I don’t appreciate the side eye here
2 Likes
side eye from your gm deals 10d6 psychic damage, wisdom resist
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I second that it is best not to be too stingy with magic items in old school d&d. Magic items are one of the main ways for character differentiation. A fighter with a broom of flying is a whole different thing from a fighter with a decanter of endless water!
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BJ + an immovable rod is as powerful as a full wizard
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played the lone wolf gamebook fire on the water, which i loved as a kid.
as an adult, i am disappointed by how many bad design decisions there are in it.
lots of times where you don’t get to make a choice, your fate decided by rng (you’re supposed to close your eyes and point your pencil at a random number table at the back of the book, but in this enlightened time, i used a d10 instead). if you don’t pick healing and hunting as two of your five abilities at he start of the game, you’re screwed, as there are very few opportunities to recover hp or obtain food. multiple occasions where all your items get destroyed or otherwise taken away, that you can’t avoid.
3 Likes
did you know someone ported the first five lone wolf gamebooks to the nintendo ds
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i did know at some point in the past, then i totally forgot about it!
1 Like
we’re doing a campaign of shadowdark in the ffxiv discord that @Father.Torque is GMing and im a little feral goblin chaotic thief with a lawful goddess who hates me
my name is brak flak and i have a super backstab
i made a little dude in hero forge, hes based on @Grandpa 's discorc, but fantasy instead of radical
i made a joke because my stats arent very thief-like (like my dexterity is decent but my strength and con are high so id be a good fighter but IM ALWAYS THIEF OR ROGUE IF I CAN HELP IT) so my excuse was ‘oh i just have really big hands that get stuck in peoples pockets.’ unfortunately i cant represent that in heroclix, i mean forge, there is no hand slider
BUT instead of us all meeting during hte campaign we all already know eachother through a large hands support group
cant wait to critically fail my life
11 Likes
How’s Shadowdark?
My first session with my new group got delayed again today because of illness and whatnot. Still gunning on using white box, but it would be like me to throw myself a curve at the last minute.
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We haven’t actually played yet, just session zero’d. Will report back
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i like the shadowgate torch mechanic and the very limited inventory space but yeah im excited to REALLY play
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I’ve played like ten or so sessions of Shadowdark.
It’s clean and easy and fast compared to other d20 games. The real time torch timer is a real push to get the players to move forward in the dungeon. You need to have the DM do things like
- Attack the torch to put pressure on the players
- Never pull punches
- Remember to do morale checks
- Discourage “perception” checks. Or Int/Cha/Wis checks in general. If a player spends the time to check the thing, they find the thing. If they don’t describe how they check the thing very well, the DM should ask them to be specific. This is the timer mechanic in play
Players have to
- be OK with dying
- when combat looks bad… run away
- be fast! or be ok with spending torches!
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I have some downtime while my latest Quake map gets tested by a friend of mine, so in need of something creative to work on, I’ve turned to dreaming up a set of Dungeon World adventures that I’d like to run. One is a one-off and the other is a longer adventure. The one-off is the conclusion to the longer adventure, but played from the perspective of the villains instead of the hero side which you’d experience in the long adventure. This seems like a cool idea to me because it lets me work on one story but from two different ends, and at two different scales. With a one off I can go deep right now by designing a dungeon and several encounters, which otherwise should probably wait when it comes to the long adventure because I’d have to react to the player composition and choice a bit more. But all my broad dreamy ideas which cannot apply to the scope of the one-off are still lending themselves to the long adventure in some way. I think this is pretty clever!
I imagine the one-off would be easy to rope some of my coworkers into and we could it play it online using FoundryVTT. Like I said a long time ago, that VTT is a bit power user-y, so what I’m trying to do right now is to get a basic set up of modules and resources together that let me draw dungeons and orient players in a basic space. I like the presentation and UX of it way more than something like Roll 20. But it’s actually quite difficult to learn how to do things simply, because every tutorial you can find online is the sweatiest 50 minute thing about setting up realistic, multi-layered, scripted dungeons that look like complex tile-based adventure games. Way too too much.
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The one-off I’m working on is set in the guts of an arcane refinery that is the source powering both industry and state projects in the region. The players are grunts or low level officials working at the refinery at its deepest levels when a group of eco terrorists enact catastrophic industrial sabotage on the plant, stranding them. In an adventure in parts like a 70s disaster movie and Half-Life, I want things to progress to a point where the players witness the eco terrorists fall short of completing their goals but motivated to finish things for them by destroying the plant in a relatively safe way that doesn’t jeopardize the local work towns and also lets them escape to safety.
Sort of like FF7 Remake but from the POV of people working in the Shinra plants.
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Lots of opportunities there for players to go way divergent from your plans for the plot, especially if some of them take harder to their phoney baloney jobs than you expect. Godspeed!
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You’re definitely right. Maybe that’s something I need to actually let go of completely, for once and finally. Just let my players do what they will! I still think at least getting to an opportunity like that would be pretty cool 
2 Likes
if you want a structure with which to write a dungeon world specific adventure, I can send you a copy of Perilous Wilds by Jason Lutes, which is mostly about overland adventure procedures but it has a great system for constructing dungeons in a Dungeon World friendly way
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Would love to check that out.
1 Like
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I would totally expect a chunk of my past players to try to be good employees in that scenario.
If you want to force the issue you could put them in a position where they’d take the blame either way.
3 Likes