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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

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[pikachu17]

Do you have a plan for how they can learn the proper activation sequence?

The name is Gnome Ann. Gnome Ann can use this device!

[Jimmy]

Yep, they'll have multiple opportunities to identify the curse.

First, the item's so damned good yet the enemy isn't using it? Should be a red flag.

Second, it'll have a script inside the item in gnomish to the effect of "Property of [insert gnomish name here], hands off!"

Finally, the treasure room will include a scroll of Analyze Dweomer, which will automatically identify the curse if they use it to examine the items.

[smjjames]

Finally, the treasure room will include a scroll of Analyze Dweomer, which will automatically identify the curse if they use it to examine the items.

In a conveniently accessable location? I'd imagine the treasure room in the Greed thing to be not unlike Mammons vault in Kill Six Billion Demons, except with maybe half the gold and littered with all kinds of expensive stuff, most of it would be junk to your players or otherwise useless.

Although half of that vast place would still be more than your players would ever be able to use, unless you go for the equivalent of a megaproject at some point.

[IcyTea31]

So I'm rejoining a 5e campaign I had to leave for a dozen sessions or so. --

So apparently the GM had had a demon disguise as my previous character after I'd left and the party was on to the deception almost immediately, pondering whether I was playing another demon or a doppelgänger. After they figured out there was an illusion, they even guessed that my character didn't exist at all. I had the character reveal himself after they suggested using torture instead of, say, Dispel Magic. Apparently playing the damsel in distress card doesn't work on this party anymore. I did earn inspiration for it, though, meaning it was probably all worth it.

[Trekkin]

So, does anyone have any ideas for factions that could spring up from this, aside from your bog standard guilds, colleges and such?

What size of factions do you want and what role do you want them to play narratively?

[Trekkin]

Well, if you just want the adventurer-facing parts of factions you can probably just put together a set of random tables and roll until something cool falls out. List out all the things players might have a strong opinion about someone else controlling; in your particular case, that might be elementals and other spirits, some localized ex-divine esoterica, organized magic, the law, and the local economy. Then just put together a table for how openly they control it (by default I roll a d4 to see if they're open, an open secret, acting through a front group or actually unknown) and roll on the first table again to see what they want to control but don't yet, then figure out why. Once something makes sense, scale it up based on how cool it is and repeat until you're satisfied.

[NJW2000]

A faction that wants to explore past the outerlands?

A sort of reality-police that prevent breaks and portals with an iron fist?

A faction trying to find a way to kill all gods and prevent any more ever arising permanently?

A faction trying to reclaim the original world, either by manipulation of reality or mutation to survive there?

[pikachu17]

A group of Paladins of Redemption from 5E? Possibly trying to go back so they can try to redeem any surviving gods?

A secret group of succubus hookers?

[Rolan7]

I hope Myth-Weavers comes back online soon...

We finally started 5th edition Thursday.  After actually playing a session, most of my expectations were confirmed.  Advantage is still weird but okay, as are dragonborn/drow player races (now that 4e's alignment fuckery has been reversed).  We have a paladin in the party, and that's not a potential disaster like in 3.5.

I particularly like the "background" choice.  It helped give me some foundation on which to form my character's personality.  My dwarf fighter is a sage, quite intelligent but rolled 6 charisma, so I have him constantly remark on how "fascinating" other people's cultures are at inappropriate times.  He also shares trivia in an attempt to look smarter, and makes bad puns.  Somehow this character is very easy to get into (;

I'm going warhammer-and-board, which worked out pretty well in the practice/intro session.  The "protection" ability came in more useful than I expected, saving the dragonborn paladin from a melee crit and saving our tiefling sorcerer from a ranged attack.  Said sorcerer *really* needs to learn mage armor...

[Kadzar]

Yeah, backgrounds are such a great roleplaying tool. One of my first 5e characters was a barbarian, and, while normally such a character is often roleplayed as a dumb brute (though it wouldn't have made sense with him, since I somehow managed to roll him with all stats at least above a 14, with a couple of 18's), the fact that he was a guild merchant played a much bigger role in how he interacted with people than his barbarianism (which I decided was something of a family tradition, which he would tap into when things got violent.)

Another great one was my half-elf noble warlock. Technically he was heir to the throne, but he had enough political enemies due to his parentage (the other half was half-orc, in a union meant to bring peace with the nearby half-orc kingdom, though his half-orc mother was eventually assassinated) that he didn't dare stick around the elven kingdom, and instead  sought the help of a mysterious Archfey patron to give him the power to take on his enemies. And, in play, it was fun to be a haughty noble who didn't understand that not everyone cares about his noble status (especially a bunch of dwarves who never really leave their mountain nation and don't really care much about the outside world except in regards to trade).

