Blaaarg's page

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.

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.

Here is yet another version of the book.

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.

Zuddiger's Picnic..

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.

Transformed my game.

Four more soundtracks for Trial of the Beast:

The Swamps of Morast

The Village of Hergstag

Schloss Caromarc: Manse

The Bondslave Thrall

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:

Harrowstone ground floor and upper level

Harrowstone underground level

Ustalav Forest Nighttime

I'll do more if anyone is interested. Blarg.

I just finished a few more:

That about does it for The Wormwood Mutiny. This was fun!
If anyone wants me to mix up something different I probably can. Blaarg.

I've been making a few custom audio environments with Softrope for my Skull&Shackles group and I thought I'd share some of what I've been working on:

5 minutes of pirate ship sounds

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!

I'm sure a lot of players don't consider that crap to be worth it, but it's my main draw to MMOs as a genre, frankly.

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.

An anti-OOC text filter. Obvious anachronisms get filtered out in public chat.

'Garth is a total newb and he sux. Let's port to COD without him.'

<Blaarg> "Garth is a total novice and he reeks. Let's teleport to the Caverns of Despair without him."

'WTF that's not wat I typed'

<Blaarg> "Nine Hells, that's not what I said"

'LOL OMGWTF??!'

<Blaarg> "Ha! Gods, what in the Abyss??!"

'WTF'

<Blaarg> "Nine Hells!"

I'm only half-joking.

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.

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.