05.11 - Lakeside Visit

You can take your honor with you to the grave. I’m not dying for someone else’s war; I’m not dying for anyone but myself!

So says a Deserter, who takes the military training of a warrior and bends it to means most unsavory. Highly adept at hitting enemies when they’re down, but against an opponent who can give a straight fight, a Deserter will have to be a bit more selfish, setting up advantage with Focused Aim instead. Somewhat of a mix of the Battlemaster and Samurai, mechanically, but the Rogue chassis makes for a very different experience than the raw offensive prowess of a Fighter. Synergizes extremely well with Focused Aim, from Tasha’s, and while potentially doubling your Sneak Attack damage is impressive, it’s actually only slightly ahead of, say, using Booming Blade and keeping your advantage. Naturally, it’s not possible to stack them… at least, not without six levels of Bladesinger, but that means giving up a whole lot of Sneak Attack dice.

do you have any resources or guides for worldbuilding and reimagining the feywild? not looking for adventure prompts or npcs just your thoughts on setting and how to make the feywild feel dangerous and mystical

Planescape: The Feywild

I won’t lie,  the introduction if the feywild is one of the best additions to the default d&d cosmology in a while, not only from a thematic perspective, but gameplay aswell, as it allows any podunk patch of land to act as a doorway to wild adventure. That said, too often this wonderland is treated as a place where things are just wacky, without real attention paid to the narrative possibilities introducing the feywild into a story can have. 

To that end, I’m going propose a few different aspects of the feywild, different visions of how things could be drawn from different mythologies and storytelling conventions:

The feywild has no geography: like the notes of a song or the lines of a play, the reality of faerie is reinterpreted with every visitation, Coloring itself based on the expectations and emotions of those exploring it. This is why a child can stumble into a mushroom ring and have themselves a whimsical romp full of talking animal friends and life lessons, whereas adults tend to find themselves ensnared by echoes of their deepest desires and why adventurers ALWAYS find something to fight.  If you want to go anywhere in the feywild you don’t need a map, you need a thematic structure that will carry you to your destination: whether that be staying on a yellow brick road through a number of distractions and tribulations, or winning a game of riddles against a talking bird who’ll swear to drop you off at your destination. 

The feywild is a place of stories:  When a peasant family leaves out milk and performs small acts of thanks for the brownie, they are unwittingly inviting the primal energies of the feywild to fill the space they have made for it, creating a creature that had always been there, looking out for them. Likewise, when folk tell of wonderous places just beyond the edge of the map, the feywild becomes those places, taking solidity from repeated tellings of the tale and incorporating different interpretations to give themselves depth. This is not to say that the translation is perfect, as one can’t simply make up a story, tell it to an audience, and expect it to suddenly become true as it takes a powerful and engrained sort of lies, embelishment, or folktales to give shape to the otherworld.  When populating your local fairy-realm or those areas near enough to it, consider what sort of stories people tell about that place, whether it be about monsters that gobble up wayward children or treasure hidden there by bandits long ago. 

The feywild responds to your emotions: When your party takes a rest, ask them how they think their characters are feeling. Consider whether they are frightened or foolheardy, adventurous or avricious, and then sketch out some random encounter to spice in along the way as the realm of whimsy responds to the vibes they’re putting out.   A party that’s feeling hungry may encounter a friendly fey teaparty or a dangerous lure disguised as a snack, a group that’s feeling pressed for time may hear the horn of a savage hunter stalking them, or a parable about stopping to help others can actually speed you along your own path.  In this way, the fairyland is in diolog with the party’s desire to press their narrative forward, and will test or reward them according to its whim. 

The feywild is everywhere: one of the underutilized aspects of having the feywild in our games is that a portal to the “shallower” areas of the otherworld can pop up anywhere overtaken by nature, allowing fey beings and other oddities to cross over in a way that creates all manner of adventure hooks. If I’m building a dungeon in the wilderness, I’m personally fond of having a mounting fey presence the deeper in you get, replacing the normal ruin dwelling hazards with troops of hobgoblins, odd enchantments, and various tricksters. For smaller dungeons, the closed off fey portal can be an adventure hook for later, encouraging them to come back when they need to delve into whimsy, whereas for the larger dungeons,  a non contiguous fey realm connecting multiple points can serve as a combination of fast travel AND bonus stage. Even for non dungeon locations, consider how much fun of an adventure it’d be if someone discovered that their cellar had been replaced with a fairy’s larder, or that the vine-covered lot where neighborhood kids play during the day transforms into a vast battlefield for sprites during the night. 

