The Snows of Summer ❄️ ❄️ ❄️Reign of Winter 2E ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ (Inactive)

Game Master Reckless

Welcome one and all.

Yay! Quite excited. Thanks for choosing me.

Thanks for the opportunity, Reckless!

Do you have a preferred option (or options) for how we do our sheets? I'm happy to use a Pathbuilder link if it's easy for you, but also happy to export as a PDF or to write out in text in my profile.

To the party, I haven't read everyone's background yet but I will. I'm happy to make some modifications/interweave if you'd like. My image is that Maq'la has been in/around Hedron for about six months now, and would mostly have had occasion to meet folks either on a low-level mercenary job or at anything alcohol related (e.g. at a tavern, or a festival with drinking involved).

Cheers!

I'm ok with either fashion, as Pathbuilder is relatively easy to access.

I think since the characters all have ties to Heldren, and it is a small town, it is very reasonable to find some collaboration among your backstories and add in vignettes about how some of you may know each other now the crew is decided.

This discussion thread is a good place to do that.

I know that for at least a few of the younger adventurers, Lilyana would have likely left before they were even born, so she'd likely be an outsider to a lot of people, if not everyone in the party. She'd still be up for interacting with them, but yeah.

Also forgot to dot this thread. Whoops.

Ai has spent her entire life here in Heldron, being born there a little over eighteen years ago. She has always been considered a bit odd but is very disciplined.

This gives plenty of time for connections (which other than her family ones have been kept rather vague). Feel free to make suggestions.

Nice! Glad to be gaming with everyone.

I have no strong concept on how long Noemy has been in town, but I imagine its been long enough to meet a lot of folks, make the rounds at the taverns, and take up a half-dozen small jobs and tasks to help out the town's children.

Maq'la has likely seen Noemy having a great and noisy time in the same establishments she herself visits. You may even have been asked by the boozed up poppet to help her up into a tankard.

Hey all! Happy to be here. On the topic of familiarity - Yorah is a recluse living in the woods a few hours from town.

Some locals did visit her once in a blue moon for herbalist remedies and honeywax and whatnot.

So if some of you feel like they did visit at some point, I'm here for it.

Other than that, she did not actually visit the town.

Greetings to all. I'm honored to be selected, and I look forward to gaming alongside you.

As far as familiarity is concerned, my character is a relatively recent arrival to Heldren, but he has still been in town for a few months, making a living as a hunter. I had envisioned him renting a room above the general store or the like, but he would have visited the Silver Stoat fairly often - he doesn't drink, but he enjoys playing his music in the common room. He's a likeable enough person, but he's unlikely to have many friends in town - my impression of the setting was that few in Taldor trust Qadirans, especially in a border town like Heldren, and few anywhere trust tieflings. He likely wouldn't know Lilyana, but may well have met Maq'la and Noemy in the tavern, and given how he spends most of his time in the woods, he may well have also visited Yorah for healing potions or the like.

Hmmm, sounds like we are a rather scattered group.

@ Vhekk

It is possible you came across Ai practicing in the woods during one of your hunts. She would go there for the quiet and solitude to practice her kinetic abilities.

@ Maq'la

While it is unlikely Ai and Maq'la would have interacted very much I could see Ai having been around when you came back with an injury that needed more than a bandage. She could well have used her control over water to heal some of your wounds one time.

@ Lilyana

Given how long she has been gone it is unlikely they met unless it was when Ai was very young. Having said that, if she starts hearing the stories your grandmother told it might very well ahve caught her attention.

@ Yorah

Yours is another one I am unsure how to make any connection too. Given you live a long way outside of town and rarely visit makes it hard. I could see Ai having accompanied her grandfather to visit you when he came to get a remedy for joint pain or something.

@ Noemy

Not sure on an exact connection to you other than having seen the strange poppet wandering around town and trying to understand what you were.

Yeah I imagine that's going to be a whole ordeal once Ai and Lilyana start interacting for sure, but considering Ai is 19, I think Lilyana probably left Heldren before Ai was even born. I imagine at some point the two of our characters are going to have interesting reactions to each other to say the least! It'll be fun.

GM, quick question. How are you handling secret rolls in PbP?

Seeing the spoilered diplomacies in the first post, should we roll for these, or do you plan on rolling them for us instead?

Yikes! Didn't realize gameplay had opened up.

GM, quick question. How are you handling secret rolls in PbP?

Seeing the spoilered diplomacies in the first post, should we roll for these, or do you plan on rolling them for us instead?

