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themonstrousarchives · 3 years

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Hunt: Party Pack

Description: A motley crew of fellow monster hunters, but with a twist about them. They're just a little too monstrous. A quartet of roadtripping werewolves* seized by the Hunt, given an insatiable desire to track down and destroy other avatars primarily. They hunger for the PC that has done the most collateral damage, ready for revenge.

Hook, Session goals: Time for the most dangerous game, as we risk NPCs that the players have come across, along with any other monsters in the world- Bigfoot, an avatar of the Stranger, others capitalizing on the fears

Monster Type: Executioner (motivation: to punish the guilty) Powers: All of them have supernatural speed and strength, and can shapeshift into humanoid lycanthrope-esque beings for more effective predation. One of them is adept at using “magic,” mostly in a supportive way like a bard- helping to direct the others and prime their attacks. They try to lure monsters out, one of them faking weakness or taking on some aspect that the target might find appealing, then the bait leads them into an ambush. When hunting a group, they try to split everyone up so that they can gang up on whoever gets left behind. Attacks: Detailed below Weaknesses: The Dark, The Stranger, and the Spiral can either blind or misdirect the wolves, though actually killing them will be difficult- they have to be made into quarry to make them “vulnerable.” It’s a farfetched pull, but calling upon the owner of Lobos Ltd. (See the Deer Man adventure) and acquiring some of his cages would be effective in removing them as threats.

The Wolves: (Attacks ordered by preference)

Greg (Armor: 1) [][][][][][][] (Shapeshifts quickly)

Bite- 3-harm intimate

Claw- 2-harm ignore armor hand

9mm- 2-harm close loud

Johnny Hobo (Armor: 2) [][][][][][][] (Bait)

Claw- 2-harm close ignore armor

Bite- 3-harm intimate

Baseball bat- 1-harm hand

Elsa (Armor: 0) [][][][][][][] (Stays hidden/protected)

Magic Snare- 0-harm close restraining

Enchant- adds 1-harm to damage dealt

Shotgun- 3-harm close messy

Bite- 3-harm intimate

Pat (Armor 1) [][][][][][][] (Fastest chaser)

Knife- 2-harm hand

Claw- 2-harm ignore armor hand

Bite- 3-harm intimate

Greg (Hotheaded and rash. Eager to feel powerful.)

Johnny Hobo (Patient. Durable. The methodical pursuit, often tempering Greg or supporting the others.)

Elsa (The brains of the operation. Puts on a cool air.)

Pat (Jumpy, a pure manifestation of id. The fastest, but also the easiest to fool.)

Countdown:

Burgers on the Coast gets accosted by a brash customer. After they finish eating, they will leave and the table can be investigated.

The Pack arrives in town, a PC sees Johnny outside their window (if they doubletake, or run to get equipment, he will be gone).

If the PCs have convinced any “monsters” to only hunt “bad guys” or otherwise change their ways, the reformed monster gets ambushed. Depending on the monster, the Pack might kill them.

Shiro violently cuts back a mass of vines, which fight back, whipping around his arm and leg. As he pulls to get away, thorns tear into him, and the vines start to dig into him.

The Pack tracks down Bigfoot, and kills her after she menaces some campers.

The Pack finds Shiro restrained, spider lilies growing out of his mouth and stomach. They kill him.

They will start the next hunt, if not found, or if not given the primary focus during the hunt. They are essentially competition for the PCs.

Bystanders:

Susan- (Gossip, Victim) Burgers on the Coast waitress. She’s worked at this same restaurant for 30 years and as a result knows all the regulars. Greg will accost her, then Johnny Hobo will smack him upside the head. Only these two are at the diner.

Anuset- (Victim, Gossip) The mask is out pursuing someone it has targeted in the past week. As it falls upon this person and begin to unpeel, Johnny Hobo will appear behind it with a baseball bat. The morning after, a hunter will see a destroyed clay mask left discarded. Further inspection will discern that a couple fragments were taken.

Shiro- (Helper, Victim) Shiro has been plagued by vines overgrowing his orange tree. While he cuts them back, the vines fight back and restrain him, as impossible amounts of blood issue from his person. Where blood spills, spider lilies start to grow... after a few days he is still restrained, but the Party Pack finds him, and will kill him.

Bigfoot (Victim) (Stranger Avatar)- aka Isadora Vila Quintana, a hiker who got too lost in the woods and now menaces other hikers. She doesn’t quite need to kill the hikers, but often puts them into precarious positions after she is finished with them.

Francesca Lopez (Victim) (Stranger Monster) sells secondhand items. She has ties to Charlotte and her trade market, wherein Frannie goes around flea markets and digital marketplaces. Having recently finished a transaction, or at least would have if she hadn’t gotten caught by the Pack.

Minnie Taylor (Witness, Innocent) a resident who had gotten lost trying to find her own home. The Pack has promised to help her once the danger is cleared, and if they don’t return for her she will try to free herself from the place they sealed her into, inevitably getting lost and becoming a spiral avatar. She trusts the Pack to help her, and if the Players come across her, will not trust them if they don’t seem to have a good reason to kill them.

Isadora, the Lonely avatar Bigfoot

Shiro Kamada, the Slaughter avatar

Minnie Taylor, a woman about 29 years of age, who recently moved into the Strange Suburb (before it was strange)

Locations:

Burgers on the Coast (and Parking Lot)- the diner that the PCs have taken a liking to, their repeated presence dooms it to become a hub of Interesting Persons.

The table that Greg and Johnny sat at will have some traces that can be discovered- some gum under the table, a deep cut into the particle board table, a dropped receipt (Ammo- 9mm and shells).

Camping Grounds

In the forest, far from the sounds of the city, a hiking trail opens up to a small clearing where hikers can put down tents and keep a campfire. This is Isadora’s favorite haunt, because of it’s isolation and the sheer ability to disorient people in these woods. She can be tracked, sometimes.

Parked by the beach, one of many RVs. Once the right one is sussed out, it can be broken into. It is likely that at least one of the Pack is there, keeping watch. As soon as the PCs head there, the other members of the Pack will be notified, and they will circle the party, trying to make sure that they don’t leave with anything important.

Inside the RV is a mess. Clothes in one or two piles strewn over one of the seats or in a receptacle. Projects lay unfinished- Someone’s trying to patch their jacket, someone else is growing seed starters. Plastic dishes lay in the mini sink. One bed looks like it’s been used as an operating table on more than one occasion, a big antique chest sits in the corner undisturbed, and some hefty power tools poke out of a footlocker pushed out of the way. Treat this as a Haven for the Pack, with an Infirmary, an Armory, and a Workshop.

They also have many “trophies” from previous kills in an upper cabinet- everything sealed with an eye sigil. Some Tallow. A mushroom. A long, preserved beak. A lock of inky black hair. These hunters have been traveling the US, fighting monsters and leaving a wake of supernatural power vacuum.

Shiro’s home

Vines stretch, having grown a strong base on the telephone pole near Shiro’s home. Runners stretch from the pole to the lines and then to the houses. They have sprouted purple flowers, and are now growing green fruit- not yet ripened, though that may change quickly.

The vines are attempting to peel under the shingles of Shiro’s home to anchor themselves, though he has managed to beat back the majority. It’s harder for him to keep up with the vines currently suffocating the orange tree, though.

Him using his ultraviolent powers to destroy the vines has attracted the attention of the Party Pack.

The Strange Suburb

An entire suburb has fallen into unreality and is distorting- building extensions without rime or reason, warping through various decades and shapes. Think McMansions but worse and more terrible and insufferably generic. Very easy to get lost in, very easy to separate people and confine them in terrible, bland, almost claustrophobic (make sure everyone is okay about this if you use it) spaces. There is no real branding on anything, and looking through the house will find very little personal effects if any.

One house is holding Minnie Taylor. Elsa had set up wards which will keep the spiralizing at bay (The door containing her room is unlocked, but there are multiple and they shift around. A golden seal distinguishes this door if the players look for it with supernatural means).

The largest, most cancerous McMansion house is wavering in the most volatile sense. The house goes through waves of eras- wallpapered walls, then painted, then cheap drywall, then wood paneling. The rooms are labyrinthine, measurements all feel wrong- hallways too narrow, rooms too big or small. Pat is the scout of the group, and will be ready for anyone entering the house conventionally, sprinting away as soon as they come in. As the Players follow him (if they do), the rooms stretch and expand, making pursuit difficult. At the top of the house is a large, undefinable room with elements of any kind of room in the house. A little bit of a kitchen, a showerhead, photo frames on the walls and ceiling. In the center of the room lies Francesca, with Johnny Hobo holding her down as Elsa prepares Greg to execute her. Behind them all hangs a painting on the wall, from which a malevolent energy exudes.

Artefact: A Francis Bacon painting which is the source of the reality warping in the first place. Disrupting Elsa’s preparations will make the manifestation worse. The Players are able to either try to finish the Ritual Elsa was performing (containment, some reversal of the manifestation, at the cost of Francesca’s life), or find their own solution to destroy it.

Cold Open: A beat up RV speeds up Highway 101 under the light of a waxing moon. A folkpunk song plays through the speakers as a rowdy quartet sings along. Street lights illuminate a messy dashboard with all sorts of little tchotchkes- batteries, flashlights, pocketknives, that kinda stuff. The song ends and the next one opens with a death growl, and as they roar along, their voices get loud, feral, deeper. The RV hits a bump and the knick knacks on the dashboard shift, the riders laughing with the chaos. The next time the streetlights flicker to the dash, a mugshot of [PC] has made it to the top.

#the magnus archives #tma motw #pbta #monster of the week #the monstrous archives #Hunt module Party Pack #my work #needless to say. theyre all gay #mcmansion

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studyblrsophie · 4 years

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I’m starting RB in October, I’m studying stage and events management, do you have any tips for starting out and how to organise and prepare??

I am so sorry it took me so long to get round to answering this question but here’s my overview of what to do when preparing! Some of these tips are specifically for RB and some are more general but I hope you find them all useful in their own ways.

(Also I still live near RB so if you ever want to grab a coffee to talk about things let me know!)

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

✻ Before you attend any introductory talks or lectures decide whether you want to take digital or paper notes and start preparing accordingly. E.g setting up sections or folders for different modules. I personally use OneNote on my laptop and I love it because it has endless formatting options and can be accessed on any device. If you’re going for paper I recommend using a folder and investing in some dividers.

✻ Set-up a small pencil case, even if you’re taking digital notes. You never know when you’ll need a pen or pencil. Don’t go overboard and fill it with loads of highlighters or anything. Just keep it simple so you can always have it with you. Bonus points if you have a little notebook to write in too.

✻ Speak to people! This is especially important at RB because it’s such a small university, the more well known you are the better. (As long as it’s for the right reasons of course). Strike up conversations with people studying on other courses, the connections you make when you first arrive will become invaluable. Also make sure you’re lovely to all the members of staff you meet, not just your course tutors.

↳ People you want to make a particularly good first impression with at RB include, the head of productions (he’s a great laugh), the technical managers (they will save your life during productions but will not tolerate any bs) and the head of the workshop (who is an absolute angel). Don’t forget to be friendly towards the staff in the Rose Cafe and Bru Bar as well, they are all so sweet and very good allies to have - especially when you’re on campus till late and need sustenance. If you’re extra nice they’ll let you know which nights they put out the food going over its date to take for free, which saved me from going hungry on several occasions!

✻ Familiarise yourself with the campus as soon as you can. Even if this just means taking a stroll in the morning. The library may look small but it’s packed full of really useful books that are woefully underutilised by most DMTA students. There’s no need to go out and buy all the expensive Stage Management books. I completed my whole undergrad degree with just Peter Maccoys’ book and borrowed the rest from friends and the library when I needed them. I also recommend visiting the local public libraries, there’s one no matter where you live around campus and you can use your RB card to take out books from them too. They often have sections dedicated to Management so you can add quotes in your essays that will really stand out amongst everyone else’s quotes from google. The Central Library in Bexleyheath is great for important assignments as it’s pretty large with lots of space to work and loads of food and coffee shops outside. It will only be a bus journey away no matter where you live.

✻ Pop into student services when you get a chance and introduce yourself. They are the humans you’ll need for anything non-course related. Whether it’s collecting your council tax exemption letter, asking for help splitting bills with housemates or having a shoulder to cry on, they should be your first port of call. Towards the end of my third year I spent a lot of time just chilling in there talking to them when the Bru Bar was too busy.

✻ Invest in a good pair of steelies and a good quality podger. You will use them both. A lot. Make sure your steelies are fully black and don’t have any colour on them and find a way to mark your podger so you know it’s yours, as people will ‘accidentally’ take it ‘thinking it’s theirs’. Likewise if you manage to get a hold of LX tape at any point - do not let it out of your sight. LX tape is a precious commodity and will disappear from under your nose.

✻ Lever arch folders are a Stage Managers best friend. You don’t need hundreds but two or three for keeping scripts in will serve you well. My industrial strength hole punch also got a lot of use and saved me wasting time trying to hunt one down on campus.

✻ Sort out a planning system that works for you and actually use it. Those that really struggled in my year were those who were constantly disorganised and never knew where they were supposed to be. I personally choose to use a Filofax as I can quickly jot down appointments, lectures and notes as they crop up, whilst being able to add any extra pieces of paper when required. If you prefer digital calendars and planners that’s fine but have something to refer to so you aren’t constantly juggling dates and times.

✻ Once show season is in full swing you can kiss goodbye to partying constantly, so whilst it’s fun to start with, remember that as the year progresses the workload will increase and a quick drink at the pub after tech week is a much better choice than an all night house party that will leave you in no shape for show week.

✻ One major thing to remember is that your patience will be tested - by directors, actors and oftentimes your own fellow Stage Managers. You will have to master the art of taking a deep breath and smiling instead of retaliating, no matter how much someone is bugging you. Everyone is coming from a different head-space and has a different point of view so try to be kind and reliable. It will pay off in the end. I promise.

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

This post feels like it’s already really long and I still have so much more to say! I’ll leave it at this for now, I hope you find it useful. If you want a part two let me know. I hope you have a wonderful time studying Stage Management.

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samsbastardzone · 4 years

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Hey, you know that 35 d&d questions ask meme? I answered all of them.

This is a long ass post. Be warned. It took up seven and a half pages in google docs. Original post here.

1. A favorite character you have played.

Would have to be Zize Fortier, dragonborn gunslinger. Their tag on this blog is #zize and you can find their bio and info on my character page. Love that bastard!! He’s sweet and bratty and a total delight to play (we are such an OP party, y’all).

2. Your favorite character that someone else has played.

UM UM gonna talk about a few here. To be fair to people I play a *lot* of games with, I’m only gonna talk about one PC per person.

- The bastard trio in my Wildemount game– @toomanyorphans ’s Nakoria, @overplannedbutunnamednpc ‘s Zier (also an NPC in the campaign Zize is in), and @glasyasbutch ‘s Nissy. They all really suck so bad but in SUCH funny ways. They’re varying degrees of self centered and awful, but we trust each other in this campaign, and those 3 players are SO funny in their RP.

- (RIP) Avri in my Wildemount game. They and Bly named each other,,,, they were parent and child…… VERY sweet. huge goliath with tiny bird in backpack.

- @bekahdoesnershit ‘s Raini. Zize’s BFF, and her tag on that blog is rich. She’s SUCH a bitch but we love her.

- @bhissar ‘s Saela. She is a dream character for me to DM for– very little fleshed out backstory with room to explore, with still-concrete events in it. Consistent character choices and personality, to the point I can sometimes predict what she’ll do. Very cool aesthetically. And overall? EXTREMELY sweet. Baby, baby bird.

3. Your favorite side quest.

Either the one going on right now in amnesia, where we have to collect brain matter from big powerful elementals, or the stop we made at a family of vampires in Acarnya (the one I played Osfyr in).

4. Your current campaign.

There are five of those, with two on hold.

-Wildemount, aka the Frozen Sick module from Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount (we’re almost done with that, my PC is Bly).

