
- night hags that can conjure a world in their dreams
- fortresses stuck in the past during a pivotal battle
- crystal balls that show what might happen
- passing comets that alter reality for a single night
are for.
If you don’t mind it not going as planned, and you should, just try to put it out there organically and work with what your friends do.
You can also just do a one-shot. People like making disposable characters. Carla wants to be a gothic elf bard call Bjorn Sorrowmeet, but like, only for 4 hours.
Okay you guys fucked up repeatedly and now you should be dead, really, but if you accept this mission then you can live. Like shit a TPK will happen... okay the Lich says how about I don't kill you and you serve me
I think that's about the only time I'd pull that.
It's honestly been a very strange situation. The simplified version is an NPC who'd been traveling with us for a while suddenly assassinated a politically-important NPC with some kind of instant kill magic arrow out of nowhere (as in this NPC literally had left her magic bow behind when we went to go see the other NPC, but somehow it appeared in her hand). Further, the NPC seemed to have been under unsubtle mind control when this happened.
The rest of the party was put on trial to see if we were accomplices to the murder. We were forced to accept magical tracking devices that could be used to spy on us and could instantly kill us if we did something worthy of execution.
Honestly, the trial part was kind of fun, but then we got to the end and the ultimatum was presented. The tracking insta-kill bracelets are still on our person, and one PC died towards the end of the session trying to remove it.
To make things particularly strange, the NPC who actually committed the murder (you know, the one who the rest of the party was threatened with death for possibly being accomplices to her crime) has for some reason not only not been punished, but seems to be being trained as a special agent of the state (the same state we just saved from a dracolich and its dragon army, btw).
I'm trying to guess what the DM's plan was here. Best I can guess is that the group that forced our party into this situation secretly wanted that other NPC dead but used the threat of execution for supposedly being accomplices in the assassination to force us into being pawns who have to obey or be killed by our tracking bracelets.
I get the feeling the DM may backtrack on at least some of this, and my main concern was that one of my fellow players was very displeased by this stripping of agency. I myself feel my character would want revenge for this, but seeing as the DM has introduced magic surveillance/remote execution bracelets into the mix it wouldn't surprise me if an attempt at revenge would be met with similarly overpowered resistance.
That said, I would also assume that part of the plan is that you are supposed to be getting out of this eventually in some way, most likely with the desire to commit revenge intact. Even if the GM wasn't expecting the full extent to which the players resisted, I can't imagine they didn't know this was going to be a thing, and it feels to me like they're setting up some powerful villains in both the person who was traveling with you (or whoever impersonated them) and the organization forcing you to work on their behalf.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
This is, like, the least objectionable part of the whole thing, since "teleports to my hand" is a commonish, though far from universal, feature of magic weapons.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
One of my players has a homebrew ancestral feat where if he reaches behind him, he will always grab something that can be used as an improvised weapon
If he's in a forest, it'll be a tree branch or old bone; if it's indoors, a bottle (bludgeoning first attack, slashing on subsequent attacks)
He's yet to use it, but eventually he'll be in a situation where the party is unarmed for some reason
Suicide Squad is a solid campaign concept but you have to go into it with the consent of your players.
Regardless, they're both built on a sort of adversarial GM-player relationship, and I think having an out-of-character/out-of-session conversation with your GM about their plans for the campaign would be a good step forward. I'm guessing they won't want to tip their hand too much, based on everything else, but if you're being backed into a corner with regards to your decisions and doing things that would be otherwise out of character, it feels like a fair compromise to have them reveal a bit more of their secret plan in turn. You're ultimately still people who are playing a game together, and shouldn't be working against each other - if you're supposed to (or not supposed to) be talking opportunities to push back and rebel against your new masters, you should be aware of that out-of-character, regardless of what your character decides to pursue.
HAMMERSPACE!
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
And they will sing the song that ends the world
Phrased like that I can understand the DMs thought process more, but as things were presented last night it just felt like the party was being treated like shit for some unknown reason.
