Old Jimmy Legs's page

I've been running games for 30 years now . It is literally one of my favorite things to do . I know my players appreciate and look forward to my games .

But every now and then being a GM seems like a thankless and arduous job .

Example ;

Me - I've been thinking about doing a city-based political intrigue style campaign , would you guys be interested in that ?

Players - Sounds great !

After 2 adventures ;

Players - This is good and all , but we want pirates .

Me - Uh , I'm not sure how that would fit in but maybe there's a coastal city that . . .

Players - Whatever man , just make it happen .

After the next adventure ;

Players - What was that that ?! We wanted the pirates to be our friends , they were total jerks !

Me - Why would pirates be on your side ? You're basically the police .

Players - That's your problem buddy .

After the next adventure ;

Me - What was that ? Those pirates were going to be your allies and you massacred them .

Players - Yeah , they had good stuff . You can't have NPCs with cool gear try and befriend us , you know what's going to happen - that was your fault . We want the pirates to BE cool not have cool stuff that we are forced to kill them for .

After the next adventure ;

Players - Why are there so many pirates in this campaign ? What is this some kind of dang pirate campaign ? I thought we were doing political intrigue . You should have told us this was a pirate campaign .

Thanks folks , does indeed look like pretty slim pickings . Any there any third party sources ?

Are there any books besides Heroes of the Wild that introduce new rooms and teams for the downtime stuff from Ultimate Campaign ?

I wondered if it might be a PFS deal

A while back I had some vague plans to set a campaign in Carcosa but I ultimately decided that a mostly empty city-plane ruled over by the King in Yellow was not a fertile bed for the kind of game I wanted to run at the time .

But I'm starting up a new campaign and I thought why not make a Carcosa-style city where the architect of the whole thing is a benevolent source . Something along the lines of a civic minded god who "rescues" interesting cities from doomed worlds and brings them into his stitched together mega-city plane .

My first (and only question) is back in the day was Lloth's Demonweb pit the same concept as Carcosa or was that whole planes she was web-smashing together ?

But the real reason for this post is to see if anyone has any rad city ideas they want to toss out there for me to steal in building this city-quilt .

On TV Tropes in the entry on "Take a Third Option" it mentions ;

"One Pathfinder module has you breaking into a warehouse in Riddleport in order to question the guards. After accomplishing this and taking out all of the guards you can then loot the warehouse and find several potions and weapons. Far more than you could ever carry. Upon leaving the warehouse a group of thugs will threaten to kill you if you don't give them what you stole."

Anyone know which module they're talking about ?

The Kingmaker path was a dud in my group but my players did really enjoy the kingdom building aspect of it . We're going to start on Ruins in a few weeks and I was thinking about expanding the role of the colony and making building up and curating the colony a more important part of the story . But the kingdom building rules aren't an exact fit for building a colony . I was thinking of maybe trying to do a little more with the camp-rules from Serpent's Skull but there's not a lot there .

Being lazy I wanted to see if there was any material already out there a step below the kingdom rules focusing more on a single city/town/what have you .

Thanks

NASA invading a fantasy world?

I'm intrigued, at the very least. Is this fantasy world circling a different star? They'd need much better spaceships than they have right now, which I feel ruins the feel of modern humans vs a fantasy world . . . but I guess that might not be the feel you're going for. Or is the fantasy world accessible only by magic? (A portal or something?)

I'm also curious as to NASA's motives for seizing a planet by force. Is this the same NASA that's made of curious scientists who want to understand the universe? I can easily imagine a modern army murdering their way across a land of elves, dwarves, and dragons, but NASA? I also don't know that NASA has enough manpower for a boots on the ground style invasion . . .

And, most of all, the question we've all been asking ourselves, what is SpaceX doing? Leaving the planet exploring to the government? Launching their own invasion? Launching peace missions? Trying to sell electric cars?

NASA will be represented as close to the real world NASA as your average fantasy setting is a representation of the dark ages/medieval times/renaissance/whatever kind of hodgepodge D&D was birthed from . So mostly modern (probably even back a few decades) but also you know , Moonraker bases and laserbeams. Basically GI Joe from the 80's .

I'll probably mix in a little NASA magic , like they have "occult" experts that at least understand that magic is real but they got to fantasy town via a "stable" wormhole or somesuch .

The reason for the invasion is that Earth is under threat from whatever , some kind of Cloverfield monster , asteroid , whatever was happening in Core , too many movies with the Rock at one time , etc. and only some resource in fantastyland can save the day and the only way to get it is by some ecologically ruinous extraction method . And there's no time to trick the backwards screwheads that live there into letting them do it .

I wonder if anyone here is old enough to get that reference .

