Why Are Yt To Mp3 Websites Always The Shadiest Fuckin Sites I Feel Like I’m Going Down A Dark Alleyway

As war grips the land, a group of warriors band together to protect a population of displaced peasants and towsnfolk as they winter in an ancient mountain fortress.  

Led by the veteran warleader Voadicia, the warriors have amassed a sizeable force of skilled fighters and eager recruits to their cause. Little interested in the goings on of the wider war, their group of holdouts has none the less attracted the attention of the embattled monarchs of the region, who see this rogue warband as a needless complication in their plans of conquest. 

Quest hooks: 

The party is made up of the initiate members of the warband, tossed together from deserters and aspiring peasants who wish to put themselves between the innocents in their charge and the horrors of the war. Their tasks are endless, scouting, exploring the reaches of the ruins, searching for more supplies. Should they cultivate a reputation as trustworthy and capable warriors, they will be brought into Voadicia’s councils about how best to defend their crumbling fortress, and what to do AFTER the war has passed. 

Allied with one faction in the war, the party is sent to negotiate with Voadicia’s warriors after several raids are made on their patron’s supply train. With careful persuasion the warband could be turned from a liability into a powerful ally, if only the party can mind their manners against a disillusioned band of brigands, or get past the fact that their patron is Voadicia’s former leige lord, who would more than happily see her in irons or with her head on a pike as an ally. 

Though the ruins the warband has taken as their home are said to have belonged to a line of forgotten kings, they are infact the last edifices of an ancient empire that spanned the continent and far eclipsed the development of the barbaric present. Vast treasures still remain undiscovered within its vaults, as do powerful artifacts of a forgotten age. Should they be discovered and put to use, it might just be enough to turn the enclave of warriors and refugees into a kingdom of their own, and Voadicia into a reluctant queen. 

hi i found your page cause of your Masks art!!

imma be running a game of masks and was wondering if you have any tips

Oh hello! Very cool you're gonna run a MASKS game, it can be a lot of fun!

I'm not sure how helpful my advice will be since I'm still learning and am not sure how well I actually run the game haha, but for starters there's a whole lot of great advice on Reddit that will help with the mechanics and the structure of the game. In my opinion, the Principles section in the GM part of the core book is critical and succinct and is great advice for running ttrpgs in general.

my top advice is:

"We play to get the next issue picked up!"

Play the game like we want people to buy the next issue and not put the series down! Take chances! Make big choices! Make it interesting! Be bold!!

other things:

Theme. Establish the themes of your story early on. This will help you understand how the world and story should respond to the PCs. And make the themes interesting to you! For example, beyond the general coming-of-age story themes already built into the character arcs, I lean heavily into the concepts of fame, celebrity, and the 24-hour news cycle. And all the things that were going on in the early 2000s.

Be a Fan of the PCs. This is my favorite rule from The Principles. Make sure all your players soak this rule in. The MASKS mechanics mean characters will often make less-than-optimal decisions, so players must feel supported in their character choices. You should be a fan of the characters, and so should your players! They should want to help bring out every character's arc, not just their own.

Treating Human Life as Meaningful is what Makes Threats Real. This is another principle, but yeah, make the world's NPCs feel like they matter, and that will make the world worth protecting. Treat them as people. Give everyone Drives, not just your Villains. Mentally treating even non-villain NPCs as having Conditions can do a lot to help with characterization.

Condense. Condense your world, your NPCs, make the world feel smaller. In our game, for example, having the Protege's mentor also be the same superhero who saved the Delinquent years ago was a great decision.

Playlists. I have a bunch of different playlists for the campaign, from a big one of music of the time (our game is set in 2004) to playlists for important NPCs, to playlists I asked my players to curate for their characters. Music inspires me a bunch, a song can help create a villain for me, and I also like choosing a different "ending" song for every episode based on whatever happened.

