We have a similar houserule. The prices for all non-weapon mundane items remain the same, but the prices for all magic items and weapons are dropped to one tenth. Effectively, all references to "gp" become silver pieces. My players have commented on how much more believable it feels when you're not carting Fort Knox around in your backpack. 8000 gold coins should be a royal haul.
Another side of the same problem is that the "Big Six" magical items are necessary to have viable characters and are also expensive and horribly, horribly boring (this cloak makes you ever so slightly better at diving for cover, resisting mental control, and metabolizing poison. What?!). We just scrapped these items and replaced them with more frequent ability increases. It's worked pretty well.
A lot like Hyboria. The civilized countries are Iron-age city states with a lot of wilderness tribes around them. The north is Norse-inspired, but with mountaineers instead of sailors, while the south is sword-and-sandal pulp. Gods number in the hundreds, with players encouraged to make up their own, but the main bunch are called the Weavers (based on the Norns) Thunarr, a thunder god, Greenman, a nature god, Mir, an animal god, and Morrigan, a death goddess.
Really I just wanted a lot of homebrewed ritual prayer ideas. I understand that "Inner Sea Gods" exists, but I don't always play in Golarion, and this is a homebrew board.
Torag: Gather ritual objects, disassemble and remake them while pondering their structure.
Calistria: Sing or chant while sampling intoxicating drink, incense, or other substances, or engage in tantric companionship
I've always imagined wizards using their book as a reference while they mumble and gesture and cast a really long spell, which they "save up" and complete some time later that day as a standard action.
Inner Sea Gods is definitely on my (ever-expanding) wish list. I chose to make them domain-based to make the clerics of the same god different.
One wilder cleric might be devoted to Erastil's animalistic aspect while another more civilized sort might venerate the community's protector, and worship very differently.
Religion is wonderfully weird. I'm not a very religious person, but I love all the tradition and oddness of ritual. I feel that the flavor of religious practice is sometimes missing from games and this is my attempt to fix that.
I envision every clerical domain as having a different style of prayer, and each domain comes with a bit of sacrifice; something the cleric commits to, which connects him to his deity. The religious act separates the Cleric class from the ordinary clergy, who don't do magic. This isn't meant as a mechanical change, really, just flavor.
A few I've come up with:
Air
Prayer: Air clerics climb a high place and meditate silently in the wind. They climb a tree, or up on a rock, or sit on a stool if they're trapped indoors (which they hate).
Sacrifice: Frequent fasting; air clerics tend to look pretty gaunt.
Animal
Prayer: Wear animal skins or horned headdresses, dance and caper while imitating animals, growl and howl, paw the earth, etc.
Sacrifice: Eat no cooked food.
Chaos
Prayer: Slip into an ecstatic trance, writhing and gibbering as chaos takes over.
Sacrifice: losing control sometimes, occasionally drifting into trance states at random.
Any ideas? I would love a brainstorming session on this.
Thank you so much; all stealing is welcome! I left the last page blank to paste the map in. I just put Natalie's watercolor there and it looks astounding.
Foolishly, I didn't check this thread in time to find the masterpieces already here, or I would have used those instead of attempting my own, but I may as well share.
The program you're looking for is called Softrope and it is unbelievable.
It's exactly what you say, buttons. You can decorate the buttons with a picture, and then just push them to start playing your playlist randomly. You can use music, or sound effects, or both at once. You can have multiple soundscapes going at once. You choose whether they fade out or not, and how long it takes them to fade.
There is a very long and useful thread on music here, but I'll share what I use in my game:
These first ones are awesome for any dark dungeons, including Harrowstone. They blend well together and they don't steal the spotlight either.
World of Warcraft, "Tirisfal Glades"
World of Warcraft Cataclysm: "Undead"
World of Warcraft Cataclysm: "Cursed"
World of Warcraft, "Naxxramas"
World of Warcraft WOTLK, "Borean Tundra"
Diablo 3, "Act 1 Zombie music"
Elder Scrolls Oblivion, "Wind from the Depths"
Elder Scrolls Oblivion, "Dungeon 2"
Constantine (film), "Destiny"
Aliens (film), "Main Title"
These are great for combat with undead and other creeps.