Injecting sci-fi into D&D (I really should start saying Pathfinder at some point eh ? ) is a long standing tradition that I've never been a fan of . Expedition to the Barrier Peak and all that never did it for me . I'm not sure why my brain can accept a shirtless dude with a +3 greatclub bludgeoning a 90 foot dragon to death but somehow a knight with a sword fighting a robot is "silly" .

I remember specifically when Tale of the Comet came out in 97 I turned up my nose at it with ALL the disdain possible by a college freshman - which is rather a lot as you know . It was enough to turn me off D&D for a while (plus Vampire the Masquerade was clearly so much more mature - trench coats and katanas for everyone ! )

The Iron Gods campaign path is one of the better written and well done paths (to me) but I just can't get into it .

However the other day while I was farting around online I came across a short story someone had written about a NASA astronaut landing in fantasy town and for some reason it really intrigued me .

I think I'm going to try and talk my players into a shortish campaign where NASA invades generic fantasy world #10 . It's not something I want to put a ton of effort into so I think I'll re-skin the Ironfang Invasion with NASA drones and deadly rovers and whatnot . And of course the atmosphere will be deadly so the NASA people so they'll be in their spacesuits all the time . When they're not in their Moonraker style bases anyway .

I acknowledge that this is a fairly silly idea but I think we can have fun with it for a dozen sessions or so .

To prevent this from being a completely self indulgent "here's my campaign idea" post I ask you good people of the internet - how do you feel about the old "space ship crashes into D&D" trope ? Love it ? hate it ? It's complicated ? Enjoy it in small doses ? Tried it once in college but didn't inhale ?

Old Jimmy Legs wrote:

But you know what I was wrong , there's one class that never ruins things - the bard . Bards are always cool with whatever . They can't do much but they're always happy to help with what little they have to contribute . And they can use whips , because why not .

So that settles it , bard is the best class . The end .

Not in my neck of the woods. We've never forgiven the bard for abandoning his 1st edition druidic roots!

Back then he had principles, he believed in something! Now he's just a thief who uses magic.

So they're all rotten - every single class in the game!

The end.

That's a good point , bards are dead to me

Have all of these legitimately been a problem at your table, or is this just an exercise in catharsis?

A bit of both

In 1975 the first supplement to D&D was published - Greyhawk - which introduced the Paladin . Shortly thereafter the grand debate about Paladins ruining everything began .

But I say it's time to give the other classes their due , because as we all know , any class can (and does) ruin a campaign , which proves once and for all that all the classes are perfectly balanced .

Number one of the ruin countdown is of course the Druid . Ugh , these guys . I thought neutrals were supposed to be quiet and retiring not shrieking lunatics . Let me get this straight , if I go into a city I'm "tainted" but it's totally cool for you to gallivant around with a dinosaur like that's normal ? Get over yourself man . And you love trees so you'll only wear armor made out of them ? That checks out .

Next up we have the Barbarian , specifically the magic-hating superstitious Barbarian . I get it you're "roleplaying" when you steal all the magic items and bury them because they're wicked but the GM isn't in on the joke . We're still going to have to fight stuff that makes sense if I had a +3 Breastplate . Which I don't . Because it's evil ? Whereas slaughtering villagers by the truckload is totally fine ?

Then of course we have the Thief , I mean rogue - specifically the cowardly rogue . So when you steal from us , hide during combat , and betray our allies that's "good character work" but when our characters get mad about it we're taking the game "too seriously" ? Take your ten foot pole and beat it pal .

Next up we have the Wizard and its ugly cousin the Sorcerer . So you need to be wrapped in bubble wrap and carried around in a protective case for the first 9 levels and then you're going to outshine everyone else ? Sounds good .

Now the lightening round ;

Cleric - Sure your god told you to do it
Ranger - Ooh , I have two weapons ! Get a job
Monk - Almost as useful as a fighter half your level , if you take the right feats
Psion - Don't even get me started

But you know what I was wrong , there's one class that never ruins things - the bard . Bards are always cool with whatever . They can't do much but they're always happy to help with what little they have to contribute . And they can use whips , because why not .

So that settles it , bard is the best class . The end .

Of course classes don't ruin campaigns , players (and GMs) do .

But then again , what is a campaign for except to ruin ?

I was putting together a village that worships/is controlled by an intelligent magic warhammer for an upcoming session and the specifics of the hammer itself aren't important but I wanted something just in case so I grabbed stats from an old Dungeon magazine . Said hammer's purpose was to destroy orcs (of course) but in the campaign I'm running there are no orcs . Got me to wondering , most intelligent items have basically "eternal quests" that will never be completed , but if they do what happens next ?

The simplest answer is of course , nothing , they just stop having that as their main goal .

But I could see rationalization that after they fulfil their purpose they stop being sentient and revert to a normal magic item . If you really wanted to be mean it could become completely non-magical .

But the funnest answer is that they get all depressed and wiggy once they no longer have a purpose .

Thoughts ?