-Amnesia campaign aka high level campaign: we woke up in hell with no memories! PC is Zize.

-Hoard of the Dragon Queen module, near the beginning of that, PC is Pointy.

-Horror campaign, only two sessions so far, but we’re trapped in an alternate dimension carrying out tasks for a creepy dude. PC is Vinny.

-Kithan, where we’re high level monster hunting guild members searching out ancient artifacts of the gods (campaign based on the Monster Hunter games), PC is Topaz.

-Silas, party is currently trying to help dragons free themselves and stop a… dude? No spoilers! I DM. On hold because I had too many campaigns going at once.

-Silas v2: extremely vaguely based on the plot of season one of the web series Carmilla. A tweaked version of the first arc the Silas party went through. On hold because it was played in person at school.

5. Favorite NPC.

I don’t really have any NPCs in my campaigns that I’m super attached to, except– Nikeo, a goliath rogue PC in Silas 1, had many adopted children. Three of them– kobolds– sometimes stand on each others’ shoulders, put on a long coat, and help out around their parent’s store. They’ve named themselves Koby.

As for favorite NPCs in campaigns I’ve played, I can think of… a lot. The first is Laurel, a blue dragonborn loner type who followed Osfyr and friends in Acarnya. They were kind of broody and dark, but they really drew me in. They were the first NPC we really talked to– they were sitting on top of the post office laughing at the mob scene of people protesting not getting their mail delivered.

I’d also pick Osfyr’s partners in that campaign– Yelkian, a backstory love interest I came up with, a flamboyant soft sorcerer. Jupiter, politician’s niece, who took pity on Osfyr’s attempts to seduce information out of her and let them succeed on both counts (seduction and information). Xerxes, extra AF rogue with a big loving family, who swept in after a fight on the back of an eagle-wildshaped Brysth (npc druid).

There’s a blue dragon in the HOTDQ campaign that we don’t know much about. I really enjoyed the way @dungeonsanddraconicqueer played him. He’s just a dude! Lex’s warlock made a Deal with him to leave the town alone. We still don’t know the implications of that. It’s fine, guys.

And then, there’s Stewart the Skin Steward, a servant of False Mystra. Fun dude. Very cavalier– nigh, enthusiastic!– about the fact that his entire city was made of skin. Something of a skin connoisseur, in fact!

6. Favorite death (monster, player character, NPC, etc).

Saela, hands down. She got breathed on by a dragon, yo. We then had to stop playing for 4-5 months because a player lost access to the Internet. I wrote a vision/speech from her warlock patron, the Raven Queen, the night she died, and basically didn’t touch it until I read it out in game. It involved a confession that the Queen was tired of being a god, and showing Saela all the lives she’d touched. Then we used Matt Mercer’s rez rules for her. She came back– but it was her choice.

7. Your favorite downtime activity.

Fucking tinkering dude!!! I don’t get to do it enough as Zize and that is entirely my fault. @ morgan, eyes emoji

8. Your favorite fight/encounter.

I LOVE creepy shit. There was a train car with people dancing in it, and party members got enchanted to dance along and eat the food, and the revelers were clearly in pain, and snuffing out a candle caused a reveler to disappear. Creepy shit!

In Kithan, we had to climb a staircase, and we timed it with produce flame which is a 10 minute duration cantrip, and we were climbing for 50 minutes. We started to see things in the edges of our vision. Then someone realized it was an illusion, and it all vanished. It freaked me out so bad.

In amnesia campaign, at level 19, we were traversing a cave, and our shadows started dripping the same black goop we were there to investigate. We killed one and it took down the max hp of the person whose shadow it was, and then they straight up didn’t have a shadow until they long rested. It really freaked us out, realizing the shadows were actually creatures, but they were like CR 1. Really effective use of a low level monster.

9. Your favorite thing about D&D.

The way it has something for everyone… the way it’s brought me so many friends… the way it’s inspired my OC creation like nothing else.

10. Your favorite enemy and the enemy you hate the most.

I’m not sure if this is asking about NPCs I’ve had as enemies, or any monster in D&D canon? The longest campaign I played in didn’t have long term enemies per se. I’d say I was frustrated with the cultists that ambushed us last session in HOTDQ, but I didn’t hate them! I just couldn’t seem to hit or dodge them. As for a favorite… probably False Mystra: the demon lord Orcus who’d taken over the position, and therefore the duties, of Mystra, the god of arcane magic. We killed it, but then whoopso!! Our wizard lost her powers.

11. How often do you play and how often would you ideally like to play?

I play an ideal amount, honestly: four times a week, for about 2.5-3 hours a session. HOTDQ Tuesdays, Kithan and horror campaign switching off Wednesdays, Wildemount Thursdays cause we miss CR, Amnesia Sundays.

12. Your in game inside jokes/memes/catchphrases and where they came from.

Amnesia: Yocheved, the party barbarian/full time fish, has a secret third arm and/or a prosthetic ass. Cylthia, the druid, does arson (but actually). Relentless is a Crown paladin, so she puts her fingers in her ears when we do crime/lie. She also has a rod of lordly might that, immediately post amnesia, she made into a 32 foot climbing pole. Yocheved eats pounds and pounds of raw fish for every meal.

Wildemount: just the shenanigans and sabotaging each other that the Bastard Trio get into. Example: Nissy was tasked with buying Zier a cloak for cold weather and purposely got him an ugly one. Zier then prestidigitated it to be a nicer color.

13. Introduce your current party.

Oh boy, I have 6 of those. Here goes. Keep in mind many of these characters are played and games are DMed by my friends who have OC blogs of their own: Raini and Ayen are bekahdoesnerdshit, Ezra, Nissy, and Roona are glasyasbutch, Horror DM, Lent, Eve, and Nakoria are toomanyorphans, Wildemount DM, Saela, Daecyne, and Cylthia are bhissar, HOTDQ DM is dungeonsanddraconicqueer, and Amnesia DM, Zier, Nyxi, and Sarril are overplannedbutunnamednpc. Not an OC blog, but Yocheved, Avri, Arbor, Thraf, Nikeo, and Whisper are mickgoesabsolutelyhamforbarbie.

Amnesia (Zize): Lent, tiefling paladin, former crownsguard who “fell” (became an oathbreaker), then un-fell when we lost our memories. Cylthia, tiefling/elf druid who can shift between tiefling and elf forms and loves setting things on fire. Yocheved, 14 foot tall nereid (fishfolk) barbarian with a dry sense of humor, is the party parent. And Raini, aasimar wizard, sass machine and Zize’s bff.

HOTDQ. My PC is Pointy. Ezra, quiet human paladin. Theata, moon elf rogue. Freya, sweet (human?) light cleric who sometimes misreads situations. Eve, 13 year old (!!) human warlock who kinda sucks, but like, she’s 13. Nyxi, motherly gnome bard who Is going to adopt Pointy.

Wildemount (Bly): Alene, human barbarian. Quiet and with somewhat of a parent instinct. Some sort of Mysterious Backstory. Delta, aasimar rogue, similarly shady backstory? Unclear. Sticks with Alene. Nissy, drow rune knight, sucks. Zier, drow sorcerer, also sucks. Nakoria, dragonborn warlock, ALSO sucks. (Those three make up the Bastard Trio.) Avri (F for them), goliath bard and Avri’s guardian, died last session by falling on a floor full of knives.

Horror campaign (Vinny): Roona, halfling bard, very impulsive, eats exclusively with her spoon that says ASS, and chills in Vinny’s fanny pack. Ayen, elven teenage warlock with a dark backstory. Sarril, Ayen’s not-dad, half elf beast barbarian who got it from his wife. Arbor, dryad monk, who wears an all white plague doctor outfit at all times.

Silas v1 (DM), Original party before 1 left and 1 died: Hacka (RIP), human luchador-styled drunken monk. Nikeo (left), goliath rogue with so many adopted children. Inferno, fire genasi paladin/phoenix sorcerer with anger and impulse control issues. Saela, babiest aarakocra warlock of the Raven Queen. Hacka’s player now plays Voda, a stoic water genasi tempest cleric who cast Raise Dead successfully on Saela. Nikeo’s player now plays Whisper, a tabaxi astral soul monk.

Kithan (Topaz): Thraf, monsterborn (universe-compliant dragonborn) barbarian. Very social, very outgoing, very stupid, and very traumatized. Fucks majorly. Daecyne, sweet tiefling druid and Topaz’s good friend. Viosa, aasimar homebrew class I forget the name of, uses her small stature and allure to her advantage. Damur, half-orc eldritch knight, the party’s only braincell.

14. Introduce any other parties you have played in or DM-ed.

Acarnya. My PC was Osfyr. Soraphine, traumatized halfling bard. Azalea, human fighter. Durzuell, haughty high elf sorcerer. James, nerdy half elf wizard. Drago, erratic Russian dragonborn monk. Kairon, slightly edgy ranger/paladin (but we love him).

Nordenheim. My PC was Cap. I will admit: we only played 2 or 3 sessions, so I don’t really remember most of the other party members except Rory, a fire genasi ranger who almost burned to death.

Silas v2 (hopefully will continue; I DMed): Kysseris IV. Half-elf paladin, uptight. Tower 1-6, warforged wizard who crawled out of the desert and is looking for info on how he was made. Mae “Pock”, gnome rogue, very small and sweet. Josh, human trickery cleric, kind of an asshole, but in a way that’s funny and hasn’t bled over into IRL annoying.

[school] West Marches campaign (Ner): by the nature of West Marches, there was never a consistent party, but a few stood out to me. Red Foot, a hyperactive kobold sorcerer who’s level 8 against all West Marches odds. Lyra, Great Old One warlock of Tzee’Mhor, an abomination goat that a party I was in accidentally created. Fildo Baggins, divination wizard who can only affect allies whose toenail clippings he has in his vial.

15. Do you have snacks during game times?

Hell yeah babey!!! I mostly play digitally, especially during COVID, and I need something to munch after DMing for a while. Shit’s exhausting.

16. Do you play online or in person? Which do you prefer?

Welp! Online mostly, since everyone I want to play with has the audacity to live far away, and now exclusively online because of COVID.

17. What are some house rules that your group has?

Our Amnesia party is so rich that we just don’t keep track of money. In Kithan, a lot of rules that make characters less powerful are just… abolished (like the bonus action spell rule). (The DM likes super OP characters so she can throw SUPER OP monsters at us. My character has a necklace that gives 5 additional uses of channel divinity.)

18. Does your party keep any pets?

Nope. No opportunities for them. Zize’s party has a little water snake on the druid’s arm but I doubt that will last very long.

19. Do you or your party have any dice superstitions?

Absolutely. Cursed dice get j a i l.

20. How did you get into D&D? How long have you been playing?

Acarnya got me into d&d, it was my first campaign, and it was happening at the place I lived. I’ve been playing almost 2 years. (Critical Role inspired me to DM)

21. Have you ever regretted something your character has done?

Not sent a fucking letter to say goodbye to their boyfriend before the world-fate-deciding bullshit that was gonna happen and possibly destroy shit. It was fine in the end though!

22. What color was your first dragon?

Red. Man, that guy sucked, he almost killed Osfyr. We were investigating a monastery secretly run by dragons disguised as humans.

23. Do you use premade modules or original campaigns?

Original campaigns. I’ve never run a module before! I’m not opposed, but most of my campaigns came from ideas that I had. I’ve never been short on ideas for a game.

24. How much planning/preparation do you do for a game?

As a player, I just open my character sheet and get out dice. As a DM, I try and think about what material I want to get through this session, and write some narration and/or stat things out if I feel like it.

For DMs

25. What have your players done that you never could have planned for?

A lot of times, Inferno has rushed into battle from what I’d built as a stealth mission, and gotten her ass and sometimes the party’s asses kicked. I should really have learned by now.

26. What was your favorite scene to write and show your characters?

Definitely Saela’s resurrection ritual and vision.

27. Do you allow homebrew content?

Yes! I’ll check it first, but I’m all for expanding the boundaries. I homebrew items and monsters all the time, why shouldn’t my payers get to homebrew their shit?

28. How often do you use NPCs in a party?

Too often in my first arc. I had like 7 NPCs running around at all times (they were Carmilla characters). Super not recommended. I have 0 right now.

29. Do you prefer RP heavy sessions or combat sessions?

I’m still finding my groove with RP as a DM. I like encouraging my players to RP amongst themselves. I consider myself fairly good at combat on both sides of the equation, DM and player, so that’s always fun to me, especially when my players enjoy it too.

30. Are your players diplomatic or murder hobos?

I have one actively reforming murder hobo player, the rest are diplomatic. (The character, Inferno, is having a great growth arc. I’m super proud.)

For Players

31. What is your favorite class? Favorite race?

I fucking love genasi as a concept. Favorite class would have to be rogue or cleric, but gunslinger’s up there too.

32. What role do you like to play the most? (Tank/healer/etc?)

I honestly don't have the patience to not play DPS. I love doing lots of damage. Healing is satisfying, support is satisfying, but there’s a reason I picked rogue twice and tempest cleric over other domains.

33. How do you write your backstory, or do you even write a backstory?

Sometimes the backstory is part of the character concept– especially for Pointy, because I had the name first, then went hmm why would she have this name. Almost always, though, more backstory gets written during the campaign when I have an idea. Sometimes a character will act in a way I don’t expect, and it’s fun thinking of a justification to fill backstory gaps.

34. Do you tend to pick weapons/spells for being useful or for flavor?

Mostly usefulness honestly. I’ll make choices among several for flavor, but I’m a big proponent of using mechanics to build character. What I mean is, think about Magnus in TAZ Balance– his protection fighting style contributed a lot to the way Travis played him as a protective person. I love that shit.

35. How much roleplay do you like to do?

I like to do a lot, but unfortunately my energy is pretty down lately so I haven’t been doing as much.

#zize #pointy #cap #bly #osfyr #ner #vinny #topaz #dm thots #meta thots #asks #amnesia campaign #hotdq #horror campaign #wildemount campaign #silasverse #kithan

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pixelgrotto · 3 years

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Underdark slogging

Last month myself and a group of other folks finished the Dungeons & Dragons campaign Out of the Abyss after about 18 months of playing nearly every week. Jinkies. This wasn’t the lengthiest campaign I’d ever participated in or run, but it was the one where we met most frequently, since all of my other long-running tabletop RPG games are either monthly or bi-weekly.

On that note, I’d love to be able to say that it was nearly two years of weekly thrills, but I can’t quite do that. There was actually a lot of slog in this experience, and I had an internal debate a few times on whether or not I’d stick it out. (More on that later.) At the end of the day, I stuck around, and now I can look back and say that the overall experience was worth it. But I’ve also taken some time to ponder about what I didn’t necessarily like, and I think there were a couple of issues at work - the first being that I found Out of the Abyss, as an adventure module, to be grueling.

Out of the Abyss is described by D&D writer Chris Perkins in the intro as heavily inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, where the player characters are constantly bouncing from one strange encounter in the Underdark to the next. That sounds interesting on paper, but in reality the adventure begins with the players captured by drow and stuck in a prison camp, and once you escape you’re constantly on the run without much of a chance to catch your breath. You hop from one dungeon crawl to the next, only occasionally stopping in Underdark cities like Gracklstugh or Sloobludop, and there’s not really any downtime. And then the demon lords break free, Demogorgon shows up and starts inflicting madness on everyone, and off you go running from the big bads once more. Eventually your party eludes the drow and demons chasing them and returns to the surface world, where it seems like the campaign should come to a natural end, but after a few months, Bruenor Battlehammer tasks everyone to return to the horrors of the Underdark to take care of the demonic invasion.

In other words, Out of the Abyss is one of those D&D campaigns that railroads the players while pretending not to. You’ve gotta run through the Underdark at the speed of light without much time to smell the subterranean mushrooms, and later you gotta go back in. The second half of the campaign is, in fact, a series of fetch quests that the players are once again forced into to arrange a spell that gets the demon lords to fight against each other until there’s only one standing, and the final one will always inevitably be Demogorgon, at least if you’re running this adventure as written.

