Yea these many years ago, The God-King Gilgeam decreed a PBP. In that time many have smarted under his rod, which is his wrath and his joy at once. The many have dwindled and the Father of Victories tires of repeated smiting of those who remain. He hungers for new victims, two in number, who will join forthwith for the commencement of his second tablet.
Right then. I've lately lost two players who I seek to replace for a Gestalt Age of Worms game set in Theme Park Bablyonia. We are here if you wish to check us out. You may find setting information and chargen here. The only change I can think of at the moment from the previous is that the group are now third level. Take half your WBL for third and the rest is in automatic bonus progression.
Our current roster:
Amarekkashu human monk/oracle
Arundel elf unmonk/diviner
Regin human paladin (Ishtar)/bard
Questions welcome.
Recruitment shall be open until 11:59 PM on Wednesday, January 16th.
Hello! This year has been a dumpster fire and the casualties include two players in my Wrath PBP. That puts us at three, which is a touch too cozy. We promise not to sacrifice you to Deskari. Much of the original recruitment post still applies, except that we're now at seventh level and MR2 and we've consistently forgotten the mythic house rules I sketched out way back in the day. At some point, hopefully soonish, I'll be revisiting those in a more comprehensive way with guidance from some third-party fixes. We've also lately abandoned Automatic Bonus Progression in favor of just using the items because it's a little simpler and most of us forgot it most of the time too.
Our Heroes are currently in the tail end of Book Two, down in Drezen's Dirty Dungeons. They are highly likely to return to camp now that the late battle has concluded, so we have an ideal window to introduce new PCs with minimal awkwardness. These seem like the easiest ways to me:
1) You were with the army all along and have just now come to prominence. That makes your mythic power a little hard to explain, but not insurmountable. There could have been a raid on the camp by some demon with a mythic thigabob. I'm flexible here.
2) You are heroes from elsewhere in Mendev who were empowered at the same time as the group, but engaged on another front. The recently-departed wizard/arcanist was summoned away on Urgent Crusade Business and he could easily have told the high command that the Drezen expedition could use some extra badasses given he left. :) Essentially you'd be teleported in after having your own separate adventure -which happened off-stage and got you to your present level- with the plan to join the crusade on this front.
The current cast:
Blink Vala, a sylph slayer+rogue/arcanist who flits about the battlefield doing murders. She's on the Trickster path and does some buffing and scouting as well as damage.
Galin Solatar, a half-elven warpriest of Arqueros/fighter (dervish of dawn) on the Champion path. Galin mostly focuses on archery, but he can cut demons up close too.
Steave Rojerz, an angel-blooded aasimar brawler/paladin who throws his shield a lot and just punched a half-fiend minotaur to death with his bare hands. Champion mythic path.
Recruitment is open until 11:59 PM, EST, on Monday, December 24. As always, questions welcome.
Noon in Sundabar. Somewhere above the blanketing clouds, the sun must shine. Only a dirty gray light struggled through to show on the city's looming stone. A hard wind blew from the Spine of the World, tearing at cloaks, doors, shutters, and biting exposed flesh. It carried snow enough to carpet the cobbled streets almost to the depth of a grown human's knees, far more where it caught under eaves and against buildings. The storm narrowed every street to a path wide enough for a wagon, at best, save those where countless feet must pass.
Sundabarians fastened their shutters tight, pushed hard against the drifts where they blocked doors, and stepped mindful of the slick ice that might lay beneath. Many shops had not opened in a few days. Everywhere firewood dwindled as smoke rose from chimneys.
The people trudged about, muttering kind words for Auril Frostmaiden and Lathander Morninglord in equal fervor. An Icepriest had come to the city during a break in the snows and many Sundabarians made the uncomfortable climb to the Frostmaiden's shrine to feel her caress and quench the fire of their blood in the sacred pool. The goddess hungered still, but soon she would rest. Spring had fewer than two tendays left to it.
At the Hall of Everlasting Justice, a chest-high fence mired deep in the snow separated the training ground from the street. The din of steel on steel rang across it. A few youths huddled near together, poised on barrels and crates to watch those a few years older hard at work under the unstinting eyes of grizzled veterans. Their hair matted down with sweat, arms wavering, shivers everywhere, the older youths strove against one another, blunt blades drawing bruises where not met by wooden shields. A few boys, white and trembling, showed the marks on their bare chests and looked longingly to stacks of furs off to one corner as they drilled on the hard mud.
One fell, tripping over his own feet. His opponent let out a cry of triumph, not seeing the veteran priest slip up behind and pull his own legs out from under him with a deft maneuver. A firm talk on keeping one's head ensued.
The temple guards, resplendent in their armor, stood two to a side: a pair of Tyrrans with hammers and a pair of Tormtar with heavy blades. More waited quietly, and with more comfort, within. None challenged the visitors as they arrived. Novices, many not yet bearing signs of their chosen devotion, met each just beyond the gate and in easy sight of the guards. A half dozen sat ready -and bored- on benches, dispatched by a duty priest with swift nods when guests stated their business. Frowns silenced those that tried to whisper amongst themselves when she turned her back.
One by one, the novices guided the guests through the temple. They passed Acolytes of Laws, in their blue and purple robes with white sashes, quietly set warm cider and fresh bread on tables, mindful of the black gloves on their right hands and white on their left all the while. A few Andurans in dark crimson joined them at the work, many frequently glancing out in the direction of the nearby yard.
They came to a spartan study, hung with thick tapestries showing the signs of the two gods. They were the only concession to color, all else wrought from dark wood graven with martial patterns. Shields marched down the edges of tables. The legs of chairs bore swords and hammers. All sharp corners and hard edges, little marked by wear and diligently polished. Upon a sidebar sat scanty refreshments. The novices bid those called to wait on the arrival of the Hammer Lord, who had temple business to occupy her. Each novice saw to the refreshments and the fire merrily burning before departing.
Hi players. The IC thread will not be live until tomorrow, but we can do some housekeeping all the same.
Aliases
In getting your aliases together, I'd like you to throw some stats into the happy gray lines under your name for easy reference. It's a pain to remember how to get stuff to show up properly -I always forget- but they display in this order: Gender, Class/Levels, Race.
Here's a premade blank for you. Just replace the x with your stuff. The three before perception are for any novel senses you have.
Gender:
HP x/x | AC xx, T xx, FF xx | CMD xx | F +x, R +x, W +x | Init +x | xxx; Perception +x
You can do your classes, races, etc too but those are the ones I'm going to need all the time. Generally defensive abilities (immunities, situational bonuses, etc) are more helpful for me there, because you'll remind me of your attacks on-demand. :)
Formatting
When speaking IC, please bold text in addition to the quotation marks. That jumps out a bit more from the rest on what are visually fairly noisy boards. Similarly if putting a rules question or something like that in the same post with IC stuff, please use the ooc tags.
Minions
At least sometimes, this game will employ special rules for minions.
Minions:
No unusual creature will be a minion on its first appearance. Foes become minions largely based on their story role, not anything intrinsic to them. The ten guards are probably minions. The two guys in really fancy armor with them probably are not.
1) Minions will die or be rendered unconscious on a hit by a PC. The PC decides which happens.
2) Minions cannot crit PCs.
3) If a minion fails a save, it’s out of the fight.
4) When in use, especially in mixed groups, I’ll try to mark out minion status so you can plan accordingly.
5) Minions will usually roll things in batches, always initiative and other stuff depending on how many there are and what seems cool at the time. Ten minion skeletons might all roll the same save vs. a fireball, for example.
6) If you want to keep a minion alive for questioning or whatever, you can do so by simple fiat. Say you want to and it happens. It’s even fine to change your mind if you were killing them all previously. The minion was just mostly dead.
7) Boss-type foes might have the ability to sacrifice minions to protect themselves.
Religion Stuff
I will try to have full faith primers out for everyone by the end of the week, basically on the lines of the Ilmater stuff I wrote up for Ariyana. If you're not a divine caster or divinely-poewred, it's basically just RP stuff and will be a bit shorter. If there are faith-specific spells you can pull out right away, those may take a bit longer to get done but I'll try to have them in your hands soon.
Some Silly Analytics
There are four humans, two dwarves, one half-elf, and one elan.
The party is all LG, except for one LN and one CG. Two Tormtar and two followers of the dwarven pantheon.
Three monks. Two each of magi and paladins. One wizard and one sorcerer. One cleric and one oracle. One psion. Two PoW-users, unless I missed someone, both on the archetype progression table.
TL;DR: Go read the thing. It’s not that long. (Yes it is.)
TL;DR2: 1e-era FR homebrew game using some old adventures here and there. Dreamscarred Path of War and Psionics are a go. Now go read the thing.
Hello! We am a collection of wriggling, squirming things that has hollowed out Samnell and uses him as a meat puppet. He is by far the least comfortable flesh sheath we have ever infested, but we all have our crosses to bear and Samnell’s quite low on the waiting list so I’m stuck here for a while. To entertain myself, I have decided to try my hand at a homebrew campaign which I have chosen to call for no particular reason that should absolutely not be taken as a hint to the major enemies, themes, or anything at all Against the Necromancers. I seek 4-6 players, with one slot already spoken for, so it’s 3-5.
What is Against the Necromancers?
Against the Necromancers is a homebrew campaign set in the North of the 1e-era Forgotten Realms, Sundabar specifically, but eventually going off the map. The current plan includes a mix of urban and wilderness adventure, some time in the Underdark, and the exploration of lands entirely new to the PCs. Many foes will be undead and/or necromancers, but I’ll be sure to include living things with other hobbies for you to meet and murder as well. You can expect to spend the usual amount of time battling, but also navigating wilderness, working your way through social situations and exploring trap-laden ruins. You will journey through snow-capped mountains, deep forests, cold deserts, and deadly jungles as well as underground and eventually on other planes.
A story runs through the intended adventures, what one might call a path, of my own design which incorporates my inventions and a fair amount of published material. Much of the direct inspiration comes from 1e and 2e D&D, with a fair helping of some pulp fiction that inspired them. The story is intended to be a narrative spine expanded through PC choices and player interests, tuning it to you as much as I can manage.
About the Setting:
You don’t need to be a Realms scholar to submit a character. If you are one, then you probably already know more or less what you need to. If you’re not, you should be able to get the gist from the religion, races, and Sundabar primers. They skew heavily toward characters who are natives or longtime residents of the North, particularly Sundabar itself, but PCs hailing from the farther-flung Realms are welcome too. Just ask if you want to know how things work with the PF rules or my take on a setting detail.
I have much more I can share, or produce to order, but there's always a temptation to overwrite these things into monstrosities no one will actually read.
Rules:
Ok, then, you want a chargen.
Ability Scores 25 point buy. You may reduce one score as low as 7 (before racial modifiers) to get more points to spend elsewhere. OR you may take 4d6 drop lowest. You can roll and then decide how you’d like to go. If you do roll and don’t get a net positive set of ability modifiers, you can junk it and roll until you do before deciding. If you choose the roll, there’s no limit to how low your scores can go.
Races Human, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, and elf characters are generally accepted in Sundabar and among the civilized people of the North. All these races have various canon ethnicities in Faerun. In past editions those ethnicities sometimes had different stats. Not so here. So far as PC races go, elves are elves, dwarves are dwarves, etc. The differences between them are cosmetic and cultural.
Half-orcs are possible, but would face serious RP difficulties unless they can easily pass as human. The long and short of it is that orcs are the overwhelming generational enemy of civilization in the North and Sundabar is right on the leading edge whenever a horde comes by. One did a fair bit of damage to the city just last year.
Because of the theme, I’ll also allow dhampir. Most people in the Realms (possibly including the character) would not know what a dhampir is and may interpret visible physical oddities as signs of orcish blood, demonic taint, or the result of some kind of divine or magical curse. Passing as human would avoid those issues, though people in the know who see you wilt under a cure light wounds may suspect the worst all the same.
Languages I hate the Common tongue. It is not a thing. The dominant language in Sundabar and the civilized human North is Illuskan, which you make take as a freebie in lieu of Common. Other major languages in the region include Dwarven, Bothii (the tongue of the Uthgardt barbarians), and Orc. They’re available as bonus languages from high intelligence. Illuskan and Dwarven share an alphabet, the Dethek runes.
Classes
This is a gestalt game, so you get two classes. Go nuts. No variant multiclassing since with gestalt you already get ubermulticlassing.
You may choose from any Paizo classes and archetypes, save that if you wish to play a summoner it needs to be an unchained one. Psychic magic is extremely unusual in the Realms. Psionics (see below) is somewhat more common, but still rare. The divinely empowered, except oracles, must choose a patron god. All PCs are encouraged to do so. Please see the religion primer for more details about how religion works in FR. If you’re interested in an FR deity not listed, get in touch and we can probably make that work. I have more information on deities available for those playing devotees.
The following provisos apply:
Nothing using firearms is appropriate because they haven’t been discovered in the Realms yet.
Asian-themed and flavored characters in general are a difficult sell because the North is far from FR’s nearest plausible Asia analog (Thay) and lacks Golarion’s circumpolar trade routes. But if you want to use the basic rules and re-flavor them for a more quasi-Northern European flair, I’m open to that.
I sense you are curious about third party products. Usually I say no out of hand, though I’ve made a few exceptions in the past when something was especially apt. Since I have more elbow room to work with here and FR has traditionally been home to some D&D content that Paizo has chosen to revisit in different ways, I have some third party permission for you. As always and as with Paizo content, I reserve the right to modify things if something looks out of whack.
Alignment No evils. PCs don’t have to be paladins or people who would love to hang out with paladins, but they should be indifferent-to-benevolent in general. Of course if you want to all be best of friends that's fine too. Just so long as disagreements among PCs can be settled in some kind of amicable way rather than go on for ever and make the game increasingly less fun for all. Friendly rivalry and belligerent friendships, so long as they really are amicable on both ends, are fine.
Dreamscarred Psionics is a-ok. Psionics is known as the Invisible Art. It’s rare but not so rare that a person reasonably educated in such things would be baffled by them. Psionics and magic are transparent to one another. To most unsophisticated people, psionics are threatening because they’re more subtle than magic...if they can tell the difference.
Dreamscarred’s Path of War is also a-ok because I loved that stuff in 3e. The various disciplines aren’t strongly associated with any particular set of cultural tropes, but rather answer to a multitude of flavors. If an Uthgardt barbarian uses a maneuver against you, he probably doesn’t think of it with some poetic name. He may understand it as invoking some kind of spirit, but could just as easily understand his tricks as just particular fighting moves he’s learned. By contrast, a dwarf may believe he channels Gorm Gulthyn or borrows from the might of earth elementals to become the rock that breaks the enemy’s charge. If an elf does some weird flippy floppy thing while singing, what else would you expect from elves? You can choose how your abilities are flavored.
Archetypes and feats that give other classes tastes of psionics and maneuvers are also cool.
Level Everyone starts at first level. It’s boring. Let’s do third. Max hp. Go nuts.
Gear To make things a little easier, this game will use Automatic Bonus Progression. You get all the bonuses the game expects you to have and the items that normally do those jobs don’t exist. I make one modification from the standard table: You may swap the progressions of physical and mental prowess to the one that works best for your PC, if you like. So a melee-oriented character can have +2 to a physical ability at 6th, then +2 to a mental at 7th rather than the other way around.
As per ABP rules, you only get half your normal wealth by level to go shopping with. You can buy what you like from that before we start. If you take skills and/or feats that let you make items, you can provide for yourself at crafting cost. You don’t have to roll for items you create before the game begins.
Traits You can choose two. If you want something attached to a Golarion deity or other flavor, we may be able to find an FR equivalent. You can take one drawback to get one more trait. You may have no more than one trait in a given category.
Backstory & Hooks:
I want a backstory. Give me at least a paragraph to get a sense of who your PC is, where they come from, and what they care about. Feel free to mine the primers for ideas. It doesn’t have to be a novel, but I should have a sense of the PC as a person.
It should also include why you feel obliged to the local temple of Tyr (god of justice) and Torm (god of duty) and inclined to them a big favor. You might be one of the faithful, an orphan raised in the temple, a recent convert...or maybe you owe them money or you’re doing this to get out of legal trouble. You might owe someone else in town and they traded your favor in for some consideration on the temple’s part. You could be buddies with a priest or taking on the debt of a friend who can’t pay it back just now.. Both faiths are largely lawful good and quite popular in Sundabar. They have extensive secular business interests that can cause entanglements. Feel free to be creative. If you think maybe you’re presuming too much or don’t have a good feel for them, let me know and we can talk it over.
If you’d rather not go quite that way, or would like to piggyback it, feel free to loot this for ideas:
The first adventure will send you to the village of Auvandell at the foot of Silverymoon Pass, three days to the northwest of Sundabar. It’s a fortified place set around an old dwarf tower that holds an impressive bell often used to warn the community of approaching perils. Legend holds that an ancient dwarf slew a dragon there and then built a hold. The belltower is all that remains. A few hundred years ago, Auvandell (by then a human community) fell under the influence of a dark power of mysterious origin. A band of adventurers, the Knights of the Silver Coursers, dispatched said evil seventy-five years past. All are now long gone, taken by the battle, orcs, and the press of winters, but PCs could be descendants, natives of the village who were stuck in Sundabar for the winter, people who know it as a waystation on the caravan route to Silverymoon, or have some other connection to the place. Or something you think up.
[spoiler=Norms & Expectations]
I hope to get about a post a day up, life permitting, but I will wait for players if you’re role-playing or something rather than steamrolling onward. In battles, I try to give three days before botting the PC and usually end up doing a bit longer. I am terrible at running your PCs. In said battles, I’ll usually give out the ACs of foes (and other defenses as you discover them) so you can flavor your own hits and misses because I am also terrible at that.