Go ahead and roll them and then just look at the spoilers you accomplished with your roll.

If I need to make secret rolls, I'll handle it with post preview and then post the resulting information.

Hey yall, what do you think of having a private Discord channel for this game? (What is Discord?)

I'm a big fan of keeping all Gameplay here, but over the years more and more of my PbP games have had a Discord channel for side discussion. I've found it to sometimes speed up play, and recommend it to folks who haven't tried yet.

That said, PbP clearly works well without it too. I'm happy to follow Reckless' lead here, or whatever the majority wants.

Hey yall, what do you think of having a private Discord channel for this game? (What is Discord?)

I'm a big fan of keeping all Gameplay here, but over the years more and more of my PbP games have had a Discord channel for side discussion. I've found it to sometimes speed up play, and recommend it to folks who haven't tried yet.

That said, PbP clearly works well without it too. I'm happy to follow Reckless' lead here, or whatever the majority wants.

I'd be down for it, but yeah I'd wait for Reckless on that, haha.

Not against it. They tend to be banter, which emulates that social aspect of tabletop gaming. So I'm down.

Yeah, I use a discord for a few PbP games. Some groups end up using it more than others, but it's always worth a try.

I think that a Discord channel would be great! I'm in one right now for a Kingmaker game I'm playing on these boards, and it's a good deal more convenient than the forums are for OOC discussion and the like. I'm no Discord maven myself, so I'd have to do some research before I do it, but I'd be happy to set up a server.

I have one already for my PbP games, if we want to use that one.

I have a Discord channel for my games you'd be welcome to join. I'll create a category for this game there.

I completely forgot about that. The link is not opening the group in dischord for me and doesn't seem to work when I paste it in manually.

I figure hearing one, fairly common word in Russion won't be enough to really catch Ai's attention, she just hears it as what it is and moves on with her life without registering what the language is.

Just to check you were saying Hi/Hello right? Google Translate thought the text was Bulgarian not Russian but that was what Russian gave me.

Yeah it's Russian, and yes it's a hello. I'll definitely not even use actual Russian going forward, but I figured just "Hello" would be okay to put in the pre-1918 orthography.

That's likely why then change in language over time.

It just dawned on me why the link for dischord wont work, it's too old! Doh!

Yeah, sadly the link is too old. Yeah I don't exactly want to translate each time, go to Wiktionary to find the old orthography, then copy-paste it here. Just for hello? That seems fine.

Yes, I did not want to post a forever-link to discord here.

Lilyana and Ai (or players thereof) are either of you Russian speakers? Violant/Lily, from the way you wrote your comment above, it certainly sounds like it! The only language I'm anywhere near fluent in is English, though I can hobble along in super basic conversations in Spanish or American Sign Language...if the person I'm chatting with is VERY patient. ;-)

I'm in a number of PBPs where people blindly copy/paste from Google Translate (typically with the English in a spoiler or OOC tag), e.g. see the bottom spoiler on this WotR campaign I'm in...but in those cases the translation is haphazard at best, and it's really just there for the flavor of how it looks (and maybe as a way to spoiler the meaning from those who don't speak that language).

I can speak anything...
...
...using garble...er google translate!

No, I speak American English (Hoosier dialect) and a small smattering of German and Spanish words.

I have been told that Google Translate does a decent enough job if you type in what you want to say, copy/paste the output into the what you want to say field and translate back to the starting language. If the two match up fairly closely then the translation is passable to good, otherwise it isn't.

American English is my first language, but I'm also more or less fluent in Korean (no formal classes, however), and I have taken enough Spanish courses to struggle through a conversation. Assyriology is my hobby, so I can translate to and from Akkadian and some Sumerian, but it almost never comes up, as neither has had a native speaker for close to two and a half millennia. The language list in the WotR campaign linked is quite extensive, but it would seem that we're likely to be using actual Russian in this campaign, so if we do something similar, we'd have to find an alternative Abyssal script. I myself like to use Akkadian for Abyssal, as it has a primordial sound (after all, it's one of the oldest languages, and it influenced the development of dozens of later European, North African, and West Asian languages), and it's an obscure dead language with no close relatives, avoiding a lot of the ethical issues of choosing a real-world language as the language of ultimate evil.

The Association Assyrophile de France has a rather good Romanized Akkadian to English dictionary online, if anyone's interested.

I'm definitely guilty of using random translations to get a "look" for some alien (in Starfinder) or magical creature's (in Pathfinder) strange language. Especially if the player characters are not able to understand it! It's just fun stuff.