There’s nothing technically wrong with all of this, since half of D&D 5e’s official modules are railroads that try very hard to convince you otherwise. But Out of the Abyss is specifically a railroad that leans very hard on the travel rules of the game, and frankly...it’s no secret that the travel mechanics in 5e aren’t great. Almost every game that I’ve been in (including the ones that I’ve run) either ignored or hacked 5e’s methods of tracking water/food, making survival checks and looking up setbacks on random encounter tables because generally speaking, that stuff’s the least fun bit of D&D. (If you want a good travel hack for 5e, look up Adventures in Middle-Earth.) Out of the Abyss, unfortunately, really wants you to use these rules for much of the campaign to emphasize the fact that characters are on the run in a bizarre underworld realm.

You’d think that a ranger in the party, especially a ranger specialized in traversing the Underdark, might fix these issues. And this leads me to the other qualm I had with my Out of the Abyss game...I played just such a character, a Gloom Stalker (later re-rolled him into a Deep Stalker via the revised ranger rules) whose favorite enemy was fiends, no less, and despite all of his abilities designed for hiding in the dark, finding more food when foraging and hunting down demons...none of this really made things better. Two years ago, I didn’t buy into all those claims floating around the internet that rangers in fifth edition are a poorly designed class, but whoo boy, I do now. They depend just so heavily on very specialized tracking abilities that a DM has to emphasize over the course of a game in order to make you feel as if your character is special and contributing, and once our DM became aware of my skillset, he would generally just be like, “thanks to your ranger friend, you safely make it to the next area quickly.” Which sounds empowering in theory (and did remove a lot of the boring bookkeeping) but in reality, I couldn’t help but feel like my character was sort of a patch to fix a segment of the game that was naturally dull. And that’s not even getting into the fact that rangers in combat aren’t as great as fighters, nor as versatile as any other spellcasting class.

So why’d I stick with the campaign for nearly two years, then? Well, I think it took a while for these feelings to solidify in my head, and once they were there, we were already pretty deep into the Underdark and I wanted to see how events played out. Also, though I haven’t touched upon them much in this post, there were some real highs during our adventure, like the time we befriended a gelatinous cube, stuck rope ladders in him and used him as a floatation device to escape a flooding torture chamber. Then there were all the quirky NPC friends that ended up dying over the course of our Underdark romp to the point where it became a running joke. (”What NPCs shall we murder today?!”) The only issue was that the slog began outweighing those highs for me, especially once the campaign moved online due to COVID and we lost some of the dynamism and magic that comes from playing D&D in-person.

Honestly, I also resisted these feelings for a while, because I figured that lots of folks struggle to find a long-running D&D game to participate in. Part of me felt like I needed to enjoy this one and make the most of my experience. But for a variety of reasons, it ended up being a 3 out of 5 campaign; or perhaps 3.5 at times. And you know, we should normalize talking about this, because if you look at tabletop RPG message boards and Discords, you’ll see a lot of people chatting about amazing campaigns or god-awful campaigns. What folks don’t talk too much about is a phenomena that is probably more common than the two opposing ends of that spectrum - and I’m referring to the decent campaign. The one where the story has some alright twists and turns, but not everything is to your liking, or maybe the group and DM doesn’t gel with you 100% of the time. The one where you kinda don’t realize this until you’re a few weeks in, and then choose to endure hoping that you’ll hit another high point, or because you feel attached to your character. The one where you complete, feel glad that you had the experience, but then look back on with fairly critical eyes, as I’m doing now.

After finishing Out of the Abyss, I’ve had to gently bow out from the group that I played with, partially due to the fact that my schedule has become way too packed in recent months and also because I didn’t feel like continuing into higher level content. (We ended at level 15, which is more than enough, since high level 5e is generally too bonkers for me.) I certainly appreciate the journey my ranger went through, but now I’m also ready for him to retire in peace. Not every D&D campaign goes on forever, and sometimes you realize after a period of lengthy playing that maybe you’re just having an okay time...and that it’s also okay to feel that way.

#pixel grotto #musings #tabletop gaming #dungeons & dragons #d&d #out of the abyss

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in-arlathan · 4 years

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I just realized that we’re already half-way through the story! Can you believe it? Because I certainly can’t!

Before we jump into the chapter, I wanted to let you know that I made an important change in naming. Until now, I have tried to simply describe the creature Solas was sent out to hunt. I came to realize that I need to give it some sort of name, so this one specific creature is set apart from all the other beasts that make an appearance in this story. So, from now on, when I’m writing about the “Black Dread”, you know this is the name for that big bad creature.

I will work the new name into the previous chapters at some point. For now, I wish you a wonderful time reading!

_____

Chapter Seven: A Convergence Of Wolves

The wolves came for him, covering the distance between them with incredible speed.

Solas shifted into a fighting stance and opened up to the magic of the skies. The world flickered and green mist began to dance around him as he gave himself to the Beyond. Its energy flowed through him, filling him up to the brim with power. For but a moment, he remembered how he had felt as a spirit, a creature of pure wonder, and he smiled.

With his mind, he warped the Beyond into flames and formed it into a fireball. When the wolves were close enough, he released the magic, casting of a wall of fire that reached seven feet into the air.

The pack leader snarled, commanding the remaining wolves to go around the fiery barrier, while it picked up speed, charging at Solas directly. Its mighty paws thundered on the blackened earth. Dust whirled around the beast when it jumped.

Solas dodged the attack, rolling over and drawing Felani’s blade from the scabbard at his belt in a single movement. The metal sang as he turned to face the pack leader. “I don’t want to fight you,” he said, enhancing his voice with the Beyond so that his words echoed in both layers of reality.

The only answer was a deep growl and second charge.

Solas stepped sideways, casting a fireball at the pack leader. Behind him, the remaining wolves encircled him, drooling and barking. In a heartbeat, Solas drew the ambient magic of the area toward him to create another barrier. It would protect him from a few attacks but not all of them. That much he knew.

With his free hand, he reached to the skies and called their power down to him. A moment later, meteorites of raw energy peppered the ground. The wolves howled in surprise, then scattered in all directions. Three beasts stumbled and fell, dropping dead with their skulls smashed in.

Solas had no time to enjoy his small victory. The pack leader was at him again, and he angled his blade to meet the wolf’s attack. He aimed for its side but the leader was too fast. It flung itself at Solas, clawing at his armor. The onslaught made Solas lose his footing, knocking him down. He landed on his back, and the impact drew the breath from his lungs. Warm salvia covered his face as the pack leader lowered its head over his.

“Stop,” Solas urged the creature, modulating his voice once more. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

And once more, the wolf ignored him. It barked and dug its long teeth into the pauldron of Solas’s armor. The force with which the beast tore at it reverberated in his body. Solas tried to push the beast away with his hands, but it only fought more vigorously.

I have no choice.

“I’m sorry,” he said while amassing magic around him. With a blast of air and thunder, he repulsed the pack leader. It landed with a painful howl, and the other wolves answered in kind.

They were incredibly close. Solas could feel the warmth of their bodies despite the cold. He got back up on his feet and let the Beyond take over. Another mind blast drew the entire pack backward, blowing up dust in a wide radius. He heard the wolves whimper as some bruised and others broke their legs when they landed.

But it still wasn’t enough.

As soon as the wolves were back on their feet, they coordinated again, coming at him from all sides at once. No matter how fast he cast his spells or how elegantly he slashed through the pack with his blade, the wolves would bring him down eventually.

And so they did. They closed in on him, rendering unable to move, and bit and clawed at his armor furiously. In a combined effort, they tore at the metal, ripping it apart piece by piece. Solas clenched his teeth, waiting for them to go for his legs and arms as he brought down his blade on his attackers. Charged with magic, the sword was ablaze with fire and cut through the wolves without effort. Blood sprayed and he tasted vile in his mouth. Dead beasts dropped around him, as the remaining pack robbed him of his pauldron and breastplate. They bit down on the metal and tossed it aside with rage and revulsion.

It’s the armor, Solas noticed. They’re after the armor!

Suddenly, it all seemed so painfully obvious. Andruil herself had told him that she had traveled these lands with her hunters in search of the Black Dread, and she had been corrupted with a new madness in doing so.

Certainly, the wolves had witnessed Andruil’s transformation or at least made a connection between the creature and the goddess and her party. And now, another elvhen appeared to follow in Andruil’s footsteps, wearing the same armor that she had.

No wonder they saw him as a threat.

“Wait!” Solas yelled, casting another blast that drove the wolves back. The wolves landed violently, dazed by the impact. In that instant, Solas dropped his sword and took off his gauntlets. He tossed them aside, then removed the greave and cuisse on his legs. He was fumbling with the vambrace–that long piece of metal that protected his lowered arms–when the leader howled at its pack.

And just like that, the wolves backed away.

Solas breathed a sigh of relief and divested himself of the remaining armor and chainmail. Clothed in nothing more than the linen shirt and trousers he had worn underneath the armor, he got to his knees and held out a hand.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he repeated.

The pack leader stalked closer, sniffing and smelling. Solas waited for the wolf to make its assessment, panting heavily. He didn’t even notice how much he exerted himself in the fight until then.

The wolf growled and looked at him.

‘You are different than the others.’

The wolf’s mouth remained still, but its voice echoed in the Beyond. Solas could hear it in his mind, as long as he maintained his connection with the magic. The sound had a masculine quality to it.

‘You can call me Leader,’ the wolf told him.

“My name is Solas,” he said and bowed his head. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

***

After they had buried Solas’s armor, Leader and his pack brought him to their lair. They had made a home for themselves in a cave system that tunneled a range of ice-covered hills.

Solas followed them, shaking and shivering from the cold. Without the armor, he was left unprotected from the weather. He used his connection to the Beyond the heat up the air around him but soon began to feel the exhaustion the fight and his extended use of magic caused. He would be able to keep himself warm by supernatural means forever.

‘We will take care of you once we reach the lair,’ Leader promised.

More wolves waited for them when Solas and pack enter the caves. They were sleeping or chewing on the remains of an elk they had killed a while ago. Solas could smell blood, urine and wet dirt in every corner.

Leader stopped by a stone at the very entrance of the cave and asked Solas to wait there. He sat down and wrapped his arms around his torso. The rest of the pack watched him carefully, their eyes alight with suspicion and fear.

Soon after, Leader returned with two she-wolves that carried the dead body of another between them. They placed the dead wolf in front of Solas.

‘Our brother died from his injuries two nights prior,’ Leader told him. ‘Soon, his body will begin to rot. I assume you can use your magic to turn his hide into clothing. The elvhen still cloak themselves in wolf’s skin, don’t they?’

Solas opened his mouth and gaped at Leader.

“I cannot keep his hide,” he said.

‘Why not?’

He thought about all the wolves whose lives he had ended. If Leader or his pack were mad at him, he could hardly blame them. They were only doing what they thought was necessary.

“I already took to much from you,” he said. “I won’t to take any more.”

Leader looked at him for a long moment. ‘You really are different. The elvhen that came before you simply took what they thought was theirs without so much as batting an eyelid,’ he said. ‘Consider this a gift from my pack, then.’

Around them, the wolves stirred and let our low growls that got under Solas’s skin. He drew in a long shuddering breath.

“Thank you,” he said and reached out to the Beyond. The magic welcomed him and he redirected its energy to the dead wolf lying before him. Following the image in his mind, the magic stripped the pelt for them wolf’s body. It was a very clean affair without any blood. And when the skin was finally removed from the corpse, Solas wrapped the pelt around his shoulders and released the energy of the Beyond.

“Thank you,” he said again.

Leader didn’t answer. Instead, he growled at his pack. An order, Solas suspected, as the wolves immediately retreated deeper into the caves. They left the skinned body of their companion where it lay.

‘Why have you come here?’, Leader asked.

“I'm here to hunt the Black Dread,” Solas replied. “It poses a terrible threat and has killed many of my people, both spirit and elvhen. I want to end its reign of terror.”

Leader regarded him for a long moment.

‘Come,’ he said and made his way to a small opening at the side of the cave. ‘I want to show you something.’

Solas conjured a small fireball to light his way, then followed him through the gap in the stone. He had to shuffle through sideways, but Leader waited patiently for him.

The ground lowered as they ventured on. Soon after, they entered a tiny cavern that smell of death.

Solas fought the urge to gag. “What is this place?”

The big wolf trotted to a pit that the pack had dug at the center of the cavern. In it lay more dead wolves. Their bodies were broken, the flesh burned from their skin. Black bones lay scattered around. Solas recognized smashed-in skulls and twisted spines.

‘This Black Dread has killed many of my kind, too,’ Leader told him. ‘We have tried to hunt it down, but the creature is too strong for us.’

Solas picked up a bone from the ground beside the pit and examined it. t was part of a jawbone by the looks of it, but the teeth were missing. The bone was marred by the magic that had killed the wolf. He brushed its surface with his thumb and pushed back the memories of the dead elvhen he found throughout the land.

Leader nodded towards the dead wolves in the pit. ‘These were my best fighters. The Black Dread brought them down like it was nothing. We have retreated to our stronghold to keep the pups safe. I’ve been patrolling the area with what remains of my hunters ever since.’

“Wait!” Solas said. “Does that mean⎯you know where the Black Dread is?”

‘Yes,’ he admitted reluctantly.

“Can you take me there?”

Leader considered his request for a moment.

‘You said that you wanted to end the Black Dread’s reign,’ he mused. ‘Why do you think you can destroy this creature? What makes you so certain that you will come out victorious when so many have died fighting against it?’

Solas swallowed. “Because I have to.”

He truly wished he had a better answer. Something that sounded competent and reassuring. But the truth was that he had no way of knowing whether or not he could win. He’d had to defeat the Black Dread or die trying. There were no other options.

Leader let out a snarl that might have been a resigned sigh if he were an elvhen. ‘I can take you there,’ he said, ‘but I will not risk any more lives besides my own. Once we reach the creature’s lair, I will leave you to yourself.’

“Of course,” Solas replied. “I am grateful for your help.’

‘We leave at sunrise,’ Leader said. ‘You should rest and eat to maintain your strength. I will tell the youngsters to clear a space for you. The pack will watch over you while you sleep.’

Solas thanked him once again.

“May I keep this?”, he asked, holding up the jawbone.

Leader’s ears flinched and he gave him a quizzical look. ‘Why would do this?’

“It will remind me what I'm fighting for,” Solas said. “Not just my own people, but for spirits and wolves and every other living creature.”

Silence.

‘Take it if you have to,’ the wolf said at last, then turned back to the gap in the wall. ‘Whatever good it may do you.’

#dragon age #fanfiction #da fanfiction #fanfic #rebels ascension #solas #fen'harel #origin story #ancient elves #elvhenan #arlathan #dread wolf

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fancoloredglasses · 4 years

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Dungeons & Dragons episode review Module 1-10: The Garden of Zinn

(Thanks to Branded in the 80s)

The DM decides to add a romantic subplot into this week’s adventure (of course, this being D&D, there’s no XP involved unless we’re talking something like the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones...and I will not throw a link up as it’s more than a bit NSFW)

Additionally, we have the second adventure that doesn’t involve Venger. I’d say the DM is working on expanding his skills, but I really don’t expect much improvement...

Where the PCs are: Diana and Sheila are 6th Level, while the rest of the party’s at 5th. My prediction is that Eric and Hank will level up this adventure (assuming the NPCs don’t hog all the action)

We open with Bobby and Eric chasing down a lizard to invite it for lunch. One would think Hank could just shoot it, but no...he sends a whiny brat and Bobby to get it. I can understand Bobby, as he’d tenderize it with one blow of his club, but what good is a shield gonna do? Inevitably, the lizard escapes while Presto, Hank, and Sheila look on not 6 feet away. They couldn’t have gotten off their asses and helped? I mean, if they’re resorting to half-assed hunting for food it should be a group effort!