I don’t have a particular content rating in mind for this game. It’s not set in an especially horrible place, but it is still in a world where bad things happen. My natural inclination is for PG-13 and up, but it’s really something we’ll work out together. The goal isn’t to upset anyone RL or play the internet toughguy card of “You just can’t handle reality!” If something or someone goes over a line, I hope we can work it out to everyone’s satisfaction. The same applies to personality and style clashes between PCs and players. My goal is always an “everyone wins” ending, even if we might have to retcon and adjust a bit to manage.
With the possible exception of the opposition dominating someone’s PC and turning the character on the others, there will be no PVP.
Logistics!:
This game will use Roll20 for maps. We’re still a PBP, but I find it most convenient and easy to set things up for to manage fights. Exploration will happen there too courtesy of fog of war. Once we have a map it’s worth looking at, I’ll set you up with control of your own tokens to move around and generally have fun with.
Please format your PC using the normal Paizo statblock. It makes things much easier on my end.
Questions most welcome.
Submissions are due at 11:59 PM on July 17, a touch over seven days hence.
I've been thinking about Carrion Crown set in an alternate, late Enlightenment/Early Romantic Ustalav where the default, dominant magic system is psychic. Divine magic is believed in by the populace, but not something you could go down to the local heal-o-matic to pick up. The age of miracles was great and wondrous, but since the Whispering Tyrant was put away that age has ended. Arcane magic is considered synonymous with necromancy and almost completely proscribed. Maybe you have to do some seriously evil stuff to get access. It's fine for the Whispering Way or anybody else that wants to sacrifice a few virgins, but otherwise verboten. Maybe the secrets of the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye include some functional divine magic, if the party earn their trust.
Generally magic available to the PCs would be limited to the psychic magic classes and psychic-using archetypes of others, except for Alchemist (because Alchemy is Science!) and witchcraft (which is technically not ok by the church or local law, but friendly neighborhood witches have enough presence in remote communities to get a pass as long as they behave). Heavily playing up Pharasma as the state religion too, though not to the point of making the world monotheistic.
IC, Alchemy is a modern, secular, practical discipline you learn at university. It's Natural Philosophy and has a somewhat (and increasingly) tense relationship with traditionalists in the church. Some proponents are religious skeptics. Psychic magic may also be that a little, but has a more esoteric air and a somewhat closer relationship with the Pharasmin church. It's Enlightened Philosophy, which includes theology. Practitioners may tend more deistic. Stuff involving spirits would fit into a conceptual niche kind of like ghostbusting and harmless divination. Witchcraft would be conceptualized mostly as superstition, with practicing witches often presenting themselves as anti-witch experts or and fortune tellers.
The flavor sounds neat to me and it looks like the party would still have access to healing and most of the usual. Am I missing anything?
Day 1: Flamerule 19 in the Year of the Worm. (2,090th year of Gilgeam's rule) Flamerule is July.
Outside, the sand felt like dull coals; red would come by highsun. The wind from the south breathed like a furnace, throwing up dust and stealing the water from eyes and mouth. The blue dome of the heavens arched high above, clear and uncaring.
Those who had committed infamous crimes -stealing, sloth, disrespect, being convenient, screaming well- were bound to the stakes in the square, under the face of the Great God Gilgeam, to whom all are slaves. There, as every morning, Overseer Mattaki raised his lash in prayer and cut flesh and blood from their bodies. It flew in arcs across the sand. The naked slaves screamed and begged mercy. The usual crowd had gathered, laughing and shouting encouragement.
Zummabu made his home far from that, far even from his brother's house. Within a square of thick walls with bronze gates stood his tower and his tree. The insides of the walls bore basic carvings, a pair of shedim in relief, but they had been unfinished as long as most could remember. The artist had crossed the wrong person and left Dalath without warning. Some said otherwise, that he lived still in Zummabu's tower, trapped in an iron flask.
In the evenings Zummabu often sat beneath the tree branches, reading a scroll or lost in thought. He spent his mornings with his games, a half-dozen dragonchess sets carefully laid out and each move precisely recorded on an endless series of wax tablets. Every few months, he committed them to a scroll and had the tablets scraped. The games he played with Eannatum and Marenza changed the most often, sometimes with a move or more every tenday.
The afternoons, Zummabu reserved to his research. Sometimes he closeted himself in his casting chamber. Other days saw him in the laboratory. In either case, he was not to be disturbed. Only when he worked in his library did his household have leave to interrupt, for their own safety. Strange noises, smells, and occasional tremors had issued from the other chambers while the master was within.
The invitation to the wizard's casting chamber -an invitation even to his property!- came unexpectedly this morning. It stood at the very top of Zummabu's tower, where narrow windows looked down on Dalath. Here the painted mud brick gave way to bare walls, marked by many scorches. Only the rudest furniture occupied the room, a few tables and chairs very out of keeping with the wizard's preference for comfort. They were hard wood with leather stretched over the frame. Stepping into the room brought the skin alive, as if touched by a thousand pins, and despite Dalath's nearness no sound came through the windows.
Zummabu, a tall, spare man on the far side of middle age, greeted everyone politely and reserved himself to inconsequential pleasantries until all had arrived. Then he stood, smoothed his plain robe, and produced a small, black sphere. He whispered a word and released it. The sphere floated in midair, emitting a soft hum.
"We will not be overheard now," he said. "Not without knowing. If the sphere falls or shatters, then we have lost our privacy."
"My friends," the wizard said, not at all the way he usually addressed his property. "News has come to me. As you know, our god-tombs have long stood idle. Everything worth taking went out in grasping hands a generation ago, when I was away..." Zummabu's voice took on a harsh edge that he spared a moment to master. "Since then I have despaired of my work on a history of our empire. My correspondent Eannatum, of the City of Gems, sends word of a tomb sought but never found."
"This scroll came to me a month past. I sent back asking if he could learn more, but I fear time has run out. Four days ago, three strangers came to Dalath from Unthalass. My brother informs me that they think they have something to find in our hills. I can dally no longer; my research must begin now or end forever. I did not hope to thrust this upon you so urgently, but these strangers have forced my hand."
"They have come and gone once already. I ask of you, will you learn what they know? If they have been to this... The scroll calls it the Cairn of Whispers, but that cannot be the correct translation. If they have been there or know of it, I must know. If not, I believe I have enough lore now to set you about finding it. There you would explore and catalog it for me. Any artifacts, inscriptions, mosaics, everything that tells a story. I would go myself, but I cannot. Many in Dalath watch me. If they see me move, they will follow and may despoil anything that remains."
"I ask -I do not demand- you to undertake a dangerous quest. These adventurers may oppose you. If my lore holds true, the cairn itself may bring perils. If you will consent to be my eyes and ears then I will accept your service against those considerations which stand between us."
And here we are. I'm going to post the same stuff I did in the other one, but then I'll have a separate one with adaptation notes.
Here we are then. Some housekeeping things:
In getting your aliases together, I'd like you to throw some stats into the happy gray lines under your name for easy reference. It's a pain to remember how to get stuff to show up properly -I always forget- but the blanks display in this order: Gender, Class/Levels, Race.
Here's a premade blank for you. Just replace the x with your stuff. The three before perception are for any novel senses you have.
Gender:
HP x/x | AC xx, T xx, FF xx | CMD xx | F +x, R +x, W +x | Init +x | xxx; Perception +x
You can do your classes, races, etc too but those are the ones I'm going to need all the time. Generally defensive abilities (immunities, situational bonuses, etc) are more helpful for me there, because you'll remind me of your attacks on-demand. :)
A couple of things I would have put in the chargen but left out because I frontloaded so much:
As is probably expected, I'll be handwaving some stuff and skipping some incidental battles in the name of brevity. It's a long AP and it takes longer via posts. So there may be times where I just have you slay a bunch of random encounters off-screen, as it were.
Rolls
This appears to be a norm in PBP, but I'll say it anyway. So far as is reasonable, I want you to roll all your stuff. When there's a reactive roll or something, I'll do that but in the main you throw your own dice. It's more fun that way. I'll also be giving you the ACs and some other defensive abilities of foes up-front so you can roll against them in the course of your action. That gives you the chance to sell your hits or explain misses, which is something I'm often terrible with.
With things where you expect you may need a skill or other check but aren't sure, it's totally fine by me for you to roll in the post where you ask. That includes if you want to throw all your knowledges at it. I'll pick up the pertinent one or say why it doesn't apply. Occasionally I remember to anticipate those, but more often not. There are many of you and I am a degenerate parasite slowly eating Samnell's brain. :)
Formatting
When speaking IC, please bold text in addition to the quotation marks. That jumps out a bit more from the rest on what are visually fairly noisy boards. Similarly if putting a rules question or something like that in the same post with IC stuff, please use the ooc tags.
The game will use Minion rules in some fights. Here they are
Minions:
This game will use minion rules in the interests of speeding up fights. No unusual creature will be a minion on its first appearance. Foes become minions largely based on their story role, not anything intrinsic to them. The ten guards are probably minions. The two guys in really fancy armor with them probably are not.
1) Minions will die or be rendered unconscious on a hit by a PC. The PC decides which happens.
2) Minions cannot crit PCs.
3) If a minion fails a save, it’s out of the fight.
4) When in use, especially in mixed groups, I’ll try to mark out minion status so you can plan accordingly.
5) Minions will usually roll things in batches, always initiative and other stuff depending on how many there are and what seems cool at the time. Ten minion skeletons might all roll the same save vs. a fireball, for example.
6) If you want to keep a minion alive for questioning or whatever, you can do so by simple fiat. Say you want to and it happens. It’s even fine to change your mind if you were killing them all previously. The minion was just mostly dead.
7) Boss-type foes might have the ability to sacrifice minions to protect themselves.
And I think that's everything, which means I've forgotten much but it's now your job to remind me. Go go Team Waterdeep!
In getting your aliases together, I'd like you to throw some stats into the happy gray lines under your name for easy reference. It's a pain to remember how to get stuff to show up properly -I always forget- but the blanks display in this order: Gender, Class/Levels, Race.
Here's a premade blank for you. Just replace the x with your stuff. The three before perception are for any novel senses you have.
Gender:
HP x/x | AC xx, T xx, FF xx | CMD xx | F +x, R +x, W +x | Init +x | xxx; Perception +x
You can do your classes, races, etc too but those are the ones I'm going to need all the time. Generally defensive abilities (immunities, situational bonuses, etc) are more helpful for me there, because you'll remind me of your attacks on-demand. :)
A couple of things I would have put in the chargen but left out because I frontloaded so much:
As is probably expected, I'll be handwaving some stuff and skipping some incidental battles in the name of brevity. It's a long AP and it takes longer via posts. So there may be times where I just have you slay a bunch of random encounters off-screen, as it were.
Rolls
This appears to be a norm in PBP, but I'll say it anyway. So far as is reasonable, I want you to roll all your stuff. When there's a reactive roll or something, I'll do that but in the main you throw your own dice. It's more fun that way. I'll also be giving you the ACs and some other defensive abilities of foes up-front so you can roll against them in the course of your action. That gives you the chance to sell your hits or explain misses, which is something I'm often terrible with.
With things where you expect you may need a skill or other check but aren't sure, it's totally fine by me for you to roll in the post where you ask. That includes if you want to throw all your knowledges at it. I'll pick up the pertinent one or say why it doesn't apply. Occasionally I remember to anticipate those, but more often not. There are many of you and I am a degenerate parasite slowly eating Samnell's brain. :)
Formatting
When speaking IC, please bold text in addition to the quotation marks. That jumps out a bit more from the rest on what are visually fairly noisy boards. Similarly if putting a rules question or something like that in the same post with IC stuff, please use the ooc tags.
The game will use Minion rules in some fights. Here they are
Minions:
This game will use minion rules in the interests of speeding up fights. No unusual creature will be a minion on its first appearance. Foes become minions largely based on their story role, not anything intrinsic to them. The ten guards are probably minions. The two guys in really fancy armor with them probably are not.
1) Minions will die or be rendered unconscious on a hit by a PC. The PC decides which happens.
2) Minions cannot crit PCs.
3) If a minion fails a save, it’s out of the fight.
4) When in use, especially in mixed groups, I’ll try to mark out minion status so you can plan accordingly.
5) Minions will usually roll things in batches, always initiative and other stuff depending on how many there are and what seems cool at the time. Ten minion skeletons might all roll the same save vs. a fireball, for example.
6) If you want to keep a minion alive for questioning or whatever, you can do so by simple fiat. Say you want to and it happens. It’s even fine to change your mind if you were killing them all previously. The minion was just mostly dead.
7) Boss-type foes might have the ability to sacrifice minions to protect themselves.
And I think that's everything, which means I've forgotten much but it's now your job to remind me. Go go Team Unther!
In the perfumed arcade of the Garden of Wonders, Lord Teuman Bloodletter, Autarch of the Third Rank, seized the foreign woman Zalamandra by the throat, cursed her, and demanded his favorite. Adjoining the Veiled Corridor, dancers and snakes gyrated to the sonorous weave of cymbals and pipes. A floor below, free miners shoved one another aside to peer into the dark cell of a two-headed lamb.
One the street, a gang of enforcers screamed obscenities at a halfling slave, kicking it like a ball as it desperately cried to foreign gods for relief. Its prayers fell with its blood on uncaring dust. Drunken laughter rang from of shutters tied closed and locked doors. A bust of the Father of Victories looked on, uncaring.
Within a rude, two-tiered ziggurat across the square, filthy men with nothing to lose shouted hymns to the Crying God of the foreigners. They clutched scourges and lashed themselves, then begged Ishtar to spread her bounty as the blood fell. Outside, the skeletons of the last two high priests hung from obelisks bearing the name of Gilgaem the Great. They paid the price for the God-King’s indulgence and Lord Teuman’s wrath. At the altar, a hairy foreigner and a shaven-headed priestess preached with wild eyes as they scourged one another.
In the dusty square, under the blazing sun, two naked slaves scream for forgiveness as Enforcer Cit smiles and lashes each in turn. The Pit Lords look on look on, laughing and shouting encouragement. To one side, a scribe notes each lash on a wax tablet.
This is Dalath.
Hello! I am a brain-eating parasite which has burrowed into Samnell, eaten his brain, and wriggles around inside his flesh sack to make it move and soil itself. Some years ago, I ran Age of Worms as a PBEM. It was a lot of fun, but RL eventually got in the way for a good chunk of the group and things ground to a halt. I’ve regretted that ever since, so I thought it was worth another shot. My other PBPs are going pretty well and I want AoW for my birthday. With gestalt too, because gestalt is fun. To do that I need players. One spot is spoken for, but that leaves 3-5 more. I’m hoping to get about a substantive post a day, life permitting.
So this will be Age of Worms, but with some significant things worth knowing upfront.
Setting
I aim to run Age of Worms in an atypical corner of the Forgotten Realms: Unther. If you know your FR, I mean specifically pre-Time of Troubles Unther where the mad god-king Gilgeam is still on the throne and times are bad for everyone. If you don’t know your FR, then I mean fantasy theme park Babylonia literally ruled by a god-king who used to be a pretty solid strong ruler type but is now an out of touch tyrannical jackass everyone hates. Either way, he presides over a rump empire on the verge of collapse that has recently lost its second city to rebellion and doesn’t seem sure it can hire enough mercenaries to stand a good chance of retaking the place. I will not be using the normal FR setting adaptation, but rather writing my own.
You don’t need to know anything about FR, Unther, or Mesopotamian mythology to play. Nor am I deeply bent on keeping everything exact to FR canon. They’re inspirations, not lovely chains for fun times. I have other chains for that.
A Hard AP?
Age of Worms had that reputation back in the day. Between Pathfinder and gestalt, I’ve probably pushed back against that a bit. I’m not set on recreating the 3.5-era difficulty, but it’s likely that I’ll turn the volume up a bit all the same. I prefer close calls to murdering PCs; any lousy GM can murder PCs at will. But this is a game where death is possible, particularly given the rolls will all be out in the open. If your PC dies and you’d like to continue with the same character, I’ll be sure that you get reasonable means to resurrect them. I am cognizant of the risk of “hard” and “challenging” becoming a tedious grind only fun for the GM and will try to avoid going that far.
Content Advisory
I don’t plan to get graphic or lurid, except with the horrific violence we all know and love, but I do aim for a PG-13 to R rating for the game. This is less about sex or language than the fact that Untheric society is really terrible in a lot of ways that have RL resonance. It’s a deeply racist empire built on, and still practicing, slavery. I don’t aim to grind all the fun into the dirt with a mire of historically-inspired flavor about how bad this is, but I do study slavery and slavery-adjacent history and it’s likely there will be some bleed-through.
That said, if I do become upsetting or make you uncomfortable please let me know. I don’t intend this notice as an excuse I can throw in your face down the road, but rather as an acknowledgement that things may get dark in ways otherwise not expected. We all have different boundaries for that kind of thing.
Things to Keep in Mind, or What Passes for a Player’s Guide:
There’s no Player’s Guide for Age of Worms, so here are some things you should probably know:
Probably the entire game will take place in subtropical to tropical settings, including Unther’s near-desert and various jungles. These will pose some hazards for unprotected PCs in heavy armor.
Undead play a very prominent role in the campaign, particularly the kinds with those special attacks that makes them so dangerous. Dragons, including some quite really big ones, also factor into events but they don’t put on an appearance for a while.
Age of Worms has an investigation and archaeology kind of theme that I aspire to stress, in lieu of having NPCs tell you everything. PCs interested in digging up the forgotten or suppressed past should find much to do.
The Meaty Chargen:
Ability Scores
Use 25 point buy. You may reduce one score below 10, but to no lower than 8, before racial modifiers. Here’s a calculator to skip the tedium of working it out by hand.
Races
Going traditional here: core races only. You’re free to flavor your PC as hailing from one of the FR subraces, but mechanically they’re all Pathfinder elves, dwarves, halflings, and so forth.