Adventure: An Icy Expedition

“I’m not sure what the foreman means when she says “ Shift’s over, head out and warm yourself up” do you? The whole thing’s buried under a glacier and half the canyon’s still coated in ice. I haven’t been warm since we started this damn excursion! “ 

Setup: The ancient goliath enclave of Emendurana once surveilled an Edenic valley of delights, but was covered over with glacial ice and buried millennia ago. Little now remains beside stone and the chill of ages, but some vaults may yet hold the secrets of ages past, hidden away from the march of time and empire in the outside world. 

Too large and of too historically significant for any one adventuring party to delve, Emendurana has been taken over by the Nhilari Expeditionary Coalition as one of their premiere dig sites. Too often characterized as a “ roving army of mercenary Archeologists”, the coalition has taken careful pains to negotiate with both the dwarven clanhold who hold territorial claim over the ruin as well as those goliath herds who descended from Emendurana long ago. 

With Hard weeks of travel through snowy foothills behind them, the N.E.C. Has set up a village-sized basecamp at the opening to the glacial caverns, and is ready to begin the first real forays into the ruins proper. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Plenty of adventuring groups get their start apprenticing with the coalition, who work hard to assemble synergistic teams of scouts, scholars, technicians, and “strongbacks”. Drawn from their disparate lives by the promise of adventure or steady payment by the N.E.C. recruitment officers, the party will bein their journey by helping their employer to break new ground in Emendurana’s frozen halls.  

When a nobleman with a fondness for ancient curios is petrified in his own home by an ancient goliath artifact he recently obtained, the reliquarian who is now at blame for the incident hires the party to help clear their name. The investigation leads to a shifty fence, and a smuggling ring that may be working within the ranks of the N.E.C. to siphon off relics and other treasures beneath the organization’s nose. Ousting these outlaws will require the party to travel far north to the digsite itself, as well as dealing with their agents in the city. 

Seeking council from a mystic oracle on their current adventure, the party receives a prophecy that the answers they seek are “beyond the deepest gates of Emendurana”. Research gives the party the location and the history they’ll need, but convincing the coalition that they’re more than simple teasure hunters looking to loot the dig site will take some negotiation. 

Keep reading

Variant Classes Pt. 1

With the continued expansion of 5e through new subclasses and races, the ability to create new unique characters continues to grow. Though, in my mind, one of the faults to this is that, every time you make a new subclass or such, it's just 1 more character archetype, which can sometimes feel a little lacking in terms of new possibilities.

Now of course, there's the option to just make a lot of content, which was the style of older editions, but that eventually lead to the issue of content bloat, with there just being too much content for a single person to reasonably deal with.

Though recently in my own homebrewing, I've found what I feel is a pretty good solution for such a thing: Multiplicative, rather than additive content.

This was the idea behind my Prestige Classes document, with each single prestige class being designed to be applicable to a wide number of classes at any time, meaning that with each PrC, each would add a new potential character option for each class it could interact with (or even 1 for each subclass).

So, long rambling on thought processes, Variant Classes. The idea for this is to, by adding one new class, add new character options equal to the number of subclasses a class already had, essentially being a x2.

Variant Classes are new classes that modify an existing class to varying degrees, replacing some or many of their features with new ones, creating a whole new character option. It's sorta like a Tasha optional feature, but the optional feature messes with your entire class.

So above, there are the two Variant Classes of this post: The Archivist and the Eldritch Sage

The Archivist takes inspiration from a 3rd edition class of the same game. They are scholarly mages, though they focus on divine magic rather than arcane. As such, mechanically they are very similar to the wizard (Even having a spellbook equivalent in their 'Prayerbook'), but differing from them is their spell list: rather than the wizard list, they use the Cleric list.