Meanwhile, Diana proves to be the only one who actually wants to do something about eating again as she’s fashioned a makeshift fishing pole out of her quarterstaff and has actually caught something! It seems to be too strong for her to pull in herself, so Hank and Bobby join in. Eventually they pull in...

(Thanks to Jenny Saqua)

...a Dragon Turtle! ...at least they call it a Dragon Turtle. According to a future edition D&D Monster Manual, (the 1st edition one doesn’t have a good picture, so maybe they worked with what little they had...) this is a Dragon Turtle

(Thanks to Forgotten Realms Wiki)

Anyway, it grabs Diana. Diana attempts to brace its mouth open with her staff, but it clamps down, snapping it in half! Dungeon Master’s gonna be pissed... Hank fires a bolt that wraps around the Dragon Turtle’s snout, tying it closed. Startled, it drops Diana, but Bobby catches her with his club (using it like an uneven bar for Diana to flip to safety. You would think the club would be too thick for that, but MAGIC! I guess...)

Bobby then charges the Dragon Turtle, but Sheila grabs him back before it can have a bite-sized barbarian for lunch (though it did get a fang on him). Bobby tries again, smacking the water and causing a splash big enough to drive the beast away. Really? I’m guessing the DM just got tired of watching the group fail at getting food and decided to spice things up with a grudge monster to get things moving, only to realize he went overboard (a pack of lizard men might have done the job better). In any event, I’m going to say this was a small Dragon Turtle, so quick research nets the party 3700XP

Suddenly, Bobby collapses (poison? That wasn’t in the text I read! I’ll have to revise my XP award...call it 4550XP) As the group worries, Diana reassembles her broken staff (wait, it can do that? I guess MAGIC!) Hank makes the executive decision to look for Dungeon Master (do they really need to look? Usually he just shows up whether they want him to or not)

After aimlessly walking for who knows how long, Bobby asks for a rest (Hank’s carrying him, so he’s not expending much energy, but I imagine it still takes effort to not fall...) At that point Dungeon Master shows up (see?) and says that, although his own magic can’t help Bobby, he says the foot of a Yellow Dragon will cure the poison, and that it can be found nearby in the garden of Queen Zinn, whose kingdom is to the north (WHAT?! the DM’s actually using a map for once?! He IS stepping up his game!)

Speaking of Queen Zinn...

(Thanks to Spud’s Cartoon Showcase)

...she is approached by one of her servants, a Phantom Stalker says that a “suitable knight” has entered her realm with a weapon given to him by Dungeon Master (wait, Eric? Is she looking for a court jester?) Zinn says he must undertake something called “the Trial of the Worm” to see if he is suitable for marriage...

youtube

(Thanks to hmcnally)

OK, after cleaning off my monitor...

It seems that she must marry a suitable knight (excuse me while I catch my breath from laughing so hard. Eric as a suitable husband...HOO-BOY!) or the spell she cast will end and she will lose her throne. Ah, so if the Phantom Stalker wasn’t enough of a clue it seems we’ve found our Venger Surrogate for the session

(A quick note that I can’t find any indication that Zinn was ever given stats as a character, so I’m going to have to REALLY guess as to her abilities. If anyone wants to dispute my conclusions, please feel free. I don’t think she would be on par with Venger...maybe Lolth? She seems to give off a similar vibe, but without the spider motif)

Meanwhile, Eric’s complaining that he’s still hungry (seriously guys, STOCK UP BEFORE LEAVING TOWN!) and finds a convenient bag of food just lying that (do you smell a trap? I smell a trap. Unfortunately, Eric can only smell food...) As Eric walks off with the bag, the owner shows up...

(Thanks again to Jenny)

The being, who calls himself Solars, chastises Eric for his thievery before giving the starving party the food. He then sees Bobby’s weakened state and offers to look after him. Sheila stays behind while the rest of the party look for the Yellow Dragon (You know, there’s no entry in any of the 1st edition books about a Yellow Dragon. I smell shenanigans) Solars warns the party that the Garden of Zinn is evil, but the party doesn’t have much of a choice (so once again we are splitting the party. I swear, this DM must be a masochist)

Later, the party goes from the...jungle, I guess...to yet another wasteland called the Valley of Smoke (and the DM once again displays his lack of basic ecosystem knowledge) when they come to a fork in the road. Eric immediately declares Solars to be evil and wants to turn back to...do what exactly? Hide behind his shield menacingly?

Just then, Dungeon Master arrives and sounds...a bit off. For starters, he’s not speaking in riddles. Hank is immediately suspicious. Eric manages to outwit the fake Dungeon Master, just as another Dungeon Master shows up and praises him (OK, that should raise another red flag or two...) and the pair fight. You would think it would be an epic Wizard’s Duel, but it’s more a magical shoving match.

(Jenny again)

The one still standing boasts he will destroy the imposter, which to the party means that this is the actual imposter (as Dungeon Master preaches mercy to his opponents) and attacks, wrapping him in a bolt from his bow. This Dungeon Master immediately transforms into a Phantom Stalker. It throws a taunt and vanishes. That nets 375XP to the four on-hand (I’ll bet Eric’s happy he′s not the one getting shafted on XP when the party splits for once) The party asks Dungeon Master what road to take. He points them to the right road (”...which is not the left” DIANA: That’s the real Dungeon Master, all right!) Dungeon Master waves farewell (instead of vanishing...hmmm...) and gives a sinister grin before transforming into another Phantom Stalker (so neither was Dungeon Master? Well played, DM...)

Meanwhile, at Solars’ hut, Sheila looks for a blanket for Bobby and discovers a chest with a crown, robe, and sword within. Solars immediately slams it closed and yells at Sheila. When asked, he claims they belong to someone who is long gone. Nothing sinister about that... Anyway, he gets a blanket for Bobby as we fade back to......the end of the road (literally) The road the party is traveling abruptly ends, and tentacles emerge from the sand and attack the party!

(Hi Jenny!)

Dungeon Master once again shows up, and when Eric demands he help, he refuses. Eric concludes that this is the Phantom Stalker. That’s when another Dungeon Master shows up, and says that he, too, is an imposter! The Phantom Stalkers mention the Trial of the Worm as the party is pulled under the sand! Later, the party (except Eric) is deposited in an underground cavern (splitting the party farther? the DM IS a glutton for punishment, isn’t he?) Oops, never mind. the DM just decided to drop Eric a bit late and in comedic fashion

(Yep, Ms. Saqua again)

(I really get the impression that Eric pissed off the DM before this campaign started. Does he owe the DM money or something?)

youtube

(Thanks to DamnSpiffy)

Then the DM reminds Presto that he has a paralyzing fear of worms...as a group of them crawl over his feet. Diana wonders if this is the “Trial of the Worm” the Stalkers mentioned.

Back at the hut, Bobby is getting worse, and Solars inadvertently reveals he’s under a spell, but refuses to say anything about it. (I’m getting the impression that, unlike Eric, Sheila is enjoying her subplot...however brief her scenes are)

Back in the tunnel, Presto is about to have an awful day as...

(Thanks to Villains Wiki)

...a giant worm attacks! Diana manages to jump on its neck and subdue it, riding it to the surface like a mount with the rest of the party. While there is no “Giant Worm” in any of the tomes, there is a “Purple Worm” that is close enough to base the XP award on, so the quartet gain 7200XP. Conveniently, the Worm deposits them outside Queen Zinn’s castle, where the Phantom Stalkers arrive and escort them inside.

Inside, Zinn announces her engagement to Eric. Eric balks until he’s bribed into accepting, then he starts to see the merits of marriage. Diana then reminds Eric about Bobby, so he asks Zinn about the Yellow Dragon. Zinn then leads the party to her garden, where she shows them the Yellow Dragon...

(Thanks again to Villains Wiki)

...a plant with a foot-like root. She gives a piece to Hank (who is upset due to the fact that they likely won’t be fighting her) Hank, Diana, and Presto head back to save Bobby. Eric invites the party back to the wedding, even extending an invite to Solars.

Zinn, however, has other plans. She instructs her Phantom Stalkers to stop the party from reaching Solars. (Keeping secrets from hubby already? This doesn’t have the makings of a long and happy union...)

Later, on the trip back, the Phantom Stalkers try to stop the trio, but they have other ideas and combat ensues (but since the Stalkers can become intangible their attacks are ineffective). Apparently it’s happening near enough to Solars’ hut as he hear the commotion. Sheila immediately runs off to help while Solars grabs a potion off of his table.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Zinn’s Social Event of the Year begins as the priest starts rattling off Eric’s wedding vows (as Eric wonders when he gets the XP for becoming a King)

(Once again, Villains Wiki)

Seriously, Eric looks bored out of his skull.

Meanwhile, the Stalkers spot Solars and turn their attention on him. Solars then splashes the potion on the Stalkers and they turn to stone. Despite the fact that Solars defeated the Stalkers, the party did participate in combat, so I’ll award the XP for defeating the pair for 750XP total.Sheila then runs to Solars and hugs him, weeping a tear of joy, before Uni reminds the party about Bobby. As they run off, Solars begins to glow. The cure works like a charm and Bobby is fine.

Suddenly, in walks a man who claims he was Solars, but is actually Sir Lawrence, rightful King of Zinn. Apparently, a young girl’s tears act like Belle’s declaration at the end of Beauty and the Beast. It seems that Zinn cast a transformation spell on Lawrence, changing him into a beast until Sheila broke the spell.

(I am SO gonna ignore the romantic subtext that follows between Lawrence and Sheila. It’s one thing with Zinn and Eric, as he could possibly be 18, but Sheila is clearly underage (I would say 15 or 16). It may be cool in a pseudo-midieval setting, but not for a kids’ show in the 80s!)

Then Lawrence drops the ironic bombshell: once the spell on Lawrence is broker, it reflects back on the caster...

(One more from Jenny)

...Needless to say, the wedding is off (since Eric is a shallow ass who was only marrying Zinn for her looks, money, and power...and now she has none of that) I can’t really give XP for Zinn’s defeat, as it was the spell backfiring more than anything the PCs did (to be honest, if I was to award XP to anyone for it then it would be to Sheila)

The party as a whole (and the only portion Bobby will be getting XP for) receives 4550XP, or 758XP each. The quartet of Hank, Diana, Presto, and Eric (and the rest of what Eric will receive) earns 7575XP, or 1893XP (so Eric gets 2651XP). Remove Eric and add Sheila and they will receive 750XP, or 187XP each, so Sheila gets 945XP and the rest of the party gets 2838XP each.

No one levels up, while Eric is pissed at Sheila and the DM for ruining his chance at royalty

#d&d #animation #Fan Colored Glasses

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obeetlebeetle · 5 years

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Do all the dnd asks!

1. A favorite character you have played.

done!

2. Your favorite character that someone else has played.

o my god.. this is so hard, my group makes really good characters! for each of them:zach - nickels!! trauma child kenku weirdo who sold their soul to talk.. who grew up to be an angry pirate who adopted a child on impulse.ari - lael, obviously. they have a half-elf complex, a good chunk of their personality is being the kid that catches lizards, and they have a robot arm.lemon - honestly? jj devinyl. i mean, john mulaney as a tiefling cleric who loves his wife and is also going completely insane? yeah.bree - i.. love layla. she’s a good-aligned cleric to an evil god and her and kellan are the cutest couple in dnd tbh.connor - guardian is a robot.

3. Your favorite side quest.

o fuck!! y’all.. it’s bufo. it’s the fact that my talking toad npc was so lovable that they unlocked the quest in which his mother hunts him down and tries to kill him so that she can live forever. they killed her ofc and bufo was untransformed into a handsome.. halfling.

4. Your current campaign.

i’m running a murder mystery set aboard an airship! with strong cosmic horror elements! and i’m playing in a large-scale epic about spies caught up in the very start of a continent-wide war.

5. Favorite NPC.

also a very hard question. on one hand, jean is my actual boyfriend and also a literal angel assassin. on the other hand, nika is a child god trapped in an amulet whose super god power makes people trip which is so fucking funny. back around to the first hand, which is now the third, aengus is so well-done as a villain that he’s almost scared me in my real-life actual heart and yet he’s an a huge loser with breakup trauma, which is objectively also so fucking funny. on my fourth hand, fela is my most important npc who i’m probably in love with and she’s been in every one of my campaigns. on my FIFTH hand--

6. Favorite death (monster, player character, NPC, etc).

done!

7. Your favorite downtime activity.

done!

8. Your favorite fight/encounter.

that time nasuada beat lumley up in her own dumb-ass head, and lumley’s response was to find this super hot.

9. Your favorite thing about D&D.

getting together and spending time with my friends! or maybe that it lets me be creative without the stress writing gives me.

10. Your favorite enemy and the enemy you hate the most.

fav enemy is def aengus!! like wow he’s fucking terrifying!! and i hate yin&yang the most, they were so creepy and cruel and they were never really punished.

11. How often do you play and how often would you ideally like to play?

i dm once a week these days, and i play sporadically. thesis year has been hard on me! but ideally i would love to dm twice a week and play in one or two steady campaigns, or dm once a week with regular one-shot sessions!

12. Your in game inside jokes/memes/catchphrases and where they came from.

o.. there’s a lot?? my favorite is “honeyclaw pissed on lenthol” bc our barbarian thought it would be a good idea to climb into the robot piloted by the “big bad” (or so we thought at the time), and then to sell her bluff that she was looking for the bathroom, she just...... pissed herself >:(

13. Introduce your current party.

as a dm: lael (half-elf magitechnician who bases their mad science off of cool bugs); guardian (robot paladin on his third life, basically robocop with light existential crises); senhora (brash and kind-hearted by turns, an elf who [REDACTED] before becoming a ranger and bonding w a wolf); jj devinyl (a tiefling cleric who does stand-up comedy and loves his wife); and percy (an android with identity issues, driven by curiosity, and love for magic, and literally no qualms about threatening to kill her friends).

as a player:rowan (the last prince of a lost kingdom and also the saddest, gayest boy in town); ko&kokumo (my elf boy whose soul split in two after leaving his warlock patron, driven by nosiness and romance respectively); honeyclaw (a tabaxi pro-wrestler who deserted her life as a child soldier, pissed on lenthol); peitho (the surprisingly wholesome god of sex, was kinda into the tactics of being a spy before he got distracted by p*ssy); and lumley (the dumbest baby lesbian ever o my god, she’s the daughter of a powerful river goddess and she still can’t get a date).

14. Introduce any other parties you have played in or DM-ed.

that would take me one million years.

15. Do you have snacks during game times?

yeah!! traditionally we take a halfway break at 9 and all go get snacks together, it’s great.

16. Do you play online or in person? Which do you prefer?

i prefer in person, but we play online a lot, and we’ll have to be only online once we graduate.

17. What are some house rules that your group has?

we round up score mods from odds and we don’t pay attention to like.. most of the little rules. it’s more abt the storytelling. (which is why we may switch to a different system if i can seduce them away.)

18. Does your party keep any pets?

o yeah, i think almost every group has had an animal companion. and if not, zach always plays a furry.

19. Do you or your party have any dice superstitions?

a lot of us roll specific sets for each character!

20. How did you get into D&D? How long have you been playing?

i got into dnd in high school bc i liked a boy who watched community, and then i watched community, and the dnd episode fucking rocked. never got past making characters and one botched attempt at a session. then in my first year of college, i joined the dnd club and i’ve been playing since! so like, three years and some change.

21. Have you ever regretted something your character has done?

ya lol i play very much how my character would act and tho that usually goes well for me.. ko wanted to break his pact with aengus despite the Consequences and i didn’t. but overall i think the outcome has been a lot of fun!

22. What color was your first dragon?

silver! just introduced them, actually!

23. Do you use premade modules or original campaigns?

all original, baby.

24. How much planning/preparation do you do for a game?

a ton. as a dm i write........ a lot. i want to have a lot of vivid characters, solid plots, and a huge interwoven world. so my docs are always huge and take me months to finish.

as a player i do less bc players just inherently have far less to do. but i still try put a ton into really developing my character so i can play them more naturally.