The majority of Unther’s people are humans of Mulan descent, usually dark of hair and eyes and tend toward tall, slim builds. The upper classes customarily shave what little hair they have. They respect magic and learning, but tend to treat those who lack their ancestry and breeding with disdain. It’s a great point of pride to be of pure Untheric blood. The priesthoods of the native gods are strictly restricted to those who have and can prove their pedigree. The empire’s founding myth boasts of how the Mulan drove the Turami people from the land that became Unther and decrees them fit only for slavery. Mulan themselves are often slaves, but a Mulan who can prove pure enough blood must be freed unless enslaved for a notorious crime. Non-mulan humans may be mercenaries, traders, or slaves. In recent centuries, most are mercenaries.
Second to humans, the dwarves of Unther hail from the Smoking Mountains, or from the Great Rift far to the south. They tend toward darker coloration than the typical Mulan. Many are valued for their expert craftsmanship, particularly of stonework, and the Great Rift’s trade goods are very welcome in Untheric markets. Few dwarves are enslaved.
Halflings are the third most prominent race in Unther. The Mulan perceive halflings, who tend to share their coloration, as simply a stunted, somewhat deformed sort of human. Just over half the halfling population are enslaved and most Mulan presume any halfling they meet is someone’s property.
Elves, gnomes, and half-orcs rarely come to Unther except as mercenaries. The Mulan are indifferent to all save those of orc blood, whom they consider themselves under religious obligation to hate.
Classes
Any paizo class or archetype should be fine, excepting those featuring guns, technology, or with Asian-inspired flavor. Plus summoners and vigilantes are right out.
PCs who don’t fit into a broadly-construed Ancient Near Eastern theme should be foreigners, albeit foreigners who have lived in the Dalath area long enough to know roughly how things work. Patron deities for divines should be chosen from the Untheric pantheon or the prominent foreign gods in Unther, as detailed in the Religion spoiler. If you’re really set on playing with a different deity from the Forgotten Realms, let me know and we may be able to work something out.
A special note for those who may wish to be part of the priesthood of Gilgeam: Most Untheri loathe their god-king and his faith. The Martinets of the Father of Victories rule Unther through force and cruelty, so most Untheri will presume any bearing his sign to be bullying theocrats until thoroughly convinced otherwise. You can play one, but the role-playing challenge comes with it.
Be aware that the game will take place entirely in quite hot climates, so heavy armor might present some difficulties.
Gestalt? What’s Gestalt?
This is a gestalt game. It’s Pathfinder rules except for that. If you have a reasonable combination that you can meet the prerequisites for, you can have a prestige class on both sides of your gestalt. Rules you can be found here. The very short version is that you get to level two classes in parallel. Shore up a weakness. Double-down on a specialization. Play with neat combos. Have fun. If there’s any ambiguity about how classes smash together, ask away.
Alignment
You may play any non-evil alignment you like, provided that you do so in such a way that you’re able to get along with the group rather than work constantly at cross-purposes. Tension and disagreement are fine, but PCs should not constantly be seriously at odds or creating situations that make things routinely unfun for other players.
Gear
This game will use automatic bonus progression. That means your wealth by level will be halved, but you will receive built-in bonuses to model the standard magic items that the game assumes you get. However, the present bonus table slightly favors casters at the expense of martials. Instead of automatically getting your +2 ability score to a mental ability first you may choose to take either Physical Prowess or Mental Prowess when the opportunity arises. If you choose mental first, you follow the table as written. If you choose physical, swap the positions all the way down. So if you took physical prowess at 6th level, your 7th level bonus is mental prowess, and so forth.
Starting out, PCs get with the maximum gold specified for their class (if they differ, choose the better of the two) to spend on gear, keep, give to poor orphans, or whatever else you’d like. You can stretch that gold (but not the orphans) further through the use of crafting skills. Assume all pre-game rolls are successful. During the game, item crafting and item crafting feats are fair game. There will be periods when you are not racing any particular clock and can take time out to invest in making things and other pursuits.
Languages
There is no common tongue as such. The dominant language of Unther is Untheric, which is written in its own set of characters. If you have a different native language, you get Untheric as a freebie on top. Both the language and the characters have changed dramatically over the milennia, to the point where Ancient Untheric is no longer comprehensible to untrained modern speakers, but may be chosen through the Linguistic skill. Priests of the native gods of Unther may take the tongue for one of their bonus languages from high intelligence.
The major languages of Unther’s human neighbors are Aglarondan (spoken across the sea and far to the north, where Unther once ruled), Chessentan (to the northwest, where Unther also once ruled, and by a majority of the mercenaries), and Mulhorandi (to the east, the lands of Unther’s ancient ally) and Shaaran (spoken on the endless plains to the South). Many Untheri also learn dwarven and halfling, though few admit to the latter. All are suitable bonus languages for Untheri PCs.
Traits
Everyone loves traits. I believe traits may be secretly trying to take over the world through the corruption of our precious bodily fluids. Your PC may take two traits, one of which must be a campaign trait. Rather than try to write my own slate of campaign traits, which I am terrible at, you can choose any campaign trait you like provided it makes sense for Unther or is easily adapted. Feel free to rifle through the Dalath primer for ideas. This trait should also represent how you are indebted or connected to Zummabu, the Wizard of of Dalath and inclined to do him a possibly dangerous favor of two.
You may take one additional trait in exchange for taking a drawback.
Roll20
For my sanity, this game will use Roll20 for battle maps. It’s otherwise a standard PBP. The tabletop is there for convenience and because it’s infinitely less fiddly than trying to get things working on a Google Drawing or something like that. When fights do come I’ll resolve them more or less like one would around a table, just like if we were in the room together and you could see the parasite’s tendrils leaking out of my ears. My preference is for you to do the great majority of the rolls on behalf of your PC, which seems to be the PBP norm.
Books you can draw from?
Let’s keep it to Paizo only. I might grant a modest exception here or there for something that fits the theme and setting really well, but I’m not going to sign on to learn whole new rules subsystems, classes, or other things on that scale.
Backstory
PCs should be either natives or longtime residents of Dalath who are somehow obliged or indebted to Zummabu, the local wizard. Maybe he paid your debts. Maybe your family owes him a large favor. He might own you or have taken you as an apprentice. However it’s come about (you tell me), Zummabu’s asked you and several others to come together and help him with a potentially dangerous project. For what it’s worth, Zummabu is a pretty nice guy even to people who he has a hold over. Someone in Unther has to be.
You can write as much as you like. I’ll be looking for who the PC is, how they behave, what their values are, how well they fit into Unther and Dalath, and how they seem likely to mesh with others. I place much more stock in this than I do in strict mechanical considerations. If a non-traditional party emerges, that’s just as good as the classic fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard to me and I’ll adjust things accordingly.
A Very Brief Guide to Dalath:
Dalath sits in the foothills of the Smoking Mountains, next to a small lake long since poisoned by effluvia from the mines. Numerous ancient tombs dot the hills, all dating back to Unther’s ancient past. Many believe the Old Gods themselves rest somewhere nearby, but none has ever found their final abodes. The tombs were forgotten for many centuries, until prospectors struck gold. In short order, Dalath sprang up to supply the mines being driven into the earth and then the looters who came for the rediscovered tombs. More than a generation has passed since then, with the tombs emptied and the mines slowly playing out. Once more than two dozen companies operated in the region, but now only six remain.
To the north, past the lake and across a short stretch of plains, one finds the tangled Methwood full of savage lizardmen and, the stories say, dragons. Unther maintains several outposts along the fringe of the jungle, which manage an uneasy peace with the lizard tribes. Farther still, past the Riders to the Sky Mountains, lay the city-states of Chessenta and sandy march of Threskel that Unther lost to rebellion long ago.
Days to the east, the road takes travelers to Unthalass, the City of Gems and seat of the Empire. It stands on the shore of the poison waters, where the River of Metals flows into it. There also flows Dalath’s trade, the ores and occasional gemstones still pulled from the Pits. In Unthalass, the mad God-King Gilgeam rules from his high ziggurat, great and terrible. He has not departed it and shown his face to the people made to be his slaves in centuries.
Authority Figures Lord Teuman Bloodletter rules Dalath in the name of the God-King, but everyone knows that he cannot oppose the Pit Lords who rule the mines and supply Dalath’s wealth. Many believe his brother, Zummabu guards what little authority Teuman has with his spells. Others say that the Pit Lords [i]Semmik, most loathsome of the lot, and the dwarf lord Ragnolin Dourstone would have swept Teuman and Zummabu aside years ago if they could ever set aside their intense feud. The other Pit Lords are caught in a complicated game of playing them off each other and Lord Teuman, which has claimed more than one fortune.
Local Places of Worship The Two Tears Dedicated to Ishtar and the foreign god Ilmater, this temple draws in many of Dalath’s locals. The priest and priestess preach against the Pit Lords and preside over services centered around self-flagellation, in the belief that righteous blood will make the land bloom and free all from the toil of the mines. Lately, many of their exhortations speak of a dark, writhing time ahead. Dalath’s authorities consider the temple a threat to good order and have executed several previous high priests and priestesses.
The House of War, within the local garrison, serves the god of the foreign mercenaries: Tempus. A fair number of Dalath’s residents find the warlike message of the foreign god more appealing than Gilgeam’s dogma and make their way to the edge of town to worship with the soldiers.
The Twilight Monastery Two hours north of Dalath, the monastery is a somber place where a small band of aesthetics and mystics follow the memory of the Old Gods who died long ago. Many believe them mad, but they insist that the dead gods sometimes stir in their tombs and give their blessings. The monks keep to themselves, appearing around Dalath mostly to see to the graveyard and sell herbs that they believe grant sacred visions.
The Teeth of the Storm Three hours from Dalath, a circle of stones shaped by no hand rise on a hill. When the storms come, lightning lashes each and they glow with inner fire. A small community of woodsmen and priests of Ramman live nearby, coming to Dalath but rarely.
Secular Establishments The Bed of Ishtar is a house of pleasure staffed by women who claim the goddess’ favor and practice the arts of the moon. Some serve as acolytes at The Two Tears. Most know the business as a cheaper version of the Veiled Corridor.
The Garden of Wonders is Dalath’s preeminent den of vice and other amusements, chiefly staffed by foreigners. The finest prostitutes ply their trade in its Veiled Corridor, catering to only the town’s wealthiest. Any who can meet the small entry fee might come to gawk at the Beast Man of the North, the Demon Boy in his cage, the contortionist, the dancing girls and boys, and the sword-swallowing pyromancer. They might go off to a quiet corner and have the blind woman read their future in her cards, or crowd to see the two-headed calf. Cockfights, gambling, and more go on every night.
The God’s Pit is the largest of Dalath’s dives. Men and women come to drink and partake of rougher bloodsports. The pit in the middle of the floor holds dogfights and cockfights, but most who come for more than drink come to see wrestling beneath the stern face of Gilgeam. Nothing promises a fair fight, and the patrons often turn on old favorites or pelt the contenders with bottles, knives, chairs, or whatever else comes to hand to make the matches more interesting. The law rarely takes note of those who die within the Pit.
The Lapis Plate caters to those who care for a quiet night and exquisite cuisine and don’t care how much they pay. The Lord, Pit Lords, and a few others supply most of its custom.
Lugal’s caters to a more refined crowd, fans of the foreign game Dragonchess. One comes here for sedate amusement, either playing themselves or wagering on the games of others amid civilized conversation. For many, the conversation holds more interest than the game. The uncouth and poor are not welcome.
The Spinning Knife fills with off-duty soldiers from the garrison every night, entertained by the best music to be heard in Dalath. Fights are rare -soldiers so inclined go to the Pit, or at least take it outside- and outsiders are welcome, so long as they give way to warriors and impugn neither the arts of steel nor the Lord of Battles.
Zummabu’s Tower stands toward the edge of town. Lord Teuman’s brother lives within, appearing rarely except to lend his authority to official pronouncements. A walled garden surrounds it. Therein stands Dalath’s only tree. The wizard conducts most of his business through his slave, Iva.
Religion in Unther:
Mortals are the slaves of the gods. This weak clay, subject to all the woes of life, has no reason but to feel the foot of the Lords of Heaven, to taste each stroke of the lash, to burn in undying wrath, and look on those who set the earth and sky in their places and tremble in awe. These are Unther’s native gods.
Gilgaem
Portfolio: Strength, athletic prowess (especially wrestling), the sky, battle, cities, the land of Unther
Alignments: LN, LE
Symbol: A red fist on a sunburst, in a black lozenge
Domains: Air, Law (Tyranny), Strength, War
Weapon: Heavy mace
On his Ziggurat that holds the firmament, stands Gilgaem the Great, Master of War, Father of Unnumbered Victories, Supreme Ruler of Unther, of Chessenta, of Threskel, and Chondath, Turmish, Conqueror, Emptier of the Shaar, Scourge of the Yuir. He smote Tiamat, broke her back in his hands and slew her and made her his. He took Assuran in his arms and threw the Doombringer from Unther, and the Lord of the Three Thunders struck the firmament and broke it open. The Outer Waters fell and made the Great Sea. The god-king speaks and the Outer Waters shake with the echo of his voice on the firmament. His name is Might and Rule. His words are the Chain of Law. The god-king speaks: “I am All Religion, I am All Worship, none may breath in Unther without blessing me.”
Ishtar
Portfolio: Weather, Rivers, the Harvest, Love, Marriage, Magic, War
Alignments: LG, LN, NG, N, CG, CN
Symbol: A woman’s hand gripping a glowing crystal rod
Domains: Charm, Good, Healing, Magic, Water
Weapon: Quarterstaff
Ishtar of the Sweet Waters, Wife to the Earth, her bountiful womb is the spring of all rivers. With her flail she reaps endless harvests. Many are her lovers, few who can meet her passion and not be consumed. Need kindles in all who fall under her gaze. Those she takes dig seven mighty pits and raise seven raise high towers, for She Who Mounts holds the goad and whip in her hands. She fits each to the halter and makes steeds of them. Her pleasure is the soft rain from the sky. When she yearns, her lust burns and consumes the land. She knows the secrets of the moon. Her wrath is a lion’s, falling on all who slight her.
Ramman
Portfolio: War, Thunder, Rain, Storms
Alignments: LN, NG, N, NE, CN
Symbol: A cloud pierced by a lightning bolt
Domains: Air, Destruction, Glory, Protection, Weather
Weapon: Spear
Ramman the Thunder is the hard rain. His feet stand on the mountains. His lance is ten lightnings. His passing is the west wind. His word is the lion’s roar. His strength is the charging bull. His wrath tears trees from the earth and makes the walls fall. His waters overflow the banks and drown cities. His light burns the unrighteous. His anger blackens the sun. He knows all secrets and puts them in the liver of the ram, in the oil on water, and his gale moves the stars.
The Dead Gods
Long ago, many gods stood in the Heavens. They marched to war with their people, smote the gods of the orcs and were smote by them. Enlil the King bore his Rod, the Breaker of Chains, his Might, against Gruumsh in the beginning of the world. The Orcgod threw his axe against the Rod and the great blow broke it in seven. The tip, with the Old King’s might, pierced Gruumsh the Orcgod and stole his eye so he is called One Eye, but the shards flew across the field and smote seven gods with all the power of the Old King that was spent. There died Girru the Flame; Inanna, Mother of Ishtar; Ki, Untouchable Queen of Beasts and the Green Earth; Marduk, Tiamat’s bane, who spoke the Law; Nanna-Sin the Moon with an Axe of Night; Nergal who feasted on the dead and carried plague on his shield; and Utu the Sun. Enlil decreed that they lay in god-tombs, but his might had passed. As the workers sealed the last tomb, he set aside his rule, named Gilgeam the King his successor, and passed from the circle of the world.
The God of the Rebels Tiamat
Portfolio: Dragons, reptiles, greed, revolution, revenge
Alignments: Any (Tiamat has no paladins)
Symbol: A five-headed dragon
Domains: Air, Evil, Law, Liberation, Scalykind (Dragon)
Weapon: Heavy Pick
Centuries of neglect, misrule, decline, and divine madness have broken the faith of many in the traditional gods of the Empire. Instead, they turn to the Nemesis of the Gods, Tiamat the Thrice-Slain. She promises them she will tear Unther down raise it high again with the secrets of rebirth. Worship of Tiamat is death under the laws of Unther, preferably by torture.
Foreign Gods
Outsiders, chiefly mercenaries, have brought these faiths to Unther of the centuries. They are foreign and strange, but the madness of the God-King and the impotence of Ishtar and Ramman’s faiths under his law have driven some to embrace the ways of the strangers. Foreign gods are technically illegal, but save for sporadic repression and token reprisals the law is rarely enforced. When Gilgeam’s priests want a scapegoat, they frequently look to the priests of these alien faiths.
All of these are the familiar Forgotten Realms deities. I can provide more information if necessary. The main foreign gods worshipped in Unther are Mystra (mostly popular among dissident wizards), and Tempus (the mercenaries’ most prominent god). Ilmater’s faith is quite rare in Unther, but the Crying God has recently taken hold in Dalath. I’ve omitted some popular faiths that aren’t PC-appropriate.
Mystra
Portfolio: Magic, spells
Alignments: LG, LN, LE, NG, N, NE
Symbol: A blue-white star
Domains: Law, Knowledge, Magic, Runes
Weapon: shiruken
Tempus
Portfolio: War, battle, warriors
Alignments: CG, CN, CE
Symbol: A blazing silver sword on a blood-red shield
Domains: Chaos, Protection, Strength, War
Weapon: Battleaxe
Recruitment ends at 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Friday, October 14th.
Ulfar Blackhands lived in a hut three miles from Torch; he did not like to get closer than that. Where sunset burned in the earth, atop Black Hill, none should walk. Those who did would carry its curse and come to bad ends.
