I will be posting up Campaign Info by tomorrow and, after approving your final character stats, will be sparking up the first Gameplay post directly after that!
Use this time to ask any questions, share any comments or to simply lift a mug to your fellow adventurers! A rough n' tumble meet and greet to get to know the other players(though if you break anything in here its coming out of your plunder!)
If you have anything you need to send to me personally feel free to email me at SingerRPG@hotmail.com
I'm excited for some high sea shenanigans! Who's with me?!
Farewell and adieu, to you Nexian Ladies,
Farewell and adieu, ye ladies of Nex;
For we've received orders to sail for old Taldor,
But we hope in a short time to see you again.
We will rant and we'll roar like true Taldan sailors,
We'll rant and we'll roar upon the salt sea.
Until we strike soundings in the channel of old Sellen;
From Escadar to Oppara is thirty-five leagues.
Wow outclassed in every skill. Oh well Malack can drink all night, take a knife in the back and still put scury sea dogs on there backs before breakfast.
A word of caution about my character, he is an alcoholic as will become apparent immediately. Despite his rather crude manner and reckless decision-making, he does endeavor to be a team player as long as he's given sufficient direction.
He does have a few skills that were not covered on that list above but they will show themselves as time goes by. He's a dirty feller and I'd appreciate some restrictions on this foulmouthed sea urchin so I don't offend anyone.
Basically Malack is a character that just came to me years ago fully formed. I've used him in multiple campaigns and multiple gaming systems. His destiny is never fulfilled and I imagine him wandering from adventure to adventure drinking away his gains and memories. He's the old cuss in the back a the bar that can take a licking and get right back up. I won't engage in excessive or overly indulgent roleplaying but I will say that sometimes I feel like this character in particular plays me.
Really excited about this adventure path. In the company of pirates how clean do we need to keep things?
From what I have heard of this AP, the only skills we are missing that would be of use are Knowledge (nature) and Knowledge (geography). Especially the latter, since it deals with navigation.
Oh I meant skills like dirty joke telling and winning the affection of lonely housewives while on shore leave.
But I was considering taking a level of rogue to round Malack out as a proper pirate, but maybe I should just focus on being the team tank.
I'm usually not interested in playing with unique races but for some reason I think that Urk's goblin sounds pretty fun.
Asmodia's trait 'Shackles Seafearer' gives her a bonus to Knowledge (geography) and Knowledge (nature) on the Ocean, so I could put a point in one of those and get that trained.
Question. Given the introduction to the campaign (i.e. being press-ganged), would I even have the time to gain the spells for the day, given that clerics need one hour praying to get them? I don't mind if I don't get any, as I reckon that'd be more fitting for the scenario we find ourselves in.
It might depend on when you prepare your spells. If you spend your hour of meditation at midnight - which seems plausible for a cleric of Besmara - then perhaps you were shanghai'ed when you went carousing afterwards. A CN priestess of the pirate queen on shore leave? Heck yeah she's going to be up all night partying.
To answer a few of your questions, your characters are free to be a little rough around the edges, but I'd say keep things in the high PG-13 range if you can. I don't mind a little relevant profanity and violence in the spirit of piracy, but when its excessive it can be a distraction.
You are all free to prepare whatever spells you would have normally prepared for the day based on what you think your character would have been doing the night before. Don't fret too much on the Press Ganging plot hook. Just start the character how you feel you should.
It would seem the only character who hasn't checked in is Urk the Green. I'll be doing a final round of checks on your character sheets and then starting the game up tomorrow!
GM Singer, what do you think to letting Clerics of Besmara use the Cutlass, rather then the Rapier, as their favoured weapon? The Cutlass seems to fit a Pirate Deity a lot more, and is actually less useful then a Rapier.
Hey I just wanted to say I'm really enjoying this campaign so far. Singer you've been doing some great writing so I'm hoping I can get in on your Jade Regent game as well. I just submitted a character named Osgar and its pretty different from Malack and its also not a core class. If you think you're likely to pass on non-core class characters or Osgar doesn't appeal to you I'll happily make another.
Also let me know if I need to tone Malack down a bit.
Roger that dude. Throwing the halfling is only a classic move because most parties don't include goblins. In a face to face campaign I play in Serpents Skull my Shoanti Barbarian throws our halfling rogue and gets sneak attack on the principle of surprise. Given action conservation in combat it actually isn't tactically useful action, but we've found some cool situations for it in which it was tactically sweet.
I've been through it a bit. Some of the submissions don't seem to have read any of the guidelines or the player's guide. Some write a back story that is unnecessarily long. On the other hand I tend to write a lot myself and I do it more for myself really than to get into a game. Personally I think the purpose of a back story is to give your character a starting point to grow and be something other than the subtotal of his previous experiences indefinitely. Its easy to lose track of that when you get writing because you start enjoy writing that story and you want it to have a conclusion within your own locus of control. The second you start the adventure though dice and a DM hold the fate of your creation in their hands.
I'm of the opinion that maybe a quarter or a third of character's actions should come from their back story because the game itself is the story and your character has to find a way to fit within that to make it a great story.
I've always been opposed to level 1 characters having overly extensive backstories. I mean, level one implies you've only just started doing... well, anything besides normal day-to-day stuff. You certainly haven't gone through anything particularly epic or exciting yet.
Exactly, characters at level one are lucky to survive a single attack. Hardly heroes worthy of song and myth. Two or three good rolls and a level one commoner might kill you. And almost any level one character is just one crit away from dead.
Never had it. I'm actually a vegetarian.
Where does everybody hail from?
I'm from Iowa but I'm a lecturer in South Korea with a wife and newborn daughter.
Public speaking, debate, and stress management. I teach at a grad school for interpreters and translators.
I actually don't drink at all or philander. Malack is my polar opposite. Except for fighting. I do like to wrestle, it's the Iowa in me I guess. Very into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which is the opposite of how Malack fights.
Just to round things out, I also teach Yoga and meditation in my freetime.
I'm from Arizona, but currently living in Kentucky to attend grad school. I finish in about 18 months, then my wife finally gets to use her stationery stamp that reads, "Dr. and Mrs. Tanner Nielsen". She has waited a long time for that.
Hey gang, the start of this AP is meant to set the stage and give you a taste of some of the NPCs and life on the Wormwood.
While a lot of the posts have a "reactionary" feel to them, feel free to post more than a simple response to the task at hand. If they want, PCs can be chatting with one another about their pasts, thoughts or plans. You can ask questions about certain areas, make perception checks to analyze your surroundings and even interact with some of the other NPCs who were press ganged recently.
As the AP progresses, you will have more freedom about the vessel, but I want you to know that the door is certainly open for you to be expansive with your posts even from the start.
Noted. One thing I'll be watching out for is relationships among the crew. Particularly who's friends with who, and who hates who. Also, watching out for any tensions between the higher ranked crew and the captain and Mr. Plugg that could be turned to our advantage...
When we do get to combat I look forward to seeing the synergy between Sjurd and Urk. Just in general I think Water blast is a really underrated ability. Sjurd can knock someone down and the rest of us can swarm on them. If they elect not stand up, to avoid attacks of opportunity, they have to contend with Urk's sneak attack ability. That'll come in handy for sure.
Well I'll be. I thought you might be a "M-Dub" Urk, that's the preferred term for mid-westerners here in Seoul. We sense each from afar then duel to death with swords. There can be only one.
I was planning on using my Water Blast to knock people out of rigging or off the ship entirely if they are near a side, but setting them up for swift and merciless stabbity-death is also favorable. :)
Asmodia Voralius