In comparison to the Cleric, the way they interact with spells is a bit different. The Cleric has access to their entire spell list for free, alongside their domain spells. The Archivist however, needs to learn spells, only gaining 3 per level and needing to pay for more. To make up for this is their Domain Studies, in which they initially learn a set of Cleric domain spells of their choice. At later levels however, they can learn additional diving domains, and choose which set of domain spells to prepare from each day. Yet later they even gain the ability to prepare two domains at once.

As such, while a Cleric will often have to focus on a single theme when it comes to their spells, an Archivist is more a multi-tool, able to have a wide number of domains and prepare whichever they might need for a given day.

The Eldritch Sage is a researcher into the otherworldly. They like Wizards use their intellect to fuel their magic, but rather than from direct study of the arcane, their application of magic comes from the study of the extraplanar.

Mechanically, the eldritch Sage is a warlock, with their patron instead representing ehat type of otherworldly entity they focus their research upon. Unlike the regular warlock, they use Int instead of Cha. Most differently is that they use regular Spellcasting rather than the warlocks Pact Magic, making them more of a traditional long rest based caster.

The Eldritch Sage also interacts with Invocations differently. Rather than having a number of invocations at will they instead learn a number of invocations, and can prepare a few of them at the end of a long rest. This means that they will often have more total invocations, but less active invocations.

Woops yeah, lots of text today.

Ah, you may have noticed the Pt.1 at the top of the post! That's because I actually made 4 variant classes, it's just that the other 2 will be posted seperately (very much my own choice, totally not because tumblr didn't like me dropping 20 pages into here). So yeah, I guess look forward to seeing in maybe a few days time the Mentalist and the Mountebank.

Honestly imo they're more my favourite out of the bunch, being the more radical in their changes to their classes. (Or maybe it's bias, since I am in the process of playtesting both of them in campaigns I'm in x) )

Edit: oh hell I forgot to put in the art credits, since they were all part of the images originally, but they'd be on the last page of the second set. My bad

Art credits:

Archivist.

- Clever Distraction from Innistrad: Crimson Vow by Andrew Mar

- Conspiracy Theorist from Strixhaven by Svetlin Velinov

Eldritch Sage.

- Contact Other Plane from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms by Alix Branwyn

- Magus of the Moon MtG from Time Spiral Remastered by Milivoj Ceran

Edit: Part 2 is up, and can be found here

plot feeling a little empty in the middle? here’s some food for thought.

actions have consequences. things that your characters do inevitably can affect other people around them. what might they have done in the past that could come back and serve as an obstacle? or, maybe, what could they do now that could possibly raise the stakes just a little bit more?

subplots! be mindful of the subplots you’re adding - but sometimes it might be a good idea to include one if your plot is feeling a little bit empty. not only can it tie back into the overarching struggle, but it could also serve as a way to explore one of your characters or points further.

character exploration. get to know your characters a little bit better! let your readers find out something new. connecting and understanding the people within your story is important if you want your readers to grow attached to them.

world exploration. similar to the previous point, with the addition of creating a greater sense of familiarity of the circumstances that your story is taking place in. remember that nobody else knows the world of your wip as well as you do - illustrate it even further so everyone else can grasp it even better.

let your characters bond! maybe there’s a lull in the plot. if your characters have the chance to take a breather and get to know the people around them, let them! it might help flesh out or even realistically advance their relationships with each other.

I wish more people used Magic the Gathering's Color Pie instead of D&D's alignment all of the time.

Like, saying a character embodies the selfishness and impulsivenes of Red Black offers more depth than Chaotic Evil

It's all just

head turn

dialogue

leans forward

dialogue

eyes narrow

dialogue

More Non-Monetary Rewards

People seemed to like the previous list, so I thought I’d make some more.

Honorary Titles (courtesy of Vlad)

Free passage aboard any vessel in the fleet

A scroll of any spell the court wizard can cast

A manual outlining the fundamentals of the local language

A portion of land with a fixer-upper of a keep

The finest hound from the kennels

A large, unidentified, jewel encrusted egg

The captain of the guard as a retainer

A map detailing the location of a mythic treasure

The book of vile darkness

A willow extract that cures headaches

A book of coupons (near expiry)

The Far Roofs

Kickstarter

Coming soon: The Far Roofs

a game of talking rats, god-monsters, and you

So today I want to talk a bit about what this game wants to be. In particular, I'm going to go over its key technical and artistic goals.