Stories. Okay, here's the thing. I don't really care much for superhero stories. Why did I choose to run MASKS, you ask? Because of the emotion-based mechanics. That's my shit. But anyway, I don't take in much superhero media... But I do LOVE movies and television and stories in general, and I think taking in a lot of "short stories" is helpful to develop an instinct on how to pace a story, make a character or moment memorable, etc. And because MASKS has an episodic nature, this is extremely important! The sheer amount of movies I've watched has helped me a whole bunch, since they have to get the Beginning, Middle, and End done within such a short time frame.

Don't Wait. This is an instinct I've picked up from some of my favorite media. Don't wait for The big important moment. Make a lot of big important moments, and make the characters have to make a lot of important choices, and keep the momentum going. Paint yourself into a corner and then force yourself to think of ways out! It makes the story more interesting. (this may not apply to everyone, I get this kind of mindset from shows like Breaking Bad and Succession, which for your story could be too much haha)

Everyone Works. Okay, I am not a benevolent, sweet GM, I will not smile with tears in my eyes and quietly work away and accept that without complaint. no way. I make my players help me a lot. I'm gonna whine. Guys I'm doing so much work! Guys this is hard! Weeehhh! MAKE THEM HELP YOU. RUNNING A GAME IS SOOOOO MUCH WORK OH MY GOD IT'S SOOOOOO MUCH WORK!!! Ask them to take notes! Ask them to treat the world with sincerity! Ask them to make NPCs! Ask them to play NPCs! Ask them to help fill out the world! Ask them to tell you what their character wants to do next so you have extra time to consider it! Ask them to make playlists for their characters to help you figure out how to engage with them! Don't let them just show up on playday!! I'm a "you get what you give" kind of GM. You're a player too and you deserve to enjoy the game as well, and having the other players help you helps a BUNCH. PUT THEM TO WORK.

what else. uh. visuals help a lot with engagement so i subscribed to a bunch of modern battlemap patreons. i run using Foundry which lists the rules upon every roll which is great for me, someone with horrid memory. if you're lucky and favored by god, you'll have a benevolent player that will be the scribe for your sessions and log everything down so they can be referred back to (again, great for someone like me with a horrid memory). remember to give focus to the PC's out-of-costume lives as well. make NPCs in response to your PCs (superheroes, villains, touch on something of a PC in the creation process). be silly. be serious. be sincere.

i'm still figuring out how to run the game, maybe i'll have better advice on a later day, but i hope this can help some! sorry this is longwinded and more a stream of consciousness than it is succinct.

Tableskills: The Proactive DM Voice

One of the most fundamental lesions I learned over the course of becoming a great DM was that it was my job to push the story forward, not my players.  When I was younger I was terrified of taking any agency upon myself for fear of railroading my group, thinking that my job was merely to read out prepared text and design a playground for my players to explore as they saw fit. Needless to say, no matter how much planning i did or how big I made my campaign world it never made my party any more energized, instead bleeding out their attention until they became listless and the group/campaign dissolved. 

Once I made the change to DM driven play, things changed almost instantly. My once distracted players became excited collaborators, looking to steer the runaway engine that was my narrative. Where as before they were directionless, having infinite shallow options, they were now focused on the road ahead of them, trying to dodge upcoming hurdles while reacting to the unexpected ones.  

This change took some getting used to, but became most evident in how I narrated my games, cutting down on extraneous calls for rolls,  chaining together scenes until a big finale at the end of the session, using my infinite power as narrator to push receptive players into interesting situations that progressed both the story and their character arc. Over time I began to think of these changes and a bunch of others as “proactive DM voice”, a skill that I think players and dungeonmaters alike could benefit from learning. 

Lets look at an example, lifted from one of the very first modules I ever ran: The party stands at the edge of a tremendously large fissure, and has to lower themselves a hundred or more feet down to a ledge where they’ll be ambushed by direrats.  You could run this in a rules literal sense: reading out the prepared text then waiting for the party to come up with a solution, likely dallying as they ask questions. Have them make athletics checks to descend the ropes, risk the possibility of one of them dying before the adventure ever begins. Then you do it two or three more times as they leapfrog down the side of the canyon, wasting what was perhaps half an hour of session time before you even got to any of the fun stuff. 