The hut, which Blackhands had made large over many years, sat in the midst of a rowan grove that also held his goats. All along the edge, he made his mark on the trees and hung the skulls of rats, squirrels, deer, and other wildlife to warn those who came unasked. Ulfar stood apart, respected by many but loved by few.
More skulls, together with bones, stones, and fetishes of sticks tied together hung from the overhanging hut's branch and bough roof. They would stir in the wind, sometimes in the other direction from how it blew. Sometimes they seemed to speak, but only Ulfar knew what they said.
Those who came inside found the walls hung with skins. In the winter, the skins would have fur. In the summer, now, Blackhands hung tanned hides. No hide of a speaking race ever marked Blackhands' wall, except for one in the shape of swollen hand. Many stories said how the hand came to Ulfar's hut. It came from a man who asked of him what only flesh could pay. It came from a child, a thief, who tried to slit his throat in the night. It was all that remained of a son or daughter. He took it from the wise man who taught him. The Blackhands would not say. He let the hand speak for itself.
Just now, Ulfar stood over his firepit, stirring the coals with his much-carved staff. A ram's skull hung from the other end, swinging as he did his work. Blackhands was a very old man, thin so you could count his ribs. His hair and beard hung down to his waist. He wore little in the summer, nothing at all when he stood on his cloud rock and read the sky. Now a breechclout covered him and he wore twine in rows down his wrists, each piece with a kind of charm hanging from it. Teeth, fingernails, bits of bone, gems, berries. His hands were as black as his name promised, the color of coal with red cracks that glistened.
Ulfar stirred his coals firepit for a long time, not speaking. He called you here and waited for all to come in silence. Then proceeded in further silence. The Blackhands would not be rushed.
"The sunset that burns the earth has died," he said, finally. "If only that happened, it would be good. In my dream, I saw seven-and-ten ravens devour a man. The ground shook with his screams. A white goat was born with two heads. It died. The clouds make signs and move away. The bones whisper; they are very awake now."
"I said to myself 'what do these things mean?'. The sunset in the hill is gone. The men and women of Torch have no livelihood. The metal men will come for their tribute and find none. In Torch, they know this. They will fine the tribute or they will be it. None want to slave for the metal men. They will go looking, and go soon, to find slaves to replace them. They will take their bad people, but it will not be enough. They will look to the free people. They must do this thing, whether they want it or not."
Ulfar stared into the pit for a while, not moving.
"It is not good that they touch the sunset in the hill. It burns their spirits. But they are not the metal men. Where the metal men go, all become slaves. They work the Dark Arts and put metal things into you, then you are them. You become a thing. If Torch does not come for us, then they will. They may dig what must be left buried; it is their way. Torch does not do that."
Ulfar fell silent again, turning his head to look at Torch through the wall of his hut.
"My dreams tell more. I see a woman who is not a woman, holding the sunset in the hill. She is smiling. I see a metal man, his body rust and flame. He screams and people run. I see a dead man breathing smoke. I see another woman who is dead and not dead, and broken in many parts; with pieces of her missing. I see a spider and a night that hates and has skin. I see a man made of lightning that goes in straight lines and cannot turn. I do not know what those dreams mean."
Hello there, players. I am the machine that you stick posts into and make fun come out. But we are all a part of the machine. It is around us and inside us and doing strange things to our houseplants.
If you haven't already, please get your alias set up and toss the big, important stats like ACs up in the happy gray text under your names for ease of reference. I'll be cobbling together some dice roll macros in due course as well. They're mostly for my convenience, but will be right up on the campaign info page if you want to have your saves or whatever pre-typed.
I will be sending you each a PM with the link to set you up for the Roll20 thingabob quite shortly. It should take no more than a handy little click to get you set.
So, while I'm doing that everybody can say hi and all that weird social stuff that humans are supposed to do. Or so I am told. I would not know. I am a parasite that burrowed into Samnell and ate his insides. But also he didn't know either.
There is a chance that I will not have the Gameplay thread up tonight due to feeling slightly under the weather, but if not it'll be around tomorrow.
I have probably forgotten something, but if I have not then I am wrong. If I am wrong about being wrong, please set me wrong. Or right. However that works.
Aaaaaand I mistakenly sent you all the wrong map link. That'll get you to the page but not make you a player. Sending a new round of PMs now.
Hello, I am a dangerous parasite which has hollowed out Samnell and uses him as a meat puppet. I propose to run a themed, gestalt Iron Gods game. One spot is spoken for, so I require 3-5 PCs first level PCs to bring us to a nice 4-6 total.
The theme, you say? The most important part of the theme is where my friends hollow you out and use you as a meat p- Sorry, I mean that Numeria is already a lot like Thundarr the Barbarian or Conan, so why not push it a little further in that direction? This is Barbaric Iron Gods! Step into a strange world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. Be the heroes that burst their bonds to fight against all the hated workers of the Dark Arts! Rar!
Who the hell do you think you are?:
I the hell think I am a dangerous parasite which has hollowed out Samnell. In the course of doing so I have gained all of his powers, most particularly his epic cause to be modest, but also his ability to run two PBPs that the players seem to enjoy and many PBEMs before that. I also know quite a few things about the nineteenth century United States, particularly horrible things about slavery. So much slavery.
The theme in detail, or How to Barbarian:
All PCs should be somewhat barbaric, which in this case means they would fit well into a Conan story or Thundarr episode. The latter is somewhat more permissive, given how using magic in Conan generally makes you a villain. Thundarr ran around with a princess who knew magic and a feline Chewbacca. That’s a bit more PF-friendly, but I know a cartoon from the early 80s is the more obscure references despite the Jack Kirby character designs.
None of this necessarily means you’ve got to be a current member of a barbarian tribe or you need to take levels in the class, but I’m looking for characters with minimal “book learning” and other trappings of civilization. You don’t have to be innocent of cities and their ways but PCs should understand themselves as personally apart from it even if they have frequent dealings with the settled types.
Numerian barbarians are usually humans of Kellid stock, but many tribes will take in or tolerate other races and ethnicities. They may also have varying degrees of toleration for non-members who behave themselves and just hang out. The big cultural values, aside general barbarism stuff, are a very strong distrust of technology and certain forms of magic. Both of these are accursed and dark arts, associated respectively with great dangers best left buried and forgotten and the evils of the oppressive Technic League. They steal lives and twist souls.
Note that one’s barbarism isn’t necessarily an eternal state. PCs can change their minds about things or be corrupted by the strange ways of cityfolk as the game goes on. Maybe the process has already begun.
Rules Stuff:
To help achieve the theme, chargen options are missing some of the usual mainstays and otherwise tweaked around.
Ability Scores
Use 25 point buy. You may reduce one score below 10, but to no lower than 8, before racial modifiers. Here’s a calculator to skip the tedium of working it out by hand.
Both androids and ratfolk have significant populations in Numeria, but warrant some special considerations: The Technic League considers androids things, specifically things which are their personal property to do with as they will. Barbarians tend to distrust them but aren’t uniformly hostile. Ratfolk are generally seen as disreputable but not inherently evil.
Variant racial features are a-ok, provided they’re Paizo-written.
Classes
This list is meant to be complete, but I can’t survey every available archetype and concept. Archetypes which are conventionally scholarly are generally out. When in doubt, ask.
Gestalt? What’s Gestalt?
It’s a school of psychology popular in the- Oh right, for the game. Old 3e variant rule you can find here. The very short version is that you get to level two classes in parallel. Shore up a weakness. Double-down on a specialization. Play with neat combos. Have fun. If there’s any ambiguity about how classes smash together, ask away.
Alignment
You may play any non-evil alignment you like, provided that you do so in such a way that you’re able to get along with the group rather than work constantly at cross-purposes. Tension and disagreement are fine, but PCs should not constantly be seriously at odds or creating situations that make things routinely unfun for other PCs.
Hit Points
Take your maximum at every level.
Gear
This game will use automatic bonus progression. That means your wealth by level will be halved, but you will receive built-in bonuses to model the standard magic items that the game assumes you get. However, the present bonus table slightly favors casters at the expense of martials. Instead of automatically getting your +2 ability score to a mental ability first you may choose to take either Physical Prowess or Mental Prowess when the opportunity arises. If you choose mental first, you follow the table as written. If you choose physical, swap the positions all the way down. So if you took physical prowess at 6th level, your 7th level bonus is mental prowess, and so forth.
Starting out, PCs get with the maximum gold specified for their class (if they differ, choose the better of the two) to spend on gear, keep, give to poor orphans, or whatever else you’d like. You can stretch that gold (but not the orphans) further through the use of crafting skills. Assume all pre-game rolls are successful. During the game, item crafting and item crafting feats are fair game. There will be periods when you are not racing any particular clock and can take time out to invest in making things and other pursuits. This may include technological items in due course, but probably not for quite a while, and even when it becomes an option you can’t make your own lab but rather must use one you gain access to in-game.
Technology and You
There’s a lot of technology in this AP, as there is in Numeria. However, the useful stuff tends to be kept under tight wraps by the Technic League, who are strongly inclined to persecute those who deal in technology without their sanction. A certain number of outsiders have gained mastery of its secrets without their knowledge or distant from their centers of power, but such skills are rare and ill-favored by barbaric sorts. As such, you cannot begin play with the Technologist feat. You may select it beginning at fifth level. If you select the Local Ties, Numerian Archaeologist, or Stargazer campaign traits, you may instead take the feat beginning at third level.
Also, at least for the early part of the game, useful technological items will be available to you only through finding them in the course of your adventures. Later on you may be able to buy them. Likewise, you can’t begin play with technology-oriented spells, other feats, etc except for the campaign traits.
Numerian Goo and You
There’s this sludge you can drink in-game which may give you temporary or permanent powers, horribly addict you, and/or maim you as permanently as access to divine magic allows. You’re free to drink it any time you come across the stuff but you will be playing the lottery when you do. There’s also a 1% chance it’ll kill you. The full table of results is here.
Languages
I am not a fan of the worldwide common tongue. It’s weird, gamey, and tends to devalue investment in learning local languages. It doesn’t exist in this game. Instead, every PC begins play speaking Hallit. If it’s not your native tongue, then it’s a free bonus language above and beyond any your intelligence, race, and so forth entitle you to. This is the tongue of the Kellid tribes. Civilized Numerians usually speak Taldane, which anybody may take as a bonus language from high intelligence. No one may begin play speaking Androffan, unless they take the Numerian Archaeologist campaign trait. Others may devote Linguistics ranks to learning it once they have been exposed to the tongue in-game.
Traits
Everyone loves traits. I believe traits may be secretly trying to take over the world through the corruption of our precious bodily fluids. Your PC may take two traits, one of which must be a campaign trait from the Player’s Guide. To better fit the theme of this game, the following traits deserve special consideration in your background:
Local Ties, Numerian Archaeologist, and Stargazer: These traits represent knowledge your PC has acquired which most barbarians strongly disfavor. It might have come to you as described in the text, but it might also have been forced on you through strange dreams or traumatic experiences, manifesting as flashes of things you ought not know and things you didn’t consciously realize you could do. Maybe it’s even things you learned before rejecting civilization. Your backstory should explain how your PC came upon the knowledge and what they think of it. Do they hide it from others? Revel in it? Revealing your knowledge to barbarous Numerians will negatively affect their opinion of you, shifting it toward hostile by one step, though this can be remedied through roleplay and interaction skills.
You may take one additional trait in exchange for taking a drawback.
Books you can draw from?
Let’s keep it to Paizo only. I might grant a modest exception here or there for something that fits the theme and setting really well, but I’m not going to sign on to learn whole new rules subsystems, classes, or other things on that scale.
Minions Rules:
This game will use minion rules in the interests of speeding up fights. No unusual creature will be a minion on its first appearance. Foes become minions largely based on their story role, not anything intrinsic to them. The ten guards are probably minions. The two guys in really fancy armor with them probably are not.
1) Minions will die or be rendered unconscious on a hit by a PC. The PC decides which happens.
2) Minions cannot crit PCs.
3) If a minion fails a save, it’s out of the fight.
4) When in use, especially in mixed groups, I’ll try to mark out minion status so you can plan accordingly.
5) Minions will usually roll things in batches, always initiative and other stuff depending on how many there are and what seems cool at the time. Ten minion skeletons might all roll the same save vs. a fireball, for example.
6) If you want to keep a minion alive for questioning or whatever, you can do so by simple fiat. Say you want to and it happens. It’s even fine to change your mind if you were killing them all previously. The minion was just mostly dead.
7) Boss-type foes might have the ability to sacrifice minions to protect themselves.
Backstory & Hook:
Every PC should come with a backstory that gives me a rough idea of who your character is and where they come from. This game will use a slightly different hook from the one in the published adventures, which you should also keep in mind for writing it. It doesn’t have to be a novel. If you can do it in a paragraph, then that’s fine. Backstories are the primary factor, though not the only, factor in which PCs I choose.
What's the Hook, then?
For whatever reason -tell me in your backstory- PCs all either strongly respect or feel beholden to Ulfar Burnhands, a wise man and shaman who advises the free people of the region about Torch. He knows you to be capable sorts and has called for you to attend him on a grave matter. The game will begin with you answering this summons.
Norms & Procedures:
I am to get one substantive, plot-moving post out per day. It’s inevitable that I’ll miss it sometimes, but that’s the goal. If it’s been roughly that long and I haven’t heard from you, I may bot your PC in the interests of keeping things moving. I know from experience that it’s really easy to get into a waiting loop in online games.
This game will be run as a PBP all the way, but will also use Roll20 for battle maps. This lets you control your own PC and move them as you like, just as if we had minis out on a real table. If you’ve never used it before, that’s fine. It’s browser-based and doesn’t require any installation on your part. I’ll PM you an invite link when the time comes and connect your account to your token. From your end, everything but that first time through should be a simple matter of dragging and dropping.
Please list key stats (current/total hit points, ACs, saves, initiative, perception) on the little text bar under your alias. You can include more if you want, but those are the big ones that I’ll likely need from everyone all at once and rather often so having them in the thread is very convenient.
I’ll roll combat-beginning things like perception and initiative, as well as anything else that would benefit from immediate resolution. So if I throw a fireball at you, I’ll roll the saves. You are free, and encouraged, to write flavor text for how you dodged and made your save or how you failed to do so. Likewise ACs and some other all-or-nothing defenses will be known to you when you get into a fight so you can flavor how your attacks miss or hit as I am exceptionally bad at that. I’ll do all these rolls in the open using the dice commands. I’ll bury the lot of them in a spoiler and put descriptive text outside it to avoid making walls of numbers. That does mean that the dice gods may cruelly frown upon you, even lethally. If your PC dies, you are not out of the game. Means to raise the dead (and possibly technological variants) will be available if needed. If you’d rather, you can also make a new PC.
I’ve tried some initiative variants in my other games, but they tend to hose PCs who rely on a decent chance at going first. For this game I’m going to try to do it vanilla-style. When a fight starts, I’ll roll the initiatives and resolve actions in order just like would happen around a table.
I’ll be giving out loot in this game pegged to the ABP values, so half normal, probably in the main through just ignoring things that ABP covers. Once I give it out in a loot post, that loot becomes the party’s responsibility to track. How you want to set that up is up to you. I’ve seen games do well with spreadsheets and games that did just as well with a simple procedure of take what you want and automatically sell the rest. My only requirement after I give you the goodies is that things are managed amicably.
PC submissions are due in at midnight, EDT, on Sunday, July 24, one week hence.
Hello! That stuff up in the thread title? That's the stuff. But you want more stuff. Who doesn't? So let me explain the Kansas-Nebraska Act and-
Right then, wrong stuff. You're probably reading this because you want to hear about a game with openings. I have two lovely openings in my gestalt, (soonish to be) mythic WotR game thanks to RL interference. The party are just starting their second foray into the Gray Garrison, so I rate them 75-80% done with the first book. All the chargen stuff from here still applies, unless I've forgotten something, save that you're making a fourth level gestalt PC now instead of a first level one.
The present party roster:
Galin (half-elf warpriest/fighter)
Steave (aasimar brawler/paladin)
Theran (human barbarian/oracle)
Yridhrennor (elf wizard/arcanist)
The players have expressed an interest in securing a sneaky type, so I will weigh that more heavily, but there are two spots open so if you're interested in the game but not the role there's definitely room for other concepts.
Should you want a sense for how the game operates or how awful a GM I am, to better minister to the needs of the Samnell-shaped voodoo dolls I'm sure everybody has several of, you can also check out the gameplay and discussion threads.
I'll take applications until midnight, EDT, July 7, a week from this posting and select the two that seem like they'll fit best with the group.
So that's the stuff. Be sure to ask if anything's unclear, confusing, or uncertain. I love to destroy questions with the power of answers.
Five years could be as long or short a time as circumstance dictated, but it had come and gone. The lure of home and old promise alike drew five natives and one new friend toward Solace as agreed long ago.
Though they searched diligently, none found sign of gods any truer than those the Seekers and others preached. None commanded the wonders that Ansalon beheld before the old gods turned away and the ruin of the world. Faith died countless deaths, one heart at a time as a shadow devoured the two moons, the black flame woke, the red flame swept the plains, the trees wept blood, the earth shook, and the sky fell.
But the Innfellows had only found what many had before them. They would come home and see old friends again. If they could not have triumph to share, then reunion had its own rewards.
Caitlyn, Jakun, and Thistletorp:
As the long distance to Solace shrank, anticipation grew. Just as the first house-bearing vallenwoods peeked out from amid the trees, you come around a bend in the road and find the way blocked by armsmen bearing the nine-pointed star of the Highseeker's militia. Two of them had a farmer's cart stopped, searching through its contents while the driver and a passenger stood by under the close eye of other guards. Another pair stood apart, looking down the road. One held the chain of a vicious hound.
