Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[MrRoboto75]

18d20 sounds like casting fireball with extra steps.

[Kagus]

18d20 sounds like casting fireball with extra steps.

You might enjoy my 51d20 68d6 build.

The one I made specifically for the sake of rolling as many dice as possible on their turn and just generally being a horrible abomination of a character that should never be included in a game ever.

[Loud Whispers]

Can you reroll those dice to maximise the rolling?

[Kagus]

Can you reroll those dice to maximise the rolling?

Eh, not as much as one might hope, I don't think... You can squeeze an easy extra 10d6 out if you really want, but I haven't looked into all possible rerolling options. Halfling doesn't work.

[Cthulhu]

I'm setting up an ACKS campaign, set between Jutland(Norse but mediterranean climate) and Rorn (England but mediterranean climate).

Gonna be a sandbox type of hexcrawl, still adding points of interest and such.  Being late antiquity norse Jutland is still in a tribal/clan structure with petty kingdoms that rise and fall with the success of their leaders.  Wave-cutter is the biggest, it's the jomsviking type of thing, mercenaries and pirates that have been highly successful.  Players will start in Holgirsson.

The "plot" is an underlying situation.  The sorcerer king Sebek, way off the map to the southeast, is doing That Which Sleeps shenanigans to bring about the Awakening, where the chthonic (underground, not cthulhu) gods manifest on earth and destroy all the enemies of Chaos.  He's got agents in Jutland, he doesn't see it as a threat to his plans but Rorn would fight him and he's hoping to subvert Jutland and use it to neutralize Rorn.  There'll be some opportunities to interact with this conspiracy and as the PCs become bigger players in Jutland the conspiracy will eventually come to them.

Mimic Farmstead is what I'm most excited about.  When/if the PCs arrive they'll find the 13 people living there having some kind of conniption.  They've found these empty pods full of undifferentiated human tissue, seven of them.  One of them had a guy's ring in it, and they're convinced that guy has been replaced with some kind of imposter, body-snatchers style.  They're correct, and six more of them are pod people too.

The pod people are mostly identical, except...

-The pod regrows lost body parts.  This is apparent on the guy with the ring if they look close enough and ask around, and that'll help them identify one or two real people.
-The pod recreates their personality perfectly, but their memories of the night they got podded are scrambled, either swapping memories completely or swapping characters.  So for example, Bob went to the market with Bill, and Joe played cards with Jim.  Joe and Bob got podded, and now Joe thinks he went to the market with Bill, and Bob thinks he went to the market will Jim.  It's obvious that some of the memories are wrong, but since everyone is sus you can't say who's telling the truth.

So the players will have to identify at least one real person and work backwards to identify whose memories are incompatible with the confirmed true memories, alongside any more traditional detective work they do.  If they fail, or ignore it, eventually they'll get the entire farmstead and go after the players or just start hitting other villages and farmsteads around the area.

I'm excited for it, it'll be fun.

---

Snorri's Bane is just a mini-dungeon, the lair of a grendel-type monster that killed a locally famous hero Snorri the Iron-Skinned.  His magic shield Sword-Shame is still there, you can use it to sunder weapons if they fail an attack roll against you.  Another big early dungeon will be an artificial dungeon created by a local wizard, he lets monsters take up residence and hires adventurers to clear them out and bring him back corpses and magically-contaminated organs for his spell research.  He's also part of Sebek's conspiracy, and uses his access to build a register of local adventurers and mercenaries to forward to other conspirators.  Useful ones might be approached, others might be eliminated or ignored. 

[Grim Portent]

A stupid idea I have for a campaign premise. The PCs are members of one faction of their choice in a war of succession following the death of a child king, thing is that the war of succession is huge and complicated and involves several different types of claims to leadership.

Claimant ideas I have include:

A foreign noble who has a claim on the throne according to their realm's legal system but not the realm in question's legal system. Backed mostly by their holdings in their homeland.

A descendent of a family that was deposed by the former monarch's family several generations ago, and is now the most obvious successor in the realm's own laws but lacks popular backing.

A devil who was declared the heir of the realm in the event the royal family dies out by one of the recently deceased monarch's recent ancestors as part of a pact. Barely any backing from the nobles or clergy, but has fiends and cultists insisting that a deal is a deal.

A powerful Duke who was married to the family of someone who married into the royal family. No proper claim, but powerful enough to contest things on even the most tenuous grounds.

A less powerful Duke who has the backing of more nobles on the grounds of popularity despite no genuine claim to the throne. Is nominally a reformist who wants to return the kingdom to an elective monarchy succession system it left behind a few centuries prior, in part because it would justify him being king.

The widowed mother (not of the royal line) of the deceased king, and their only immediate living relative. A decent politician and broadly liked, but a woman in a patriarchal succession system. Backed by what could be termed as loyalists who see her as a vestige of the old regime they can cling to.

[Kagus]

The widowed mother (not of the royal line) of the deceased king, and their only immediate living relative. A decent politician and broadly liked, but a woman in a patriarchal succession system. Backed by what could be termed as loyalists who see her as a vestige of the old regime they can cling to.

Go full Hatshepsut on their asses

[Iduno]

A devil who was declared the heir of the realm in the event the royal family dies out by one of the recently deceased monarch's recent ancestors as part of a pact. Barely any backing from the nobles or clergy, but has fiends and cultists insisting that a deal is a deal.

A fun one to push as the strongest claim based on law, if there's a paladin in the group.

[Rolan7]

It's a solid idea, particularly since it relies on the line dying out.  It'd almost certainly be unlawful as heck if it was just "when I die you get my kingdom" since you usually couldn't just nominate some rando as your heir.  There are, well, laws and traditions, meant to prevent exactly that kind of abuse.

But the end of a line is akin to the end of a nation, in that sort of divine monarchy.  Anything goes, in a way, and a devil stepping in with law-and-order might well gain the fealty of the local noble vassals.  The alternative is complete chaos.  An infernal contact (inherently trustworthy, in-universe) would be largely an excuse, but a good one to point to.  The divine mandate continues- via this lawful immortal.

Except it's a *devil* so the party has plenty of reason to get involved.  They'll probably be tricking people into soul contracts at the very least, if not gearing up for aggressive wars.

[Egan_BW]

delightfully devilish

[Rolan7]

And you just know that the forces of Hell would have shown summoning-leniency in order to kill off the line.  Which might be a way to convince certain nobles that the devil is an unjust liege.

[Grim Portent]

My thoughts are that the nobles for the most part don't care about the devil's legitimacy, in large part because a lot of them don't care about who has the legitimate claim anyway.

I'm also thinking the child king died in a genuine accident, dying to injuries sustained when thrown from a horse in a riding lesson. Not that some of the claimants aren't accusing others of being murderers to undermine them, as well as spreading other falsehoods. In my head at the moment the only honest claimants are the queen mother, the foreign noble and the devil. All the others are spreading some kind of lies about the other claimants or about their own claims validity.

[NJW2000]

Where's the non- aristocratic Pretender, attempting to sway the common folk and ride to the throne on a wave of popular support?

[Egan_BW]

Because if there's a unambiguous good guy then the players will always back them, and rob us of the fun part where we see which faction they like best~

[Grim Portent]

I could see a bandit king or similar rallying a bunch of peasants to their cause, not a nice person by any means, but not necessarily any worse than anyone else in the running.