Resident Evil 4, "Garrador"
Resident Evil 4, "Ganado 3"
Diablo 2, "Tombs"
Diablo, "Wasteland"
Warcraft 3, "Undead" 1, 2, 3, and 4
HBO's Game of Thrones (TV series), "Three Blasts"
For the Five Prisoners and other gothic bosses:
The Wolf Man (film), "Bad Moon Rising"
The Wolf Man (film), "Wolf Wild" and "Wolf Wild 2"
The Wolf Man (film), "Gypsy Massacre"
The Wolf Man (film), "Wolf Suite part 1"
Sleepy Hollow (film),"Main Title"
Yeah, I really enjoy combining them. Like for Harrowstone I would have some of the quieter, gloomier pieces from Aliens and dungeon music from the various Elder Scrolls games going right along with the sounds. Danny Elfman's score for The Wolfman was incredible for the haunt fights.
I'm currently running The Haunting of Harrowstone and I wanted to share some ambient background mixes to play with music or in place of music, depending on your group's preferences. Here's what I've got so far:
My players just finished The Wormwood Mutiny and they were so excited afterwards that they had a two hour brainstorming session to come up with a name for their ship, the Reckoning, complete with a flag!
I gotta say, that is one sweet pirate flag. More flags!
I've put together a few tracks for anyone who likes to GM with a bit of noise in the background. In my home games I'm always using it, or music, or both at the same time. If you want to loop the videos, go here and paste the url in the box.
Maybe someone here can answer this; what on earth is the ship action "Make Way" supposed to represent?
From the Player's Guide:
Make Way (standard action): With a successful sailing check, a pilot can make a tricky or difficult maneuver that forces an enemy pilot to react. The result of this sailing check then becomes the DC of the enemy pilot’s next sailing check. On a failed check, the ship’s speed remains constant, but the ship cannot move forward diagonally, and the enemy pilot makes his next sailing check at the normal DC.
So if the pirates are gaining on me, the enemy ship wants to ram me and I "make way," I could see myself rolling the ship somehow and messing up his ramming manouver, but what if my enemy is 400 feet away and makes a hard turn? What did I just do to interfere with him from way over here? What kind of "tricky or difficult manouver" can make it harder for my enemy to accelerate, slow down, turn, gain the upper hand, etc? I'm looking for ideas for making the fluff a little more specific than "Ok you do something and it throws off the other pilot's groove."
You could also use this to download my vid as a sound file, then loop the sound file in your preferred media player. I used copyright-free sound effects so no worries there.
There are some other scenes in The Wormwood Mutiny that I want to make ambiences for:
Spoilers:
The creepy bilges, the storm on day 8, the beach on the island, and all those flooded grindylow tunnels come to mind.
Naturally since the sounds in the video aren't randomly being selected like in softrope, it may get repetitive but I made it pretty long to compensate. If anyone wants a longer one or wants me to mix a different soundscape just let me know and I'll do it.
I like to play this one while I browse and pretend I'm at sea. Arrr!
This is perhaps one of the best ideas I have heard yet and is in line with the devs EVE love. In EVE, you can avoid systems in which podkilling has recently occurred. I would love to see red "circles" on your map where PKing (griefing or otherwise does not matter...may have only been a duel) has recently occured. The circle would fade as time goes by and would grow with the number of killings. The "RP" rationale is "a disturbance in the force" in the way of animals fleeing an area, battle noises, people screaming, people whispering, whatever...
This helps enable people to not only avoid PKers by going around, but also move away or set up a defense when PKers are incoming (you would see a trail of red as the PKers come closer).
Red circle, meh. Dot the area with circling vultures and crows. On the ground, spawn bleached bones and discarded, rusting armor and rising columns of smoke. The more people have died, the more of these lingering effects pop in until it looks like a charred battlefield.
Tie as much of what we think of as "RP" behavior into the mechanics as possible. Hudax's card games are an excellent idea. People who can actually play cards don't have to pretend.
