Mosaic's page

greetings all-

i would also like to finish off hero's hoard before the new batch come out.

here's what i've got to trade:

01 banded mail
06 leather suit x2
15 wooden shield
21 dagger
23 flail x2
25 lance
28 longsword
30 longsword
31 mace x2
37 spear
47 potion
50 potion
52 potion
59 ring x2
60 ring
63 scroll
68 scroll
71 scroll
73 rod
75 staff
81 wand x3
82 wand
87 wand
90 amulet
91 bag x2
92 belt x2
94 boots
97 bracers
104 gauntlets
106 gloves
107 headband
110 robe

plus a bunch of foils i'd be willing to part with:
03 chainmail
20 crossbow
31 mace
33 shortbow
40 potion
47 potion
63 scroll
76 staff
79 wand
81 wand
85 wand
88 wand
94 boots
103 crystal ball

here's what i'm looking for:
02 breastplate
o5 hide armor
08 scale mail
09 splint mail
10 studded leather x2
14 tower shield
17 battle axe
20 crossbow
22 dagger
29 longsword
32 shortbow
36 sling
38 spiked chain
39 warhammer
43 potion
51 potion
54 potion
56 potion
66 scroll
72 scroll
76 staff
78 staff
84 wand
85 wand
89 amulet
93 book x2
95 boots
100 cloak
105 gemstone

i guess i'll compare lists now and see if we can do some swaps.

thanks.

I'm not interested in painting minis, but now that I can buy just the adventure and map cards I might pick up a few Complete Encounters. Is there any way to know what the maps cards with the different set look like? Knowing how much I could use them for other adventures would help me decide which to buy. Thanks.

Defending cities from invasion seems like a fantasy staple. Maybe you all could do a set of cards with sections of city wall, gates, breeched walls, towers, things like that. They could also double as castle or fortress walls.

Greetings all. I have a question for all you cartographers and history buffs out there. I love city maps and I get all warm and fuzzy whenever either Dungeon or Dragon publishes a good one - Crimmor, Istivin, Diamond Lake, Alhaster, now Sasserine. I especially like dense walled-in cities that have an old-world feel to them. As beautiful as the maps in the magazines are, they seem to have a lot of empty space within the city walls. Granted that one can do whatever one wants in a fantasy game, but are big spaces inside walled cities realistic?

Also, the area outside the walls of most of these cities is completely empty. Is that "right"? I feel like there should be some buildings outside the wall, especially around the gates. Or shanty towns. Land inside the walls strikes me as too valuable for slums. Maybe not in a war-torn country, but in peaceful lands, I imagine the city spilling out the gates and into the surrounding countryside.

I guess when I think of cities like this I think of Sanctuary from the old Thieves' World books. That map had several farms and villas right outside the city walls and the red light district was too. Or Rome that grew so big that they had to keep adding more and more walls to encompass it all.

Anyway, just curious what folks more knowledgible than I can add to the discussion.

Thanks

awesome! i will buy several. plus an extra one to show my support for non-randomized packs.

dang! figuring out where to start took me quite a while despite all the clues. i guess i was distracted by the big t-shaped beacon in the sky. not a good place to start at all! i was also snared by the siren-song of numbers for quite a while. for anyone still working, you can avoid numbers all together if you like, and if you insist on using them, by all means, don't start with 1! for best results, follow the beacon to its source. from t here, it's a race against the clock to the beginning. best of luck.

Perhaps treating the grouping of trilithons in the center as one unit might help.

i also tried assigning numbers to colors based on their relation to the INNER stones based on this comment, but they don't line up well enough to correspond.

I am assuming the T marks the Zero position,

what if the T marks the 1 position? and what if the count goes clockwise? i tried using the count starting with T as 0 and as 1, clockwise and counterclockwise, taking the second digit of numbers of the blocks (1-18) where each color fell and puting them in ROYGBIV order, and nothing. but whatever way one counts the blocks and assignes numbers to the colors, puting them in ROYGBIV order makes sense.

btw, those numbers were:

starting with T=0, counterclockwise: 5858119
clockwise, T=19: 9118585
T=1 (so 20 blocks total), counterclockwise: 6969220
clockwise, T=20: 0229696

question - are we fairly sure that the important part of the big T clue is the block that triggers it and not the blocks it appears over?

another question - how many blocks is it all the way around? it's hard to count but one would assume 28 if it's a lunar calendar and 30 (31?) if it's solar. might this matter?