Or you could get proactive about it: 

Securing your ropes as best you can, you belay over the side of the fissure, descending down in a measured, careful pace aiming for the most stable looking outcrop of rock, still a hundred or so feet above the canyon’s base. A few minutes and about two thirds of the way through your decent [least athletic PC] looks like they’re struggling, their hands are coated in sweat and they can feel unfamiliar muscles burning in complaint.  I need [PC] to make me an athletics check

Rather than waiting for the players and the dice to make a story for me, I took the extra step in my prep time to think of something interesting that might happen while they’re venturing through this section of the map. I specifically designed things so that happenstance wouldn’t kill off one of my heroes, but they might end up damaged and in a perilous situation should the fates not favour them that particular moment. 

Likewise, this planning has let me prepare a number of different angles that I could use to prepare the next scene: with an injured player ambushed by multiple rats while their allies dangle a few rounds away or with the party saving their friend and descending together, too much of a threat for the rats to tackle all at once, leading them to stalk the party through future encounters.

This is already getting a bit long, but for those interested in more ways you can adopt a proactive DM voice, I’ll give more examples under the cut

Keep reading

Adventure:  Rebels in the Rimebough 

No matter how cold the north wind blows, the pain of old injustice burns hotter. 

Setup: The Frontier kingdom of Volskolt sits on the edge of a vast wilderness, the last bastion of so called civilization against the vast territories where no sovereign save winter can rule. Given that the kingdom was only established and its populace converted to the dominant faith less than two centuries ago most on the continent regard the Volskoltans to be little more than backwater heathens, feigning piety in polite company while practicing barbaric rituals while at home. This attitude is reflected by the urban Volskoltan population towards their rural neighbors, and by those rural neighbors towards the migratory tribes that live in the hinterlands. 

It is this tension that sits at the heart of the kigndom’s current troubles, as the elders among their people remember that their now sedate nobles came to their land as militant holy orders seeking to crusade against their heathen neighbors, burning what villages they did not take for their own and building stout stone walls as a sign of their dominance. While the elites now consider themselves one people with the “common Volskoltan”, few who keep to the old ways have forgiven them for the bloodshed, or the merciless suppression of their ancestral rites in favor of the continental faith. 

And so we come to the crossroads of fate, nearly two hundred years of injustice and resentment reaching a boiling point during the coldest winter in generations. Rebels gather their power, giants stir in the mountains, and the destiny of a kingdom may hinge on a single life. 

Adventure Hooks: 

After rescuing a waylaid caravan of holyfolk out in the hinterlands, the party arrives in a village just in time to interupt a group of villagers being burned alive in their home by a priest and his mob. Though there is no secular law against worshiping other gods in the kingdom, the church takes folk worshiping both the new and ancesteral ways as the greatest affront. Now the party must decide between preserving their in with the church and doing the right thing and saving the townsfolk from a mob that could just as easily turn on them.  

The party is called together by noble allies who have become aware of a grim secret. The young heir to the throne of Volskolt has been kidnapped while hunting near the Rimebough forest. Some ready themselves for ransom, while others cultists are behind the dead, others are worried that political dissidents are behind these actions and expect him to be used against the royal family some time soon. All that matters now is that the boy be returned home unharmed, a deed that will require the party to brave the harshest wilderness, but will see them royally rewarded. 

While everything else is happening, a normally sedate clan of giants have decided to start marauding down into civilized lands.  Is this mere chance? A plot by a faction of the Rimebough rebels? or do these giants answer the call of something even more ancient? 

Keep reading

nate | he/him

this is a little tag guide so i know what i'm doing

Catch All

#the thundering isles - campaign i'm planning for friends

#general

#materials

Inspo

#character inspo

#class inspo

World Building

#character building

#cities

#monsters

#events

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Jason Isaacs as Colonel William Tavington in “The Patriot”

OP: When demonstrating dance moves, it's crucial to execute the actions precisely. (cr 爵士舞柳柳老师)

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. 

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)