You're about two hundred yards distant and the guards don't appear to have seen you just yet.
Gavin, Mariel, and Tania:
Solace loomed nearer and nearer, but the forest still blocked its view. The road passed through a spot where the trees and underbrush pressed especially close, swallowing up much of the horizon and throwing long shadows.
As you proceed toward home, Gavin spots rustling in the bushes one one side of the road, against the breeze, and the telltale glint of steel in the fading light on the other.
Opening with two separate scenes. I tried to keep the groups even but still put backstory companions together. If you weren't traveling with so and so otherwise, you can assume that you met on the road earlier today.
Hi, players. Here's the discussion thread, where we can handle heavy OOC stuff and other such blather. A few things.
Automatic Bonus Progression We talked about it a bit in the recruitment thread and I said I'd raise it here. If you're generally of a mind to switch over to that, I'm cool with it. I'd go with the sense of the party, since I think it would end up confusing for all of us in the long run if some PCs used it and some didn't.
Some Canon Notes I looked through the backstories and wanted to set a few things down more clearly before we dove in. These aren't huge deals, I just want us all on the same setting page. Which does not have a number because it's a metaphorical page. Not one of the numbered ones the Solamnics use to wrangle their codpieces.
1) The Dragonarmies are not presently common knowledge anywhere around Abanasinia. They are active, and about to become much more so, but unless your PC was on the far end of the continent in the last two or three years it's very unlikely that you've heard anything except vague rumors about some kind of war out in the east.
2) Even if you have heard of the dragonarmies, nobody has seen a dragon in living memory. It's been about 1300 years, so even very old elves don't have any firsthand knowledge of them. Most people think they've either all died or were a myth from the beginning.
3) You are, of course, sans divine magic for the present. Even the devout of the Old Gods aren't so gifted yet. I think everyone's clear on that, but it's worth a mention considering how things will go. :)
Hook Stuff I am using the "gone five years looking for signs of gods" deal. It doesn't have to be a literal five years and you needn't have gone far, but rather than have some PCs start up while others have to wait for the story to get going I'm going to run with the idea that the appointed day of meeting is at hand. If you've been back in town for a while, then you were out of town for some reason for a fair part of the day and are on your way back in for the big reunion.
I don't think any of that should pinch backstories too hard.
Aliases! Please set up your aliases if you haven't already. Sheets on the profile page, etc. If you're not sure what I'm looking for there, here's an example from my other PBP.
Formatting Stuff I'd like for you to use quotation marks and bold text for things your PC says aloud. They help it stand out better and distinguish from thoughts, which you can put in italics if you mean them to be word-for-word. Stage directions, description, etc, can go in as regular text. Use the ooc tags for rules questions, clarification, etc.
For example:
Samnell flounced into the tavern and whined, "This guy's historiography sucks! Honestly, I'd rather read proslavery propaganda."There is something deeply wrong with me.
Good? Questions? We've got a whole thread here for 'em. :)
Hello! I’m Samnell or I have hollowed out his body and wear his skin as clothing, which is pretty much the same thing. Inspired by this thread over here, I’ve decided to give running the Dragonlance series a go. Cool? Cool.
GM in search of 4-6 PCs (and matching players) to play the Dragonlance saga. I have three spots spoken for from the thread where I got the idea. They got me excited about it, so it would be rude to shut them out. The spoken-for spots go to a player interested in a cleric, a wizard or knight, and a rogue or bard. But that’s only half to three-quarters of a party. Probably half, given the odds, but who knows? The closer I get to six, the less worried I am about having a classic or semi-classic balanced party.
But here’s some stuff.
The Dragonlance series? What?:
Yes. The original 1980s adventure epic involving the warring, riding, and lancing of various dragons. The ones with the kender, the Solamnic Knights, and the weird-eyed wizard in dire need of a lozenge.
I have the originals and started off reading through them in the course of deciding to do this, but learned after reading the first adventure in both versions that the 00s update is faithful right down to word-for-word passages and seemed to have no substantive changes to the story. So I’ll be drawing mostly from that. They don’t seem to have left anything out, except some dated presentation that I can’t say I miss. It’s not fair to compare thirty year old adventures with modern stuff, of course. I’m just more used to how adventures have been written in the past fifteen years or so and thus find it much easier to navigate.
Canon and associated PCs:
If you’re interested in this game, you probably know the story. It’s been thirty years, right? The series started before I entered kindergarten. The whole thing comes with premade PCs that have all the familiar names and probably act like the characters in the novels to most of us. That’s cool and all, but insisting upon all of that wouldn’t make for much of a game. For purposes of this game, those PCs largely do not exist. Your PCs will take their places and be the Heroes of the Lance. You are not, by and large, obligated to follow their choices. Your PCs are your PCs. We’re here to game, not play canon police. It’s fine, of course, to be inspired by a canon PC in creating your own. I am not the boss of your brain.
With regard to the canon PCs, I say “largely” replaced because a few of them on the fringes of the core group may still show up as NPCs and serve as occasional supporting players. It’s still your story. They’re just visiting.
With regard to the canon choices, I’ll be honest: The DL series has very set start and end points to scenarios and isn’t especially fault-tolerant. Within a scenario you can explore alternate options. Individual adventures can be more open-ended than the series’ reputation suggests, but sometimes they do live up to it. You don’t have to go where the plot appears to demand, but there is a limit to how far off-script one can go and how long one can remain there. This is much more like an adventure path than a sandbox. It demands a bit of playing along. While it might seem more abrupt than usual (and if you’ve ever read any of the adventures, you’ll know it gets heavy-handed) I’ll do my best to keep it within the normal social contract inherent in an adventure path.
That said, there are occasions where choices are forced. I’ll do what I can to mitigate them and try to make the choices seem reasonable in-character. This includes at least a few occasions where the party are scripted to lose fights and get taken prisoner. For the times I’ve looked closely at in advance, there seem to be ways around the foregone conclusion and they will be available to the party without breaking the plot.
But there’s a big one you can’t really dodge: About a third of the way through the main narrative, which is a very long RL time off, a party split is forced. The party remains split for the back half of the adventure path, only coming back together for the big conclusion. The two halves of the story proceed on different ends of the continent and run concurrently in-world. I plan to let the players decide how to best handle that and to pick where they go rather than imposing the choice upon you. The party will fission into two roughly equal-sized half parties, who then get augmented with new characters and/or NPCs taken over by players. We’ll work out the logistics when the time comes. If no one is really interested in one of the plot forks, I’ll skip it and you’ll all go with the one you prefer. What has to happen to keep things going, I’ll handwave as proceeding offscreen.
Will I make changes?:
Oh yes. I’m not going to turn Takhisis into a good guy, but it’s inherent in GMing that I’ll adjust things to taste (mine and the group’s), to suit the party’s abilities, and in the interests of fun as well as to accommodate the medium. I’m not a massive fan of comic relief and gully dwarves make me a little bit uneasy. That doesn’t mean either will be absent, but I’ll probably tone them down a bit. It’s fine for you to like them and all, but if you’ve just got to have the all-gully dwarf laugh parade then I’m probably not going to give you what you want in a game. No hard feelings.
PBPs are slow, so I’ll definitely be outright skipping some encounters, rolling others together, and handling others through brief narrative references like “You slay several parties of draconians on your way to the outhouse.” I’ll narrate through small potatoes stuff, not plot-critical elements or your first fight against a cool new monster. I might make reference to injuries suffered and healed in narration, but consider all that dealt with by virtual resources that don’t really count against you.
Divine Magic:
The deal at the start of the AP is that the real gods either pitched a fit, and a mountain, at Krynn and abandoned it for centuries or the people of Krynn turned against them and they respected the choice. The latter is technically the canon version, but as you might have guessed I’m open to alternative readings of events. The details don’t matter so much as the consequence: nobody has cast a divine spell or worked any species of gods-given miracle for three hundred years. All clerics, druids, and so forth are heathens who lack the knowledge and possibly the inclination to follow the true gods. As such they don’t get any magical abilities, period.
That sucks, right? Who wants to play a spell-less cleric? Possibly no one, but if someone does want to take one for the team then I’m ok with that. However, know going in that the divine blackout ends at the conclusion of the first adventure and you will have limited healing access before then via a plot device. When the blackout ends, you’ll have the option of an epiphany that permits you to swap any and all of your existing levels for levels in a divine spellcasting class. So you can play something else that fits your concept and then trade up if that’s your thing, rather than being stuck with a class missing class features for a goodly while.
The Hook
I would normally tack this on the end of the post, or at least spoiler it, but it asks a bit more than usual of you in the way of backstory and concept so I want to put it up here. The initial conceit of the game is that the party already know one another and all grew up in or around the town of Solace in Abanasinia, the latter of which I am extremely likely to misspell. Its unofficial nickname is Misspelled Ethiopia because I am a dork. Anyway, about five years back, the plucky youngsters left home on various business. They were all nominally looking for signs of the true gods, but may have had other things in mind too. Now they’re coming home, as agreed beforehand, to share what they know with one another. Nobody found the true gods just yet. It’s totally fine, and encouraged, if you and another PC spent all or part of the five years abroad together.
Solace is a majority-human place and not particularly diverse. It is at a crossroads and has trade with elves and dwarves, as well as kender crawling around, but it’s not really home to many unusual races. Even some otherwise normal Dragonlance races would be unusual. There’ll be a full list in the chargen.
Are you out of luck if you want to play something unusual? Not really. The easiest way to do that would be for your PC to meet and befriend one of the Solace crowd in their travels and come back with them. Or your friend from Solace could have died at some point, but you came to let his hometown know and get caught up in things. I’m open to suggestions.
I think that hits all the high notes of stuff you really ought to know upfront, so let’s get into some chargen stuff.
Chargen:
25 point buy. You may lower one score below 10, before racial modifiers, but don’t go too crazy with it. Feel free to avail yourself of the calculator here.
Level: PCs begin the game at 5th level. You will advance on hitting key plot points, not by xp accumulation.
Gear: You know what, I hate keeping track of gear. I bet you do too. This game will use virtual gearing. Every level you get an allowance, in gp, which you can spend on whatever gear you like provided that it’s not breaking some setting provision. (They’re fresh out of healing potions.) Whenever you level, your allowance increases and you can reconfigure your armament. You can also do so in any sufficiently large city, given a bit of downtime. You still need to track your burning through scrolls, wands, and other items with limited uses because they can run out in the wild, but when you have the ability to replenish you can replace them. If you choose to take item creation feats and/or craft skills, you can charge yourself with only the cost to craft of items you make for yourself. If you want, you can even use the skills for others. In that case, the crafting cost would come out of their budget.
Looting will mostly reveal plot devices and story information, since it’s all abstracted. However, from time to time I might give you something of in-world significance. Plot devices don’t count against your gear total, but more ordinary cool things may. It’ll be decided on a case-by-case basis. There are situations where the adventures obviously give you something to help out with a tough boss fight, usually a single-use item. I wouldn’t charge those against you. But a cool sword that’s basically a normal magic item with a good backstory? That probably would. It’s something we can talk through when the occasion arises.
This isn’t the most realistic thing around, but it skips almost all the discussions about who gets what or whether or not people are about even and it does so with very little overhead. You’re just responsible for tracking your own PC, which you would do anyway. :)
Allowed Races: human, hill dwarf, Qualinesti elf, half-elf, kender. The dwarves and elves use the PRD/PH rules. There are other kinds of dwarf and elf, but they would be more unusual in Solace and need a bit more explaining. Likewise minotaurs, which live on the far corner of Ansalon from Solace. Goblinoid sorts would be an especially hard sell.
If you need rules for one of the Krynn-specific races, let me know and I can hook you up. I’m using the versions in the 3.5 campaign setting.
Allowed Classes: Rather than make a big list, let me lay out some general points. If a class doesn’t run afoul of them, you should be good to go. If you’re not sure, please ask. I rarely bite. Also remember that divine spellcasters can’t cast spells yet.
No guns.
No Asian-themed classes.
No occult classes.
No spontaneous arcane spellcasting...except for bards. (There’s a minor continuity snarl with regard to bards, since they were very different in the 1e that DL was written for. The books have “bards” of a sort going way back, so this is my compromise. The Order of High Sorcery does not consider bardcraft within their purview. Bards cannot cast healing magic.)
No summoners.
You can play non-wizard, prepared arcane spellcasters but the Order of High Sorcery would understand them as under its purview and treat those who didn’t cooperate, take their Test, and enroll as dangerous renegades. No such character can cast any cure X wounds or other healing spell, but they can retain the rest of their spell list.
Alignment
Dragonlance is a pretty goody-good sort of story. PCs are generally assumed to be altruistic. However, it’s a goody-good story that also has as a major trope that evil turns on itself. The most famous character from the novels is a guy who starts off neutral and turns evil, but still proves an asset to the party most of the time. As long as your PC can work well enough with the other PCs and you’re not stomping on one another’s fun, I don’t particularly mind if someone wants to play neutral and/or evil. It will, however, necessarily fall on you to figure out why your PC is still on the side of the angels in this particular case. Maybe you just like the party more than you do the bad guys.
Languages
I can provide a list if necessary, but there’s one axe I’m going to grind here. The continent-wide common tongue that everyone grows up speaking drives me nuts. It’s a gaming abstraction, I know, but it’s an abstraction that gets in the way of a lot of flavor. Languages are pretty easy to acquire in PF, so I don’t think removing Common hurts too much. The dominant language of trade and commerce in Abanasinia is Abanasinian. Everyone gets it for free, no matter where you’re from. Other languages will be useful in-game, and you can probably guess or already know several of them. I don’t intend to hassle you endlessly about language matters, but now and then you might need to find an interpreter or use some magic to communicate.
Hit Points
Let’s keep it simple: take your maximum at every level.
Backstory
Give me a paragraph or so of text telling me about your PC, how they came to Solace, and what kind of person they are. You can write more if you want. This is how I’ll get a sense for who might go well with the party and who might clash badly, as well as interesting dynamics that might emerge. Other than the backstory, I only know a PC by stats and they’re rarely eloquent on such matters.
Various House Rules:
Initiative and Fights
I learned in my other PBP that trying to do individual resolutions of actions in fights bogged things down very badly and most players soon lost track of what was happening. So here’s how it’ll go: Whenever a fight begins, I’ll roll the initiatives for everyone. The PCs, and any combatant friendlies, will then have their rolls averaged together to give a group initiative. Same for the bad guys. This group initiative decides who goes first, you or the opposition. I’ll resolve individual actions together in order of posting, unless someone declares a delay, either all the good guys first or all the bad guys first, depending on the outcome of the group rolls. It’s not quite as granular as tabletop, but I found out in my other game that it was much easier for PCs to coordinate actions together and made a lot of intuitive sense to most people.
After every resolution, I’ll post up a due date for actions. Usually it’s about two days hence. If you haven’t posted a declaration by the time it rolls around, I may bot your PC for the round to keep things going.
Curse of the Magic
This is a variant rule from the 3e campaign setting. In the books, characters using arcane magic often have it take a lot out of them. To model this, whenever a character casts an arcane spell the character must roll a Fortitude Save, DC 10+spell level. If you succeed, you’re fine. On a failure, you become Fatigued. Fail again while fatigued and you’re exhausted. Fail while exhausted and you fall unconscious. These states can be remedied through rest or with restorative magic.
Given the low DC, I think this will be mostly a flavor thing unless you purposefully build for it. If it seems too intrusive or fun-ruining, let me know and we can discuss the issue. I think it’s cool, but I’m not married to it.
Norms and Expectations:
Most of this is probably pretty standard.
I will share battlemaps via Roll20. I don’t think you need to sign up for an account to view; there’ll be a link above the thread when the time comes. If you’re not familiar, Roll20 is a handy virtual tabletop that works through your browser. If you want to make accounts, then I can attach your PC token to your account so you can move yourself around the battle. It also facilitates fog of war and such very nicely, which makes for easy exploration and battle set-up. No other method I’ve used to do those things online has been half so easy to manage. It’s even got little health bars to help you keep track of friends and foes. Doing those chores used to be the absolute worst when I ran games online. I understand that not everyone loves it, but I rate the thing an essential tool.
I plan for a post a day or thereabouts. If it’s been roughly that long and I haven’t heard from you, I may bot your PC in the interests of keeping things moving. I know from experience that it’s really easy to get into a waiting loop in online games.
Please list key stats (current/total hit points, ACs, saves, initiative, perception) on the little text bar under your alias. You can include more if you want, but those are the big ones that I’ll likely need from everyone all at once and rather often so having them in the thread is very convenient.
I’ll roll combat-beginning things like perception and initiative, as well as anything else that would benefit from immediate resolution. So if I throw a fireball at you, I’ll roll the saves. You are free, and encouraged, to write flavor text for how you dodged and made your save or how you failed to do so. I’ll do all these rolls in the open using the dice commands, but bury the lot of them in a spoiler and just put descriptive text outside it to avoid making walls of numbers. That does mean that the dice gods may cruelly frown upon you, even lethally, but I’ll try to minimize fatalities. Story-driven games tend to rot when from within with too much cast turnover.
When you do something that requires a roll from an NPC, like casting a hostile spell, I’ll roll that save. There are too many conditional bonuses, resistances, and immunities that might come into play to frontload a listing of them all and at times the PCs should be surprised by them. When foes come loaded with buffing spells and the like, I will do my best to remember to indicate that in their descriptions under the premise that active magical effects in close proximity generally have some visible manifestation.
I will be more forthcoming with ACs, as they tend to be all-or-nothing affairs. If I forget, feel free to remind me. Thus you should ordinarily be able to resolve things requiring attack rolls in the post with your declaration. You’re encouraged to flavor your hits and misses how you like. Most of the time, I plan to outright give you the hit point totals of your targets so you can know right away if you did them in or not. For important NPCs and monsters, I’ll keep the hit point total hidden but plan to give you general descriptors of their condition like “unharmed” and “near death”.