How 'bout it folks? Wouldn't a special Demogorgon repaint mini available only to Dungeon subscribers cap off the STAP nicely?

Seriously, how'd Paizo get permission to do the Black Dragon w/ Rider, and is there any chance you could get permission to bring back the Big D just in time for the STAP finale? Please?

I suppose I ought to figure out what Isle of Dread is in Spanish

two choices ... "la isla de terror" or "la isla de pavor." "Pavor" is maybe a little strong; it's like paralyzing, jaw-dropping fear. "Terror" is just bein' scared. ;)

Fantastic. I was waiting to see when this thread would turn into "$setting sucks"!

I have to agree w/ Evilturnip. I enjoy Eberron. Do I think it's perfect - no. Have I tweeked the backstory and history a little in my own version - sure. But basically I enjoy the novelty of the setting and would swipe ideas from it even if I weren't using it as a setting. I find the discussion of people's views on it's strengths and weaknesses interesting (as opposed to pointless bashing); I love the idea of the non-functioning warforged! But calls for mass firings and boycotts seem silly. I will happily continue buying Eberron books for as long as they continue to give me new ideas.

Green Ronin has a product called Hamunaptra. I don't own it but looked through it at a Con. Seemed pretty cool. Egyptianized PC races and included Gnolls as a playable race.

Just curious, for those of you who've played bards, what instrument did you have them use?

I ask because I read about a language called Silbo "spoken" by shepherds in the Canary Islands that is composed entirely of whistles! It made me think it might be cool to play a bard whose instrument whistling.

It kinda makes sense to me to have certain acquired conditions like vampirism or lycanthropy be leveled templates. If the PCs or somebody gets bitten, they shouldn't become full-fledged werewolves the next day. It takes time (i.e., experience) for their new powers to manifest, or for them to master their powers. Even with other undead like ghouls or wights, the leveling up seems to me to represent "becoming."

WIth other monsterous classes, it doesn't make sense for a human to become a minatuar, but it does make sense for a juvenile minatuar to become an adult and gain power or even size as he does it. The issue of him fighting a few critters and getting bigger over night as he levels up seems to be more of a problem with gaining levels to fast and not with monster-as-classes; even human PCs can gain 20 levels in a year and be Merlin by age 19.

I'd take darkvision away from dwarves, give them low-light vision instead. See, if dwarves can see in the dark, then dwarven cities are pitch black - no torches, no lanterns, no glowglobes, no need for light of any kind. That's just not how I picture dwarven halls. Beside, it sucks for visitors. I agree that dwarves can operate with minimal light, but I think they need a little.

As a matter of fact, I'd probably take darkvision away from most monsterous humanoids and give them low-light vision instead. I imagine the orc patrol carrying torches, not moving about in total darkness. Or if you want a few individuals who can move in total darkness, give them Blindsight as a feat. Besides, if everybody but a few aberations and REALLY deep dwellers needs at leasta little light, it solves the problem of surface adventures alerting everyone in the Underdark to their presence with their torches.

Finally, I would strongly consider giving anyone with genuine darkvision a strong aversion to light to make up for it.

it can really help if you want to limit the magical Wal-Mart feel of 3.x edition. The local spellcaster might still be very powerful and a pillar of the community, but can't give the party a scroll of fireball, simply because he doesn't know it.

That was my thinking. The local priests might have a bunch of spells useful to the community but only a few that could help the party. Players might also run across spellbooks or scrolls full of spells but some of them would less useful.

It would seem to fill in some of the gaps in a medium to high magic world; if magic is common, what do regular folk do with it?

Greetings All.

