(Spoiler-free) (Also fuck yeah this is post 666 for me)
As far as we’ve discovered, the Blood of Vol are a religion that comes from Karrnath, which in Eberron, is a country that heavily uses necromancy and the undead. When you die as a Blood of Vol member, it’s kind of a tragedy because your soul is obliterated, but it is considered A-OK for necromancers to use your body as an undead. Serving as an undead is seen as an honorable act of a martyr, helping others avoid your fate.
Due to how long it’s been around, the Blood of Vol isn’t a cult or anything, it’s a full-blown, normal-ass religion that regular people have. For Lark, she’s lived amongst and worked with Blood of Vol devout her whole life. It’s normal to the point of being boring.
They believe that there are no gods, only mortals who have managed to ascend to a higher plane. They teach that everyone has the potential to become immortal, but only one member of the House of Vol who fucked a dragon and birthed a perfect dragon-elf hybrid actually achieved this.
Doctrine is pretty dope:
Everyone has a spark of divinity. Find that power within.
Death is the end, Dolurrh is oblivion, and if the gods exist, they are cruel. Stand with those you care for; all we have is this life and each other.
The core doctrine of the Blood of Vol is that the promises of other faiths are simply lies - mortality is a curse inflicted by uncaring gods who jealously hoard immortality and the potential of divinity.
Anyways the most relevant thing so far is that they do this ritual with the same regularity that christians do communion, where they let out a certain amount of blood, which the priests collect. Nobody knows what they do with all that blood.
had a kickstarter arrival this week! koryo hall of adventures, a korean fantasy 5e setting.
i don’t know if i’ll ever use any of the stuff in here (i backed it on a whim well over a year ago, at a time when i wasn’t regularly playing), but it’s interesting all the same. maybe if i keep dming after the end of my current campaign, i’ll try making up my own campaign and using some of the stuff in here.
there’s some cool monsters, and the whole thing is based around the eponymous hall, where adventurers can go to take on jobs, as well as use other facilities like specialist instructors in magic and martial techniques and so on.
there’s also a whole new class, the mudang, who summon spirits that can cast spells and cause various effects?
there’s a couple of subspecies of dragonborn in there, but the book only offers flavour text for them, not stats, which is a shame.
Can anyone recommend a good resource for free (or pirateable) map and token resources, for DND fantasy settings, but maybe also Call of Cthulhu stuff? I actually did buy a license for that Virutal Table Top I posted above, and I am really liking it, but it just lets me get to use resources like that in the way I always wanted but never felt able to pull off until now.
A lot of my favorite random generators are made by this person, and I feel like the procgen mansion would be especially useful for Call of Cthulhu stuff
HPLHS has a lot of great free resources for making Call of Cthulhu props, and I can imagine this stuff would be useful if you were making handouts for a roll20 CoC game
Wow I love this dungeon scrawl tool. Will definitely want to use it and may have to introduce more dungeons to my dungeons and dragons game just to use it.
be sure to take a look at the text and fonts options in dungeon scrawl! they have a lot of fairly unique looking symbol fonts that are great for making occult imagery in your maps
it’s not really the current topic of conversation, but my call of chthulu group clubbed together to get the HPLHS props for masks of nyarlathotep, and they’re awesome
Do you do maps for settlements and stuff? So far most of my locations have been above-ground buildings and nature areas. I’ve been torn between complete theater of the mind presentation without maps, rough maps (like Thief 1 style, sort of talked about above somewhere), and exhaustively drawing a map. I want the room to imagine things that the thief style map affords, but it is nice to know with certainty what the space more or less looks like and have that image be stable.
Tonight, in prep for a session, I am thinking of going a different approach where I create a thief style map for myself of parts the physical space and the narrative space. So like having a fast moving section be represented with narrow twists and turns leading into a dense forested area that is roughly sketched… I’m trying things to keep the imagination open but give me, and my players in turn, some confidence about where they’re playing in.
Soon I have to draw a city/settlement but I kind of don’t want to show them what it looks like until we do some work to flesh it out ourselves, but having a stable basis would be really nice especially when I am presenting a space where I want the players to feel like they have options. The problem there is getting them to act out and create options for themselves, versus showing them options with a map and having them think that’s all there really is. But maybe it is best to remind them the map is not the terrain, eh.
One idea is to draw an abstract map, IMO. Like ‘downtown, uptown, the docks’ and ask folks what stuff they know and fill in spots in those semi abstracted spaces as you , with rough special approximations of locations rather than a precise map.
Or have an unlabeled detailed map and ask players questions about where things are located as you play, labeling previously unlabeled parts of the map.