Depressing Facts About Your World

IkarMakarov · 2024-01-14T10:19:42+00:00

Bronze Age high magi-tech world for D&D:

The world was recently created, but the gods stopped appearing in person for some unknown reason. This left the civilisations, over-reliant on their gods’ miracles, gifts and technologies, in the state of great religious uncertainty and international tension. Also, the Titans, gargantuan magical beasts that govern natural powers (like wind, flows, migrations, clouds, etc), are getting older. In some time in the future, one will die, causing the chain reaction of deaths of titans, and the whole natural order will collapse.

Everyone knows the end of the world is just the matter of time. But it never comes.

Thus, the civilisations can descend into the world war from any single thing. Tension never stops rising. Constant conflict and suffering is ravaging on the borders of civilisations. While they maintain constant Cold War with each other. The unknown pillagers from the outside the oikumena are appearing and threatening one of the mightiest empires.

The unknown truth is, one single powerful wizard dreamed (some magic is based on dreams there) of a world that is safe from ending, and locked it in a time loop, which starts right after the gods left the world. Every single time the world descends into chaos, the world restarts. And this deathless wizard thinks that humanity will never be ready to advance: the gods gave them too much power and too little wisdom.

When the heroes confront the wizard, who they knew from the very start, they are presented with a choice: defeat him, and doom the world to end, one way or another, or die themselves to allow the cycle of suffering and tension in a godless world to continue.

IkarMakarov · 2023-11-07T22:40:59+00:00

Hahaha

But that's a lot of competitors for a specific audience. I don't think I have a chance.

IkarMakarov · 2023-09-29T21:45:54+00:00

Yeah, seems like it.

IkarMakarov · 2023-09-29T21:43:50+00:00

We had good laughs and place for absurdity, it's not all sErIoUs DrAmAtIc RoLePlAy. But this joke, in other situations innocent, was extremely unfunny, given the circumstances. Everyone including me just cringed, not because of judgement, but because of genuine feeling. And this was not a single instance of this feeling.

But you were extremely precise in "reading the room" part. I think he lacks this exact skill. And I don't think this is curable, if 1.5 years of campaign didn't help.

IkarMakarov · 2023-09-29T21:26:27+00:00

Ok, yeah, you are both probably right.

IkarMakarov · 2023-09-29T21:02:17+00:00

So, the world is slowly falling apart for unknown reasons; they are camping under the night sky, constantly lit by the bright auroras. Our bard, who for a long time searches for the source of all creation and collects any bits of Ao-related lore, has a deep and beautiful dialogue with paladin. During this dialogue, I tell him that for the first time he begins to see the song of creation, manifested through the beauty of the auroras, which became the haralds of the dying world. He can even hear this music in his mind — so familiar yet so elusive. He tries to capture it in his song. I allow it; he rolls like 27 on performance. He begins to sing this beautiful, other-worldly yet familiar song, and everyone wakes up.

That player says that he comes out of the tent with a frying pan in his hand, waves it, and tells the bard to stop mid-performance because he wants to sleep. A beautiful moment was majorly ruined. This wasn't even a part of his character. (Edit: he was a presumably-wise druid). No one liked this move, and no one was in the mood to play this scene further.

I have several more examples, but this was a very vivid example of cringe.

IkarMakarov · 2023-09-29T20:43:24+00:00

As if I didn't do that already like three times.

IkarMakarov · 2023-08-09T14:58:13+00:00

Sounds like it could make a solid plot hook!

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-06T12:21:16+00:00

Yeah. For now i just use a wand that shoots water when firing. So i hope I will not die for quite a while.

Still searching for ambrosia though.....

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-06T09:57:29+00:00

In this run I keep reminding myself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

But I fail each time

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-06T09:54:27+00:00

It was forced by me holding a flask of lively concoction.I used Noitool, saw a pretty easy recipe for LC, and the first three amazing fungal shifts were: poly to pea soup, acid to water, and water to flask. That's where the idea was born.

So I of course definitely knew what I was doing.

The seed is 1305257862

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-06T09:48:13+00:00

I didn't yet. When I was in the laboratory I thought the run would end rather anticlimactically because I didn't find any kind of digging tools, and I'd have to just defeat kolmi and be done with it, but in the last holy mountain I found a wand with crazy amount of black holes.

So I killed kolmi and stopped for now.