Obviously most spells in the books are geared toward adventurers and saving the world, but does anyone have any ideas on the kind of spells someone like a non-adventuring cleric or wizard might have? I'm assuming zero utility for PCs but maybe some good flavor for a village priest or school-bound apprentice wizard. I'm thinking of 0-1 level spells like:

Bless Livestock
Bountiful Crops
Headcount
Incense
Calm Children
Ease Pain
Ease Childbirth
Continual Heat

Going with the idea of turning cliche plots on their head, I've noticed that a lot of fantasy literature starts off with youngish heroes who discover they have some kind of power/legacy and are guided by a mentor/wizard who they don't trust at first but eventually grow to respect. Even AoW has some aspects of this. My frustration as a reader is that they are still doubting thier mentor way into the book when they should just do what he says.

Well what if their first impression was right? What if Gandalf or Belgarath or the druid guy from Shanara WAS bad and led the party astray? Could you do an adventure path were the BBE dupes the players into setting him free or retrieving some power-item for him that he needs to conquor the world. After maybe the third adventure they "succeed" and screw the world. The campaign could now shift to a shattered land where everyone hates the PCs for what they did and the players have to redeem themselves and fix their mistake. I guess it would be a fairly dark campiagn but there would be more hope that, say, a Midnight campaign. Dragonlance was pretty dark at first. I just like the idea of all the badness being the players fault. Talk about a hook!

If you haven't read it already, check out a book called "The Amulet of Samarkand" by Jonathan Stroud. It marketed as juvenile literature and part of a trilogy called "The Bartimaeus Trilogy." In this world, magic is done by imps and little genies that wizards bind to their will. The narration flips back and forth between a yound wizard and the imp he has bound. Good book, quick read, funny and you can see how a bunch of imps really could rule the world. A few pretty bas ass imps too.

If I remember correctly, Dragon ran a series of articles a few years back (maybe the 290's?) that detailed Western Oerik for the Chainmail miniatures game. Seems to me there was an old elven empire that was being eclipsed by a new human kingdom, a dwarven workers-collective nation and a gnoll kingdom led by a priest-king related to their demon-god.

Heathansson, how is Skull and Bones?

I usually DM for a group of middle-schoolers in a fast-paced, rules-lite game. We play natural 20 is an automatic critical hit (keeps the tension high) and a natural 1 is a critical miss. When someone rolls a 1 in combat I count the number of people - including friends! - the player threatens and make her roll to see which one she accidently attacked. Then she rolls a new attack roll versus her new, accidental target. Sometimes players end up hitting another bad guy but we've had quite a few incidents of "friendly fire" and even a few crits on friends. One of my players - a young lady who curently runs a 4th level fighter with 17 Strength - has earned the nickname "Liria, Friend Killer." She was a little miffed at first but has come to embrace the title and uses her reputation to threaten friend and foe alike. Loads of fun.

Greetings all. I just finished reading the "Name My Setting" and "Name My Setting Two" threads and am terribly impressed by the campaign worlds people come up with. Y'all are way more creative than I am. If other folks wouldn't mind sharing, I'd be interested in reading more 2-3 paragraph blurbs about people's homebrew worlds, something like the little treatments movie folks use to pitch scripts. Thanks.

I love playing with ethnicities because it makes a fantasy world seem more real. One of my favorite things about Greyhawk is that - because of the details on different ethnic groups - it seems more like a world with history. Other worlds I've seen that have well-developed ethnicities and cultures are Caen in the Iron Kingdoms and Aryth in Midnight.

My own campaign centers on an alternative Earth (I teach history and usually play with students). In my version history, dwarves are a human sub-group that went underground before the last ice age and re-emerged in Northern Europe toward the end of the Roman Empire, so just as nations were coming together on the surface, they were forming underground too. For dwarves, ethnicity and physical characteristics are more a factor of depth than geography. But for your average Saxon peasant, a dwarf would be about as unusual as an Italian or Russian. An African or Chinese human, however, would be very unusual.

Similarly, giants are humans who got big and elemental to survive the ice age (think hyper-Neanderthals). Ethnicity for them is more like fire, frost, stone, etc. Like I said, ethnicity adds flavor for me. It also keeps me from making everyone in my world white Europeans.

