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I wonder if you still use books from older editions in your PF games?


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Like stuff from 3.0 or 3.5? I do include things from time to time. For instance, in the last game I ran I included a spell and a magic weapon ability from "The Book of Vile Darkness". In the house rules for my campaign I made it perfectly fine to use classes and other aspects of 3.5 in our PF games with the understanding that some tweaks would have to be made.

I've even used a magic item or two from 2e because they often have such great fluff that is sometimes more fun than the crunch. We don't worry too much about the caster levels or prices of the magic items in our games so just dropping an item or two in from 2e or even 1e for fun makes the whole game better for our group because they might remember it from our games from back in the day. The 1e DMG is a really neat book to have for its random dungeon generator and some of the the many, many lists of things it has.

What about you and your group? Do you pull things from the shelves to spice up things in your games?


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I'm using some ideas from old forgotten realms for a pbp campaign, and I have to say that I run monsters with the fluff they had in Ad&d (like goblins and Drows).

I try to handle treasure as in Ad&d but it's hard to do in PF.

I really like the complete book of villains and Castle sites. I would love to use the 2e books of Forgotten realms, but that setting is not popular in my gaming group.

I would like to use more things from the old Dragon magazines, those are full of great things.


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Nicos wrote:
I would like to use more things from the old Dragon magazines, those are full of great things.

I have a LOT of Dragon Magazines. Nearly all the 1e issues, all of the 2e issues and I HAD all the 3.x issues but those were lost in a move, something that bothers me to this day. I still drag them out from time to time and look through them for ideas.


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DungeonmasterCal wrote:
and I HAD all the 3.x issues but those were lost in a move

Ouch.


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Yeah. When I went to move 6 years ago to my current residence they could not be found anywhere where I had been living, neither in the house or the storage unit.


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What do I have to sacrifice for an earlier spring.


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It was very warm for February all the past week, even warm for central Arkansas. But it dropped from 71 this morning to a current 29 with a wind chill of 20 at the moment and it's supposed to stay like this for 3 or 4 days. I know winter is a big hassle for some people but it's my favorite season and I get depressed when it's over.


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where would be a good place to get some pdfs of old TSR material like dragons and some of the gaming stuff ["Top Secret" mainly] there was some good work in those pieces.


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Isn't there a website for that, drive thru games or something like that.


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www.drivethrurpg.com


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DungeonmasterCal wrote:
Seth Kairos wrote:
Have you ever reused a years old NPC that your players have liked?

I have. One was a sleezy merchant who had connections all over the city and was the best person to go to if you wanted to know what was really happening. His name was Alyar One Eye.

Another was a Gnome named Twiggy Jackapple. They first rescued him from a tribe of primitives who thought he was a god and prophet. He got tired of being worshiped and paid the players a handsome sum to to make him disappear. They later encountered hundreds of miles away as the leader of a small Gnome village.

Man, I love this, though it’s been hard to do it often in our games (as the PCs generally either maintain contact/association with the NPCs or eliminate them... thoroughly). Still, sometimes we’ve been able to do this and it’s been fun!


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DungeonmasterCal wrote:
Tacticslion wrote:

Tell me everything you know about

- d20Modern
- Oriental Adventures
- Psionics
- Blue Rose and/or True20

I know very little about everything listed except Psionics and Oriental Adventures. I love both of them and have managed to incorporate the former into my campaign pretty successfully.

Psionics use the inner power of a character to shape and affect the world around him. I've only seen the Psionist in actual play, but the main NPC in my current campaign is going to be a Psychic Warrior.

Oriental Adventures has been harder. I love the spells listed and the Sohei class, but I think that the class didn't have as many abilities as it should have. I'd like to figure out a way to translate it over to PF.

I really enjoy the idea of OA, but the specific Lo5R setting was just kind of “that’s pretty okay,” for my tastes (absolutely nothing wrong, at all, as a setting, but it feels a little too “clean” and “neat” - too organized, I guess - for a setting for my tastes), and a lot of the classes and people they have don’t really fit into their own setting, which... unfortunate. But! It’s pretty awesome for all that and I’d love to use it. Now all I need is interested players and/or a GM.

I’ve been enjoying running a d20Modern game lately; I like it and a number of things they do with it, but feel that it should give out more skill points, and/or have a skill overhaul akin to PF’s. I also prefer stamina/wounds as a system to hit points, so... yeah.
It shares a number of mechanics with Blue Rose, which was the precursor to True20, which was definitely inspirational for things like Star Wars d20 (Also great, but once again different). Anyway I like all those systems and broadly recommend at least looking at them, if you haven’t - note that BR/T20 are the “most” different of the systems as both strove to eliminate any dice other than the d20 with interesting results.

Paionifs, of course, is my “Boo.” I heart psi! DSP has such amazing products that it’s really hard to compete; I sometimes prefer the old 3.X psi-look/feel, but I’ve used psionics mechanics as non-psionic elements and they are just so smoooooooothe. Anyway, I totally agree with how great they are.


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I remember at the height of 3.5 when Blue Rose and True20 both came out. My local bookstore carried tons of D&D and related items. It helped a lot that the guy who managed the books section was a gamer, too. I glanced through them and got the gist of both but never enough to fully play them. I liked the idea of Blue Rose a lot and True20 seemed like a great way to go about things. But I didn't invest in them because all my group wanted to play at the time was 3.5. Kinda wish now I had them just to read for ideas.


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I like the BR setting a lot (it gets flak for being “overly progressive/SJW-preachy” or “thought police-y/not progressive enough” depending on your political affiliation, and though I understand such criticisms, I find mooooooost such a little overblown; there were several legitimate complaints, but I also think that’s true of most any setting, and I think BR received far more hate than it earned). I thought True20 had a great system, but there were a few quirks I preferred about BR, and there a few things I wished they’d expanded on in both.