For DMs

25. What have your players done that you never could have planned for?

in my first campaign, i used a lot of weird memory spells to keep characters from remembering the big bad, because him being unremembered was a HUGE plot point for me. i had two different groups playing in the city at the same time, and one of them.... had this dragonborn who just liked to talk to plants and who hated nobles, and who fucking cast MAGIC MOUTH on their FANNY PACK to record that big bad so that it COULDN’T BE FORGOTTEN. MAGIC MOUTH. THAT’S THE SPELL THAT BROKE ME.

26. What was your favorite scene to write and show your characters.

i’ve really liked a couple, but i know i haven’t topped the finale for my first campaign. after finally the groups finally came together and killed Shargaas, the city began to crumble around them, and they all watched me set a ten-minute timer for them to figure out how to get away with their lives.

27. Do you allow homebrew content?

o yea, i adore MFOV particularly.

28. How often do you use NPCs in a party?

o there are always a couple kicking around.

29. Do you prefer RP heavy sessions or combat sessions?

we don’t really.. do... that second thing....

30. Are your players diplomatic or murder hobos?

yes.

For Players

31. What is your favorite class? Favorite race?

o fuck. uh probably wizard. and i love................. half-elves.

32. What role do you like to play the most? (Tank/healer/etc?)

i really like long-distance damage dealers.

33. How do you write your backstory, or do you even write a backstory?

i always start with a concept and then i just write an entire novel ell em ay oh.

34. Do you tend pick weapons/spells for being useful or for flavor?

done!

35. How much roleplay do you like to do?

like, 70% rp, 30% jokes,

#shadiekid

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noblecrumpet-dorkvision · 6 years

Text

Jungle Environment Generator

I just started running Tomb of Annihilation, but I wanted to make exploration more exciting. A lot of forums online said they wished there was more to discover in the jungle while wandering, and I myself wanted a way to randomly create useful environments to affect combat. Therefore I created this big ole set of tables. The content specifically refers to the adventure module in many places, but you could always use this as a jumping-off point for any adventure if you wish to use the tables. There are no story or NPC spoilers.

How to Use the Tables

These tables are designed to be used in tandem with the random encounter tables and exploration rules already detailed in the Tomb of Annihilation.

Whenever a random encounter is found, roll for Terrain Features based on the type of hex the party is in (either mountainous or non-mountainous). Then, whether or not an encounter was found in that hex, roll for Structural Features. Apply all relevant features to the battlefield for the random encounter. If there was no random encounter, there might still be a structure for players to explore. That structure may or may not be inhabited, which could interact with the encounter, if there was one.

For instance, the players are in the jungle and have encountered a pack of Velociraptors using the encounter table found in the Tomb of Annihilation module. You then roll here and ended up with two terrain features, a stream and a hazard (Razorvine). You also rolled and found a major structural feature, a small village inhabited by native Chultans. You place the village around the stream and place the razorvine on one side of the village. The predators will likely be attacking the settlement, leading to a new, narrative encounter and creating several terrain details the players can exploit.

image credit: Nele Diel

Random Terrain (Jungle/Coast/Swamp)

There is always at least one random terrain feature. Roll 1d6. On a 5-6, there is an additional terrain feature, then reroll to see if there is another. Randomly determine which side of the battlefield players approach from. The jungle is assumed to have a medium amount of foliage and trees for hiding and cover.

Roll d100:

(01-10) Boulders: Offers cover based on size. Roll 1d6:

(1-2) Rubble: Partial Cover, +2 AC

(3-4) Boulders: Half Cover, +5 AC

(5-6) Towering Boulders: Total Cover

(11-15) Crawlspace: natural stone, manmade tunnels, or a hollowed out log.

(16-25) Tight Brush: all terrain is difficult terrain except for Huge, Colossal, or Small creatures. Lightly obscured.

(26-35) Sparse Brush: plenty of room to maneuver but less terrain to work with.

(36-40) Slippery: wet slope or ground, sand slope, scree slope

(41-50) Lightly Obscured: Either the dense canopy cuts off light, or a thick fog rolls in.

(51-55) Cliff: one edge of battlefield is a cliff face. 1d10 x 10 ft. high, climb DC 16. May be a waterfall (1 in 6 chance)

(56-60) Slope: One end of the battlefield is higher than the other. Those at the upper end have +1 on attacks against those on the lower end.

(61-70) Ravine: A ravine 1d10 x 10 ft. deep and 2d6 x 5 ft. wide spans the battlefield. Introduce the ravine and ask if players are taking the high road or low road.

(71-81) Swamp or Mud: Treat as difficult terrain. Swamp may harbor disease. Creatures can hide underwater. Mud has 1 in 6 chance to restrain when moved through for the first time each turn (DC 10 STR to escape)

(82-86) Pool: a pond or vernal pool takes up a quarter or half the battlefield. First 5 ft. of the pool is difficult terrain, rest requires swimming.

(87-95) Stream: there is a small stream, 1d6 ft. deep. Either difficult terrain (1-3 ft) or requires swimming (4-6 ft).

(96-00) Hazard: Secretly place a hazard in a random quadrant of the map, spotted with a DC 16 Perception check. Roll 1d4 to determine the type of hazard.

(1) Razorvine: As found in DMG. The plants have AC 11, 25 HP and are Immune to bludgeon/slashing. Victims must make a DC 10 DEX save or take 1d10 piercing.

(2) Quicksand: As found in DMG. Victim sinks in 1d4+1 ft. and is restrained, then sinks 1d4 ft/rd. Self STR DC 10+(#ft). Ally can pull them free with a STR check DC 5+(#ft).

(3) Sinkhole: 2d4 x 10 ft. deep. 1 in 6 chance reveals a catacomb or mine (see Major Structures)

(4) Man-made Trap (snare trap, hunting trap, pit trap): DEX save DC 15 to avoid. A snare restrains (escape DC 12), a Hunting Trap restrains (escape DC 14) and deals 1d10 piercing, and a pit trap deals 4d6 piercing as they fall 15 ft. onto wooden stakes.

Random Terrain (Mountain)

There is always at least one random feature. Roll 1d6. On a 5-6, there is an additional terrain feature, then reroll to see if there is another. Mountainous terrain is always considered to have a slope, and PCs always approach either perpendicular to the slope or from up or down the slope, depending on whether they are climbing or descending the mountain. Those at the upper end of the slope have +1 on attacks against those on the lower end.

Roll d100:

(01-10) Boulders: Offers cover based on size. Roll 1d6:

(1-2) Rubble: Partial Cover, +2 AC

(3-4) Boulders: Half Cover, +5 AC

(5-6) Towering Boulders: Total Cover

(11-16) Crawlspace: natural stone, manmade tunnels, or a hollowed out log.

(17-25) Narrow Pass: difficult terrain that requires squeezing.

(26-35) Plateau or Peak: The area is flat here despite being on a mountain.

(36-40) Slippery: wet slope or ground, sand slope, scree slope

(41-45) Clouds/Smoke: Fast-moving clouds or smoke cause the area to be lightly or heavily obscured on any given round (50:50 chance)

(46-55) Cliff: one edge of battlefield is a cliff face. 1d10 x 10 ft. high, climb DC 16. May be a waterfall (1 in 8 chance)

(56-60) Bridge: A rope, wood, or stone bridge spans a drop of 3d10 x 10 ft.

(61-70) Cliffside Path: A narrow path with a dangerous drop or similar hazard on one side.

(71-80) Ravine: A ravine 1d10 x 10 ft. deep and 2d6 x 5 ft. wide spans the battlefield. Introduce the ravine and ask if players are taking the high road or low road.

(81-94) Debris: Treat the debris as difficult terrain.

(95-00) Lava Feature: a fissure, vent, flow, or pool of lava.

Structural Features

Whenever the party travels through a hex, whether or not there was an encounter, roll 1d6. On a 6, the PCs stumble across a structural feature. If a structure is encountered, roll 1d6. On a 1-5, the feature is a minor structure. On a 6, the feature is a major structure.

For the purposes of these rolls, “Faction Agents” refers to exploring members of the Flaming Fist, Order of the Gauntlet, Emerald Enclave, or Zhentarim. Other factions are too rare to be found in the jungle. “Native Chultans” refers to either humans, dwarves, goblins, tabaxi, yuan-ti, or grung native to unsettled regions of Chult. They may have never even heard of Port Nyanzaru.

Banteay Srei Temple in Cambodia, photo by Matthew Laird Acred

Minor Structural Features

These terrain features aren’t usually worth putting on a map, but provide unique environments for loot to be found in or to act as 1-room dungeons or NPC encounters.

Roll d100:

(01-10) Border Stone: A tall boulder or slab painted or carved with a symbol apparently designating a border. It could point to a new minor or major feature.

(11-15) Ruined Staircase: A tall stone staircase that goes nowhere. It’s 3d4 x 5 ft. long. Every 10 ft. of length rises 5 ft. high.

(16-20) Graveyard: An overgrown grave site with individually marked graves, either by mounds, stones, slabs, or metal stakes. If there were no undead encountered, there is a 50% chance of encountering 3d4 zombies or skeletons.

(21-25) Cairn: A pile of stones used as either a trail marker or as a simple marker of a grave site. An INT check DC 15 determines its nature. A trail marker could point to a new minor or major feature. A grave site could have buried valuables.

(26-30) Tomb: A small sealed tomb, 15 x 15 ft. Can be built above ground or below it, but often built into a hill or cliff.

(31-40) Camp Site: An abandoned campfire and supplies left behind from recent adventurers.

(41-45) Monument: A statue, pillar, slab, or victory gate carved or painted to be a monument. Requires a DC 13 INT check to determine its nature. It might be dedicated to a deity, hero, monarch, or one of the barae. Or it can be erected after an event like a volcanic eruption, a battle, the founding of a city, the Sundering, or the disappearance of Mezro.

(46-50) Shrine: A small 10 x 15 ft covered shrine on a tiered platform dedicated to either Ubtao or one of the nine Omuan deities.

(51-55) Broken Wagon: An abandoned wagon left by previous adventurers or even Chultans from before Port Nyanzaru was established.

(56-60) Abandoned Siege Weapon: An abandoned mangonel or ballista left by either the Flaming Fist or Order of the Gauntlet in a failed expedition. There is a 50:50 chance that it still functions, but it needs repairs if it is to be moved.

(61-65) Ruined Aqueduct: A stone structure that gently slopes in one direction, held up by stone pillars and arches. Once used for catching and transporting water. Think Roman Aqueducts.

(66-75) Mudbrick Hut: This hut has wooden beams jutting out of the sides of it called toron. Climbing them requires a DC 10 DEX check. Has a 1 in 10 chance of being inhabited when discovered. If uninhabited, it is likely to be ruined by either rain or dinosaurs using it as a scratching post.

(76-80) Tower: A 100 ft tall stone tower with either mirrors or a brazier at the top for signaling. Has a 1 in 10 chance of being inhabited when discovered, usually by 2d6 faction agents, but sometimes by squatters or monsters.

(81-90) Wooden Hut: A hut primarily made of wood and covered in grass, palms, or reeds. If in a swampy region, it stands on stilts. In a mountainous region, it could be built into a stone feature. 1 in 3 chance of being inhabited by a ranger, rogue, monk, barbarian, warlock, wizard, or sorcerer NPC.

(91-00) Road or Trail: Leads to another feature if followed. 50:50 chance of a minor or major feature.

Ennde Mosque, Dogon Country, Mali. Image source: link

Major Structural Features

These terrain features are worthy enough to add to a map. Think of them as 1-3 room dungeons. Structures with multiple rooms might lead you to roll up additional encounters to populate it. Simply improvise these structures but make them simple and sparsely inhabited so they are more of a distraction for the players than an entire adventure. You can use the tables on page 290 of the DMG to help stock these structures.

Roll d100:

(01-07) Pyramid: Either a stone ziggurat or a mudbrick pyramid. This either houses a tomb of an important figure or a shrine to a deity. The space inside is not particularly large despite the monumental structure, and it’s not very defensible, so it’s usually uninhabited.

(08-15) Small Castle: This castle is made from a combination of painted mudbrick, stucco, and carved stone. It has wooden beams jutting out of the sides of it called toron. Climbing them requires a DC 10 DEX check, but they begin high above the ground, at least 30 ft. up. Has a 1 in 4 chance of being inhabited by 3d6 + 2 faction agents, pirates, or native Chultans.

(16-25) Quarry: An abandoned stone quarry. This might be a place of importance to factions seeking resources like the Flaming Fist, Zhentarim, Order of the Gauntlet, or Lord’s Alliance. An accurate map to its location could fetch up to 50 gp.

(26-45) Simple Village: 3d6 simple mudbrick or wooden huts in close proximity. 2 in 3 chance of being inhabited by 4d6+4 native Chultans.

(46-50) Stacked Village: A series of stacked mudbrick homes nestled beneath a cliff. Has a 1 in 3 chance of being inhabited by 2d6+2 native Chultans, 1d4+1 lost adventurers, or 1d4+1 faction agents.

(51-60) Ruined Town: 6d4 stone residences now ruined. The buildings flank a large flagstone courtyard now overgrown with jungle. There is a 1 in 4 chance of being inhabited by 2d6+2 native Chultans, 1d4+1 lost adventurers, or 1d4+1 faction agents.

(61-66) Temple Ruin: An ancient temple to Ubtao or one of the nine Omuan deities. It has only one floor and rests on a raised stone platform. Thick clapperless bells take up some of the windows, letting out a deep chime when struck. There is a 1 in 4 chance that the temple is inhabited by a cleric making pilgrimage here.

(67-70) Emerald Enclave Blind: A tall, thin tower structure deliberately hidden by trees and foliage for spying on the surrounding landscape. A DC 20 Perception check is required to spot the hidden structure, otherwise it simply looks like a thicket of trees. There is a 2 in 3 chance it is inhabited by 1d4+1 Emerald Enclave agents. If uninhabited, it is likely they were wiped out by monsters or another faction that discovered them.

(71-75) Mine: An abandoned ancient mine. This might be a place of importance to factions seeking resources like the Flaming Fist, Zhentarim, Order of the Gauntlet, or Lord’s Alliance. An accurate map to its location could fetch up to 50 gp.

(76-79) Lumberyard: A lumberyard secretly set up by either the Zhentarim or the Flaming Fist. There is a 2 in 3 chance it is inhabited by 2d6+3 agents of one of those factions. If uninhabited, it is likely they were wiped out by monsters or another faction that discovered them.

(80-97) Catacomb: A large gravesite with a sealed entryway into an underground tomb complex, with many winding halls of dead laid to rest and one or two open rooms. There is a chance that 3d6 zombies can be found here.

(98-00) Mage Tower: This tower belongs to a spellcaster that for some reason decided Chult was a peaceful place to continue their research. Perhaps they use the jungle’s dangers as natural defenses, or perhaps they enjoy the complete isolation. The tower is not undefended, whether or not it is inhabited, and may hold several traps and sealed or locked entryways. Roll on the Magic Items tables in the DMG to determine what can be found within. There is a 1 in 4 chance the tower is inhabited by a wizard, sorcerer, or warlock. Roll 1d6 to determine their reason for building the tower out in the jungle.

(1) Study Chult's environment and cultures.

(2) Use Chult’s rare resources to create fantastic magic items.

(3) Seclude themselves while they achieve their nefarious goals.

(4) Research necromancy using Chult’s abundant undead.

(5) Escape a powerful pursuer by teleporting their tower to Chult.

(6) Search for a jungle spring said to grant immortality.

#tomb of annihilation #D&D 5e #dungeons and dragons #random encounters #terrain #temples #exploration #DnD #Noblecrumpet #Dorkvision #Chult #Forgotten Realms #Faerun #D&D #DnD 5e

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turbletoops · 5 years

Text

Curse of Castle Halloway, Pt. 10

Our current party consists of:

Anala, Dragonborn Cleric of Pelor, from the clans to south. (+ An albino dragon egg) Bartleby, Halfling Rogue, a Halloway native. Camlib, Lizardfolk Druid, from the eastern swamps. Ilios, Aasimar Monk of Lathander, from Lightbreak Temple. Rowan, Half-Elven Paladin, currently serving Eldath. Shade, a Tiefling Warlock of the Raven Queen.