I have a threadbare knowledge of German, Bahasa Indonesia, and Japanese. I am conversationally fluent in Croatian, which means I can generally suss out the meaning in half a dozen slavic languages. Russian tends to be a little too distant except for a few shared words however.

I'm guessing Russian isn't going to come up soon in the campaign, at least not in any significant way.

Knowing such ancient real-world languages is super cool Vhekk.

No, but I am a linguist (not by profession, but I minored in it), so I can do some rudimentary translations using a grammar book, a dictionary, and my mind in a pinch... or I'll resort to Google Translate. American English is my mother tongue (NE rhotic dialect), and (barely, if spoken, moreso if written though) conversational French.

Wiktionary for the win!

Fun–and impressive–yall! I'm glad I asked.

And Ai, I've got me some Hoosier roots. My folks met at IU, and I lived in campus housing there for a few years as a kid, while my dad was in grad school there.

Yeah, I'm still debating how often Lilyana will use Russian before we actually get to Russia, but it won't be too frequent no matter what I pick, probably just greetings and things she knows of from her grandma's tales that wouldn't have a concept in Taldane. But yeah I doubt specifically written Abyssal will come up, if we use the WotR translator but... we'd also need one for Triaxan eventually, and Hon-La is essentially just fantasy Mongolian if I ever find a need to use the other bonus language I have in Lilyana's arsenal (press [x] to doubt).

Would we be able to attempt to identify the creature once we see it? I'm still new to 2e, so I don't have the best grasp on how identification of creatures works here.

Would we be able to attempt to identify the creature once we see it? I'm still new to 2e, so I don't have the best grasp on how identification of creatures works here.

Yes, you would take an action to recall something about the creature. I would make a secret roll for a skill based on its type, and let you know what you know about it, and give you an opportunity to ask one or more of its features (resistances, immunities, weaknesses, special moves, weakest save, etc.) based on your roll. If you critically fail, I would feed you false information, thus the need for it to be a secret roll.

Happy Holidays, folks! I'll be taking a three day weekend and picking the game back up on Tuesday.

Happy Holidays, everyone! I will be a slow poster until Thursday or so.

The usual end of year obligations, you know the drill.

Happy New Year, everyone! Wishing it's at least as good as the last one, preferably better.

permissions fixed. Shocking grasp has a range of touch. The nearest sprite is two strides away. I'll count the shocking grasp roll for the staff attack. Staff damage 1d8+1 Concealment check 1d20

Yorah gives the sprite a good twack. It wobbles, but does not fall. It curses in Irriden abouyt Yorah's southern heritage.

Maq'la's new saving throw is only a failure instead of a critical failure. You're still shrunk, but only enfeebled 2.

Sprite 1 is down

Ai, Noemy, & Vhekk are up

Okay, one was right next to me on the map.

So do I mark off the slot?

Reckless wrote:

permissions fixed. Shocking grasp has a range of touch. The nearest sprite is two strides away. I'll count the shocking grasp roll for the staff attack. Staff damage 1d8+1 Concealment check 1d20

Yorah gives the sprite a good twack. It wobbles, but does not fall. It curses in Irriden abouyt Yorah's southern heritage.

Maq'la's new saving throw is only a failure instead of a critical failure. You're still shrunk, but only enfeebled 2.

Sprite 1 is down

Ai, Noemy, & Vhekk are up

Okay, one was right next to me on the map.

So do I mark off the slot?

No, keep it. I just had switched you and Maq'la in a fit of fake racism or just plain incompetence.

Fair enough. Back to full slots it is.

It's not easy being green, right Maq'la?

I need a better way to do this. Anyone has suggestions? First time running a prep caster in PbP, really.

I could just stick with pathbuilder, I suppose?

But I'd rather have something posted here for tracking purposes.

Yeah, tracking is a little rough in PbP. In the past I've kept a list up to date in my character's profile and applied a strike-through format to spells that get spent. Just have to remember to keep things up to date then :)

With Gradual Ability Boost, you will get an ability boost at level two along with the benefits listed for your class.

Oh, sweet. Will get to it tomorrow. Had little time to post today.

Done, I believe.

Updated as well (in "Crunch (Pathbuilder)" link, in header)

I think I have also updated my statblock. I'll probably wait to Remaster until the Swashbuckler class comes out, but I don't envision any major issues - mechanics-wise, most tiefling feats have a direct correlation to a new nephilim feat.

Rough night at home, moving forward now.

Do you think there'll be remasters for the Gunslinger class? I don't think there's anything that'd need to be changed, but I'm unsure in general about the remaster.