Both are nifty, but I only own the BR stuff. I actually wish they’d published more adventures: there are a few “adventure setups” in the main book, and a single “full” (mini-) adventure for quick play/running campaigns, but that’s about it.

I often use it to inspire other things I play, when possible.


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And regarding Oriental Adventures, I did buy the two main Rokugan d20 books. I couldn't really justify the expense for the splat books that expanded the classes, though I would love to have had them. There's not really a Chinese or similar Asian Human race in my campaign. Hobgoblins fill that role (if you remember the 1e Monster Manual had them wearing Samurai-like armor). The upcoming campaign (which is still several months away) will have them play a much larger part if the players decide to go that direction on the map. The OA and Rokugan books will come in pretty handy for that.

My Hobgoblins are the exact same way I ran them in the 1e days, not the grey-skinned, bow-legged variety found in PF but looking and behaving more like Klingons. This was a few years before "Star Trek: The Search for Spock" was in theaters so I only had the Klingons from "ST: The Motion Picture" to go off of for their appearance. The culture I just sort of extrapolated and made up the rest and it happened to be very similar to what the Klingons in the "The Search for Spock" were like. Later when the dictionaries came out and talked a bit more about their culture I just eased that into my settings and it worked perfectly.

Wow, this was a lot longer than I meant for it to be.


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That’s awesome!

I will say, the Bestiary PF hobgoblin is pretty gooberiffic, but the majority of PF hobgoblins (due to the AP Ironfang Invasion) are a kind of “pretty, skinny, bald, gray orcs” rather than the hunchback in the Bestiary. My personal “go-to” look for hobgoblins is the 3.5 MM, but I loooooooove the idea of samurai and similar cultures for them - makes so much sense (including the “head hunting cult” mythological(?) aspect of samurai culture). Similarly Klingons! That’s pretty inspired!

More later when I have time!


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I forgot what I was going to say so NEVERMIND!


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I do that all too often...lol


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Tacticslion wrote:

That’s awesome!

I will say, the Bestiary PF hobgoblin is pretty gooberiffic, but the majority of PF hobgoblins (due to the AP Ironfang Invasion) are a kind of “pretty, skinny, bald, gray orcs” rather than the hunchback in the Bestiary. My personal “go-to” look for hobgoblins is the 3.5 MM, but I loooooooove the idea of samurai and similar cultures for them - makes so much sense (including the “head hunting cult” mythological(?) aspect of samurai culture). Similarly Klingons! That’s pretty inspired!

More later when I have time!

Yeah Bugbears are all the rage.


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DungeonmasterCal wrote:

And regarding Oriental Adventures, I did buy the two main Rokugan d20 books. I couldn't really justify the expense for the splat books that expanded the classes, though I would love to have had them. There's not really a Chinese or similar Asian Human race in my campaign. Hobgoblins fill that role (if you remember the 1e Monster Manual had them wearing Samurai-like armor). The upcoming campaign (which is still several months away) will have them play a much larger part if the players decide to go that direction on the map. The OA and Rokugan books will come in pretty handy for that.

My Hobgoblins are the exact same way I ran them in the 1e days, not the grey-skinned, bow-legged variety found in PF but looking and behaving more like Klingons. This was a few years before "Star Trek: The Search for Spock" was in theaters so I only had the Klingons from "ST: The Motion Picture" to go off of for their appearance. The culture I just sort of extrapolated and made up the rest and it happened to be very similar to what the Klingons in the "The Search for Spock" were like. Later when the dictionaries came out and talked a bit more about their culture I just eased that into my settings and it worked perfectly.

Wow, this was a lot longer than I meant for it to be.

The hobgoblins in Warhammer Fantasy had a Mongolesque culture, IIRC. That was a good old setting, and I really liked WFRP.


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I ran a quasi-Mongolian mythic fantasy game, once! It a solo game for my wife, and it turned out pretty nifty.

I used hobgoblins as the “villains” (I use the term loosely, because, while they were the source of the local problems, that’s less, “hobgoblins are evil!” and more, “that dude claiming rulership over them is evil!” - the PC was even in the middle of claiming the title of “prince” from him when we got interrupted and distracted by real life: we technically never determined who won...); the inhabited a frozen swampland north of lake “Ashtear” (I think that was its name): an enormous lake with several permanent settlements on it.

The PC was a low-grade Mercenary-cum-Yak herder (she started with three; that swelled to dozens by the time we ended), who was challenged by the “warriors” of civilized culture, and kept winning. Last survivor of a village burned to the ground when she was a child, she’d slain the warrior who killed her people, taken his stuff, and was now a wandering fighter-for-hire (she never really mastered the armor, though she wore it at times).

She’d proven herself valuable by defeating several challenges by local warriors, solving a series of crimes (proving the kappa - a local enslaved people - effectively innocent of wrongdoing, while saving several lives of important people; and so was hired to discover who had taken the heirs of several important families.

Turns out the hobgoblins! Along the way, she learned their culture, and I got to stat up some variants of monsters as Chinese, Mongolian, and similar Mythological Creatures, which was exceptionally cool.

Anyway, it was a fun game. I hope to go back, one day, and finish it! She has one-to-four hell’s she might want to conquer, after all (the hobgoblin afterlife consisted of only four different hells; it... it wasn’t ideal... yet).


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Limeylongears wrote:
The hobgoblins in Warhammer Fantasy had a Mongolesque culture, IIRC. That was a good old setting, and I really liked WFRP.

Never played WH, though I have seen it played at the FLGS I used to go to. I always use Centaurs as the Mongol/Scythian type warriors.

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