After a blazing hot escape, our adventurers save the village, but at what cost? *(This session is loosely based on the Moon Over Graymoor module.)

“Sagh did it.”

~ 18 Days Until the Dark Hunter’s Moon ~

We rejoin our adventurers just as things are beginning to heat up.

However, when faced with white hot blood-pumping action, our party pulls together and, via the power of teamwork (as well as magical rain clouds, celestial steeds, and good old fashioned elbow grease), manages to save themselves from a crispy demise.

High off of the sensation of escaping death, our party flees. Someone had very clearly tried to murder them and burn the evidence down with them and the barn. Ilios' faith is a bit shaken.

They decide to head to the tree with the owl carving to await the delivery of the sword Ser Thames had requested. To avoid being seen, they determine the best route is through the copse of wood behind the chapel, for some reason.

Father Daragor is outside when they pass, and because the party is trying to be stealthy with a large tin can in their ranks, he notices them immediately. He greets them and asks whatever they could be doing skulking around in the back garden of the chapel. Rowan puts his foot in his mouth, alarming the priest, who quickly hobbles back into the chapel, terrified, and locks the door behind him. Shade has an unsuccessful herb hunt, but Anala does notice that there's something architecturally strange about the chapel.

As they enter the woods with the owl carved tree, they hear a lone, plaintive wolf howl. Noticing the disturbed dirt, they dig it back up, and retrieve a long, locked box. Bartleby makes quick work of the locks.

When the box is opened, they are forced to squint at the blindingly bright light emitted from the longsword within. They decide Rowan should be the one to hold it, and luckily, the sheath manages to contain the light.

Upon returning to the Greymoor Bend for the night, our adventurers have a meeting on what to do in regards to the problems this town is facing.

There is contention on who is responsible - the party being split on whether they think Sagh is responsible or not. Their best course of action is also disputed; the party being unsure whether they should join the feast and be likely locked inside for whatever is to happen, or stay outside and perhaps meet something worse. The idea of just packing up and leaving in the night is also floated.

The only thing they are sure of is the unseen hand of corruption threatening the innocent in this town, and that is has some connection to the Halloway Curse.

Ultimately it is a hard night emotionally for the group, as the devoted's connection to their deities seems to be tenuous at best. Camlib specifically feels a harsh psychic pain when trying to connect with her deity. Bartleby also comes to find that the letter from his family is a coded message asking for help, adding to the pressure weighing on his shoulders.

The next morning, our group is still at odds on what to do. Ilios takes a stroll to the chapel to try and obtain some more information, and though he quickly overspends his luck with the priests, he does get his hands on a brochure for the chapel.

Careful insight uncovers the final piece of the puzzle our adventurers needed to be sure of how to proceed. The depictions of the sign of Selune bears hidden imagery of the Dark Lord Malar, revealing the chapel to be a cover up for the dark machinations of a group of evil doers. Bartleby goes back and sabotages their locks for good measure.

The group decides to have a chat with Sagh, intending to either confirm their suspicions or enlist her help. She is hesitant to believe the harsh truth about her neighbors, but after being shown the brochure, she is convinced, and offers to help the group in whatever way she can.

Now assured that she is on their side, they ask her to round up all the vulnerable townsfolk she can and keep them safe in the inn. Though unsure of how willing they'll be to pass up the Moonlight Feast, she agrees to try her best. She plucks her silvered battleaxe "Old Faithful" off the display above the bar, wishes the party luck and sets off to her task.

Finally, the time for the feast draws near. The group heads to the chapel to get locked in, knowing they are the only things standing between prey and predator.

The chapel is bustling with activity as townspeople begin to pour in. Though she couldn't convince the whole town, it does seem Sagh was able to convince a good portion of the citizens of Greymoor to skip the celebration.

In the hustle and bustle of the gathering, the group manages to slip away unnoticed into Father Daragor's office. Thanks to Anala's investigation earlier, she knows that there is a hidden area under Father Daragors office.

They descend into the hidden undercroft to find Father Daragor praying to a shrine to Malar, with a small wolf chained to the altar beside him.

He speaks to the wolf, addressing her as Eryn, and entreats her to embrace her destiny and help him defeat the party. She seems hesitant, but is beholden to his commands.

Though the party got the upper hand with the element of surprise, they realize they're in for a struggle when Father Daragor transforms into a grotesque oversized lycanthropic monster. He has no teeth, but claws perfectly shaped like the trowel marks they've seen at every murder that's happened in Greymoor since they arrived. It becomes clear that Daragor committed these murders alone, as the only bodies to have standard wolf-sized wounds were missing livestock.

Within moments of transforming, Daragor's horrific claws strike Ilios down, severely injuring him. The battle is fierce, with each member of the party doing their best.

Unfortunately, even their best is not enough to protect the wounded Ilios, and Daragor's dark power compels Eryn to attack him. She tears his throat, ending the monk's life in an instant.

Spurred to fight on, perhaps in seeking revenge for their fallen ally, the party struggles against this monster.

Though on their last legs, they've nearly taken down the beast when a mysterious portal creeps open.

A new, darker Ilios steps forth,, and the portal pops closed behind him.

The arrival of his new form is suspiciously close to what happened when Shade first appeared in the burning Castle Halloway.

With a refreshed ally, our adventurers make quick work of the rest of the battle.

At the end of the battle, Camlib thinks to put the family hierloom they found in George Gilly's house onto her. With a bit of string from someone's bag, they fashion it into a necklace. As it is placed on wolf-form Eryn, she reverts back into her human form. She is quickly covered up by Ilios' cloak.

Seeing as all the evidence pointed to Daragor, the group exonerates her. She reveals she felt she had to follow him, as he was controlling her with the guilt she felt about killing her father.

The group explains that she couldn't have killed him, and that Daragor must have convinced her of that to tighten his control. Eryn is relieved to the point of bitter tears; knowing she was not responsible for the death of her father, after all, but still missing him dearly.

Our adventurers have a lot of questions, but for now they'll have to wait.

So! What is in store for our heroes(?) next time??? What will become of Eryn now that she is freed from her bonds? What's with the weakening connection between the adventurers and their various deities? Will Bartleby or Camlib's families be in one piece by time they get to them? With so much going wrong, will our adventurers manage to make things right?

Find out – Next session!

#hallowaycurse

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mothermaidenclone-blog · 6 years

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Solo: A Star Wars Story or I Don’t Know What I Expected From A Movie Named After One Bloke

The newest additions to the ever expanding Star Wars pantheon have left me with mixed feelings: the official episodes have been thoroughly enjoyable with vastly improved female representation, but Solo: A Star Wars Story has joined Rogue One in having some great moments, but being a let down for the ladies overall. Solo in particular ticked so many boxes on my list of The Bad Things™ that can be inflicted on female characters.

*Solo: A Star Wars Story spoilers follow*

Arguably the main female character is Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), the childhood sweetheart of the eponymous Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich), if that’s an appropriate term for young lovers trying to escape the darkest depths of crime, subjugation and despair together. We are introduced to the couple with their relationship already well established, and see only one brief, tender moment between the pair before their action packed escape sequence begins. Qi’ra’s failed flight from her and Han’s oppressors was the first of many tragic fates to befall the women of this film that I felt as a predictive pang in my chest before it happened. It was clear that Han needed to suffer this loss to develop in the way that the franchise has already determined that he will, so there was no way that Qi’ra was making it out of that spaceport with him. Thus, so far in the film she is a device to explain Han’s motivations more than she is a character.

In the elapsing time before we meet Qi’ra again she has suffered many unseen but suggested horrors, but she nevertheless reappears looking glamorous at a lavish party on the luxury yacht of crime boss Dryden Vos (Paul Bethany). Before anyone gets too excited, however, she is very much his possession rather than ally, colleague or even employee - she is literally branded by him so as not to leave any doubt about her situation. When she finally escapes Dryden’s clutches by murdering him at the end of the movie, she is awarded one, brief moment of caressing the evil office chair where we can believe that, however deplorable her situation, at least she is the boss now. Alas, it is not to be; our parting view of Qi’ra is a conversation she has with her new overlord, who is Darth Maul (Sam Witwer) for some baffling reason. He states, “Qi’ra, you and I will her working much more closely from now on,” in a gravelly, creepy whisper, closing Qi’ra’s part in this story with her being passed from the possession of one evil man to another.

Qi’ra’s defeat of Dryden, despite it being the desperate, split-second act of someone clutching at survival, is framed as an act of betrayal. This concept haunts Qi’ra throughout Solo; Han’s new best friend/mentor/father figure, Beckett (Woody Harrelson) is constantly suggesting that Qi’ra cannot be trusted, despite turning out to be a turncoat himself. Qi’ra is portrayed as that awful stereotype of a woman who’ll make you believe she’s in love with you to take advantage of you somehow, then throw you under the bus the moment she’s finished with you, probably winking over her shoulder at you and shrugging, before slinking away in some sort of cocktail dress. All of this is compounded by the fact that several characters, including Beckett and Qi’ra herself, keep implying that Han will no longer love Qi’ra if he knows the things she’s done, when he’s spent the intervening years since he last saw her stealing, shooting and cheating his way around the galaxy. Why is it okay for him to have a shady past, but not her? This reputation is completely unjustified when she appears to make very similar life choices to Han, but he is portrayed as a plucky survivor and loveable rogue rather than a double-crosser or back-stabber.

Another woman who receives a very raw deal in Solo is Val (Thandie Newton), Beckett’s lover. Initially, her inclusion seems wonderful as she is a middle-aged black woman portrayed as a crack-shot marksman and highly capable career criminal. However, any joy at this representational success is as short lived as Val herself, who promptly sacrifices herself in an explosion to destroy a bridge during a train heist. Her death is particularly annoying for a number of reasons; firstly, it’s the classic - and my least favourite - move of killing a woman to legitimise a male display of emotion and serve as motivation for said man and secondly, they don’t even pull off the robbery! Han is forced to dump the cargo mere minutes later, so Val’s death is totally in vain. It’s a reckless waste of such a promising character.

It’s not just human women who are at risk of sudden death in Solo, as proved by L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a female droid. L3-37 is the source of much of the comedy in Solo; some of it generated by her, such as her dry and anarchistic personality, but she is also the butt of some of it, mainly in the form of her assertions that Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) is in love with her. The audience is clearly supposed to find this idea ludicrous and laughable, sharing many a rolled eye with characters on screen. However, when L3-37 is inevitably caught in the cross fire - because it seems like none of the women are getting out of this film in one piece - Lando runs to her side, cradles her broken body and weeps. It did seem as though Lando actually had feelings for L3-37, and there was a moment of hope when her memory was to be implanted into the computer aboard the Millennium Falcon. I thought Solo was going to do a really cool thing where it explored how we fall in love with a person, not a body, so Lando could continue to explore his relationship with L3-37, no matter what physical form she took. Nope, she becomes an inanimate map and that’s the end of that.

The only woman who survives Solo relatively unscathed is Enfys Nest (Erin Kellyman), who the audience and cast believe to be a man for the vast majority of the film. Enfys is a fearsome pirate who leads the band of criminals known as the Cloud-Riders. As well as being portrayed as a man - achieved through heavy armour and a voice modulator - Enfys is presented as a villain for most of Solo. She is an antagonist, a rival marauder foiling Han’s plans and fighting for the same resources and prizes that he seeks. However, before the grand final face-off, Enfys not only reveals her true gender, but also her age - she is much younger than the audience was led to believe - as well as her alignment; she is a rebel and a freedom fighter rather than a selfish bandit. This reveal could be seen as something of a punchline, a vaguely comedic switcheroo that pulls the rug out from under not only Han, but the audience as well, and we all have a good laugh at how he was beaten by a girl. However, I’m going to take my victories where I can and celebrate the portrayal of a young woman as an accomplished warrior, leader and strategist, as well as basically the most principled person in this whole movie.

Two other credited female characters exist in Solo. One is the Chanteuse Aurodia Ventafoli (Sema-Tawi Smart), an incredibly glamorous black singer who appears to be somewhat cybernetically enhanced to improve her voice further. The other is Lady Proxima (Linda Hunt), a literal evil giant worm who exploits enslaved children to support a life of crime. So that’s pretty much the definition of “you win some, you lose some” then.

Overall, the women in Solo: A Star Wars Story, despite being capable in their various fields, are mostly exploited, enslaved, downtrodden and, eventually, murdered. This is particularly and personally such a shame for Solo, because “heist” and “getting the team together” are two of my favourite kinds of film, and I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I’m sure I can’t be the only female devotee who grew up with the franchise and became hugely excited by the new episodes, which have finally given women their rightful and glorious place in a galaxy far, far away, only to be bitterly let down by the bad things that happen to women in the spin-offs. I am left with no choice but to, like everyone’s favourite princess, live in hope.

And now for some asides:

The robot rebellion was basically the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

Can we have more Northeners in Star Wars please? I thoroughly enjoyed that accent inclusion.

Okay, so, this pissed me off for the whole film. Lando’s hangers in his cloak closet were the least practical thing ever! They were completely enclosed, so he would have had to take everything off the rail to reach whatever was at the back. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

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itnucleus · 2 years

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Professional ERP Software Development To Guide And Streamline Professions

In order to streamline key operations, ERP software is widely relied upon by trading and manufacturing companies as workflow across departments get automated resulting in ease of dataflow. Besides, security standards are well taken care of when data transfer occurs with speed and accuracy. Clearly, any noticeable ERP software development company in Delhi is highly preferred by a variety of business enterprises which seek ERP software as it unlocks solutions that deeply researched and analysed and with which operations are simplified across the arms of Business Corporation.

Growth is central to our business roadmap but then operations across all critical areas need to be properly managed and coherence needs to be formed. In case of ERP, such are available freely in India in standard form but customized ERP solutions and ERP solutions which are altered to suit specific needs and to include accounts, warehouse, inventory, staff solutions etc, do make a trick for best of business outcome.

Besides, there are ERP software that specialise in trading field and manufacturing and such agency which is a prestigious ERP development company in Delhi is pretty useful as solutions, processes and tools are unpacked for easy data management and to get to the key bussiness nerves.

Undoubtedly, innovation ability is guided by business needs and market calls while a focus upon quick time-to-value aspect underlines that lastmile functionality needed for business growth. Therefore, when you hunt for a specialized ERP development company in Delhi IT Nucleus is the IT service brand that you can rely upon.

Why Do You Need ERP Through IT Nucleus?

A majority of IT companies that develop ERP software in Delhi, just emphasize upon business operations that company involves in, in various departments. But at IT Nucleus, ERP team first identifies the challenges that businesses face and then craft a superior solutions needed to set a business on right track to progress and for the overall sake of operational excellence.

We design ERP software that is customized to your needs including factory requirements. With our ERP solution in place, manufacturers are empowered to maintain a perfect level of co-ordination among various processes and thereby professional dexterity is gained which ensure customer service and costs are controlled too. As everyday operations get easier, manufacturers can easily enhance their profitability, resource utilization can get optimized and set budget can further be reduced and we are left to invest in paramount creativity and esteem innovation.

IT Nucleus Puts Forth ERP That Is:

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Documents can be attached and stored,

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Master data can be transferred from Excel Template

System with multiple approval framework,

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Presenting ERPs Teem With Modules:

· Purchase Management

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We design and develop ERP solutions which are according to best practices and processes popular in industry and such help corporations in optimizing business processes and such systems can change as time demands and markets indicate. From a small business with a local reach to global business giants, IT Nucleus develops powerful and feature-packed ERPs which caters to all enterprises no matter what their size, industry and location is.