Imagine if walking (rather than running) indoors kept you from trouble with the locals because you're not running and knocking things over like a maniac.
Imagine if NPCs responded to emotes, if sitting in chairs or lying in beds increased your hp recovery rate, if people who had not mentioned their name to you had no name other than "Varisian merchant". "Keleshite adept". "Elven warrior", and, for those sneaks who throw on a black cloak to disappear, "Hooded figure".
Imagine players or GMs playing the part of intelligent monsters.
Raids would change drastically if dungeons were so dynamic that nobody could just go to Stratics and then tell his group "Ok boss is behind the left door and he's gonna drop such-and-such"
Roleplaying is pretending. The more consequences and effects you tie to elements of this game, the less people have to pretend. The swords and spells of battle seem real because they've got in-game crunch to back them up. Give that same strength to other social interactions.
Not a bad idea, though I also think it does need to be noted, the set faction vs faction idea also needs to go away. At least the concept of factions that are perpetually at war with each-other for a non-changable non-avertable reason. That just leads to traveling griefers who feel "Justified" for meaningless slaughter, who then run back behind their own faction lines for safety.
I agree. My aim is mostly to make murder possible, but not trivial. So everyone will know that even though I'm free to attack the guy who just emoted that he spit on me, the winner of the fight will lose xp no matter what (and maybe it's worth it, the spitting bastard). People don't just attack each other randomly. They hesitate, because there is a cost. You don't just get to ride through the newbie zone and swat three guys on your way home with no consequence.
As for factions, I envisioned them as a way to "legitimize" warfare, so if guild A is at war with guild B, they don't lose XP from killing each other, but they lose it from killing anybody else. You're absolutely right, they should not be static. My character may decide to be at peace with everyone else. I can still PvP, but not for free. It encourages me to remain peaceful without tying my hands completely. It brings a little order to the world because you know who is more likely to attack, outlaws and factions that are at war with your faction. Everyone else *might* get violent with you but you'll have to do something to provoke them, because murder costs them xp.
Kill someone within your own faction and you lose a small percentage of your XP. Simple and brutal, but more importantly: instant and unavoidable. There is no strategy you could use to avoid the XP loss. It happens automatically. Do it enough and you will lose levels.
It discourages me from just ganking anybody, but I still have the freedom to kill someone if I really, really hate them.
Then what about people who want to play a dedicated bandit or murderer? Well, what if they make a choice to become an "outlaw" for a determined time? A month at a time, maybe. An outlaw can get xp from killing PCs in any faction, but vendors will not trade with him and guards attack on sight. Now he can't go into town without a disguise. He has to live in the woods and trade with other outlaws, who can of course kill and rob each other, too. It's a dangerous life. At the end of the time period he gets the option to rejoin society (maybe for a fee and a temporary charisma penalty) or remain an outlaw for another period.
Roaming monster tribes - instead of monsters being spawned out of thin air, certain monsters may roam around to search for shelters. Once they found a shelter(and/or food source), the population number would slowly increase.
Few monster tribes remain neutral or even friendly terms with the nearby towns, however most eventually become a threat to travelers and nearby towns. The civilization npc community may realize them as a threat once their trade routes / occupants are being harassed, and will find ways to eradicate those threat (usually by asking players to do it, or on rare events they may try it on their own).
If a character belongs to the same monster race/monsters that tribe is friendly with (by spell effect or disguise), or simply charismatic enough, the character may even be able to forge a relationship with the tribe. The player will need to know their languages to do so or other ways to communicate however.
Oh, I forgot to mention two things that I really want as far as combat goes.
First, I want to be able to block people's path if they are an enemy. I want shieldwalls to work; I don't what players to run through each other like intangible phantoms, as someone above has said. I understand how this could be hell. Things get crowded in town, and a griefer could stand in a doorway and keep people bottled in, but what if you can move freely through allies and you present an obstacle to enemies?
Secondly, I've seen a lot of games where pvp involves constant bunny-hopping. This is goofy as hell and should not be a viable strategy. Maybe jumping lowers your AC by miles, or it slows you upon landing, or drains stamina, or whatever, but fighting like Tigger shouldn't be beneficial.
