Every full moon the town just locks itself in a room full of grain and has a fuckin party
you know, we can also become wererats if we drink this one weird potion
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I didn’t know it had so many upsides and so few downsides!
If BJ is given this knowledge (which he is far too incurious to find himself) he would almost certainly do exactly that!
Kill Six Billion Robots
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One of the campaigns I’m in is like, 1970’s-level technology, in a NY-like city with all the standard DnD races, etc. One big mystery is the fact that all airships, planes, or high-end cars are powered by this sealed box nobody’s ever seen the inside of, all of which are recovered by the major airline corporation if lost.
My kenku air mechanic, Darwin, got to test a rocket pack a la The Rocketeer at her work. It then went awry during the test and she crashed in the city. At the urging of another rogue player, I then decided to steal the rocket pack and say it was destroyed in the crash (to complete the Rocketeer character idea).
I now have THE singular megapower in this world after me, trying to get the rocket prototype back. The company that made this rocket is the same one with this mysterious sealed-box technology, and they probably have more resources than the government.
So far we were followed by an unmarked SUV full of suits that attempted to abduct me, resulting in a fight with the party that ended with the deaths of these 6 suits. We then pushed the car and the bodies off of the highway and into the ocean. Since I can’t go to regular hospitals to heal, I had to find this like back-alley one that’s started getting me involved in crime.
I’m assuming the megapower knows who I am and what I have at this point, so I can’t very well go back to my apartment. I’ve been staying with another player since, but my character’s mom is still like, living at the old apartment, and I can call her, but I can’t tell her what’s going on in case she gets abducted. I guess I should get my in-game mom to live with another player? I could also just move into one of the abandoned apartments in the super-shitty part of town, but another part of the game is that there’s inexplicable rising violence across the city, so without a doubt we’d get attacked by gangs or whatever if we were in a more run-down part of the city now owned by the races at the top of the class system.
I guess I could get an apartment somewhere, then squirrel away my character’s mom, have her live there with me in secret? Kind of a headache. One of us has the ability to create portals so I could have him sneak in and portal out with her.
We also aren’t sure how to go do investigations or anything in a modern-ish setting. If we get in too much trouble we get the cops called on us, and there’s closed-circuit TVs everywhere, so it’s like, risky to do anything out of the ordinary. I can’t really ever use the rocket either, because it’s super loud and bright and uses fuel I don’t think I’d be able to find again. One player floated the idea of founding a detective agency, which it’s hard to think of a reason you would go from “I’m being hunted, I need to lay low” to “let’s go around the city asking sensitive questions all the time”, but if I don’t do the latter the plot will not progress whatsoever.
Modern-era campaigns are stressful!
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Oh, also, the kenku culture in this setting is vaguely roma-themed, so need some suggestions on how to add affectations to a romani character that isn’t horrible offensive western fetishisations of their culture. The character is mostly like Tali from Mass Effect, who I’m going to assume is a horrible offensive western fetishisation of their culture.
I think two things that have come up are:
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How would the old-world mother character act? What kind of things would she eat or do for day-to-day activities?
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How do modern roma dress?
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I’m going to make a “superhero costume” basically to disguise myself when on-the-job. I think my ultimate goal is to make some kind of rocketeer helmet in style of a plague mask, but until then, I was thinking maybe of using a shemagh? Kinda looks cool, though it’s middle-eastern and not eastern european.
I think of the disguise it’ll end up being a hood up, the rocket pack, and a mask like this:
But I’ll need to be able to craft such a thing first.
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today i learned about this homebrew oath for commie paladins which, frankly, owns
literally has “turn bourgeois” as a channel divinity power lol
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Dang where was this two years ago
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Since school is going to be all online, I’m going to try to see if anyone in my cohort wants to start playing dnd as pretext just to get to know each other when we’re all separated and stuck hittin-the-books. I will probably DM. And while I am excited to put to use some of the lessons I learned from my last attempt DMing, and other story telling and game design skills I’ve been studying, I am a still a little nervous. I want to get to the point where DMing doesn’t feel like spinning a whole household’s worth of plates but just a small get together’s amount.
I feel like if I can reach that point, then as a somewhat confident DM, I can be that dangerous element around whom a roleplay game session can form at any second.