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IT Nucleus ERP: Flow Chart, Features & Functionalities

Material Requirement Planning & Purchase Management

The module relating to Purchase Management accommodates the task of procuring required raw materials, packaging material, sub assembly and other administrative & maintenance items.

Our ERP generates purchase indents automatically by forecasting Product demand and supply, Inventory level and stock-in-hand.

· ERPs ensure unlimited PO Amendment & Tracking facility,

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#erp development services #ecommerce website development in delhi #erp development company #static website development company in delhi #web design company in delhi #staff management software in delhi

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level99games · 6 years

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v40 - What's New in Seventh Cross

It's been quite a while since my last article on Seventh Cross's development. The game has taken a few changes, but ultimately we've shied away from making any major alterations since the last update to this blog. Here's a look at what's coming together!

Recently, our focus has been on a few things:

The persistent nature of the game–how do the characters develop and how does the story progress across multiple sessions?

The bosses–how can we pack the maximum number of interesting bosses into the game and still make them easily parsable?

Integration–how do we bring together the paragraph adventure book, the vertical arena board, the monster's actions, and the hunter's actions into a cohesive game experience?

With progress being made weekly on all three fronts, I'd like to show you where we are now.

1. Persistence

With Seventh Cross, after a lot of pondering, we decided to try a different campaign model than what we had seen in other games of this type. Players gradually build decks, gain new powers, acquire new allies, and fight powerful monsters.

This progression is one of the most fun parts of the game–getting these new abilities and integrating them into your fighting style is one of the most enjoyable parts of any RPG-like experience, and we wanted to make sure players would have a strong progression curve as they explored. There should be no game where you don't make significant advances toward your character's next power tier.

Rather than making a slow burn where the progression would be stretched out across a campaign spanning many castles, we decided to tighten up the scope of a campaign. Now, each castle is its own campaign. Hunters begin a castle with just a few resources at their disposal, and quickly acquire new skills and powers, recruit new allies, and unravel the story. The fast pace of this advancement means that each adventure can end with a truly climactic final boss battle, with fully realized heroes taking on a worthy foe.

After the castle is complete, that particular 'campaign' is over, and the characters are reset. Discoveries that the characters make and plots that they resolve will increase the quality of items and skills that show up in the discovery decks (things hunters can find during the next campaign). The hunters themselves, however, begin the next castle back at their starting levels.

This iterative exploration style provides a few other advantages beyond just the growth curve we have in mind. It allows players to jump in and out of future campaigns and still experience a 'full story', due to the closed nature of the narrative. It also allows better replay options, since different story paths can unlock new discoverable items. You may find yourself replaying a castle multiple times to try and find the different endings and hidden bosses.

2. Bosses

We knew from the start that we wanted Seventh Cross to have a lot of bosses available to fight. That richness of content is a hallmark of Level 99 Games, and bringing it to life in this project is something we've been working hard to accomplish.

At least half of the strategy in a good monster-hunting game is understanding, controlling, and mitigating the damage that the monsters can do to you. Like in our inspirational materials (Bloodborne, Dark Souls), hunters balance on the edge of a razor, where any slip could spell death at the hands of creatures far larger and more powerful than yourselves. With unlimited time to consider their decisions and responses, finding the right balance of revealed and hidden information has been a challenge. At the same time, we have to make monsters' routines fairly clean-cut so that human players can control them without interrupting the action too much.

We tried a number of systems that were card-based, and ultimately decided that generic cards didn't create enough personality for the monsters, while unique cards for each of our 60+ planned boss encounters would bloat the game beyond reason. We finally settled on a book-based monster system, where each enemy utilizes a control grid to make their moves.

Players can learn the monster's attack pattern (colors), which is randomized the first time through their routine, but remains the same on subsequent laps. However, each color has variations, and the order that the monster uses these variants will change on each loop through the monster's behavior. Each monster also has an Instinct effect they use when their attacks fail, and a finisher effect they use when their attack rotation ends. These two effects keep the players under escalating pressure.

The book also makes it possible to speculate about where the monster is about to strike, letting more cautious players make informed decisions about where to set up between rounds.

While our previously pioneered Monster-Controller system was quite novel, we found that players preferred to be focusing on their own actions, and that this actually detracted a fair bit from the enjoyability of the game. It's a novel mechanic that will perhaps show up somewhere else in the future.

We're still working out exact balance for various difficulty levels of monsters, but things are coming along at a good pace. We have run a bunch of successful playtests with the new system, and are planning to get stand-alone monster fights into a public testing Tabletop Simulator Module fairly soon.

3. Integration

Figuring out where the adventure book becomes involved with play, how we convey stage setups, and how the game transitions between its various phases are things that we're still working on.

One major innovation since our last update was the inclusion of Key Items. These are tools that your party will discover–actual artifacts from the world which can be used to advance the story.

The example above is a newspaper clipping the players can discover in Wilshire Village. It can be shown to the various associates the players encounter. Each associate will have something different to say about the article, and some may provide extra assistance, clues, or exploration opportunities.

We felt that story is often forced upon the players in narrative games, and decided on this system so that we could put the story in the players' hands. They can choose to explore these leads and learn more about the world. Or they can rush in to the next boss fight. Either way, the players are in control of the story, and can explore it as much or as little as they wish.

Additionally, there are some Key Items which can be used in combat to alter the outcome of a fight, forking the story in different directions.

Updated Timeline

Now that we have systems stabilized a bit and are getting into the content creation portions of the game's development, I'm a bit more comfortable writing about how things will be in the final game. Next time, I'll write a bit about the skill and hunter-progression systems that we've devised for the game! See you then!

#Seventh Cross #Boss Battle #Adventure #Board Game #Designer Diary

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its-just-like-the-movies · 6 years

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Tom & Viv (94, C+)

Why this film: Because it lined up so perfectly with this month’s Smackdown! So how could I not?

The Film: Who exactly was the predicted audience for Tom & Viv back in 1994? I don’t mean this exclusively as a dig on the source material or the finished product, but it’s hard to picture that the story of T.S. Eliot’s tumultuous marriage would’ve inspired that much fervor back in the day. The adaptation of the original play began nine years after it debuted on the West End, receiving one Laurence Olivier nomination before getting an off-Broadway run and vanishing from the stage for over twenty years. This lack of fanfare seems even more exasperated by its legacy nowadays, if it can be called that, saved from obscurity by way of two surprisingly high-profile Academy Award nominations that would still only attract those who’re deeply invested in either of the nominated women, Oscar completists who are doing it just cuz, folks who like watching period dramas about unstable women, or T.S. Eliot fans.

Of those groups, I’d imagine that the Eliot fans interested in a portrait of the artist would be the most consistently underwhelmed by the film, if only because his work is kept strictly in the film’s periphery. It’s talked about but rarely read aloud or shown, the focus on the Eliot’s marriage so predominant that his rising success and the income that comes with it is dramatized through their material wealth more that it is explicitly referenced, at least not to the degree of any of their personal lives. In fact, Eliot’s personal life and family ties don’t seem to exist outside of Viv until his fames grows, while Viv’s relationships to her family is one of the film’s central points of tension. The repercussions of Eliot’s fame are certainly discussed, as Viv worries that Tom is replacing her with his new poet friends and having affairs with women in those circles who’re dazzled by his work. There’s also the complication that Viv frequently claims to be his muse, his editor, and his sounding board, demanding credit for having given The Wasteland its name. This is not a hagiography of the artist, but the film’s focus on Eliot’s marriage and interest in Viv’s artistic credentials might keep this from being the deep plumbing of the artist someone might be hunting for.

Then again, an even bigger preclusion for Eliot fans to get into the film is how unfathomably dull Willem Dafoe is in the part. Any potential into getting a portrait of the man alongside or even superseding a portrait of the artist is stopped in its tracks by Dafoe’s soft-spoken, milquetoast take on the part. The man simply comes off as boring and stuffy, never worthy of the intrigue posed by Viv, his fellow poets, adoring fans, or anyone who presumes him to be a worthwhile figure. Dafoe is so passionless in the part, speaking his lines as softly as possible while infusing them with zero emotion, refusing to cling to any sense of intellect or to make his accent sound remotely natural, that there’s simply no believing that he might be having an affair with any of the women Viv is terrified of and antagonistic towards. What on earth could have drawn Viv to him in the first place?

Dafoe’s performance represents one half of the dichotomy of problems that best defines what makes Tom & Viv such a palpably uneven experience. If he stands in for the moments where the film could easily shape itself up more, Miranda Richardson’s energized but dangerously overmannered take on Vivienne Eliot emblematizes the film’s worst indulgences into overstatement. Richardson is more than capable of conjuring an air of instability and roiling inner turmoil, writing our her character’s thoughts through the darting glances of her eyes and jittery movements, but her madness becomes so prescriptive that it loses almost all spontaneity. In her best moments, which see her being more clearly guided by the director or by her costars, Richardson is able to temper herself slightly without sacrificing her tics, though it’s clear in these moments how little modulation is actually in the performance, aside from the moments where she makes a point of showing us that she’s modulating the performance in a lower tempo. True, she genuinely calms down in the film’s last act, but her impact before this point is ultimately limited, her scene-by-scene choices too obvious for them to build in any interesting way.

The film itself seems to follow a trajectory from being too hopped-up on its own, sporadically ostentatious filmmaking techniques all the way to almost dangerously non-cinematic, not so much a filmed play as just unimaginatively put together. This is not to say that the film is ever a showcase for its makers - director Brian Gilbert seems more than happy to slap his actors in period wares and let them carry the picture - but it’s still noticeable when the editing or the score become the primary method for the film to goose our responses. Its earliest scenes are by far the worst, as the almost 40 year old Dafoe is so heavily made up to impersonate a college-aged youth that his face loses any and all distinguishing features. He looks like a doll whose face has had any gendered characteristics smoothed away, as if he were an uncanny valley animation of an androgynous doll. Richardson’s makeup is fine, but she’s forced to pantomime the free-spirited behavior of a young person by running around with her arms outstretched as though she were a plane, galavanting on a lawn with a sign asking passerby not to galavant on it. In the next scene they meet, and in the next they pack their bags to get married. These scenes are relatively calm, something the film compensates for by showing Viv undergoing an abject breakdown, destroying their hotel room and taking a lot of her prescribed medication after an unsuccessful roll in the honeymoon sack, dramatically cross-cut with Tom’s furrowed brow contemplatively paces the shoreline of a beach.

If the establishing third of Tom & Viv is ultimately its shakiest segment, there’s something to be said for the film’s middle third, as all the pieces start sparking against each other in unexpectedly bracing ways. Even if Dafoe is unforgivably bland and Richardson semi-predictable in her brazenness, the shifting textures of their relationship are more interesting to watch play out than expected. It helps that Brian Gilbert’s direction finds an appropriately undemonstrative but still semi-active mode of shaping his story. Neither truly imaginative nor fully perfunctory, he finds the right distance from Richardson’s whirlwinds that they become more impactful as character beats rather than harried actressing. Watching her mix a boiling vat of chocolate, grow more and more vocally irate at a dinner party, draw on a mannequin with lipstick, all these actions are more compelling for how they’re shot. Simple and effective, enhancing Richardson’s work and feeding into the story with unexpected poignancy as we start to grasp how threatened Vivienne must constantly feel by these invaders who can provide something for her husband she cannot, knowing all the while that they know it too and are talking about it behind her back. This is not to suggest too much of a sudden transformation in the film’s overall style or impact - Dafoe is still left to softly murmur on in his scenes, and the cadres of artists and admirers that pop up around him are never as distinct or entrancing as they might be. Especially as he starts to seriously consider kicking Viv in a sanitarium, growing increasingly weary of her behavior, Dafoe’s performance remains as damp and demure as ever. Her fears of adultery never ring as plausible, Dafoe even drags down Richardson and the script with as little effort as possible on his part. A hot-blooded Tom might’ve really tapped in to the script’s dramatic potential, but the sight of Viv fighting so hard against people who could all have a legitimate claim to her husband’s attention, borne from paranoia that doesn’t seem borne from absolutely nothing is frankly more compelling than it has any right to be. There’s clearly a version of this story about an unreliable man sending his unreliable wife to a sanitarium on dubious grounds, one stifled by a weak leading man and half-baked direction but still able to burst through the interpretation we’re getting at odd, unexpected angles.

There is at least one unabashed bright spot in the film, in the form of Rosemary Harris’s subtly affecting performance as the matriarch of the Haigh-Wood clan. Without ever working to undermine Tom & Viv’s leading actors, she nevertheless coaxes stronger, more consistent performances from Dafoe and especially Richardson, stabilizing the latter without forgoing Mrs. Haigh-Wood’s own characterization. The film is at its best when it follows the lead of her perfectly contained but still very palpable anxiety, and is never better than in the uncomfortable sequence of Tom having dinner with Vivienne’s immediate family for the first time. Viv spends most of the meal asking provocative, blatantly upsetting questions of her loved ones. Her family telegraph exhaustion at having had this kind of dinner table conversation too many times already but still irritated by her behavior, before Rose takes her daughter aside and gets her to actually calm down, only for her lucid confession about her feelings for Tom to startle her poor mother. It takes real intelligence to project a stable grasp of her daughter’s neuroses, worrying about her future with this new man while still finding room to be elated and disappointed by both of them without overacting. Particularly in her last scenes, hurt and confused after realizing that Viv tried to stab her - even if it was with a fake knife - but perhaps even more wounded that Tom packing Vivvie off to an asylum has proven how badly this man has failed Rose and her daughter, Harris proves herself an unfussy and emotionally sincere performer within a film less stable than its central marriage.

Harris is more of a face in the crowd in her second-to-last sequence, as one of several family members and doctors present for a verbal test to see if Vivienne is certifiable for sanitarium care. This is surprisingly the film’s weakest stretch, beginning with Tom trying to warn Viv before the doctors arrive as the two engage in unexpectedly romantic talk about the state of their relationship. Here, Richardson is the primary source of that romance, which comes across as sentimental and unearned considering that Viv is suddenly without her livewire physicality and higher pitched emotions. Now she speaks in a soft voice, speaks warmly, but she undermines any of the film’s complications by stating its theses in such a loving way. She’s not wrong to judge Tom for his own lies and put-ons and for not being able to face the music the way she wanted him to, but the fact that the Viv who’s saying this is so radically unlike the Viv we’ve spent the previous hour with undermines these ideas. And yet, her affectations return in an oddly performative key once the doctors arrive, as if she’s a deer caught in headlights and trying to hurl herself at them as the last defense mechanism she has left. That they even bother with the test instead of carting her right off after Viv attempts to stab her mother with a rubber knife is pretty bizarre in itself, but Richardson’s playing strips the scene of any dramatic potential or ambiguity as she intentionally answers one of the questions incorrectly. More than that, the filmmaking is complicit in romanticizing her last act of self-sabotage, as the score swells under close ups of Tom and Viv exchanging meaningful glances before she gives the wrong answer, the scene abruptly ending as if the test actually ended on the second question.

I said earlier that the film transitions from Viv-like over-enthusiasm to Tom-ish stultification, and though the scene above certainly fits that bill, a better description for the last third might be that they simply have no other function except as being the end to a story. Both partners, gracefully made up into middle age, speak of their devotion to each other despite the fact that Tom has not visited his wife or made any attempt to contact her at the sanitarium in ten years. Dafoe’s last scene is almost completely carried by the overwhelming, piano-heavy score as he gives the cold shoulder to an old friend Viv once said wanted to sleep with her. Meanwhile, Richardson finds the right tempo between containing the energy that’s defined her performance for most of the film while suggesting some genuine recovery over the past ten years. She’s relaxed and unsentimental in her final scene, giving a fond yet forceful line reading to “Chin up.”, as her brother tries not to cry, that’s more impactful than a line so blatantly structured as a farewell forever aimed at the heartstrings has a right to be. There’s little here that’s interesting in the way that the preceding half hour was, and Gilbert ranking the volume on that orchestra as the credits roll certified that I was far less moved than he was clearly expecting. If Tom & Viv ends as unevenly as it began, I’m not sure if what painfully doesn’t work is enough to dismiss the moments where it comes to some kind of bracing life. In the moments where Harris shows the pain of a mother watching her child implode, where Richardson’s neuroses click into place and the script’s darker subtexts are able to be furnished show the rich potential that this story ultimately has. Tom & Viv isn’t crying out for any retreads, and I’m not sure how much this story deserves to be saved from the unusual legacy of almost complete anonymity that only pedigreed English adaptations of biographies of poets resulting in two high-profile Oscar nominations can truly earn. But it’s not without its merits, and something this uneven has the kind of quiet but sturdy highs that can stand against its more visible and ungainly lows.