Please try to get along, at least so far as the game threads go, OOC. We’re going to be spending a fair bit of time together.
I will probably screw it up. Be patient. :)
I’ll take submissions until 11:59 PM, Eastern Standard Time, on November 17. That’s a week from today, more or less.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? That’s what the thread’s for. :)
Hi, I'm Samnell and I study middle nineteenth century US history.
I'm here to correct some frequent errors in the pop culture-oriented understanding of the Civil War. In most cases, seeing through them requires no more than an exercise of the dark arts of reading. I think this covers everything in the late eruption, but let me know if I forgot something. I tried to be thorough, which necessarily makes this long. I've culled the misinformation from a recent post and years of rather tedious experience, but it was asked that this be taken to another thread. So here we are.
Claim: The war wasn't about slavery at all!
Answer: It would be dishonest to call this anything short of a lie, whether spoken consciously or repeated unwittingly.
If the war wasn't about slavery then nobody ever told the Confederates. Four rebel states passed official statements of their causes when they passed their ordinances of secession. Each one was drafted by the body authorized by the voters of the state to decide whether or not they would attempt to leave the United States, voted on by that body, and published as a public statement of their reasons. These documents are revealing and ought to be read in full. I'll link to each in turn. Here they are in order of secession ordinance:
South Carolina noted that in ratifying the Constitution, the states placed themselves under various obligations.
South Carolina wrote:
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
Without this, the Fugitive Slave Clause, South Carolina held that it would not have ratified. And for a while, the system worked. If your slave ran off, you could go and get your slave back from another state. But the times? They were a-changing:
South Carolina wrote:
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
I don't know how much more plainly one can say this. There's a great deal of throat clearing about the nature of the nation as understood by South Carolina as of December, 1860, but it says in black and white that the free states are increasingly hostile to slavery and have disregarded their obligation to aid in the return of fugitive slaves, therefore South Carolina is free to secede. This isn't something that the secession convention made up after a really epic bender down in Charleston, but rather a straight out fact. Back in the 1840s, the Taney Court ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that while enslavers had a right to cross state lines and seize the human property that dared steal itself from them, the states did not have an affirmative duty to facilitate that. They could pass laws barring the use of state facilities or the cooperation of state law enforcement in the recovery and rendition of slaves. These laws are usually referred to collectively as Personal Liberty Laws. The states that SC names did just that.
The slave states, always and only exponents of states rights when the right was slavery and always and defenders of the unlimited power of the federal government to suppress any species of state sovereignty employed to impede slavery or in any way threaten the right to hold slave property, had in fact demanded the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to overrule all of those laws, expanding the power of the national government to the degree that refusal to cooperate in slave renditions became a crime and providing the power for a slave catching expedition to deputize you on the spot to help. If you refused, you were guilty of that crime. This is a slave patrol draft.
But South Carolina had more sweeping grievances than Personal Liberty Laws ten years dead, or even the fact that after several high profile renditions and a few dramatic rescues had practically nullified the Fugitive Slave Act by 1854. (The last major rendition, that of Anthony Burns from Boston, literally required the Pierce administration to call out the Army and Navy.)
South Carolina wrote:
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
Let me break those out for you:
1) the free states assumed that they had a say in whether or not slave states should have slaves
2) the free states deny that a right to property in slaves exists
3) the free states denounce slavery as sinful
4) the free states have permitted societies that condemn slavery, encouraging slave revolt and absconding
5) those socieities have gone and done just that, to the tune of thousands of slaves, and distributed antislavery materials which prompt slaves to revolt
Furthermore, South Carolina held that the free states in their perfidy elected an antislavery president:
South Carolina wrote:
Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This deed, South Carolina insisted, was done
South Carolina wrote:
in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
They let black people vote, even!
I've handled South Carolina's declaration in some detail. I don't intend to replicate this with the others because the grievances are largely the same.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That's the opening paragraph, incidentally.
Florida and Alabama came next, but neither published a declaration like the first two did. A document exists for Florida, but it's not clear if it was ever officially approved and so we can't ascribe to it the same imprimatur we would to the others.
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them
The reference to equal enjoyment of the territories refers most explicitly to the matter of Kansas, where a proslavery government elected by massive fraud abetted by lynching, tarring and feathering, and all manner of other violence and threats of the same, contended with a free state government that seeing actual Kansans virtually written out of their own governance, established their own. But territorial grievances go all the way back to the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery from the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a corner of Minnesota. They continued in the Missouri Controversy, which was settled by letting Missouri have slavery essentially in perpetuity but excluding it from all other states formed from the Louisiana Purchase south of its southern border.
The subject erupted again during the debates over the annexation of Texas, which was not done by treaty in part because Texas claimed a vast swath of territory (most of which it had never exercised any control over) and practiced slavery. This would include land north of the Missouri Compromise line. Texas annexation brought the Mexican War in due course, which resulted in more territory. Most of that territory ran below the Missouri Compromise line. But remember what I said about the Lousiana Purchase? The Mexican Cession was not that and slavery had been abolished in Mexico decades before. So David Wilmot (D-PA) proposed, in the famous Wilmot Proviso, that the same language that kept slavery form the Northwest Territory be applied to the Mexican Cession. The South was outraged and the outrage got worse when they found gold in California and consequently it had sufficient population for statehood almost overnight. The Californians voted overwhelmingly not to have slavery. The eventual settlement for all of this brought the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, let California come in undivided and free rather than split or with slavery imposed upon it, and left the status of New Mexico and Utah carefully ambiguous. Both territories instituted slavery in the late 1850s.
Which brings us to 1854 and Kansas. I'll spare you the really interesting and somewhat complicated story unless someone wants to know, but the short version is that as the price for opening up Kansas to white settlement a collection of Southern politicians demanded that the Missouri Compromise be struck down and slavery permitted everywhere not yet a state. They go their way, under the fig leaf of "popular sovereignty". The argument was that the people of the territory would decide one way or another, but this was instituted to and understood by all parties as meaning that the people, who already had the power to vote slavery in when they became states, would now have the power to also vote it in earlier. It was ambiguous as to whether or not slavery existed in a jurisdiction by default and freedom had to be voted in, or the other way around. In actual practice, slavery was a creature of state law that national law recognized somewhat inconsistently, but Southerners routinely maintained that slaves were property and like all other property was guaranteed by the Constitution.
In overthrowing thirty years settled law, a sectional compromise that most understood as absolutely fixed and inviolate, the South and its northern allies outraged even men in the North who had rarely ever given slavery a thought before. They instituted a party to redress this, the Republicans. They came close to winning the 1856 election and did win in 1860.
This brings us to Texas, the last Lower South state to act.
Texas wrote:
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
[...]
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions-- a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Don't believe him? He was there. But I sense you want more data. The states trying to bolt the United States send commissioners to other state states to try to convince them to join the party. These men made speeches and wrote letters that, as official communications from states lobbying other states, we should understand as similarly expressions of reasons why states would wished to quit the nation. Even when they address states that did not ultimately secede, their appeals inherently reflect what they think should induce a state to follow their lead and why the states appointing them took chose the course they did.
Having watched with painful anxiety the growth, power, and encroachments of anti-slaveryism, and anticipating for the party held together by this sentiment of hostility to the rights and institutions of the Southern people a probable success, too fatally realized, in the recent Presidential election, the General Assembly of Alabama, on the 24th of February, 1860, adopted joint resolutions providing, on the happening of such a contingency, for a convention of the State "to consider, determine, and do whatever the rights, interests, and honor of Alabama require to be done for their protection."
[...]
The bare fact that the party is sectional and hostile to the South is a full justification for the precautionary steps taken by Alabama to provide for the escape of her citizens from the peril and dishonor of submission to its rule. Superadded to the sectional hostility the fanaticism of a sentiment which has become a controlling political force, giving ascendancy in every Northern State, and the avowed purpose, as disclosed in party creeds, declarations of editors, and utterances of representative men, of securing the diminution of slavery in the States and placing it in the course of ultimate extinction, and the South would merit the punishment of the simple if she passed on and provided no security against the imminent danger.
[...]
They [Republicans] refuse to recognize our rights of property in slaves, to make a division of the territory, to deprive themselves of their assumed constitutional power to abolish slavery in the Territories or District of Columbia, to increase the efficiency of the fugitive slave law, or make provision for the compensation of the owners of runaway or stolen slaves, or place in the hands of the South any protection against the rapacity of an unscrupulous majority.
[...]
The sentiment of the sinfulness of slavery seems to be embedded in the Northern conscience. An infidel theory has corrupted the Northern heart. A French orator said the people of England once changed their religion by act of Parliament. Whether true or not, it is not probable that the settled convictions at the North, intensely adverse to slavery, can be changed by Congressional resolutions or constitutional amendments.
Have you noticed any common themes yet?
Claim: Lincoln fought to return fugitive slaves to the South.
Answer: Untrue. Lincoln declared in his first inaugural, addressing himself to the South and hoping to avoid bloodshed, pledged that while he personally objectived to the Fugitive Slave Act, he understood it as his duty as president to enforce it. He did this as an olive branch to forstall violence among whites, not because he thought slavery was totally awesome and it was right for slaves to be with their enslavers.
He said so:
Lincoln wrote:
I take the official oath to-day with no mental reservations and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or laws by any hypercritical rules; and while I do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed than to violate any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.
Furthermore, when slaves did arrive at United States lines and owners sought to recover them, no clear policy at first existed. Some were returned on the authority of officers on hand, but Benjamin Butler declared absconded slaves contraband of war as their labor would be used to support the rebellion. Therefore, the Army had the power in time of war to seize them and hold them without compensation to deny their labor to the enemy. This soon became official policy and thereafter the advance of US Armies routinely resulted in slaves coming to those lines to seek their freedom, however tenuous it might then be.
Claim: Lincoln fought to keep slavery as is.
Answer: Misleading. Lincoln declared that he had no intention to meddle with slavery where it already existed. This was the standard position of the Republican party, which was not an abolitionist outfit demanding the immediate end of slavery and, often, some kind of racial equality. It was an antislavery party interested in the limiting and ultimate extinction of slavery, something which they estimated may take a century or more. They proposed to do this in chief by restricting slavery in the territories, where Republicans believed that the national government had the power to do so, which would confine the institution to slowly wither and die away in the South as it had in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. Southerners understood this and repeatedly identified the restriction on slavery in the territories as pernicious to their section's future. This led to demands for a federal slave code to institute bondage officially in every territory in the nation, which hit the Democratic convention of 1860 and split it in half. Twice. Thus Stephen A. Douglas ran for president as a Democrat and got the support of a state and a half (Missouri and part of New Jersey) while John Breckinridge ran as a Democrat in the South and swept the Lower South cotton states.
Claim: Lincoln suppressed the Maryland legislature, preventing them from meeting.
Answer: Untrue. The security of Maryland is obviously vital to the integrity of the nation, as it surrounds Washington on three sides, with Virginia over the Potomac on the fourth. Virginia's fate was already decided, but Maryland's was not. However, the governor had not called the Maryland legislature into session and the legislature was not then sitting.
However, it appeared in the spring of 1861 that Maryland might have an active insurrection. It included tobacco country on the east side of the Chesapeake and in the state's southern reaches that was pro-Confederate. The loyalty of Baltimore was suspect as well, and there we soon had a problem. The railroads leading to washington went through Baltimore, but did not connect directly. The first armed units answering Lincoln's call to put down the insurrection had to disembark and march through town to board a second train. A mob shadowed the 6th Massachusetts on that path and eventually attacked it. They threw stones, bricks, and eventually drew guns. Under apparent attack, some of the soldiers opened fire without orders. Four of them and twelve Baltimore residents didn't make it out alive. The four soldiers were not the first deaths of the war, technically. During the surrender of Fort Sumter, a cannon exploded during a salute and killed a man. But these were the first combat deaths of the war.
It looked like this was going to happen again and again. Baltimore's mayor and chief of police, both Confederate sympathizers, applead to Maryland's governor for permission to destroy the rail bridges that carried soldiers in from Philadelphia and Harrisburg. He reluctantly agreed. Secessionists tore town telegraph lines linking the capital with the rest of the nation as well. For days, no news could get through and it looked in Washington like they had an enemy army active to their north. Public buildings were fortified in expectation of attack.
A few tense days passed, but then the 7th New York arrived, with more trains behind it. They took a long route, via Annapolis, and only arrived because Benjamin Butler (the contraband guy) got word of the bridges being out and disembarked his troops ahead of the break in the line. He seized a steamboat, landed his men at Annapolis, and railway workers in his ranks repaired the damaged tracks.
Martial law was imposed on Baltimore, but given all this you can hardly blame anyone but the secessionists for it. At this point, the governor finally called the legislature. He expected bad news, but the legislature contented itself with a pro forma denunciation of war, a claim of state neutrality, and outright refused to either debate an ordinance of secession or to call a secession convention for the job.
So first off there's nothing to suppress, since no legislature in session. Then when one gets into session in mid-May, it doesn't consider any such thing as rebellion.
I realize that this isn't the actual claim most recently offered up on the Paizo boards, but it's a common one so I wanted to address it before and as context for getting into the next. It seems our resident neo-Confederates can't even get their bad history correctly bad.
Claim: The Maryland legislature was going to revoke Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus.
Answer: Garbled nonsense. Whatever you think of Lincoln's suspension of the Great Writ, the Maryland legislature had no such power and, at any rate, do not appear to have tried to assert one. At least the dates are right. Lincoln suspended the writ on April 27. I must note, however, that Lincoln did not suspend the writ everywhere, or even everywhere in Maryland. He did so in response to news that pro-Confederate Marylanders were going to burn railroad bridges and tear up tracks connecting Washington to the rest of the North, thereby obstructing troop movement into the capital. Since they did just that, one can see where he's coming from.
One of those guys, John Merryman, was arrested for his involvement in wrecking transport and communications. He had the cash for a lawyer, as well as serving as a lieutenant in a Confederate cavalry unit. (They helped him burn the bridges.) Merryman's lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus from Roger Taney, of Dred Scott fame. This was not a Supreme Court decision. Taney acted in his capacity as a circuit court judge. Back in the day, Supreme Court justices spent most of the year doing that duty.
Taney denied that Lincoln had the right to suspend the writ at all, noting the provision that authorized it in cases of rebellion was in the article on the Congress. No Congress was then in session. (The 37th Congress met in special session from March 4 until March 28, but then adjourned until July 4.) Furthermore, the line is a clear emergency power and does not in itself specify that Congress must suspend the writ to suspend it, only that it may be suspended.
Lincoln refused to comply with Taney's ruling, arguing when Congress got back that he had a real emergency on his hands and could not afford to wait a few months for Congress to get back together given the situation he faced in April. Was he supposed to let the entire government fall to an insurrection to secure a single provision of its constitution? Merryman was released seven weeks later, incidentally.
There's a bit more going on here, but this is the essential nut of the case. I'm already seven pages in, so I've got to cut details somewhere.
Claim: Lincoln didn't emancipate any slaves for two years. Obviously it wasn't that important to him.
Answer: Misleading. Lincoln did not believe that he had the unilateral power to abolish slavery. He also hoped that the war could be quickly ended and the South reintegrated with a minimum of fuss. Abolishing slavery, the very thing which they fought to save, would hardly facilitate that. He was also keenly aware that most US soldiers had not signed on to free the slaves, any more than Lincoln prosecuted the war to free them. They alike viewed preservation of the nation as paramount. Of course, if waging a war against the slave states greatly harmed slavery, then Lincoln was going to take the twofer with a smile.
When it became clear that the war would not be over by Christmas, or in a single decisive battle, things changed and Lincoln changed strategy with them. The South relied on slave labor. By taking it away and making every advance of the Army into an advance of freedom, he could deny the rebellion that labor source and simultaneously make it available to the United States. He justifed this under his war powers as commander-in-chief, not under ordinary powers that any old president possessed whenever he felt like using them.
Furthermore, Lincoln supported previous emancipation efforts. The First Confiscation Act implicitly gave Congressional imprimatur to Butler's contraband argument, allowing the seizing of slaves being used by the Confederacy. The Second Confiscation Act specifically authorized the freeing of the slaves of any Confederate who refused to surrender within 60 days. Lincoln signed both acts, which is a damned strange thing for him to do if he only magically started caring about slavery two years into the war.
Claim: The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, but only to draft them.
Answer: Nonsense. The Emancipation Proclamation permitted freedpeople to enlist in the US Army. It did not require them to do so. They remained "thenceforward and forever free" and pledged the United States and its military to defend that freedom regardless of whether or not they chose military service. While some of them were undoubtedly compelled on the ground to sign up, the United States had no particular difficulty finding volunteers. Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation entered into effect on the first day of 1863. The first actual United States draft did not begin until the Enrollment Act came into force on March 3 of the same year. The draft applied to, and I quote:
The Enrollment Act of 1863 wrote:
able-boded male citizens of the United States, and persons of foreign birth who shall have declared on oath their intention to become citizens
From the Naturalization Act of 1790 onward, citizenship was limited to "free white persons." A freedperson, or even a black American born free, could not be a citizen. This changed with the Fourteenth Amendment.
Because the proclamation was an expression of Lincoln's war powers, he did not consider himself to have the authority to emancipate slaves in areas not in rebellion and where the United States government had something resembling ordinary functions. Thus Lincoln exempted the loyal slave states, but notably he declined to exempt from its effect many areas under United States control where civilian governemnt was not then functioning.
