What characters are you excited to try out in Richard Pett's The Blight? Here are some of mine:
- A Psychic (Amnesiac archetype, Pain Discipline) who escaped from the Asylum, but can remember nothing of his past but episodes of searing pain...
- A Spiritualist (Haunted archetype) who made a Faustian bargain to escape the poverty of Toiltown, and now finds himself slowly being taken over by his spiritual "ally" from the Between...
- An aristocratic Barbarian (Flesheater archetype) from the Capitol who must hide his dreadful compulsion to feed on the flesh of those he kills from his peers...
(For those of you who don't know, the kickstarter for The Blight is going on here: The Blight)
Here's another batch I'm excited to play:
- A briny Bloodrager (Aberrant bloodline) whose youthful swims in the banks of Sister Lyme has left him permanently tainted him with its foul influence...
- An Alchemist (Ectochymist archetype) who performs desperate supernatural experiments to discover how to rescue his wife, who was lost in the Between...
- A mentally ill Medium (Storyteller archetype) called Richard Pett, who finds himself compelled to share his nightmarish visions with whatever depraved audience will listen to him...
I haven't thought about it - as a backer, I'm more interested in running it than playing it. XD I feel like it would work well with Investigators, Alchemists, and generally slightly gritty characters (Neutral, or Good but leaning neutral, rather than pure paragons).
Yeah, it's definitely a great fit for a lot of grittier, darker and more deeply-flawed character concepts than a lot of standard fantasy settings. If you're running through Giantslayer playing with Frodo, Gandalf and Aragorn, it feels weird to be playing an escapee from an insane asylum or a recovering drug addict...
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Wow, I love this thread and will be back later to properly absorb it and let you fellows in on a secret:)
Rich
...and the Blight just got a kickstarter Projects we Love notation - huzzah!
Man, now I wish I saved my Gunslinger (Mysterious Stranger) 1/Spiritualist Investigator X for another year. Though he's been a perfectly good fit in Mummy's Mask, too.
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Hm, I guess I'm with GM Rednal in that I'll probably sit at the other side of the table, but for some reason, if I got the opportunity to play, I'd probably gave on of my older characters a try I started to play in an adventure called "Where Madness dwells". It was a Psychic rogue turned Paladin who ended as an Shadowbane Stalker and I'd love to reeimagine this character because she died a most horrible death by friendly fire at the start of said adventure.
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I'm loving these ideas, makes me want to jump through the screen and come and play, hey wait........I have a plan.
And while I'm squeezing between the screen to come and get you chaps, the Blight as you may know has 50 backstory traits, here's a couple I haven't shared yet. Oh, and also, why we're here, each PC has an option to start out with possible relationships, so I'll add a few of those potential allies (or yes enemies too) from that list at the end. The letter afterwards is the suggested class unless one is noted...
Brine Touched: There is some briny in your family, a gift that your mother and father tried to hide. Choose either of the following; a 5ft. swim speed but webbed fingers; the ability to see in darkvision (60ft.) when under water but bulging eyes; or gain the ability to hold your breath twice as long but with rudimentary gills just behind your ears.
Thirteenth Child of a Thirteenth Child: There is something decidedly odd about you, and not all of it good. Strange effects follow your PC; these are only minor but decidedly strange; horses keel over and die in the street when you walk by, you find two-headed silver coins, a plummeting magpie crashes into a wall you walk past. Life, in short, continues to throw oddities about you. This has no mechanical effect, but should form part of your PC’s story. It should not be overtly negative or positive, just odd.
17. ClownC
18. CockfighterE
19. Coffee House OwnerE
20. Conjoined TwinC
21. ContortionistC
22. CrippleE
23. Dwarf Bard 1-2
24. Dwarf EmbalmerE
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I'm not going to lie...assuming I can get someone to run a game here on the boards, I just might steal this idea.
"A Psychic (Amnesiac archetype, Pain Discipline) who escaped from the Asylum, but can remember nothing of his past but episodes of searing pain..."
That is just too perfect for words, Porridge.
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I want to be a paladin who is drowning in the oily, sewer filled depths of despair, who feels he cannot even turn to his church for help yet who is forced to operate within their structure, either corrupt, incompetent or both.
Ooooh, nice one. I'd been focusing on more flawed/desperate characters... But having to play a LG Paladin while being mired in the muck of a corrupt church sounds like an awesome challenge (and a great source of intriguing moral dilemmas for an evil DM to throw at you...) :)
"A Psychic (Amnesiac archetype, Pain Discipline) who escaped from the Asylum, but can remember nothing of his past but episodes of searing pain..."
That is just too perfect for words, Porridge.
Thanks!
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...each PC has an option to start out with possible relationships, so I'll add a few of those potential allies (or yes enemies too) from that list at the end.
17. ClownC
18. CockfighterE
19. Coffee House OwnerE
20. Conjoined TwinC
21. ContortionistC
22. CrippleE
23. Dwarf Bard 1-2
24. Dwarf EmbalmerE
A conjoined twin ally/enemy. Awesome!
(...though somehow, still not as freaky as the clown...)
Heh heh, what till you see the other 92...
I love the idea of a PC having some off camera (or in camera if you like relationships (and these all come with a random Blight names chart of course) just to flesh out a bit of a backstory.
Optional, of course, like all the rules in the Blight, but fun if you like that extra level of background or development potential. Useful for a GM too of course since he can use them in all kinds of ways...
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Hmmm you could have some real fun with Ultimate Campaigns in the Blight. Having the players run a shop or some-such in certain less salubrious areas, with the protection rackets, tax-men, mysterious disappearances of employees....