I would have fun if I could log on and be a village baker, in peasant clothes, running my bakery and talking to adventurers. I want to be able to "level" as a baker, or a minstrel, or a blacksmith without killing stuff all the time. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
In the "dream MMO" that I've carried in my head for awhile, there is one single persistant world in which three games are happening at the same time:
1. The "I am an adventurer and I kill things and take their stuff" game
2. Trade Wars. A Sim-type game where players run a shop or a household and manage multiple NPCs to make money and expand.
3. Dungeon Keeper. Players run a stationary dungeon and fill it with monsters and treasure while defending it against meddlesome heroes. Maybe give them a capstone where if you get your dungeon to a certain level you can spawn wandering monsters that run off into the world (which makes people want to come and kill you).
All three games happen simultaneously. The shops can be sacked by monsters or PC armies. The adventurers can attack the dungeons or buy stuff from the player-shops. I would LOVE to raid a dungeon of intelligently-played monsters run by a Dungeon Keeper. I would also love to know that when I sell my loot to a vendor, I'm still interacting with real people because that NPC vendor is part of someone's economic sim game.
Heh, this is quite the coincidence. I just made some coffins last night myself, and a tomb...
I need to make some stairs, but I've been struggling with making stairs the way they are normally made. You can't put a miniature on the stairs, they just slide off. So I'm thinking of making my stairs with 1 square inch treads, which will look strange, but will allow placement of minis on any height.
I'll try to make some tonight to see how they turn out.
I'd like to see those. Stairs and ramps really are a puzzle; those poor little minis can't have an Errol Flynn swordfight on the stairs. It breaks my heart.
That column looks so huge next to the mini! I wonder if you can find molds in other styles like that one. Can you imagine a Mines of Moria-looking room full of columns to stage a battle in? Epic stuff.
I now have columns, a pair of vampire coffins, and some stair tiles.
All three of these were pretty simple. The columns are the only ones that took more than one step. First, make and bake the round bases, then make a lot of little clay balls the size of peas until you've got a handful of them. Gently roll them together on the table into a cylinder and the balls will press on each other, creating angles that look just like the edges of stone blocks. Stand them up on the bases and bake again. If you made it half the height, they'd make a pretty good rough pedestal or altar. I did all the detailing with just a basic set of clay tools from Hobby Lobby. I have still not used up my first $10.99 brick of Super Sculpey, so this is some really cheap terrain compared to what I've seen online.
This was my technique for years, decades actually, before I decided I could make usable, if aesthetically challenged, minis that at least were recognizable as orcs, kobolds, ogres, or whatever, and had the weapon that the encounter called for. It helps a lot to not have to say "No! This rock is the goblin with the spear! Those rocks are the goblins with the slings!"
Haha! The worst is when there are both enemies and allies on the same map. "Noo, you can't attack him, that's the watch captain!"
Your stuff is much, much more artistic than my stuff though. I've very impressed. My stuff is pretty lame, but it works.
I disagree; I've seen your wood pieces and the thin wood looks a lot more believable than my sculpey. Compare your tables to my fat marshmallow tables. Some of the stuff on your list sounds irresistible and I am adding it to my project list.
Minis are expensive. I don't like buying metal minis for every single lowly orc my players run across. It's so much more manageable to have a sack of glass counters or tumbled rocks (my favorite) and save the minis for bosses.
So a typical encounter would have the orc captain and his shaman as metal minis, the smattering of green rocks are the goblins, and the smaller cluster of blue rocks are the elite troops. In a perfect world they'd all be fully-painted glorious-looking minis but give the DM a break man.
I've had a very productive week off. I've always liked sculpting little custom minis with Sculpey clay, usually oozes and worms because they're easy.
Anyway, I was online looking at the dungeon furniture on sale at Dwarven Forge and on Ebay and all of it was either too expensive or not what I liked, so I've been making my own. I'm a planner, so I made a list of every common type of dungeon furniture my players are likely to run across. My goal was to have a versatile pack that would be useful in multiple games. I intend to bring each of these things into miniature reality over the next few weeks (months?).