Was the Emancipation Proclamation a military act? You bet. There was, after all, a bigass war on. Was it limited? Yes. Did the United States do nothing for the slaves beyond its reach? Well, what could it do? They were out of its practical power, it was capable of doing nothing. But per its own terms, as soon as the slaves came within the ability of the United States to do something, they became free. Did it only apply during the war and do nothing thereafter? Nonsense. Go read it. The words are "forever free" not "free until the war ends, then good luck". If that doesn't suffice for you, then know that Lincoln was anxious that some peacetime court might overrule the proclamation and put the freedpeople back into slavery. Thus he spent months lobbying intensely for the Thirteenth Amendment. You can see a version of that in the Spielberg movie.
I know it's the unfun request. Sorry. But I want to say in making it that I don't intend it as any commentary on the quality of the material. I just have more APs than I will likely ever run and need to rearrange some things.
Armasse did not properly begin until noon, but the people of Kenabres knew that good times could pass suddenly and did not much stand on ceremony. Almost since First Crusader Day, more than a week passed, the city had slowly come to life. Wooden shields, many bearing Iomedae's sign, appeared in shop windows and over doors. Now and then the signs of other righteous gods and empyreal lords joined them. Many bore fresh coats of paint, but a few hung in positions of pride: full sized shields once carried into battle proudly bearing their wear and scars. The arms of Mendev hung from banners on nearly every street corner, and in tremendous expanses of fine Tian silk from the high walls of the Kite in the distance and the Cathedral of Saint Clydwell, which dominates the plaza that shares the saint's name.
All Kenabres seemed pressed into that space, people of all races and decent faiths shoulder to shoulder and sharing breath. Laughing, bright faced children darted about holding, and often wearing, candies in the shapes of swords and shields. They cavorted about, jousting in one moment, locked in mortal combat with a demon the next. Now and then one insisted on playing a great wizard or priest, bringing cries of cheating and furious, brief arguments about whether one had to have a proper wand or staff.
Older youths slipped away to less crowded places in ones and twos, occasionally more. Now and then one of the plaza's bushes made an oddly human noise that, for this day, most adults blamed on the absent breeze. Others stood nervously about, often in small groups, awkward in new arms and armor and waiting to say their oaths. Many clustered around harried priests and priestesses in shining armor to hear brief words of encouragement. Still more went on the heels of members of this sworn brotherhood, that band of sisters in arms.
Hawkers moved through the crowd almost as swiftly as the children, shouting their wares. Many sold food, but others declaimed for charms, favors, and amulets. Several gnomes moved about offering bright ribbons, sure to please that special someone. Daringly-dressed men and women made their way through the crowd with the rest, shouting with their bodies instead of voices. Now and then someone would draw near and they, like the youths, would vanish down an alley or under bushes. Even a few scribes worked the crowd, scribbling down commissions for letters to distant lovers and family.
Entertainers of other sorts plied the crowd as well: fools in motley pretended to joust. Acrobats in far less clothing than Kenabres normally considered decent leaped and contorted themselves in small spaces ringed by spectators. Dozens of minstrels, of wildly varying talent, dueled with the din and each other.
As the noon hour drew near, you had the good fortune to make your way to a spot near the cathedral. The white stone fairly gleamed under the labors of the faithful, who had scrubbed them tirelessly for days to remove a year's filth. A collection of dignitaries gathered upon the pale expanse, ringed by numerous guards. Commander Ashus Striegher of the Order of the Sunrise Sword frowned at the crowd and stood apart, standing stiff in his battle-scarred armor. He shot dour looks in the direction of Kurt the Fair of the Sacred Band of the Rose, who held his "thorn" a glaive seven feet tall, in one hand and waved cheerfully to the revelers. The red enamel of his armor bore not so much as a shadow, let alone a chip, and its brass filigree curled about him in the shape of vines. Irabeth Tirablade of the Eagle Watch, stood an uneasy distance from Prelate Hulrun. The half-orc wore gleaming plate and shared a kiss with a young woman in leathers, ignoring the prelate entirely. He in turn pretended to stand alone on the cathedral steps, save when he spoke quietly to his stone-faced deputy Liotr Hawkblade. At several points he gestured sharply to someone in the crowd and Liotr stepped quietly away to speak to guards.
The doors of the great cathedral, huge cold iron slabs bearing sword-shaped rivets and painted brilliant silver, swung open and people stirred in the dimness within. The official opening of the festival could be only minutes away.
Hi everyone. Feel free to situate yourselves in Clydwell Plaza. You're all relatively close to the cathedral, but it's a big area with a thick crowd about. You're free to run into one another or just be off on your own. However you like. :)
So hi. Here we are. Welcome to the game. Put your feet up and dice out, or whatever doesn't sound dirty. Or whatever does. I'll go with does because I am not fit for polite company.
Don't have a whole lot to say right now because I want to get on to the gameplay thread in short order.
It would be folly to put all OOC talk here, since many times it's directly pertinent to an action or something and switching between threads would just make things more confusing. But I figure we'll use this for broader or more meta stuff, like big rules issues or quick senses of the group on when we're ready to move on.
Feel free to socialize if you'd like as well. I'm told normal people enjoy that sort of thing, but normal people frighten me and therefore I prefer not to study them too closely.
I am terrible at socializing unless there's some kind of historical esoterica or horrific atrocity involved. How are you?
Hello! I’m Samnell, or I’m wearing his underwear, or possibly some other Samnell and/or underwear combination. Best not delve too deeply. I propose, as the thread title suggests, to run the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path for four to five gestalt PCs who will become mythic, with an outside option for six if I really can’t decide between a few. One of these spots is bespoken, so there’s room for three or four, maybe five, others.
With gestalt PCs. And mythic. Both. Together. Am I a crazy person?:
No, I am not a crazy person. My last therapist may have written that in his own blood, but that’s still an official judgment. There will be significant modifications to the more problematic aspects of the mythic rules, many swiped from posters here, with an eye toward still having fun without being able to splatter Iomedae with blood from the bowels of the Abyss when you attack Deskari, miss, and slightly graze the air. Cool powers are fun, but they’re much less fun when they reduce any challenge to the initiative roll.
About Me:
If I am not a crazy person, then who am I to think I can run this thing? This will be my first PBP as the all-quivering horror behind the great cardboard wall, but I’ve been running games online since 2000, mostly via email. My current projects are a Second Darkness game (early in book 5) and an all-Hellknights Carrion Crown (late in book two). I tried Wrath with some of my regulars, but it didn’t quick click. I still like the big ideas and Paizo has these nice PBP tools, which a friend of mine recommends highly. So here I am, a bit inspired by Acid Milk Hotel’s late Wrath game where I was a player, to give it another go. How are you?
This is WotR, but I’ll change some things:
It would be shifty, or something else spelled roughly that way, to advertise a Wrath game and then run something radically different. I don’t plan to do that, but I do reserve the right to spindle, mutilate, expand/shorten, and all the other usual GM prerogatives. I’ll certainly adjust foes. All this probably goes without saying, but I’ve gone and said it anyway because I really wanted to write the first sentence of this paragraph. You can still trust the advice of the player’s guide when planning your character.
Non-rules things to include with your PC:
Each PC should come with a paragraph, more if you like, of backstory. This should explain how and why your PC is in Kenabres, their relation to the crusade, and give me an idea of their personality.
Additionally, please give me at least one goal that your PC hopes to achieve in-game. It doesn’t have to be a huge deal, but should be something important to him or her.
Finally, give me an idea of what mythic path you intend to pursue. This needn’t be final. I’d just like it as a heads-up for when the time comes. Despite the fact that you are gestalt, you will only get the one path unless you buy access to another through some mythic ability.
Ready for rules?:
You can draw on any Paizo content you like, aside playtest stuff, but I reserve the right to say no if something seems out of whack.
PCs should be made with the gestalt rules, available at this finely crafted link. We start at first level and will level up based on hitting various story milestones rather than by XP accumulation. Please be sure to wrestle your PC into the normal Paizo statblock format for ease of reference.
Generate your PCs with 25 point buy. Feel free to avail yourself of the calculator here. You may reduce no more than one ability score below 10, before racial modifiers.
You may play any non-evil alignment that you like, provided you can play it in a way that doesn’t constantly cause needless strife. It’s fine to have some RP tension in the party, but when things really get to the point of players at cross-purposes everyone tends to lose out.
PCs begin with the maximum gold specified for their class to spend on gear, keep, give to poor orphans, or whatever else you’d like. You can stretch that gold (but not the orphans) further through the use of crafting skills. Assume all pre-game rolls are successful. During the game, item crafting and item crafting feats are fair game. There will be significant periods when you are not racing any particular clock and can take time out to invest in making things and other pursuits.
PCs begin play with two traits, one of which must be a Wrath of the Righteous campaign trait. They’re in the Player’s Guide. The campaign traits make certain assumptions about your mythic path and then give you an extra benefit for choosing the “right” one. Ignore those. Traits will function the same way regardless of your mythic choices.
I have long disliked the flavor of a continental-scale common tongue. The common tongue of the crusade is Taldane. Most people in Mendev who deal with crusaders often will have at least basic competency in it, but at home most speak Hallit. You get Taldane for free and can choose Hallit as a bonus language, unless a Mendev native. Natives can have both for free.
Rather than roll for hit points, at each level just take your maximum. Foes in this AP tend to hit hard.
Norms and Expectations:
I plan for a post a day. If it’s been roughly that long and I haven’t heard from you, I may bot your PC in the interests of keeping things moving. I know from experience that it’s really easy to get into a waiting loop in online games.
Please list key stats (current/total hit points, ACs, saves, initiative, perception) on the little text bar under your alias. You can include more if you want, but those are the big ones that I’ll likely need from everyone all at once and rather often so having them in the thread is very convenient.
I’ll roll combat-beginning things like perception and initiative, as well as anything else that would benefit from immediate resolution. So if I throw a fireball at you, I’ll roll the saves. You are free, and encouraged, to write flavor text for how you dodged and made your save or how you failed to do so. I’ll do all these rolls in the open using the dice commands. I’ll probably bury the lot of them in a spoiler and just put descriptive text outside it to avoid making walls of numbers. That does mean that the dice gods may cruelly frown upon you, even lethally, but I think that mythic PCs will end up with plenty of built-in plot armor. If it comes to that point, I will make raise dead and its cousins readily available.
When you do something that requires a roll from an NPC, like casting a hostile spell, I’ll roll that save. There are too many conditional bonuses, resistances, and immunities that might come into play to frontload a listing of them all and at times the PCs should be surprised by them. When foes come loaded with buffing spells and the like, I will do my best to remember to indicate that in their descriptions under the premise that active magical effects in close proximity generally have some visible manifestation.
I aim to be a bit more forthcoming with ACs, as they tend to be all-or-nothing affairs. Thus you should ordinarily be able to resolve things requiring attack rolls in the post with your declaration. You’re encouraged to flavor your hits and misses how you like. Most of the time, I plan to outright give you the hit point totals of your targets so you can know right away if you did them in or not. For important NPCs and monsters, I’ll keep the hit point total hidden but plan to give you general descriptors of their condition like “unharmed” and “near death”.
Please try to get along, at least so far as the game threads go, OOC. We’re going to be spending a fair bit of time together.
I’m new at this medium and will probably screw it up. Be patient. :)
General House Rule:
One of the big issues I’ve read about with mythic is that you get multipliers on top of multipliers to your critical hits, plus it becomes easier to make crits, plus you get much bigger modifiers to be multiplied. Some more than once. My fix for that is a global change to crit rules:
When you confirm a critical hit, you do not roll twice and you do not multiply your non-precision damage modifiers. Instead, a crit translates into an automatic maximum damage roll, to which you add your modifiers as normal. If your crit multiplier is greater than x2, you get 50% more weapon damage per point. So x2 gives the base 100%, x3 brings you to 150%, x4 to 200%, etc.
Mythic Stuff:
This isn’t going to come up for a long while, but here are the high-level basics of my changes. I can’t foresee every possible combination and reviewing every ability in the book would be tedious even by my standards. I plan to establish some basic principles instead and then we’ll work through things together.
So here are those basic principles:
Mythic power will regenerate at the rate of 1d4 points per day. Completing a mythic trial will grant an immediate additional recovery roll.
Abilities that give you additional actions do not stack with one another. You can only have one extra of anything per round. When you can buy an extra action, it will cost you 5 mythic power and at least a swift action, possibly more depending on the ability.
The “cast any spell on your class spell list for free” abilities will cost you a swift action to expend the mythic power. They further cost 1 mythic power per spell level. If compatible with metamagic, the cost is determined by the spell’s adjusted level rather than its base. They also require the normal action necessary to cast the spell. These are over and above any restrictions in the text.
You can get off more than one spell per round by metamagic, or by casting spells which already permit it, but not by use of mythic abilities.
Abilities that bypass energy immunities and damage resistance will not do so, but will retain any other functions.
Abilities, notably mythic power attack and vital strike, which allow you to multiple your damage modifiers do not do so.
If anything's unclear, question away.
Submissions are due at 5 PM, Eastern Time, April 17, 2015.
Greetings, Paizonians. Been noodling about running Mummy's Mask for a while, possibly as a PBP, but life intervened some time back and put that on hold. Life has ceased intervening so I come here seeking advice, like it says on the tin. I haven't yet had time to read the whole thing, due to that life intervening business, but I'm sure some here have and I'll take any advice. :)
I think that I'd like to run it in a homebrew setting that recasts things a bit, but keeps the spine of the AP intact. In kicking around ideas for that, I remembered my deep, abiding love for the 2e Complete Book of Necromancers and it occurred to me that the metaplot of the mini-setting therein seems very close to the plot of the AP. So I'm considering smashing them together. The tentative idea is to set the back half with the wilderness exploration on the jungle island of Sahu. Hakotep, who will probably get renamed, would be entombed there. If anybody is familiar with the CBoN and wants to chime in there, that's also welcome.
Once I got on looking at similar themes, I realized that Age of Worms has the same themes. The BoN even as a Cult of Worms! So I might strip-mine that to augment Mummy's Mask as well. I don't think that I'd import full adventures, but maybe pieces here and there to spice things up. Advice also welcome here.
If anybody's curious, broader context of the homebrew follows but isn't really too important to the individual adventures:
:
Instead of Osirion, we have a coastal desert that's fairly North African. It used to be part of an empire, but that empire fell apart a few centuries ago, giving way to warring city-states that share a common culture. That culture includes a strong dislike of arcane magic and an indigenous, animistic religious tradition that teaches they must refrain from certain activities (like arcane magic) and engage in various ritual behaviors (like properly entombing their dead) and sacrifices. The various rituals, some of which are fairly unsavory, both serve to lull the Sleepers and renew the bindings upon them. If they fail, they may wake Sleepers, unimaginable horrors that ruled the land in the mythic past before being bound to sleep in their great tombs. Hakotep is variously the Herald of the Sleepers Return, their last high priest, or the last Sleeper bound. Scholars disagree.
The religion has no unified hierarchy and its chief practitioners are not priests but rather what are politely called god-touched. Through various means, these souls are cursed with the attention of the Sleepers's dreams and so realize strange powers at great personal cost. Some of them are initiated into it, but others just get born that way. So they're oracles unwittingly empowered by those they work to keep asleep. :) Alongside them maybe some variety of desert druids who minister more directly to the pastoral needs of the people.
Alongside these faiths are a couple of religions from outside the region that have caught on, one worshiping a the-dead-must-stay-dead kind of death god and another kind of mendicant charitable group of flagellants. Both cribbed from the Book of Necromancers.
Around thirty or forty years ago, the area was conquered by a vaguely Roman power with its own religious traditions that are somewhat at odds with the Sleeper-oriented faith of the natives. The pseudoRomans believe that the dead must be cremated and their ashes stored in modest columbaria, lest they come back as vengeful undead horrors because only blessed flames can free the soul from its body. They took over after a legate was slain during a dispute with the local aristocracy that involved the arrest of a mystic who the legate placed under his protection. It's a very murky affair, but being the pseudoRomans are a prickly, expansionist power they took it as sufficient casus belli to conquer the region in the name of the Republic's honor.
These pseudoRomans do not consider themselves obligated to respect indigenous religious practices. In fact, they consider many of them utterly evil. The Sleepers sound like literal demons, and burying the dead just means offering them up as slaves to whatever bound demons that these "savages" worship. Thus they have chosen to open the tombs of the land to reliable, trustworthy citizens and those vouched for by citizens, in order to demonstrate the power of their rule, the folly of native religious practices, and separate out the undead and other true evils and their cultists from the mere "deluded fools" who the creepy god-touched have taken for a ride. In this, they have the uneasy help of the death god's religion, since they really would like to make sure any undead get cleaned up.
The Isle of Sahu (Book of Necromancers again) sits somewhere off the southwestern coast of the region, historically part of it but long abandoned to pirates and various jungle tribes. PseudoRoman rule hasn't quite extended there in practice yet.
I have a friend who has decided that he wants to run a Council of Theives PBEM. A real friend, not the kind of friend one has when trying to ask the doctor if it's normal to have something odd happening in a private place. I am not running the game, but will be playing in it. He's shy and doesn't want to post here. :)
If you want to know how to make a character, you can also go straight here and read the chargen, but the action will actually take place on the list. He's old-fashioned that way. Gory details of his contact information are also there.
Here's how he describes the game:
Samnell's Shy Friend wrote:
You’re a bunch of average Joes with as checkered pasts as you want caught in a vast web of dirty dealings, double crosses, and deceit in the corrupted underbelly of a once-grand city. Trapped as you are in the shadows between the forces of light and darkness, you can’t hope to solve the city’s problems, all you can do is try and make it a little lighter shade of gray.
Welcome to Westcrown, the City of Twilight.