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A halfling sorceror (shadow bloodline), who is haunted by the thought of losing her soul to darkness.
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Mack the Knife, a Swashbuckler (Flying Blade archetype) with the smile of a shark, the charm of an aristocrat, and a penchant for whistling Wagnerian opera when the knife comes out...
The idea of a crooked Boardwalk Empire AP could be very nice:)
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The idea of a crooked Boardwalk Empire AP could be very nice:)
Absolutely!
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The Vermis Insectum update is the my favorite yet... Walking around with a Bloated Centipede Mite sucking your blood through the inside of your nose... Yeech!
The idea of using compelling mechanical advantages to incentivize players to let these bugs do all sorts of horrible things to them... brilliant. And sickening. But also brilliant.
And because this just begs for it:
- A Hunter (Verminous Hunter archetype) who uses insects to get that extra edge, and lets his favorite insects nestle in his bosom (among other places), feeding off of his own flesh...
Al's adventure is deranged, in an awesome way. I can't wait to see it play out.
$82,000 has now also fallen.
I love insectum too Porridge, thank you, although some of it I like less, particularly the spiders...and there is LOTS of it:)
Rich
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When will it go on sale for us general public chumps that didn't have the money during the Kickstarter.
How much will it cost?
Can I bring Tammy along.
D'oh! Wrong thread, that'll teach me to follow Pett, well I'm not moving it now. :-)
Guess, the only thing left to do is Smurf.
This is a bit tangential but, here's a question for fans of D&D 5e:
I'll be getting the Blight for both Pathfinder and D&D 5e. I haven't played D&D 5e yet, but relative cleanliness of the ruleset, and relative scarcity of "trap" options, makes this system seem like a breath of fresh air in a lot of respects.
My main obstacle to thinking about things in terms of D&D 5e is that it doesn't seem to offer much variety w.r.t. characters you can build... That is to say, looking at the characters mentioned in this thread I can see how you'd build (1) Helaman's conflicted paladin, (2) chillblame's shadow sorcerer, and (3) Mack the knife. But most of the other character ideas look hard to build...
(For *some* of them you could do something for which major parts of their character -- e.g., the compulsion to eat the flesh of those they've killed -- plays no mechanical role. But that seems to make things a lot less interesting and flavorful than one where this is an integral part of their character! (Analogy: One could say we don't need the ranger class, since you could just build a fighter and give it nature and survival skills. But, again, the lack of mechanical meaningfulness of that choice makes this suggestion fall a bit flat...))
Any thoughts about this? (Is this just an artifact of the fact that the D&D 5e ruleset hasn't been around for very long, and so they haven't provided much support material?)
Really you have to lean towards a more old school style of pc differentiation, that is personality and role play rather than mechanical. There is no where near the level of pc options that pathfinder offers, but more than pathfinder core did at launch. The newly launched dmsguild.com and OGL/SRD will give third parties a chance to extend options. Combining pathfinder SRD and 5e SRD means I don't think it will be long for fan conversions of most popular classes to appear. Wizards have said they are not getting on the crunch splat book train, rather they intend on releasing less books etc that everyone ( they hope) will buy.
Fifths simple rules make house ruling classes pretty easy TBH, there are not too many moving parts to cause massive imbalances. Also using fluff to change feel it's easy with your DM's help.
Basically if you really need hard mechanical differences, and massive numbers of options, fifth won't work for you. But IME the speed of play make up for the lack of options. I love PF for the crunch, but find that more fun theory crafting and reading than in play. But for play fifth offers me a great balance of crunch options and speed of play, but I am pretty OS having been playing since BECMI (i'm not quite OD&D old!)
...and, given the prevalence of serial killers in the setting:
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It's an artifact of a deliberate move away from the rules complexity of 3.5 and somewhat back towards the earlier editions of the game. ... There's a lot less of "you can't do that because you don't have the relevant feat or skill" and more GM rulings.
But IME the speed of play make up for the lack of options. I love PF for the crunch, but find that more fun theory crafting and reading than in play. But for play fifth offers me a great balance of crunch options and speed of play, but I am pretty OS having been playing since BECMI (i'm not quite OD&D old!)
Yeah, this is what I find most appealing about D&D 5e too. After running a Wrath of the Righteous campaign *almost* to the end (using Scorpion's buffed stat blocks to keep things challenging), the campaign finally died when we spent two whole sessions on a single combat, and *still* weren't able to finish things up... And finally the players had just had enough.
D&D 5e looks much more playable at higher levels (though again, I haven't yet played it!)...
(One of the things that makes me excited about the Blight AP, as far as Pathfinder goes, is that it uses the slow advancement track, and only goes up to 9th level... so still in Pathfinder's sweet spot.)
Yup high level play is the bane of quick combats, especially in 3e and its children. But I haven't played high level fifth yet either, but my experience points to it being a heck of a lot quicker.
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Making the Blight a lower-level setting (maxing at around 14 for the toughest NPCs) was very much a serious choice based on my own love of lower-level adventures and the edgier danger I think they tend to have.
That doesn't necessarily mean all the monsters peak out at about CR 13 though......
Yarp.
Making the Blight a lower-level setting (maxing at around 14 for the toughest NPCs) was very much a serious choice based on my own love of lower-level adventures and the edgier danger I think they tend to have.
That doesn't necessarily mean all the monsters peak out at about CR 13 though......
Yarp.
Well naturally the *monsters* shouldn't be under any restrictions!
DM (after TPK): "Yeah, so that was a CR 27 demigod. (Pause.) What? I didn't say you had to fight it!"
