Take nothing for granted. Receive nothing at face value.
If this was not where you were in our private conversations,
this is where you are now. You may talk to each other and muse before the inciting scene takes place.
You hear a squabble from the front of the pack of spearmen. Talk of roads, paths, quotas, and security.
Violent words are spoken, and you hear mention of ‘the urgency of this haul’, and ‘the other way is not without its’ own terrors!’.
The fork in the road comes, and the left path is taken. After what seems like days, you find yourself among the herd, trudging along, in aching famine.
The cold gravel beneath your feet begins to turn to white chunks of rocks, with the grains growing larger as time passes.
These eventually become bones, and farther along you find yourself walking inside of what seems to be a gigantic hollow femur.
Miles below you you hear a low droning groan, inescapably sad.
Your nostrils are filled with the scent of curdled blood and humid, meaty air, and at once you find yourself walking on warm, wet flesh.
Ahead of you you perceive a widening of the tunnel, and you see rampant ponds of hazy waters. As you near them, all begins to smell like vomit.
Take nothing for granted. Receive nothing at face value.
Welcome y'all.
So, let's talk about post tempo. Essentially, my expectation is that we keep pushing each other forwards, and to try and to not let any scenes drag.
When we're in combat, I think for now we're going to start with a round being 24 hours long.
This can be adjusted to what we end up finding mutually suitable to all.
I think an appropriate minimum posting rate per week would be 4 posts minimum.
That might seem slow, but there's a twist to it;
I will reward Inspiration at the end of each week to any players who make 8 constructive IC posts within that week.
Constructive here is defined as being around 60 words or more, and either hooking other players towards interaction, or pushing the scene forward.
I define a week as being from Monday thru Friday.
During the weekends we will break, but you can still post and move the game forwards during the weekend if desired. It happens sometimes.
Your weekend posts will count towards your Inspiration post count for the next week.
All of this is negotiable, and I would love to hear how this all makes the lot of you feel.
It's not meant to be oppressive, it's just for bolstering tempo and keeping our game threads alive.
I also want to communicate that if a majority decides we want to take a break, that we should do so. However, if we do, I don't want our game to just teeter out and die. In the case that we do take a prolonged break, I would ask that we each post in the Discussion thread once a week to just check in on everyone's OOC life, shoot the s!*~, and so on. This will help us retain cohesion as a group and to help gauge where everyone is at for when to re start the game.
Please keep questions of clarification and all OOC talk in THIS thread.
I want the IC thread's gameplay to be as seamless as possible.
When our introduction PM threads are finished, we will proceed with the gameplay thread.
Again, ask me anything if anything is unclear. Welcome aboard.
That damned black circle. It all started with that damned black circle.
You knew from the moment you saw it that it was from hell, that you should have stayed away at all costs.
But something else in you knew, against all hope, that it was only a matter of time… that somehow, when you gazed upon it, that it gazed into you as well.
Is this place what hell truly is? Is this the world of the dead?
...Unsure. It’s all been so strange.
I hope they’re taking us somewhere safe, though these white bastards have been anything but kind. To think I’d become a prisoner... Again.
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THE PREMISE
This is a recruitment thread for a 5th Edition campaign set inside a setting I’ve been brewing for awhile;
The World Without Skies, That Which Lays Beneath All Things, Wherefrom None May Leave.
It is an underworld where nearly anything is possible…
You will be starting as a recently harvested group of Wanderers, exiles from random worlds taken captive by a spear bearing troop of tailed albino men.
You have witnessed several oddities while under their itinerant care…
This saga will deal with themes of survivalism, mystery, exploration, and drama.
It will unfold in the capacity to which the players interact with its’ different facets, and will largely be player driven.
The setting lends itself to both dungeon crawling/hack and slash gameplay and immersive roleplay.
Much of the realm consists of migrating cavern systems and its’ eldritch inhabitants,but all of them also have the capacity to conduct discourse.
Roleplay is a refined drug and I would not trade it for the world.
I approach combat from a war standpoint rather than a sport approach, and the rules of the system are a means to an end, the end itself being our game.
You, the players, will be garbled into a door to the World Without Skies during your third level as a heroic character from whatever plane of existence which you hail from. Thus, character creation is wide open. We will also be using several variant rules. All of the details will be delineated below.
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THE DEETS
Character Creation:
We are starting at 3rd Level.
Most UA/DMG/3pp options are legal on a permission basis, talk to me and GIVE ME LINKS.
Custom Backgrounds are super legal. Must have at minimum 2 Flaws.
Really emphasize your characters’ motivations, fears, and flaws. Write out backstories as meaty or as brief as you’d like, but I want to meet a real person, not a tactical build with a portrait stapled on. I need something to work with in order to make this saga shine. Flesh out your backgrounds well. If you sell me on this it will secure your slot before anything else, and there will be bennies.
Ohhhh will there be bennies.....
Extra Feat @ First Level, doesn’t stack with Variant Human.
Race:
Only legal human is Variant Human.
Pureblood snakeman mag res everything thing is illegal.