This isn't entirely uncommon where the DM puts together a complex set of relationships that result in a consequence and goes, "yes, that's perfectly logical" but tell none of it to their players because that would spoil the surprise. So then the surprise happens and it's not a surprise so much as a gigantic What The Fuck?
It's a branch of "being precious with your secrets", which is something I try to actively push against in my own games because all your clever secrets are meaningless if they stay secrets.
TTRPGs are not a simulation engine to perfectly model a fantasy world, they're a game that actual humans play to have fun.
Bowerbirds, build platforms and invite mates in big showy display. Maybe a title among the bluebird embassy? Sounds like a fun game and setting!
I've honestly disagreed several times with how this DM runs things, but on the whole I've enjoyed his game. This incident was particularly egregious, though, and I fundamentally disagree with the concept of automated instakill items that can also spy on us. If we were all placed under some kind of enhanced geas spell that is unusually difficult to dispel that would be one thing. We could still choose to disobey and risk taking what could possibly be a lethal amount of damage (or at least enough to soften us up so that we'd be easier pickings unless we spent resources to heal), but it wouldn't be guaranteed death.
Let’s be honest, too. Most DMs would be lucky if even a quarter of the complex set of relationships they do tell the players about end up being remembered.
Not that I am bitter or anything as someone who loves building that kind of stuff as a DM and keeping track of it as a player... :P
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
This is the list I settled on:
- SnowBIRD: The agency dealing with the environmental impact of magic use. Unlike the rest of Netheril, the leaders of Illiaster freely acknowledged that their sky cities were fucking the land up BEFORE the damage got bad enough to provoke war with a bunch of underdark monsters whose homes were being destroyed. Unfortunately, their response was to just hurl more spells at the problem. We're causing Global Warming with our rampant magic abuse? Well, ok, we'll just artificially induce an Ice Age to balance that out. Also since SnowBIRD is handling other environmental stuff, they're the ones who maintain the enchantments that keep the city in the sky.
- SongBIRD: The entertainment and indoctrination branch, keeping the people loyal and pacified. In this setting, Bards and Wizards are recognized as much more closely linked, more like the difference between a STEM degree and a Liberal Arts degree, and this is where a lot of the Bards of Illiaster wind up working.
- FireBIRD: The viciously aggressive agency in charge of non-mercantile resource acquisition (raiding and conquest), the offensive counterpart to BlackBIRD's defensive force. FireBIRD has only ever been deployed abroad, and if they were ever brought back home to supplement BlackBIRD peacekeepers locally, no matter how good the justification, it would probably be unilaterally unpopular even with the Wizard Elite.
- SeaBIRD: Economics and trade, runs the merchant fleet, and also most of the labor camps and factories down on the surface where raw materials are harvested and processed. Therefore, also runs most of the less challenging to exploit means for unobserved travel between the surface and the flying city, by hiding in a cargo skyship or climbing one of the maintenance shafts in one of the elevator towers the city sometimes docks with. I've rolled the diplomatic functions of the BlueBIRD concept in here as well.
- ThunderBIRD: The agency "governing" the actual Research Wizards, officially the reason the whole rest of the city exists. All the arrogant mad scientists types toiling in their labs until they burst forth to reveal their creations and boast of their genius. And the harried support personnel who keep them coordinated, at least nominally, on working towards the shared goals of the city at large.
- HummingBIRD: Not a real agency, just a common nickname for the menial laborers who work for the Directorate. Employment as a HummingBIRD is one of the few ways non-Wizard surface folk get access to the flying city, but they're kept very very busy, so using their positions to cause mischief isn't really feasible for the Resistance. Also maybe there's something more sinister going on - I think a division in ThunderBIRD may have started implanting psionic suggestions in the city's maintenance and custodial staff, to turn them into suicidally loyal shock troops if needed.
- MockingBIRD: A popular nickname for the Resistance, not affiliated with the Illiaster government except in opposition to it.
One thing to note, there's no one clearly in command with these divisions, although several branches probably enjoy behaving as though they're pulling all the strings. Clearly, the different agencies answer to someone, but the true masters of Illiaster are a MYSTERY.
A BIRDBrain, if you will?
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