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[Neonivek]

It will take me over a month to get a good enough grasp on the Battletech campaign rules (and all those supplements) to even hope to know it well enough to run a game.

I think instead I should look towards Shadowrun 5th edition (as painfully underdeveloped as it is) for a possible game to run.

[Arx]

Looks like I might be running a one-off Pathfinder session at my university's con in a month. If you guys have any cool eldritch entity/creepy cult ideas, feel free to sling them my way. I'm currently thinking of a fairly basic raid on the cult base to steal (MacGuffin), facing opposition from robed mooks, eldritch deathtraps, and the occasional horror.

[Jimmy]

Scenario: Adventurers arrive at isolated seaside/swamp/deep woods village. Everyone in whole village greets them as "Hello Stranger!" in your creepiest DM voice. Anyone not from the village gets called Stranger, no matter how often or how hard they try to tell them their names. The villagers regularly violate common unwritten rules of social interaction: they reach out and touch your face when talking to you, every time you go to the out-house someone tries to accompany you to 'help', people eating things not made to be eaten, stopping suddenly and walking away halfway though speaking, random outbursts of song, laughter, poetry or crying, performing actions usually done indoors in public outdoor areas, etc. Possibly describe a baby's crying in the background at several times, only to stop describing it later, then have one of your PCs realise it's stopped.

The reason they're here is up to you. Perhaps they're supposed to meet someone here and they're not showing up until a few days. They might be someone they're supposed to protect, or someone they're supposed to kill. However it's clear nothing's right in this village, and unless they want to get murdered in their sleep they'd best get to the bottom of it. Ideas for the source include enchantment school spells such as Dominate Person that leave normal people as robotic minions, or insanity producing monsters such as many aberrations. Depends on the level of your party as to why the village is acting this way, and therefore how you expect the group to attempt to solve it.

Personally, I don't find much fun in a simple "Go here, kill cultists" mission. Doesn't give nearly as much roleplaying potential as a good mystery. If you're gonna give them a simple target like that, you may as well just make it "Generic Fantasy Dungeon Crawl #96" and let them roll their initiative for each room of inexplicably placed monsters.

[Arx]

I wasn't going to make it quite as simple as 'go here, kill cultists', but it's true. I like the village idea, though, thanks!

[Gentlefish]

Heh. I had a great idea for a Chaotic Evil Necropolitan Sorcerer. He was just high enough level to cast insanity - and by god did he ever want to use it on a big beefy guy.

He was the kind of evil where he'd sovereign glue a platinum piece over a glyph of warding. He'd polymorph into a goose and harrass a village, then turn into a dragon if someone tried to stop him.

Needless to say, guy was all sorts of "wrong". I'm going to have to use him as a villain one day - There's more to his crazy than that. It's just what he does when he gets bored. He's actually a conniving bastard of an evil villain.

[Neonivek]

Mmmm Neapolitan Sorcerer.

[Dorsidwarf]

I actually did the "creepy village" thing once.

They spent the whole day trying to figure out what was going on, but almost all the villagers would say nothing when quested but "everything is fine". When, confused and unnerved, they bought two rooms at the inn ( the keeper of which muttered constantly and clammed up when they realised he was talking like a real person). They paid for rooms 2 and 3, so the rogue obviously broke into room 1 to see who was staying there.

When she opened the door, she saw that every inch of the room was covered in faintly-glowing blood runes of interminable purpose. They decided not to fuck with them in case it was a trap, and all piled into room 3, where they passed a very uneasy night, taking turns to stand watch.

In the morning they went downstairs to find all the patrons sitting exactly where they'd been the night before. They were stock still, and staring in random directions. When prodded, they murmured that nothing was wrong and stayed frozen.

Everyone in town they found was the same, with the exception of the gate guard, who was gone.

They decided that this was the limit of creepy they were prepared to handle and left town to go bash the goblins they were here for in the first place. They were deep in the castle the gobs were operating from when they heard more fighting, and rushed to help, saving a battered young adventurer who introduced himself as Alaric. He seemed nice, so the barbarian didn't make him into modern art, and he helped them through the rest of the dungeon. The rogue was secretly spying on him and ascertained that while the friendliness seemed genuine, he seemed on edge, ad stressed in a nervous way. But anyway, they all killed the gobo boss, and decided to split the payment with him, on agreement that they'd meet up with Alaric at the nearest city when both were done with their various quests and such.
They were leaving, when the bard noted they didn't have camping gear and asked where he was staying.

"Oh, this lovely inn down in <village name>"

[TheBiggerFish]

Oh boy.

[BlackFlyme]

Another session in the back-up campaign. Arcanist player was unavailable though. Rogue player was free for once.

We kept tripping traps. Partially out of greed. We know the gems were a trap, but we want gold, damnit. Party-destroying devil-bug be damned. Then wraiths and ghasts mess our faces up. Just about everyone almost died at least once. Was fun.