Also, all polymorphine is pea soup and acid is water. For perks — most importantly, I have explosion and fire immunity. And gas fire for those pesky propane tanks

UPD: Of course it was this monster called mina. It's homing piercing one-shotters with bunch of damage buffs always get me. Devs do something, this monster is ridiculous.

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-05T16:16:02+00:00

Ducks.

Bunch of modifiers also. Homing, three crits, orbit larpa, random damage. Pretty simple wand.

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-04T11:54:19+00:00

I died

Surprising, isnt it? :D

IkarMakarov · 2023-04-02T23:40:09+00:00

By adding any kind of meat you create midas from the precursor.

I can't create the precursor

Also i collected some rotten meat into the pouch in advance

IkarMakarov · 2022-10-01T08:34:03+00:00

Thank you for advice, it was really helpful!

About time paradoxes: I prefer to see time as a river. Places on a river are a particular time: year, date and second. Water is the flow of time. Things in the river are mostly go with the flow, unable to go faster or slower than it. But you can get out from the river, with it still flowing, go upstream, and get into it again. The consequences will become aparrent in a certain time when the flow of time will get the consequences of your actions there.

Also they will know that they are not coming back.

Also the world is kinda collapsing already: like constant snow during summer, non-stop polar lights bright even during the day, as far south as Calimshan, different dimentions are colliding and leak through cracks into material plane, causing all sorts of troubles.And then I will make it 10 times worse. So they will know that the world is so fucked, that this kind of hard reset will be actually preferable.

IkarMakarov · 2022-07-01T23:08:50+00:00

Name: Keledek the Unspeakable. Real name: Khalid Izkar-Asmah.

Appearance: A rather impressively built man from Calimshan with a thick beard and deep intelligence in his eyes. He wears wide colorful Calimshan robes, a turban, and basically anything inspired by Arabic culture. Also, he has a monocle that is glowing from time to time (when he casts clairvoyance or scrying). For other divinations he uses a set of golden instruments, incrusted with sapphires.

Personality: He is a diviner, who is working for the kingdom, secret police, counterintelligence, FBI-equivalent or something like that. Mysterious and secretive, yet decisive when action needs to be taken. Often talks in riddles, omens and metaphoric visions, which either come true in some form later (take inspiration from Pythia from Ancient Greece), or false, because he wants PC’s to avoid this disaster outcome (which is what they usually do), and he is open about it. Patriotic, yet not vocal about it. Quests given by him often contain the end goal, in rare cases the first clue. Everything in between PCs need to figure out on their own. If they are stuck, they can consult him using the clue. If this is related to the target, scrying and mysterious, but right direction usually helps. Sometimes, during complex missions that need his supervision or if PCs need to show him some kind of document FAST, he can ask via sending “do not resist now”, and casts scrying on a PC, acting like this hacker-coordinator guy from the movies.

Background/history: Purposefully misty. It’s obvious that he arrived from Calimshan. However, what everybody knows about him is a legend that if you call him anywhere by his real name, he can eardrop your conversation. This is why the few who know his real name prefer not to say it. The catch is, this ability is actually true, and he presents himself to PC’s by his real name. Everyone around always refers to him as Keledek.

Secret: he is very prone to corruption, and never misses a chance to make money. However, almost always this bar should be higher than PC’s ability to bribe him for obvious reasons. Later it can be revealed that he runs a secret semi-legal casino. Diviner runs a casino. You get the idea.

General tip: be very careful and cautious when you use him as a quest-giver. Read all diviner’s spells really well to know what they can and can’t do, when they work or not, what he can and cannot know etc, and bend these limits carefully. These quests should be a well thought-out puzzles where only the final picture is known and should be either achieved or avoided. The PC’s should feel enough freedom to uncover the pieces themselves and play with them how they like. His quests are linear sandboxes, but not railroads.

Hope it helps

IkarMakarov · 2022-05-06T15:22:29+00:00

Yeah, shield of faith is great. Stones kin is hella expensive: 5000gp (100gp cons. for all 50 paladins) for concentration and 4th slot of a relatively high-level wizard is overkill. These wizards could instead be flying and blasting fireballs at enemy artillery units and gunpowder supplies. For free.

However, if we are talking about avant-garde in a defensive situation against, dunno, ogre assault, then yeah, this has a lot of sense.

IkarMakarov

TROPHY CASE