This is the list I made:
6 small dungeon doors
1 big dungeon door
3 small tables
1 big table
5 bookshelves with books and items inside
6 columns
2 coffins
2 stair tiles
2 piles of rubble
1 mage's desk
1 big bed
1 throne
1 altar
1 magic pool/font/well thing
That about covers it, right? If there are any other dungeon must-haves let me know because I am in a crazy sculpting /planning mood.
11/24/2011: I finished the doors, the bookshelves, and the tables!!
Here is everything so far: Blaarg's Minis.
Love the giant hand. Our game was cancelled so I'm still mid-cliffhanger. I'll take your advice; I don't want any of my PCs lopped before they meet TSM, who is already perfect.
Pretty soon we're going to need a thread like this one for Trial of the Beast. I love my enormous group.
A quick summary of my 8 person group's last game and the changes I made:
The Piper and Father Charlatan:
I widened the Piper's circle of influence until it covered the whole floor, and had wave after wave of skeletons coming in. I think ultimately there were 20 skeletons in three waves. The Piper targeted the barbarian while the unconscious cleric had her battle of wills with Father Charlatan. I doubled the Piper's hp and he lasted four rounds against my 2nd level party. Because of the large number of people, four rounds felt like a very long battle, but I think that had more to do with the channeling cleric being out of the fight.
Downstairs to the lower prison. Gurtis Vortch (and his identical twin Otis) charge about taking giant slices out of the PCs in a great scrap. For some reason my party immediately misidentified one of my two flaming skeletons as the Lopper. I thought it would be cool to make them a duo where one is headless and one isn't but I hadn't anticipated how very "Lopper and Victim"-like they looked. I should have made them both headless.
And now, the Lopper:
My great thundering mob of characters walked up to the oubliette and Lopper comes howling out of the pit. I had decided to mix things up by dividing his hp into three "chunks", and after each chunk he would change his tactics, like a staged boss from a videogame.
Embarrasingly, I *still* havn't decided what those tactics are! We stopped the game in the middle of combat because it was bedtime, so that's buying me some time and I need help! This is the situation right now. The party has just chewed away Lopper's first stage, and he just grinned and vanished from sight(because I haven't planned this far and WHEEE DM IMPROV TIEM). I intended to have him appear screaming behind the party as soon as they turn around and walk back down toward the collapsed stairs, but the party has decided the fight is over and has lowered a rope into the pit, with a 3rd level halfling bard on the end of it. We ended the session right then.
That's right. We stopped with a three-foot girl holding a lute in the lair of the still very-much-undead Lopper. What to do?
A few ideas I've got:
1. a lot of headless ectoplasmic humans rise from the ground and swarm the bard
2. Lopper reappears and attacks the bard mercilessly
3. Something comes up from the hall behind the party, there's a fight, then Lopper appears in the middle of it.
He'd be a lot tougher, but I want tougher. I had been thinking of making Vortch into a pair of twins: Gurtis and Orwick Vortch. One is blind and has the axe, the other one has a head, but no weapon. Also, more skeletons, muahahahaha.
I like the extra axes idea for Lopper. I really want to keep him as a solo, mostly because of that illustration with that maniacal grin; imagine that thing coming after you alone, toes dragging weightlessly along the stone...
I'm running HoH with 8, so I feel your pain. The suspenseful survival horror I imagined in my head has given way to the reality of an *army* charging into Harrowstone to bust heads and take names. All while cracking goofy jokes and generally taking the campaign in a whole new direction. The slapstick comedy version of Carrion Crown.
So far we've only had two real fights. One was the poltergeist. I added a rat swarm under its control and the creep factor worked really well, plus the rats ate up the alchemists' bombs so the 'geist didn't go down in two rounds like a chump.
Next was the laundry, where I added a second straitjacket. It was a very tough fight. My philosophy right now is to treat my large party as two smaller parties, so each encounter has twice the monsters. I'm worried about how to implement this further down the road with the Big Five, though. Lopper's gonna get ruined unless I add something to that fight and I'm still thinking about what that will be.