#my posts #my reviews #where were they then?

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shadowron · 6 years

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New Archetype (1st edition): Journalist

(Media Producer, Contact)

At some point, I will lay out in a full article why Shadowbeat was the silliest of the 1st edition sourcebooks, but it really deserves an epic, season finale type of treatment. While I have made ample fun of the Rocker, and Shadowbeat’s attempts to make that most useless archetype relevant, I must give credit to one character concept that, while given some opportunities to seed, never really bore the fruit it could: The Journalist.

Like the special music career rules for the Rocker, which I earlier called a backdoor Jem: The Roleplaying Game pilot, there were special journalism rules for reporters, which was also distinct enough to make it a backdoor New York Times: The Printing roleplaying game. Which is a shame, because:

You could run an awesome, themed Shadowrun campaign where the PCs are a pirate trid crew, hunting down leads, broadcasting dirty corp secrets, and so on, without needing the special Shadowbeat rules. I tried to get one started, over Livejournal, and like Livejournal itself, well…

Even without basing an entire campaign around it, the skills of a journalist/reporter are a great mesh in a traditional Shadowrunning team. Moreso than the Rocker at least.

Characters in the media milieu have always been present in Shadowrun, just primarily as Contacts. Media Producer in core book, Newsman/Media Entrepreneur and Reporter in Sprawl Sites (which also has a section on Media Encounters). Later supplements would flesh out alternate campaign options for them, but you could make the Journalist a workable archetype starting with 1st edition.

So that’s what I’m doing.

(Reporter, Contact)

Inspiration

Of that trio of contacts mentioned above, it is the Reporter that is the closest to being a playable character: focused primarily on Social skills with just enough combat capability to keep him from being wiped out when bullets first start flying (meaning, right away). The Reporter isn’t built as a starting archetype however, so he will serve as the template. Skills are top priority at, followed by Tech – like the decker and rigger, the Journalist will partially be judged by their gear. After a good Charisma, the rest of the attributes can take a hit, and magic and race take up the rear. Heh. I considered opting for an Elf to get the Charisma bonus, but I don’t think the +1 Cha justifies the hit you’d take elsewhere.

Attributes (20 pts)

Body: 3

Quickness: 3

Strength: 2

Charisma: 5

Intelligence: 3

Willpower: 4

I’m willing to let the Charisma not be maxed out, because I really don’t want to slight any of the other attributes. Don’t want to be too weak or too stupid, and want to keep Body and Willpower up to resist attacks physical and mental.

Skills (40 pts)

Car: 2

Computer: 4

Electronics: 4

Etiquette (Corporate): 5

Etiquette (Political): 5

Etiquette (Street): 5

Firearms: 2

Interrogation: 6

Negotiation: 5

Unarmed Combat: 2

You can see the influence from the Reporter Contact here – mostly just modifications, but with two notable additions

Electronics. He will end up being a tech rat out necessity: linking up video equipment, planting bugs, etc.

Computer. Thinking about how the media exists now, a Matrix presence is a necessity for a 2050 Journalist. Which means, yet, this will make him a decker-lite. More on that later.

Like a decker or magician, the Journalist really isn’t meant for front of the line combat – his skills are primarily for self-preservation. If you really were worried, you could ditch Car and Unarmed Combat and just get a Firearms of 6. But he’s not there to be a marksman: he’s there whenever you need to talk to people. He will have the Contacts, and he knows how to use them. If you claim this makes him too specialized, I will point out the decker, who is largely useless until a run in the Matrix is needed. And the Journalist could help with that, too.

Tech (400,000 ¥)

This tech level certainly gives the Journalist a lot of things to play with – the lower level, at 20,000 ¥, just wasn’t enough. The Journalist will not be staunchly anti-cyber like the Detective or Tribesman (or sigh Ork Mercenary), nor a near zombie like the Street Samurai or Burned-Out Mage (or Rigger or Former Company Man). While the core book did not have the option for cybereye video recording (that would wait until Street Samurai Catalog), it did have enough options to pack a lot of the Journalist’s necessities inside his head:

Datajack (of course)

Telephone

Ear Recorder

Cybereyes with Camera and Flare Compensation (might as well use up the Essence space)

Display Link

Headware Memory (100 Mp)

This gives him an Essence of 3.7 – about midrange. Clearly cybered, but not weird about it. Note, in keeping with concept, no combat-related cyber.

This still gives a lot of money to spend, and even after loading up on nearly every relevant gadget you can find in the book (phones, recorders, mics, data units, other surveillance measures, surveillance counter-measures, token armor clothing, if needed armor jacket, non-lethal taser, and even a fraggin’ Ford Americar) and an abnormally large number of starting contacts (8 extra, for a starting total of 10), there’s still a lot of money to spend.

So, yes indeed, this is where you buy a non-top of the line cyberdeck. Journalist is backup decker, and might be the only decker you need on a mission. I often forget that, while there are multiple vehicle skills required to be a rigger and multiple combat skills to be a samurai, there is only 1 skill you need to be a decker: Computer. Get a good enough deck and that will compensate for the low Computer skill. And if you didn’t ditch skill points to max out Firearms, you could ditch some to raise Computer to 6, or even shave 1 point each off an Etiquette skill to get there.

Sure, you’re only starting with a Sony CTY-360 (you have the nuyen to upgrade from the I/O-less Allegiance Alpha) and all programs at rating 4, but that really ain’t that bad. Especially since, in core rulebook decking rules, you could pump up Memory and Storage to arbitrarily high values and keep all programs running at once. Besides, once the game starts, it’s much easier to upgrade tech than raise skills.

I’ll be honest: I was tempted to buy Followers for this character, but did not, as it didn’t really mesh with the concept. Have to wait for a future archetype.

(Newsman/Media Entrepreneur, Contact)

How to use in a regular Shadowrun game

The easiest way is to follow the pattern of other archetypes and tack “Former” in front to explain his current life of quasi-crime. He got burned by someone, took the low road, and just uses his skills the best way he knows how. Eh.

More challenging is to play this as a legit, as in SIN-possessing, character. Even if not in the direct employ of a news station, the Journalist can be out on the streets, digging up dirt on the corps/government/tribes/whomever and publishing it on his own. Only fights to defend himself, so at most wears an Armor Jacket and carries a taser. Given corporate extraterritoriality, sure he might be breaking the law on Aztechnology turf, but he’ll be in the Seattle Metroplex when he breaks their story about their illicit manufacturing in the Barrens, so the ends justify the means. While he wouldn’t be one to sign on to a straight up breaking and entering theft, he would be perfect for an investigation/missing persons type adventure (examples of both can be found in the 1st edition modules).

In those adventures, there is always Legwork – everyone stomping around to their respective contacts to dig up the next piece of plot bait that propels the group forward. And they do so haltingly, because everyone maxed out Firearms and Computer and Sorcery and Strength and Body and Quickness and used Charisma and Etiquette as a dumping ground. Not only is the Journalist the social “Face” character, but they have a good backstory for being so. As noted above, if the party doesn’t have a decker, he’ll be good enough. Heck, he has a car, and so covers some of the rigger’s duties as well.

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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CrossCode Review — Cross Out Some Time to Play This Gem

July 16, 2020 11:00 AM EST

Radical Fish Games has risen the bar of quality in terms of the experience you can get in a retro-inspired indie game with CrossCode.

Having initially passed on the PC release of CrossCode back in 2018, when it was announced that this indie title from Radical Fish Games was coming to consoles, I knew I wasn’t going to make the same mistake. Having now seen it through, boy, oh boy, am I glad I didn’t skip out this time around because CrossCode is without a doubt one of the most expertly-crafted retro-inspired games I have ever had the pleasure of playing.

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“CrossCode is without a doubt one of the most expertly-crafted retro-inspired games I have ever had the pleasure of playing.”

The alien world of Shadoon plays host to players of CrossWorlds, a futuristic melding of an MMORPG, LARPING (live-action role-playing), and Disney World. Players who log-in, take control of a body, known as an Avatar. You play as Lea, an amnesiac, and mute Avatar seeking her past while working to discover the secrets of the Ancients of Shadoon. Lea won’t need to uncover the mysteries, though, as she will be able to party up with a cast of endearing and bombastic characters to aid her, both inside and outside the game.

I loved the one-sided small talk between Lea and your first party member, Emilie-Sophie de Belmond, a Pentafist (think a Monk/punchy class) who goes by the character name Emilienator. Even though Lea has a limited vocabulary in which to respond, Emilie has no issue going on about whatever is on her mind, from beating you in races through dungeons or how she got chewed out at work for being late to a meeting. Who looks in their spam folder in their email, seriously? I also found the justice-seeking Apollo, a fellow Spheromancer that strives to keep players honest and punish any that may be cheating in CrossWorlds, to be hilarious. He’s your stereotypical exaggerated hero of justice, but Radical Fish Games’ writing prowess takes him so much more fun than his similar archetype peers. He will challenge Lea multiple times throughout the story, pushing Lea and making sure she stays on the up-and-up.

The supporting cast I enjoyed just as much as the main party. Sergey, who acts as your support from the real world, helps to repair your voice module, adding in new keywords for you to use and interact with your new friends. Whenever he would randomly pop-in, more often than not, I would find myself chuckling at his remarks and quips. Rather early on, you will find yourself a member of a small guild, the First Scholars, whose aim is to be the first to discover the final secrets of the Ancients. Run by the sweet and motherly Hlin, and her stoic second-in-command, Beowulf, I was surprised how much I came to love these characters the more I spoke with them and learned their stories.

CrossCode does a good job making the in-game world feel like a popular hustling-and-bustling MMO, even though it is a single-player experience. NPCs of various classes are often running around the different areas in the wild, while cities and other social hubs are packed with vendors and other faux players to further sell the vibe. You can also join a guild, tackle tough bosses, and make friends with exciting characters.

Much like a real MMO, there is plenty of side business that you get yourself into in-between your dives into the game’s various dungeons which further plot. Townsfolk and other NPC Avatars offer missions that range from your standard fair of fetch quests and monster-slaying tasks to logging the local fauna of Shadoon. Crafting in the traditional sense is absent in CrossCode and in its place you will be trading items at specialty vendor stalls. You can expect to spend time running through the wild cutting down plants and hunting down enemies, which is reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda series. Luckily the rewards for trading are worth it, as the gear you can get is far superior to the stock you can find in the shops proper.

“CrossCode does a good job making the in-game world feel like a popular hustling-and-bustling MMO, even though it is a single-player experience.”

CrossCode gameplay balances between fast-paced hack-n-slash combat with intricate puzzles. Encounters with even generic enemies in the wild can become tense clashes as mobs can consist of five or more at a time, each trying to kill you. In some of the more frantic matches, finding the narrow passages between the bullets and dodging my way to safety reminded me of a SHUMP.

Lea, as a Spheromancer, is far from being powerless and has plenty of options to fight back. As you progress throughout the game, you will unlock multiple skill trees that let you improve your stats and unlock new skills and abilities for your close-range, long-range, and defensive moves. A particularly cool aspect is that you have you can quickly swap between specific sub-trees and unique move options from the menu system, without the need to spend your points on both.

There is an added sense of intensity and urgency in combat with the inclusion of a ranking system. As you defeat enemies, a small bar will fill and once you fill it you will gain a rank. The higher your rank is ( which goes all the way to S-Rank), the more chances you’ll have to gain rare loot from enemies. This rarer loot is incredibly valuable as many quests and the gear you can trade for at the vendors, require them. As soon as a battle ends, a timer will begin counting down, and when it runs out, you lose your rank and have to start over. This means you will have to grind items and it’s a good idea to plan out a route around an area that will let you hit as many enemies as you can, as fast as you can. A trick I found particularly useful was to leave one enemy and start scouting out the next mob while your AI companions deal with the final enemy. This will give you some extra time to explore and track down more foes.

To throw another little wrench into the situation, increasing your rank and farming for items you will also be tempting fate. As long as you have a rank and are stringing encounters together to build it, you won’t have any access to the experience you are gathering and you won’t be auto-recovering between fights. Will you risk taking on that larger mob, netting a bunch of good drops, or should you call it quits and get that level-up that’s waiting for you? It’s a nice mechanic that just adds another layer to an already rich combat system.

When you aren’t fighting snowmen, hedgehogs, and bunnies, there is a good chance that you will be hopping around the landscape or racking your brain to figure out the solution to a puzzle. Before playing CrossCode, I wasn’t aware of how prevalent puzzles would be, but color me surprised when I realized that not only were puzzles a big part of the game, but they are very well-done. Most of the puzzles I found to be the perfect balance of challenge and inventiveness, thanks mostly to incorporating mechanics that involved bouncing balls off the walls and mirrors to hit targets. Running around the open-world has an aspect of puzzle-solving, too, as you will see various chests and items out of reach, and you will have to figure out how to reach them by jumping over pits and navigating walls and plateaus of varying heights. This incentivizes exploration in a fun way, and there’s a sense of satisfaction and surprise when you’ve found that hidden route or you discover a secret area that just appears when you get close to it.

For as good as the puzzles are and as tight as the gameplay is, what blew me away the most with CrossCode is how breathtaking the sprites and pixel art are. Players familiar with the RPGs from Square Enix’s golden age on the Super Nintendo will recognize the much of the inspiration here, stemming from titles like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. You will explore scorching deserts, wintery mountain peaks, dark, dreary mines, and advanced technological laboratories. Each location’s visuals are all done with such expert craftsmanship, that you could take a snapshot and hang it in your room, and it would look fantastic. Monster designs, especially the screen-filling bosses, are finely detailed and exude such personalities and charm. You’ll find yourself saying “awwww” the first time you see the cute bunnies before they then pounce to destroy you.

“You owe it to yourself to uncover the secrets Shadoon and CrossWorlds with Lea and friends in CrossCode.”

As you play, you will find more and more cute nods to other franchises that the developers clearly love. Items like the Phoenix Feather that come with descriptions that are a clear homage to the popular Final Fantasy curative item. Another that may seem familiar is the Salty Ice Cream that is, “Best enjoyed at sunset on top of a clocktower.” My personal favorites of these are the Metal Gears that are, “Just gears made out of metal, yepp,” and the Masterball, which “Heroes once used this device to capture legendary fiends.” I’m not going to lie, skimming the item descriptions turned into one of my favorite pastimes in this game, so be sure to check them out as you go, too.

The love that Radical Fish Games has put into CrossCode has resulted in a game that will be talked about as critically and with as much praise as other masterpieces like Shovel Knight or The Messenger. CrossCode’s mix of exciting exploration, chaotic yet tight combat, vast skill trees, and clever puzzles that all wrapped up in some of the most beautiful pixel art in the past decade is an experience any fan of RPGs should partake in. Some of the dungeons do go on a bit long, and I found it to be a little annoying at times (the first dungeon having ice physics was a bold choice). I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the exchange system with the item vendors and found myself wishing for a more traditional crafting system, but these small gripes did little to tarnish my overall experience. Every new area I found myself in or new items that contained a nod to pop culture or games from the past put a smile on my face.

In short, Radical Fish Games has raised the bar for retro-inspired indie games. You owe it to yourself to uncover the secrets Shadoon and CrossWorlds with Lea and friends in CrossCode.

July 16, 2020 11:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/crosscode-review-cross-out-some-time-to-play-this-gem/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=crosscode-review-cross-out-some-time-to-play-this-gem

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