Ceres Cato's page

I need some help for a campaign I DM (this means, my player Hardwool has to quit this thread now, please) and I'd be very grateful for some funky ideas.

Here's the thing: My player (we're in a one-on-one campaign) has a character who's really good in painting. It's one of his trademark skills, so to speak. So I'm on the lookout for some ideas how to let him use his skill as often as realistically possible, with cool effects and some impact on his campaign besides "I paint a painting in my downtime and earn money" (In our game it's more of a real-time thing, so there is usually no downtime to speak of). Naturally, one of the official stuff that springs to mind is handing him a bucket of Marvelous Pigments and let him have his fun. Yes, that's nice, but...

I'd like to have him create his own Pigments. We use a homebrew setting with different craft rules for magic items that substitutes some kind of manifested magic for the gp value and if the fluff is good, you don't really need the feat, etc... A bit freestyle, if you want to call it so.

So. Back to the Pigments. Plan is, have him find some kind of recipe, let him go on a reagent run on the side of adventuring and finally mix some buckets of those pigments.

What I need now are ideas on what kind of things would make nice, thematically fitting reagents. Monster parts, materials, herbs, stuff like that. We're currently level 2 and I'd like to have him collect the stuff during his adventures or with a bit of hunting for them in his freetime. We play with two gestalt characters who can handle their share of monsters, so that's no problem. I'm all for homebrewing and winging it, so if you have an idea, i.e. a monster that's not in the bestiary, I can handle that.

All input really appreciated and thanks for reading!

Greetings!

I am interested in alternative class names that players can use in-game to describe what their character is doing, instead of saying: "I'm Hendrik and I am a witch." Or maybe "I'm Bob the fighter".

Some names that describe other aspects of the class, specializations (I always write this word wrong) or names that just avoid a cliché (i.e. the witch).

Probably well known examples might be: Hendrik the hexweaver (instead of witch) or Bob the warden (instead of fighter, because Bob has a huge shield and protects others).

What are your alternative names? How do your characters call themselves? Please share.

First things first, do not read this thread if you are Hardwool. Thanks.

The following situation: Two people switch bodies. Magically and permament. Then they get seperated and no one knows where the other is. One of them, naturally, wants her own body back but doesn't know where it currently is.

The question: If she gets killed, or kills herself, in order to get resurrected shortly thereafter by a friendly cleric, which body would she get? The body she currently inhabits or her original?

Or, to erase the possibility to use the slain body for a resurrection: She kills herself, her body gets disintegrated and then her friendly cleric casts True Resurrection (no body needed) on her. Which body would she get then?

Does it depend on her last body? Or is there some kind of imprint in her soul that's somehow connected to her original body? Is this a viable (and, admittedly, expensive) possibility to get her original body back?

Of course, I could just houserule it, but I'd like to know if this would work rulewise (the spells give no hint, in my opinion) or how you would rule this case.

Opinions very appreciated, thanks!

I don't know if this question was asked before (couldn't find a fitting thread) so I'm asking, becausse after looking through the rules concerning familiars, I stumbled over this piece of text (from the Core Rulebook):

"It retains the appearance, skills, and feats of the normal animal it once was, but is now a magical beast for the purpose of effects that depend on its type"

This implies that the animal doesn't change into a magical beast anymore (I believe it did in 3.5 edition).

So... is my little capybara familiar a magical beast or still an animal? It is intelligent now, so it can't be an animal, one would think. But if it's a magical beast now, wouldn't it get darkvision and some other goodies (a donkey rat/capybara doesn't have darkvision)?

Some clarification would be much appreciated, thanks!

Okay, this might seem kind of weird but...

I've been flipping through the NPC Codex this day, looking at the artwork and stumbled upon Brayvek the Butcher (Poacher, Ranger lvl 3 I guess, page 129). I looked at the name again, and then at the artwork and somehow I got reminded of Anders Breivik, that Norwegian fanatic who killed dozens of youths in March 2012. The name Brayvek sounds similar and even the picture remindes me a bit of Breivik.

Maybe this is a weird coincidence, but did someone noticed that too?

I like reading fantasy novels and I like discussing these with my fiancee, because I want to get him to read some books as well. However, most fantasy books I read (at least the modern ones) often have women in questionable stati, which means they are either abused, killed, sexually harrassed and molested, or everything, in any order.
My fiancee always sees red at novels with such scenes. He hates the thought that every fantasy novel nowadays (at least it seems so) features abused, killed or raped women. He wants to read, but with every book he picks up he fears that he gets angry because of something like this.

So what I am lookin for, as a present for upcoming Yule, are some fantasy novels without such themes. Price doesn't matter, language can be English or German. If any of you know of one or more fantasy novels with strong women/heroines or at least without the occassionally sexually harrassed female, I would be very grateful.

Short question about the crossblooded archetype (A crossblooded sorcerer selects two different bloodlines) and races like the Tiefling and the Genie-Kin with their Fiendish Sorcery/Elemental Affinity which allows the character to treat her charisma as 2 points higher if she chooses the corresponding bloodline (abyssal, infernal or elemental):
If my Tiefling is a crossblooded sorcerer with the abyssal and the aberrant bloodline (for example) how do I treat the Fiendish Sorcery trait? 2 points higher charisma for both bloodlines? Only on certain spells? Does it work? Will my Tiefling's head explode? I'm curious and confused, please help me!

Okay, this is a bit embarrassing for me because this thread is the result of a small lack of creativity on my part, but here it comes anyway:
I like my games dramatic, with a slight dark fantasy feeling, where the heroes walk through the darkness so that they can truly shine. To compensate, I sprinkle my campaigns with some funnier adventures because, apparently, you can only stomach so much drama.
However, here is my problem:
I'm playing a one on one game with my fiancee and we've been playing together for six years now and nearly every evening. Until recently with no problems but my player created a character one week ago for a classic adventurer campaign and he issued one request: No drama, only happy adventures. Specifically no female humanoid villains, maybe no humanoid villains at all. No nice people dying. No nice people treated badly. At the very least, no female character in the game should be sad (or at least not for long). He hates it when females are treated badly (fine by me) or when he has to treat female characters badly (in case of a villainess).
So far I've stuck to classic adventure plots with a comical twist to make it less generic, but I'm running out of ideas. Looking through encounter and adventure ideas it often revolves around murder, violence and human or humanoid villains. This, I cannot use, at least not without heavy tweaking.
So, I need help here. How do you handle no-drama campaings? Any good alternatives to clever humanoid villains without being too generic? Things to make the hero shine, even without the darkest darkness? How much drama do you have in a campaign? Is drama really necessary?
I would be really, really grateful for some advice or other opinions on this topic.

I'm a bit fascinated with the Deck of Many Things, because in my group it's a bit of a "Scares the hell out of me" thing, with cards killing or ruining your character on the spot.
However, I have an idea for an adventure with a Deck of Many Things as the main feature and I'm a little bit unsure when it is the best time to use it.
Clarified: At which party level would you introduce the Deck of Many Things, as an artifact (albeit a minor one) or/and as a plot item, probably allowing the PCs to draw some cards?
Help and hints would be much appreciated and rewarded with my gratitude.