The Far Roofs focuses on immersive hidden world fantasy adventure. It's intended to offer the experience of a grounded, emotionally real base world attached to an idealized, fantastic "hidden world" setting.

One might say, the streets and buildings and houses of the game's world are basically our own. Above us, though, is a stranger, more idealized, and more fantastic place. It's hard to get to. It's dangerous. It's less grounded. It's full of wonder.

Those are the Far Roofs.

This divide exists to make the game feel as real as possible, if you want to go that way. That's part of what hidden world fantasy is about, after all---the idea that magic is here. That it's not in some distant alien land or mythic future or past.

It's here, if you want to reach for it.

(Now, the game is flexible enough that you can play "protagonist" types instead of realer people, and many traditional gaming groups will probably prefer that, but that'll mean getting less of that immersive effect.)

The mood the game is interested in is that feeling you get when you take a huge risk---move to a new place; try a new thing. The feeling you get in those times in your life when everything is alienated and wondrous and terrifying but there's also so much more *hope* than there was in the still times before.

It's a mood of being swept up and called forward.

This is, among other things, meant to be a game for people who've been beaten down or exhausted by the ... everything ... to feel that sensation of moving forward again.

To remember what it's like, why it's worth it, how to reach for it again.

It's meant---and I do understand that I am finite and flawed and this can only go so far---as a tonic and refreshment to the soul.

--

Rules

The Far Roofs uses a 5d6-based dice pool system for day-to-day task resolution. It's relatively traditional and optimized for fast, fun dice reading. There's a loose consensus I've seen in RPG design circles that dice are for when outcomes are uncertain and both options are interesting, and I don't disagree ... but there's also this thing where rolling dice to decide is intrinsically interesting and fun, where it's fuel for a certain part of the brain.

This game tries to get as much out of that side of dice as it can.

You'll also collect letter tiles and cards over the course of the game. This is for bigger-picture stuff:

To answer big questions and to complete big projects, you'll either assemble representative words out of those tiles, or, play a poker hand built out of those cards. Word and their nuances express ideas and shape how outcomes play out; poker hands, conversely, just give a qualitative measure of how much work you do or how well things will go.

In keeping with this, the campaign is represented principally in the form of questions or issues your words and hands can address. Player/GM-created campaigns would be the same.

--

Physical and Electronic Product

I wanted to put the print version within the range of as many people who might need that tonic as possible. That means that for this particular game, I wanted to cover the full territory that I'd normally cover in a two or three volume set (core rules, setting, and campaign) in a single 200-250-page volume.

In practice this means there's a guide and examples for constructing the setting, rather than a deep dive into a fully-detailed world; that there's a bit less in the way of whimsical digression and flourish than in the writing I'm known for; that there's minimal "flavor" text on abilities; and that the campaign presentation is pretty fast-paced.

Conversely, it means that the game should be easy to absorb and to share with other possible players, and, that the game and campaign in this one relatively small volume should provide enough content for five or six years of play.

The book will be 8.5"x11" with grayscale art, available in a limited hardcover print run and a print-on-demand softcover form.

--

On the Rats

You'll see a lot of talk from me and others about the talking rats in this game. They're one of the jewels of the experience, and I think they're probably a significant draw just for being talking rats that are core to the game.

... but I'm going to hold off for now, because, to be clear, this is not a game of playing talking rats. It's just a game where talking rats and probably one of the top three most important setting elements.

I couldn't get that feeling I wanted of ... the base world being grounded realism; of the hidden world pulling you up and out and into a world full of magic ... with your playing rats, with your playing something so distant from the typical player.

So this is not a game of playing them.

They're just ... I like rats, and so I made the rats in this game with love. They're great ... whatever the equivalent is to "psychopomps" is for a magical world instead of for death ... and a way of talking about how in the face of the world, we're all pretty small.

--

I'm really excited about this game; the playtest was lovely.

I hope you'll enjoy it as well!

CUTE Pathfinder 2e Character Sheets just dropped!! 🎉🎉🎉

Find them here!