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Strongly encourage building up your improv skills, I consider being able to improvise to offer huge gains over being meticulous at prep (a little preparation and a lot of improv will carry a game much better than the obverse)
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Right, what excites me most is to have opportunities to improv with people. The thing that scares me in the lead up, and even in the middle of the game, is the worry that all my prep was on the wrong things or is just never going to be encountered. Like I worry if I haven’t come up with enough plot, enough characters, if I’m being too rigid in how I imagine what getting from beat A to beat B has to look like.
But also I have found the game is still pretty fun when you really don’t know what the next step should look like. I guess it’s just about getting comfortable with dealing with the unpredictable.
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A principle from the excellent tabletop RPG Apocalypse World, that I have integrated into my GMing of any game, is “play to find out what happens”.
My style of prep is to not think at all about plot beats or narrative in a conventional sense, but to set up ambiguous tense situations and track consequences in-between sessions
Basically, introducing a bunch of open ended problems and let the players direct their own solutions
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open ended problems [that] let the players direct their own solutions
yessss, this is what I hope for my games to be filled with. i just have to do the brain work to figure out what that means not in abstract.
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One of the tools I borrowed from AW is how ‘threats’ are organized. The antagonists have plans and ambitions, and its easy enough to come up with a checklist of things they will do should no one get in their way. This way, you always have an idea of what antagonists are trying to do, but you don’t know what the players are going to do to interfere with these plans. With practice, it becomes easier to figure out the interplay between PCs and antagonists. Here’s the best part: any threats the players ignored get to advance their plans. Ideally, you give signs and clues that those plans advanced in the background because the PCs were busy dealing with another problem.
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oh I like how brief those are, leaves a lot of room to imagine how they function in the story.
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and an example of what my prep notes looked like a couple years ago, With only a bit of elaboration, and some maps I made, these notes gave us a full year of adventure
REGION BELOVODE ISLAND
AREA - PONEDIL BAY
DISCOVERY - THE FALLEN PORTAL (Evil, Death)
DISCOVERY - SHADOW RESIDUE (Evil, Necromancy)
DANGER - SINKHOLE (a tree lays across as a makeshift bridge but it seems almost rotten)
CREATURE (1 Black Pudding - page 242) lurks within the sinkhole amongst the grey effluvia, wants to consume metal)
DANGER - BLINDING FOG (the valley where the isthmus is has blinding fog, a danger of walking into the water or the void itself, monster encounter with 4x Kuo-toa Whip, 2x Sahuagin Priestess that are trying to drink the party's blood) (deliver stolen blood to the swamp)
DANGER ANKHEGS
DISCOVERY PONEDIL SPRING, mineral groundwater, safe to drink
AREA - PIATNIK WOODS
Discovery
Danger - Wandering monsters (giant snakes)
AREA - VITORIK SWAMP
Discovery - Enchantment (ZONE OF TRUTH)
SITE - THE RUINS OF VITORIK
NPC - Hasto the Centaur (approaches party and pretends to be wounded, evil,
unaffected by the zone of truth, a knight working for the lost king, wants to unleash the
sleeping skeletal dragon on the locals, paranoid)
THEMES TORTURE/CORRUPTION
MODEL DUNGEON ON HL1 MAP KIND OF???
A WIZARD BUILT IT, STRONGHOLD OF CREATED MONSTERS, 1 SHADOW DRAGON, HALF FORMED REMAINS as do (young black dragon stats but necrotic breath)
Brigandine of Nullification (This armor glows with faint magical energy, and seems to be
able to ward off almost any blow. The magical armor has 5 charges. Whenever you are
damaged, you can spend 1 charge and use your reaction to gain resistance to one of the
damage types that damaged you until the start of your next turn. This armor regains
1d4 + 1 charges at dawn.) (Attuned,
AREA - THE SERDA MOUNTAINS
SITE - Tower for elf giants, was the sentinel of the lost king, tower made of the frozen stone statues of people from fort chetverg, forced to support it.
Discovery - GIANT'S CORPSE (recent, fallen from the tower)
AREA - FORT CHETVERG
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Okay, but, to be fair, we are uniquely extensive bullshitters and fuckarounders
sure but I only intended these notes to last 3 sessions and they ended up being useful for 28