The Crown on the Bay is your home. You've laughed, cried, sweated, and bled just to scratch a few coppers together to get another mug of hard milk to make you forget the killing fog, the rampant crime, the curfew, and the dirt a poor schlub like yourself has to put up with at the hands of the powerful and wealthy. So, when a sultry and dangerous looking woman named Janiven approaches you with a proposition you can’t refuse to join her little brigade, you’re more than willing to join the cause to satisfy your own personal agenda of revenge/justice.
What I'm finding online has me going in circles, so might as well ask. :) I'm a relative console virgin and never owned a Wii, but plan to get a WiiU. In addition to new games, I'm interested in playing some pre-U Wii titles and very interested in getting past console games from the Wii store thingie.
But I have read that those older games will not work with the controller that comes packed with the new console and so I will also need a different controller. I went to the store today and saw both wand-style Wii controllers (Wiimotes? Wiimotes plus?) that I vaguely recognize, but now U-branded, and more conventional controllers that look like the x-box controller I bought for my PC a few years back.
Which of those is the one I want to play, for example, the last Mario game for the Wii and/or the original Zelda game? Or is it "whichever because they do all the same stuff"?
I couldn't think of a properly alliterative title involving guru in the twenty seconds I spent on the subject. :)
So here's the deal: I want to run a sandbox PBEM. (In FR and in the North, roughly as it stood in 1e but borrowing freely from later stuff, if it matters.) I think it could be fun and cool, but I have never done such a thing before. I usually run APs with varying levels of tweaking to best fir the party. Nor have I ever played in a true sandbox game. Neither have my usual crop of players. But this sandbox maidenhead is just full of itching and someone has got to get it out. May as well be me.
The basic setup would be something like this:
*The initial PCs are explorers/archaeologists/whatevers in the employ of a college. They get some neat perks (a free house to live in, free item identification, a mostly for flavor magic item, a small stipend) for it and the college has a liaison guy who takes sort of the traditional patron role by offering them missions, which they are free to refuse if they want, etc. They're a bit like Pathfinders. The patron will hopefully be a bit of a friendly presence but the college as a whole would have a more diverse range of relationships with the party.
*In addition to being free to refuse missions, the party is free to terminate their relationship with the patron, the college, or both. The main idea is that the missions give them something to keep the sits away until things get rolling. (Don't know what to do? Go pull the liaison's arm and watch a new mission light up in his eyes!) They do have to give up their in-game benefits if they do so, of course. There are in-game strings attached to being in the employ of the college which they could also slip by ending their relationship with the institution.
*There will be other parties in the employ of the college, who may or may not work with their same liaison, ideally some that become friendly rivals, some they could end up rescuing or finding the mutilated corpses of, some they'll probably come to be antagonistic with.
*Everything is an adventure hook, especially if I don't think it is. Whatever they take an interest in, I'll try to roll with and come up with stuff for.
*At least in theory, missions/adventures/whatever should be relatively small (no giant dungeon crawls) with some sort of defined beginning, muddle, and end. But each should also include at least one new hook in itself, preferably more than one. These new hooks don't have to be related to the plot of the past mission. They can just be stuff that's coincidentally there and attracts notice.
*For hooks I can mine the small mountain of ink that's been spilled on the region in various FR books. It's a big, wild frontier with lots of former empires around to supply endless ruins, mysterious sites, etc. And I can make stuff up. But it's easier to lean on the setting a bit since I'll want a lot of this stuff.
*There's no single overarching plot, but rather a plethora of potential plots on all manner of scales involving various NPCs and groups of NPCs, not all of whom are traditionally villainous, which can through their actions and interactions spawn hooks all their own.
*There's no single, set way that a mission has to be done or a story has to be resolved. At least some of the time I'll be presenting a scenario and then letting them write the lion's share of the adventure through their choices, just as they're doing for the campaign as a whole. Less potted dungeons and you can pick the order you take them in and more players as co-writers that I'm facilitating and along for the ride.
*There are semi-invisible walls around the region the game is in. It's a rugged region the size of mainland Alaska, roughly. The meat of the game is intended to happen there just to keep my sanity a bit and keep them from running too far away from old hooks and stuff they might then forget about meaning to come back to.
*The players would be told that this is the idea up front.
Have I got it about right? What else should I know/avoid/could be helpful? Help me, Paizo boards. It's you or I jam this post up the hind end of an astromech droid and hope some inbred, whiny dirt farmer finds it. :)
I've saved up some cash and am looking to buy a tablet, which I have never done before.
Arches back, thrusts out man-boobs.
"Ravish me with your knowledge and experience!"
I bought my mother half her iPad, but that was a gift and she decided based on wanting something that worked like her iPhone. But fooling around with it in the course of helping her has sold me on the virtues of such devices.
However, I don't want an iPad. I want a device I have more freedom to work with. I'm probably not going to go and install linux and try to run a FPS on it or anything like that but I'd prefer much less of a walled garden model than Apple is going to provide.
What I do want to do is mostly use it as an e-reader with extras. I've looked at display models of nook tablets and kindle fires and they don't quite meet my needs. I want to read comics on the device and the screens are a bit too small for that, at least in conjunction with my factory irregular eyes. I had to work a bit to read a graphics-heavy National Geographic issue on a display model nook and the Kindle Fire wasn't a lot better.
I did an experiment and discovered the iPad's screen is in the ballpark of the right size for my crusty orbs. Plus a tablet is easier to take to bed or into the crapper than my laptop and has a more comfortable viewing distance for the aforementioned crusty orbs.
So wants:
Not an iPad
Screen size at or around iPad size (bigger is definitely ok)
Cost under or around $500 (a little over is ok, but not $100 over)
Aside from those factors, what should I keep an eye out for and what should I be keen to avoid? Of course specific product recommendations are cool too.
Most D&D games I have been in barley seem to pay any attention to religion at all. The gods are expected to grant their Clerics spells. Beyond that, no one really cares. I have rarely seen anyone play a Cleric that actually attempts to expand their god's influence throughout the world.
"Just give me my damn spells!"
Or even serve their gods aside from the occasional application of boot leather to evil. That works for clerics of battle gods and crusader gods, but even there it's far from thorough. Take the average D&D god of war. He's pretty much the god of settling differences through battle. Battle's the best thing around. It's cool. It's what life's about. Shouldn't this guy's priests probably be lobbying to resolve every dispute through at least a duel of some kind? Wouldn't refusal to fight, at least when fighting isn't suicidally idiotic, be a kind of sin? (Maybe even if it is suicidally idiotic.) It could turn the character into a walking stereotype, but one hardly finds many real world priests who shrug off the chief commandments of their religion as casually.
Then again some typical gods would be effectively amoral and probably not care. Does the god of elemental earth have an opinion on morality? Probably not, or if he does it would be rather abstract. Now mining, that he cares about. :)
It probably does not help that a perverse amount of D&D writing on gods is focused on things that are rarely going to be relevant to any game, namely the gods' exact personalities and such. Unless one is going to meet them, which is pretty rare, this stuff is much less important than the dogmas, rites, practices, and so forth of the religion. I mean I've got no objection to using a book of god stats as a bestiary. The idea that gods are not just immortal and very powerful but effectively omnipotent and untouchable is fairly monotheistic. But even for people who want that in their games, it's not something they need every session. Religion details, however, should be relevant any time a cleric is present. Or so one would hope.
The sometimes-maligned 2e FR books on the pantheon had the right on this. They had statblocks for the deities, but aside a paragraph or two at the beginning of each entry they were chiefly about the religions, complete with major centers of worship, important holidays and practices, vestments, etc. Then a page or two of a usually overpowered specialty priest class and some religion-specific spells at the end, of course. I even had a player who, bless him, took the entry on Torm to heart and did his best to have his character perform all the recurring ritual obligations. (One was something to the effect of arranging a banquet which he then served to the disadvantaged. He had to do this I think once a month.)
Of course there is a point where all of that can turn into one player having lots of fun and everybody else just sitting around, which can be especially hard in PBEMs where such a scene could go on for weeks instead of minutes. But that's a logistic issue peculiar to how I run my games rather than a problem with the thing in itself.
CourtFool wrote:
Do Paladins even have gods? I mean, everyone knows they have strict codes they have to follow…but everyone just plays them like an over-annoying Dudly Doright.
I think even aside what entails lawful goodness, the paladin is a class that suffers from having an extremely narrow flavor niche in past editions. I'm not sure that it makes sense to have a single generic order of paladins, unless they have some kind of generalized patron like the good gods collectively or some sort of unaligned goodly celestials. To me individual orders of knighthood, or just martial priesthoods, make more intuitive sense. Have one, or more, for each god that it fits and call it good. But that's a lot more work.
Which also, of course, raises issues of the difference between a cleric and a paladin. Originally I think the cleric was designed around a kind of warrior monk type, like the Templars before the banking. My 2e PHB lists Bishop Odo as an inspiration, unless my memory has failed me. But the idea space of cleric has drifted, especially with the inclusion of less martial deities, to something more like a generalized priest role and the paladin has taken up a lot of the slack. That's fine in itself, but the cleric as a walking wall of steel second only to the fighter doesn't quite fit with anything but a sort of Norse-style warrior god or crusading orders if it's meant to comprehend the whole of the religion's theological professionals.
My inclination for years now has been to take the cleric as a priest first and a warrior maybe never, but I haven't done a lot of rules tinkering on it. A paladin would be a specialized religious warrior. The name has enormous game baggage, but one could swap out certain abilities and make it into a sort of customized-for-the-faith holy warrior. Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous does something like that, but I never looked at it too closely due to the difficulty of replacing a SRD class with one I would have to manually type in for my players to use. It's a lot of upfront work, especially knowing my most likely player of it would play a paladin type with it anyway. He loves that kind of character, whether it's a well-coiffed figure of courtly love (he used to romance elven princesses) or a grungy guy with lots of armor spikes that swears a lot. (I am informed that one of his oaths, "Bane's Codpiece!" traveled from our group to make an appearance or two at GenCon.)
CourtFool wrote:
I think religion offers one of the best opportunities to really get into your character as well as endless plot hooks.
Absolutely. For most premodern people, religion is "what they believe in" almost entirely. Even if they have all sorts of secular ideas and goals, they tend to be sacralized. (This isn't just the Divine Right of Kings, Sacred Kingships, and the like but also simple everyday stuff. We still have a bit of that, with priests blessing fishing boats and the like. I got a kick out of a Catholic player when I had the party catch an NPC priest of Moradin in the midst of the blessing of the pickaxes. "That's *exactly* what they would really do!"
Most D&D worlds are intensely god-saturated, up to and including miracles practically on demand, so one would think it even more true there. Granted most campaigns play moderns in past drag, and that's not unreasonably considering we are moderns and seriously following premodern attitudes could get awfully uncomfortable awfully fast, but it's something I've struggled with on occasion.
It cuts both ways. A person's spoken word doesn't mean a lot to us and tends to be disregarded, but it's something that was taken extremely seriously in the past when documents were fewer and held in less esteem than the sworn word of a man of known good character. (This was true even for things like titles of nobility sometimes, which of course gave everyone a good reason to go to war in disagreeing.) That's something that could seemingly be worked into a campaign fairly painlessly.
Global prejudice against women, more than cosmetic racism towards other ethnicities which are meant to be equally good in-world and options for PCs, and so forth is a lot harder. Tolkien had trouble with the orcs being a race of evil so, as I understand it, decided that there were good ones we just never saw. The popular medieval conception of Islam was pretty much Always Chaotic Evil, with Mohammed being identified with the Antichrist. In the Reformation the Protestants did the same thing with the Pope. Trying to reflect that in-game and not make everybody uncomfortable is hard, especially with the assumption in D&D that there really is such a thing as objective Good and Evil and people consciously and willingly serve both. "Gosh Samnell, your fairly clear analog to Christianity is full of baby-eating villains and not a single decent human being in sight. What does that say to us?" or alternatively "Gosh Samnell, your villains are literally the Ku Klux Klan. That's, uh..." Neither quite works, but in different ways.
And it all clashes with our sense of verisimilitude because we know in real life that a supermajority of people do not actually, consciously, without excuse or reason, do things just for the evil. Rather the omnipresent theme is that everyone does what they believe is right and good, or at least understandable. Even the social dynamics of really vile prejudice include manifold justifications for it. I've certainly read enough of them, both because I'm one of the targets and because one of my major interests in reading history is in people behaving badly on a massive scale.
Of course some things are much easier than others. Killing people and taking their stuff is already moral in the framework of the game. On a basic level, that's the D&D narrative for the great many games. We can just write orcs and goblins off as subhuman, morally or otherwise. It's a game, after all. Saying the same things as one says about orcs about the dark-skinned ethnicity native to a warm continent, by contrast, is just outrageous. (And I struggled with this and ended up rewriting two descriptions of human ethnicities for an FR game when I learned a new player was black. I had never thought about it before, and I don't think that the writers had either, but putting myself in her shoes and reading them made previously innocent-seeming description into unpleasant racial stereotypes straight from the real world.) We can honestly say to ourselves that an "orc" is just made up. It may be informed by real world referents, but it is not them.
One thing I've experimented with on and off is the fact that game worlds pretty much by definition did not have Platonism or Christianity, or other religious systems that teach that the flesh is, if not evil, at least inherently prone to sinfulness. They've never been through the Victorian period and all its prudery. As such cultural attitudes about monogamy, marriage, sexuality, nudity and the like could be very different. My players are generally relatively mature about such things, but I've seen reactions to other writers playing with less restrictive cultural tropes decried for writing their porn into the game. Maybe they are, but even if that's so it's not necessarily all they're doing.
Any fantasy world is going to have both the same constraints and restrictions pressing on cultural development as we have had, but also a whole variety of other inputs which could lead its development in wildly different ways. That could mean it produces things like less-exploitative, or even non-exploitative polyamory and the like. That would be far from the least plausible thing in a typical D&D game, and doesn't seem so strange that it breaks the sense of the world being a thing itself like, say, having jet fighters, nuclear missiles, and Barack Obama as an NPC would do for most fantasy settings.
Quote:
Samnell wrote:
I've kicked around throwing what I have up in a thread or on a blog or something just for the hell of it.
I know Mage: The Awakening is very different. I'm not interested in that one. But I am a neophyte who is interested in picking up some old Ascension books because the core idea behind it sounds great and it seems like it could be a fun platform for diverse types of modern fantasy gaming.
The internet, however, has so far not given me much of an idea what's different about Mage 1e vs. Mage 2e or Mage 2e vs. Mage 2e Revised, except that I understand the latter has a much darker assumed setting where the Bad Guys (TM) have more or less won. So could someone, or diverse someones, give me a general rundown of the major themes and rules distinctions between the three?
If it helps at all, my only oWoD familiarity is with the revised editions so far as rules go.
CF wanted another thread, so here we go. The topic, I think, is the issue of compromise vs. polarization, or perhaps partisanship vs. bipartisanship in the informal sense, as a means of achieving change. A nerve (positive, I hope!) was struck. So here we are. :)
I just got to preparing copies of these maps for my players. I run a PBEM, so my floor maps also double as battlemats. The Goblin's a big, frequently-used location that the players should know the layout of upfront, so I went and did the first and second floor already. They've never been down to the basement, but I have some spare time and thus here we are.
On page 63, Area 32 is the Wrangler's Chamber. The reader is told that Bjoask hangs out here and there's a portcullis that controls access to the hallway beyond. It's not on the map on page 60. Furthermore, there's a secret door and a guard post between Bojask's bedroom and the arena, so what use is the portcullis? The writing suggests that this is a security measure to keep people away from the arena and/or Sublevel Two, but the staircase down to the sub-basement isn't hidden by the secret door and said door and it's guard post already secure access to the arena for those coming Bojask's way.
I can see that access through the Red Room is probably controlled by the bartender (and the bar is right next to the door) and the flavor text generally hints that Saul keeps his arena on a need-to-know basis, but I'm lost as to how the portcullis and secret door are supposed to work out for the casino. Is it a change that got tangled in editing? Is the portcullis that Bojask controls supposed to be where the secret door now is and the reference wasn't caught in time? Anybody have any ideas?
I just signed up for the Companion subscription, to start with Elves of Golarion.
But now when I check my account page it shows a preorder for Elves of Golarion in addition to the subscription tag, etc. Does that mean I somehow accidentally subscribed to Companion and made an additional order for an extra copy of the Elves book? Or is what I'm seeing normal for starting a subscription with the next volume and just the one copy of Elves of Golarion is headed my way come October?
I noticed that both of these bonuses are typed as racial, but then it's declared that they stack. This seems like an exception to the stacking rules that doesn't really need to be and might introduce some confusion. It seems to be almost inviting the presumption that like bonus types always stack, which is more or less the opposite of 3e's simple and intuitive bonus stacking rules. The more exceptions there are to the rule, the easier it is for the core rule to be lost.
Maybe I'm the only one obsessive enough to care, but wouldn't it be easier and head off any confusion about other racial bonuses stacking if the Fearless bonus were typed morale as it is in the SRD?
I see later on that racial bonuses are added to the list of bonuses that usually stack, but I'm at a loss as to why. Do we foresee lots of PCs with multiple races? Or is there a plan that templates will be granting racial bonuses now?
I'm not sure if this belongs here or in Customer Service, but it's not yet an order so I'm putting it here. It makes sense to me, but it's possible that I'm insane.
Now that Pathfinder has finally reached an adventure path I'm not a player in, I've decided to take the plunge and donate a portion of my soul to the Great Masters of Golarion. I'm sure they shall treat it with all the kindness and generosity it doesn't deserve.
I think I remember from those hoary days of yesteryear when Runelords were rising and all that that a PDF-only subscription was available, which I would prefer for various reasons. But I can't find any mention of such in the store, just that subscribers to the print version get a free PDF when each volume ships, and that you can buy PDFs of individual volumes off the site.
Am I misremembering and there is no such animal as a PDF-only subscription, or am I just not looking in the right place for it?