And the current character I'm playing is a bard with the pirate background, so pretty much all his spells have a pirate theme, like I use Find Familiar to have parrot familiar, and I can use Bestow Curse, which I fluff as giving them a black spot, and I keep my stuff in a Leomund's Secret Chest.

Also, my backup character I'm planning is a conjuration-specialist wizard, and I'm planning that he used to be a charlatan who specialized in shell games, and he's going to have been trained by a PC from a previous game who was an evocation-specialist wizard who I believe had the criminal background or somesuch and used to make money fencing magical goods.

So, yeah, I think backgrounds help you get a lot more character out of your characters, even if they don't have that much mechanical weight.

[Culise]

A faction that wants to explore past the outerlands?

A sort of reality-police that prevent breaks and portals with an iron fist?

A faction trying to find a way to kill all gods and prevent any more ever arising permanently?

A faction trying to reclaim the original world, either by manipulation of reality or mutation to survive there?

Appreciate the ideas. Though the third one's not really feasible since all the gods are dead.

In this setting, clerics work not by worship, but by basically siphoning minuscule amounts of divine power straight from the corpses of the gods. Since the gods aren't actively holding onto the power, they're able to get away with it.

Clerics are generally viewed as something of a necessary evil. On the one hand, they use the power that destroyed the world. On the other, they do all sorts of healing stuff.

Ah, in that case, how about ones that seek to revive their own god?  Say, because they also hope it'll repair the material plane, because they hope to gain power as the facilitators of this revival, or from the divine side, because the god itself pulled a Bhaal and made plans to arrange matters in the event of their demise.  This could play interestingly with the ones that want to create a new god or use their power without ascending, too, as well as those who hated the gods for the damage their wars wrought.  It'd kind of be an archetypal villain set, though I suppose you could give it a twist by making their goal to revive one of the gods who would be considered "good" in a conventional setting. 

[Mephisto]

I know I've said this before but it bears repeating.

For living in the current home of Gen Con, finding a gaming group in the area (especially non-D&D/Pathfinder) is almost impossible.

[smjjames]

Thing about this is that it's basically a case of "The age of the gods has passed". There's no divine recovery. Any attempts are doomed to failure (except possibly the guys that want to make a supergod that is all the gods combined into one, and if that happens it's beyond the scope of the campaign). The gods have come back numerous times, though records generally get dodgy around then. Some adventuring party thinks "Maybe we should take the power of the gods...", take them, and then become the gods, right down to the hatred of one another. Another war occurs, though since it's in the material plane it has minimal effect, and they all die again.

Hmm. Perhaps I could make some faction that's actively attempting to repress adventurers to stop this, for fear of it one time spilling into the Outerlands.

And the gods aren't good. They were at first, but as time went on they basically became uncaring. When they nearly wiped out the sentient races, it wasn't out of malice. It was simply because they didn't care that they were literally driving them extinct.

That war between gods sounds like a cautionary tale about MAD. Except that the races had a place to escape to.

Also, sapient, not sentient.

[scriver]

What is the Outerlands?

[Harry Baldman]

Thing about this is that it's basically a case of "The age of the gods has passed". There's no divine recovery. Any attempts are doomed to failure (except possibly the guys that want to make a supergod that is all the gods combined into one, and if that happens it's beyond the scope of the campaign). The gods have come back numerous times, though records generally get dodgy around then. Some adventuring party thinks "Maybe we should take the power of the gods...", take them, and then become the gods, right down to the hatred of one another. Another war occurs, though since it's in the material plane it has minimal effect, and they all die again.

Hmm. Perhaps I could make some faction that's actively attempting to repress adventurers to stop this, for fear of it one time spilling into the Outerlands.

And the gods aren't good. They were at first, but as time went on they basically became uncaring. When they nearly wiped out the sentient races, it wasn't out of malice. It was simply because they didn't care that they were literally driving them extinct.

You could take a page from Apocalypse World's book and have there be a series of god-shaped holes in the universe, totaling up to a malignant psychic maelstrom that howls across the material plane.

Or you could take even more pages from it and generate factions in accordance with the threats they pose (warlords, grotesques, afflictions, brutes, landscapes etc.), together with the general types of moves you can expect them to make.