If I end up dying, I'm probably coming back as a Vigilante. Or a Sanctified Slayer archetyped Inquisitor. Or maybe even the non-lethal bleeding Rogue I've had floating around for quite some time.

Either way, I've noticed that a Kitsune would make an awesome Vigilante. Though their persona-switching may be a little screwy, since they would need to change personas and between Kitsune form, Human form, or Fox form. But this DM gave me the OK to wield a katana in my mouth in Fox form, so long as the katana is appropriately sized for me, which is hilarious. And weebish.

[Jimmy]

Pathfinder Question: I've got a Fire Kineticist planned as the big boss for the next adventure/dungeon planned for my party. They've just hit level 3, and it's a level 6 monster, meaning CR 5. My big concern is that it has a +11 to hit vs. touch AC, and deals 3d6+12 damage. Do you think that's too much for a party of low level characters? I know the party Kineticist has over 40 hp, so he'll probably be the target most of the time, and hopefully someone plans to pack energy resistance for the day. A natural 20 roll would just about guarantee character death, though.

[kilakan]

It really depends on how smart your players are.  In the veteran campaigns I've run before my general rule of thumb is 'Players will hit the enemy 40-25% of the time' and if the boss crits it should put you into bleed out or at least fairly close.  That ends up meaning of course that with smart players using flanking, buffs and debuffs usually get about a 50% chance to hit on any given attack and when the boss hits them it feels like it actually matters.

Edit:That said, at level 3 I know people who are rather nooby at table top tactics or have really underpowered characters through either bad feat choice or for story reasons that would have a ton of trouble even dealing with a CR 4 monster.  (That said, your kineticist having 40hp sounds like he's more than optimized enough to be able to take on something that much stronger.)

Editx2 Combo:I also just remembered the reason I started to post in the first place.  I'm planning on running a sort of semi-play by post game of a system called Blade of the Iron throne.  What would happen is that role-play, day to day life, shopping, planning and the like will take place in the forum thread and then when someone enters into combat I would ask them to join me in a discord or roll20 to do the combat encounter.  I feel that blade of the iron throne should work well using this because combat takes place in a 'limelight' mode where each player takes turns doing a number of 'exchanges' with whatever or whoever is fighting them and the limelight swaps when something major in the fight happens like the player taking a large blow, killing their enemy, ect.  So ideally I'd be able to do a 10-20 minute session with each person individually, post the results in the thread and get ahold of another person who hasn't taken their turn yet to do the same thing.

Blade of the Iron throne itself has an indepth combat system utilizing stances, attack types, and specialty defenses to out-manouver your oppoent.  Including causing them to bleed to death from a number of small wounds all over their body (it has 14 attack zones that you can choose from, and then 3 subzones in that area you roll for when you hit) as well as pain, shock and regular old coup-de-grace style attacks.  Think dwarf fortress combat the tabletop more or less, including having armor only protect you where armor actually is.  Wearing a armored chest-plate ain't gonna save your shins from that warhammer.  All that said, because you do not have a true health bar like most rpg's (you just get slower, drained ect as you take blows.  Allowing them to eventually get in powerful attacks that kill you outright (even then you have a limited number of drama points to spend to 'not really die just look like you got brutally killed but you can still be saved'))

It also has magic based off of necromancy, daemonlogy, divine powers and supernatural afflictions/curses.  The use of such magic requires you to carefully contain your spells, not only cast them to avoid damaging people you don't want to damage and counter Taint which will slowly twist the bodies and minds of careless wizards.  That said the spell system has rules and guidelines to allow gm's to make their own lesser mysteries (think low level dnd spells), greater mysteries (level 4-7 spells) and arcane secrets (level 8, 9 and epic spells) so with some work with me you could have any reasonable spellcaster you'd want for the setting.

TLDR:It's a sword and sorcery game set in a brutal world, with disposable mooks, powerful arch-enemies and gigantic monsters that is reminiscent of old literature like the Odyssey, Beowulf and newer fiction like Conan the barbarian.

Overall I have a plan for an alt-history like dark ages Europe setting which I am more than happy to change to accommodate unique character ideas for anyone who'd want to play.  I have a real-life friend or two who already have expressed interest in playing (one has a character already made) but I'd be looking for 3-4 more players from the forums if there's any interest? 

Does anyone have any questions?  Feedback?  Here's a link to the extract first chapter of the rulebook as put out by the publisher here and I have the character sheets and full core book on pdf if you have questions.

[scriver]

I would express an interest.

[birdy51]

Alternatively, a village that only tries to be nice with over-bearing hospitality could be interesting. Shower the party with gifts in a bid to never let them leave. Roll out the red carpet. Praise them for heroic deeds they never did. Offer them wives and fine feasting, fattening them for the great Sun Ceremony where they shall ascend like Gods into the sky upon chariots of fire!

[SOLDIER First]

Consider: all of that, but there's no sacrifice or anything. The villagers just have way too much stuff and incredible generosity.

[Twinwolf]

That's a good way to make players feel bad when they kill them out of paranoia.