Here's a question for those of you who also use ethnicity - in our world, humans tend to vary by things like skin color, eye shape, hair texture, etc. and are grouped into "races" (somewhat arbitrarily) according to these characteristics. Most fantasy worlds seem to use the same groups - there are dark and light skinned people, rounder and narrower eyed people, etc. By what other, new, non-Earth physical characteristics could fantasy humans differ?

I was thinking of things like some people having really wide noses, like an inch or two wide all the way up the bridge. Or some people have smooth vs. lumpy skin. Maybe blothcy vs. one-tone skin. I'd be interested in other folk's ideas about adding a little variation to our species.

Maybe "Heroes of Intrigue." It could deal with espionage, politics, diplomacy, mystery, etc.

Greetings all-

I use a lot of minis when DMing with the my D&D club at school and I was wondering what other folks use for props (other than more minis). I just bought some 'treasure' from Dwarven Forge, which is cool but a little expenseve. I also found a bunch of just-the-right-size farm animals at my local school supply store for a lot less than any made-for-the-game animals I've seen (technically, they're 'math counters'). I'd love to get more props but can't think of where to look.

So, what does everyone else use, and where do you get it?

Thanks!

Me da mucho gusto leer un poco de español en el messageboard. No soy latino pero pasé unos años en México. Desafortunadamente, ya regresamos a los Estados, pero le espero buena suerte en encontrar un grupo.

Pregunta - ¿Tienen libros traducidos o usan libros en inglés?

what about giving a player who makes a convincing argument a bonus to her/his bluff or diplomacy skill check, but still doing the die roll to see if it is successful?

I love using 'official information' to confuse players and start false rumors. Trolls afraid of fire? That's what the oldsters down at the tavern say, but have any of them ever seen one? The players confront Kaius and accuse him of being a vampire, at which point he steps onto a sunlit balcony and says, "I've heard those rumors myself. The truth is much more complicated."

Just got back from GenCon SoCal. Good time but I didn't see Paizo anywhere! I was hopin' to geta look at some of thier stuff like the Shackled City book or the Compendium or even a peek at the Game Mastery stuff, but nothing. Too bad. BTW, True Dungeon was awesome, loads of fun.

I'm 34, 35 in December. I started playing in 6th grade, so ... '81? '82? I went straight for the AD&D books, though. Didn't really love the red box (Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic? Where were Good and Evil!). But we played Keep on the Boarderlands and anything we could get our hands on. Lots of fond memories of Decent into the Depths of the Earth and - wow! 3D maps! - Ravenloft. And spent hoursof drawing squiggly lines on graph paper and populatingour 'mazes' with random monsters that han no business being there. We played Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Boot HIll and anything else we could get our hands on, too!

By high school, I was buying Dragon Magazine and playing Dragonlance. Loved the epic-ness of those things. Then, in college, the only people I could find who played were a little too into it, talking in character during lectures and what not, so I stopped.

Then, about three years ago, my wife and I were doing Peace Corps in Asia. We lived in a tiny town with spotty electricity and a lot of time on our hands. I saw the 3.5 books at a mall in the capital and picked them up for old time sake. I've been hooked ever since, and I'm slowly drawing her in.

Now that we're back in the States, I teach middle school in an urban, mostly Latino neighborhood and run a small, but growing after-school group. The kids borrow my books ($30 is out of their price range). I was thinking I might be able to get a hold of some 3.0 books for a little cheaper or use the SRD when they're ready for their own copies. But I'm having a blast now that I'm back into it and it's fun introducing it to a whole new generation.

For anyone whose interested, you can hear the Pogues (an Irish folk/punk band) sing "Worms" on their album 'If I Should Fall From Grace WIth God.' Great band, great album, funny place to find that song. By the way, they sing it like this:

The worms crawl in
and the worms crawl out.

The ones that go in
are lean and thin,
The ones that crawl out
are fat and stout.

Your eyes fall in
and your teeth fall out,
Your brains come tumbling
down your snout.

Be merry, my friends,
be merry.