RACIAL HIT DICE:
- D8 default
- 1 Racial Bonus to a Physical Attribute: D10
- 2 Racial Bonuses to Physical Attributes: D12
- ‘Small’ Races: D6, +1 untyped AC bonus
- Minimum HP gained/level is always median.
Combat and Consequences:
Relative Positioning/Gridless Combat
Death @ -Con HP: NO DEATH SAVES.
Crits = Max Damage of Original Dice
Group Initiative every round (Handled by DM)
General:
Milestone XP
Slow Natural Healing:
- Characters don't regain hit points at the end of a long rest. Instead, a character can spend Hit Dice to heal at the end of a long rest, just as with a short rest.
- Spend Hit Dice by rolling it, regain HP= Roll+CON.
- Max Hit Dice = Level. STARTING Hit Dice = Half Level.
- Regain half level Hit Dice each Long Rest.
Setting Specific Rules:
These are essentially notes of immediately observable differences seen when one enters the World Without Skies rather than hard line house rules.
Hunger: You find yourself immediately FAMISHED. This hunger is an army of white noise, encroaching further and further closer towards yourself. It touches you, and you think it has plateaued, that the volume of insatiation has itself sated. You find yourself eating your foolish notions, voraciously.
Language: All words spoken in this world becomes true speech, and can be understood by all. Different sorts of intelligence and sentience exist, and there are different mediums by which these entities interact beyond spoken words, but speech itself is of one kind.
Vision: All is Darkness. Wanderers learn to see inside the darkness, but it is starkly different from the vision that they enjoyed prior. Actual light is often blinding. This has only a slight bearing on the mechanic rules, but cosmetically, what you would understand as ‘standard’ light levels are just shades above darkness. Also; Treasure Emits Light.
Gravity? Forget everything you knew.
Pet Peeves:
Lack of Communication
Lack of Character Headers
Reskinned Anime/Vidya Protagonists. You know who you are.
I am looking for at maximum 6 players, and any amount beneath that is just fine.
I would like to start the game on the 13th of November.
Hit me with any questions you may have.
I'm running the alpha test for my RPG in meatspace and partially over the internet through Skype. I've been working on this project for about 2 years. It is a lighter-fare system which is all about immersive roleplay geared towards a classic epic fantasy style. The system itself is setting agnostic, but the core design, combat design, and mysticism design all draw off of primarily real world mythology, epic poetry, and real world practices.
I am an anxious full time college student with a part time job and a million distractions. Coming back recently to these wonderful forums is one of them. I figure that I'll try to use my time here for something that is more productive rather than less so, and also force myself to stick to the schedule for the alpha test I had originally planned by opening it up to this virtual mindscape.
BUT I'M NOT YET FULLY SOLD ON THE IDEA!
That's where you all may come in.
The Alpha Test Modules contain three campaigns; The first campaign, named 'Solomon's Madness', the Shaherazad campaign WITHIN that campaign named 'Words of the Easterling', and the second campaign, which presently has no name. There are 9 Modules, but they are in comparison to Paizo modules, let us say, extremely concise.
The First Campaign's premise is such:
The year is 233 BC.
The soul of the dead King Solomon has been sitting within the confines of Abraham's Bosom for what he akin'd to be about four hundred years. For four hundred years he sat, waiting for the Messiah to break him and his brethren from their jail-cell like existence and into the promised thereafter.
And he was exceedingly bored. So he pulled the strings of his several hundred servant spirits, using the authority of his greater and lesser keys, and by some miraculous feat of wisdom and sorcery, he revived himself to the middle plane.
He has but one goal; to try and achieve immortal bliss another way- Find the legendary Garden of Eden, break into it, and eat of the Tree of Life.
To do this he must aqcuire several implements; some he once had in his former life as the third king of Israel, and some which if not for his demonic informants' tellings he would not believe have ever existed.
In order to accomplish all these things, he has raised six champions from death through eldritch means;
Gilgamesh of Babylon
Semiramis of Babylon
Hatshepsut of Egypt
Imhotep of Egypt
Arjuna of the East
Adu Ogyinae of the West
These he has chosen to reclaim his seal, his stores, the secret plunders of Thoth, Tiamat, and ultimately the Tree of Life.
But there is one alarming thing in their path: The rites by which these fool souls have been brought back require much of those residing in the bodies they do not own; they must eat the flesh of man and drink its' blood to sustain the weak vessels they were given.
The first campaign will deal mostly with combat rules, while the shaherazad campaign will deal mostly with magic rules. Both will be played with pregenerated characters.
The second campaign will be one without pregenerated characters, and if we get to it, the sky is the limit, so to speak. It's gonna be fun.
If that sounds like something enriching to you, please post here and tell me about yourself. Basically everything you want to share pertaining to any of this content and more. Ask about these characters and how I've statted them out. Tell me which of these characters you'd like to play as, probably 2-3, and why. If you don't know who they are, google them!
If people are interested and it ends up working out, I will PM those people the necessary documents needed for them to be informed on how the game's rules work, and we will proceed from there. I will give out a lot of info, but if you're a history buff and know about the cultures we'll be playing in please inform me, for I am but a child trampling on the temples of those I barely know.
If you're also a writer or designer and just want to talk writing or design feel free to PM me as well... I love looking at and providing feedback.