I'm not sure you can beat flaming Ghost Rider style

I am lost here.

Are you and/or "Buster Brown" trying to leverage your GM to get him to play an intelligent undead?

Are you and/or the GM trying to leverage "Buster Brown" to keep playing a character he is done with?

It has been suggested that my character is "boring" , not unjustly if I'm being honest , just trying to spice things up a bit .

Last night in my weekly game our arcanist got himself killed by a wyvern (but who sent it ? Random encounter ? HA ! Wake up sheeple ! You don't just encounter wyverns man) and had the bad manners to refuse being raised because "he had a good life and it was time to rest" .

The nerve of some people .

Clearly my character has no choice but to abandon all current campaign goals in favor of finding a way to make his buddy undead so they can continue to hang .

There's no saving throw on create undead buster brown !

The first question is when you create undead does the corpse in question become that person in undead form or is it just the medium for a random new undead creature ?

Are there some other good options besides create undead ?

Thanks unimportant - that article wasn't all that helpful (stupid memory) but I had forgotten about the old Complete Thief and Complete Ninja , there's good building blocks in there . How could I forget ninjas ? They have all the gadgets .

In the past few adventures in the campaign I'm running I've given the players a couple sword canes and extendable staves an other "trick" items that aren't magical . I didn't really mean for it to be anything other some interesting low-level gear before magic items start flying around , but as so often happens the PCs assumed that it must mean SOMETHING and have been trying to uncover the hidden meaning behind it . So I've decided to add a subplot with a Da Vanci like charater who made these items for a rougish organization fighting against a group of evil knights .

If you have any ideas for nifty items that aren't magical - mostly focusing on stealth and trickery , I'd love to know about them . I'm sure there's probably a lot of real world examples but I'm not sure were you'd find out about something like that .

Also back in 2nd edition days I think there was a Dragon magazine article called unearthed mundania that had some similiar items . If anyone magically remembers what issue that it it would save me from searching though the giant pile of old magazines .

Thanks for all the ideas folks

Nonlethal Substitution (Complete Arcane) or Subdual Substitution (Divine SRD) are the basically the same feat. Remember it could be a real possibility for a law enforcement group to issue metamagic rods of Nonlethal Substitution.

On the take down side, remember almost all lethal melee attacks can do nonlethal damage by taking a -4 to hit. Once you do a bit of nonlethal damage you can switch back to lethal because reducing their HP total will KO them just as fast as doing their full HP in nonlethal, if you are having problems hitting them.

Example, A bandit has a total of 10 hp. I hit the bandit with my longsword for 1d8+1 nonlethal damage (5). Then again next round for 5 lethal, he becomes staggered (non-lethal = current HP). One more point and he'll be unconscious.

I've always found that mechanic to be a bit odd . But while we're on the subject , if you have a mix of lethal and non-lethal damage and you go to negative HP are you still losing a HP each round and making stablize checks ? If not it seems like you could be a jerk and do 1 point of nonlethal damage to yourself every day to make sure you didn't die as easily .

In a campaign focused more on capturing foes rather than killing are there any classes that would be especially useful ? The beguiler and shadowcaster both spring to mind as they have nonlethal spells (or mysteries or whatever they're called) and various abilities that hinder and degrade your opponenties abilities rather than do damage . But neither of them really fit the law enforcement type theme we're going to to working with .

What else is there ? Monk I suppose - they don't have to inflict lethal damage with unarmed strikes right ?

The map pack I had from the SCHC was destroyed . I can't find anywhere on here where the maps are available . Am I just screwed here ? And if so is stabbing random people in the street an over-reaction ?

I know somewhere there's a little blurb about using X Y and Z instead of the various demodands but I can't find it . Anyone got that info on hand ?

Have many people tried this Prestige class for the Complete Warrior? I'm currently playing one (7ht lvl bar/3rd lvl bear awrrior) and have mixed feelings. What are the feelings of othere people who have tried them or run a game with one in it?

My only experience with it is in a one-shot adventure I ran where one of my players was a Bear Warrior . He was pretty fearsome in combat but he was a 5th level bear warrior and I think that's where things get "good" . Turning into a brown bear is a huge upgrade from black bear - +12 Str , +8 Con , more damage , yada , yada - but the real upgrade comes from Improved Grab . He'd hit for some pretty horrendous damage to begin with (although he never did face anyone with DR) and then a free grapple attempt . Raging in bear form he'd win easily and in a grapple you can still attack with natural weapons . It was pretty brutal .

But this adventure featured mostly human(oid) opponents with class levels rather than monsters . I could see how a Bear Warrior could have trouble with creatures that either had high DR or were too strong to grapple (which is a lot) .

Based on this limited experience I'd say that Bear Warrior in a typical monster-slaying environment might not be the best choice . But then again who cares ? In my mind D & D is plenty fun whether or not you're a hardcase in battle .