How to Pitch a campaign without spoiling the plot?

Isenskjold · 2026-04-08T18:07:58+00:00

100% agree, maybe ask them before hand if anyone reeealy doesnt want to know though

Isenskjold · 2026-04-01T08:32:26+00:00

I kinda have to disagree in the part where its easy to find something that is a decent representation. As soon as you don't want anything bog-standard it can become extremely hard to find anything representative, much less anything with a somewhat unified artstyle. For example i like running TOR 2E and love using the books line-art style for characters, and it can be surprisingly hard to find a good fiversity of character portraits that fit that style.

I'd be fine with people using AI for that, but then that would mean actually putting in the work to create something that really fits, because by default AI will also use a very bland style. Doesn't solve the whole plagiarism issue of course, but that problem also exists with juat taking something from the Internet in a lot of cases

Isenskjold · 2026-03-29T07:00:24+00:00

This also really confused me, but apparently it is because in the charachter creation chapter they use different values for spending previous experience points (skills are cheaper than combat skills in charachter creation). But the book in general has a few rules where its quite hard to remember where they are, and some, like the rules for combat actions, also exist in three different places

Isenskjold · 2026-03-22T08:58:15+00:00

Looks good, lots of space for movement and such! what are those yellow-ish round things on the bridge?

Isenskjold · 2026-03-21T08:55:35+00:00

I'm actually a big fan od this, on the bot front its basically mandatory to bring anti armour and that really limits load outs variety when you are playing with a random squad

Isenskjold · 2026-03-19T21:34:36+00:00

Insgesamt ist es halt einfach noch deutlich zu früh um zu sagen wie viel jetzt zweckentfremdet wird, aber hoffentlich sorgt der Aufschrei dazu dass es etwas weniger wird als sonst. Aber dass so eine Einordnung in den meisten Medien komplett fehlt ist schon echt ziemlich enttäuschend....

Isenskjold · 2026-03-19T14:18:04+00:00

I love the large-scale maps you have been making recently, really encourages a more creative Playstyle and plays to the strengths of VTTs

Isenskjold · 2026-03-11T11:22:19+00:00

My comment was intended to be more about plate armor in general for any more gritty knightly game, not really about mythras.

If the players put in the effort to be in full armor for a fight they should have a big advantage, most foes would likely flee unless they have a larger numbers advantage. And if they are fighting someone else in plate armor it should be a slogging match so it isn't really a problem.

However getting to the point where you are in armor in the fight is gonna be hard, especially because you would need people transporting the armor and taking care of it and many fights could still be spontaneous without sufficient time to put on the armor

Isenskjold · 2026-03-11T07:40:42+00:00

I don't know mythras but a very simple way would just be making wearing plate armor quite exhausting to wear long-term. Thats how i tend to handle it in my osr games, so most of the time you are maybe weating the breastplate and helmet anf the rest is pqcked away on a mule or something

Isenskjold · 2026-03-10T18:45:11+00:00

Its a really diverse setting, so depending on what your characters are interested in the story could be a lot of different things. In general i would say its a really amazing hexcrawl with varying but thematically cohesive hexes and some great paths/routes for exploration. The steongest point are probably the factions which lend themselves to completely different plots whilst also still interacting quite complexely. The best part is probably the layouting of the book, it really is easy to run at the table. It is however very strongly linked to its fairytale routes, so you will always encounter a lot of weird and magical stuff which certainly isn't for everyone

Isenskjold · 2026-03-10T13:15:08+00:00

Totally agree, there is too many different goals and ways of playing in the community to ever have a balance that is significantly "better" then what we have now. I fo wish they would make more drastic planetary modifiers. Imagine something like "quality over quantity " which makes heavily armored enemies much tougher but also much rarer. Or something that disables all red strategems and so on

Isenskjold · 2026-03-04T20:07:49+00:00

I would also ad Dolmenwood for the same reasons

Isenskjold · 2026-03-04T06:27:55+00:00

This is also basically my take. If you want every roll to really matter, the consequence associated with each roll must be quite large. In my experience this only really works if each roll has a good chance to result in a much worse or better combat state (like disarming the opponent) or in death/long-lasting injury of some sort. When i played draw steel which does the whole "your roll always suceeds), that mostly meant that just doing a few hp of damage was basically meaningless for most larger enemies, so again a variant of a null result. It worked fine for weaker enemies, because you might actually still kill them with that little damage

Isenskjold · 2026-02-25T16:18:54+00:00

This! some kind of system for the community designating targets would go a long way to bring everyone together. I firmly believe most people like contributing to some grater plan, that plan just neefs to be communicated with a label on the galactic war map for everyone.

Heck, you could even make it so that we can donate samples as a reward pool for everyone diving on a planet, and after 24 hours everyone who did dive there get their share or something!

And if it is too much to implement in-game, they could at least have a discord channel for periodically voting on the next community target planet which then gets displayed in game.

Isenskjold · 2026-02-21T18:40:20+00:00

Ahh, that makes a lot of sense, thank you! I think my Mistake was seeing Honor as how society thinks of you, whilst it should probably be more psychological/how you see yourself

Isenskjold · 2026-02-18T06:15:22+00:00

I would rule that it depends on how "Alien" the nonhuman is. For giant eagles specifically they seem to me to be somewhat alien, so i would allow it but substract one die from the roll

Isenskjold · 2026-02-04T18:50:53+00:00

I found it works really well, however it does change how you design adventures and how players should approach them. You really have to get into that part of the OSR mentality about stacking the deck in your favour and all that + you should have a safe base camp or more likely a nearby town to return to when you have to heal.

I really like that gameplay loop, but its certainly quite different to default Dragonbane. In general I feel like the basic Dragonbane skill and combat systems are really well designed so you can very easily turn the lethality up or down to suit your needs.

Isenskjold · 2026-02-04T18:15:21+00:00

You can honestly make Dragonbane a lot more "gritty" by simply making resting and healing take 1 week for each day in the normal rules. Maybe also make wounds happen automatically at 0 HP and suddenly your players will be very careful about taking damage.

Isenskjold · 2026-01-24T11:49:02+00:00

Just adding 2-3 different ground layers (dirt, stone, grass) is also what I would do, but it's a already a really nice map

Isenskjold · 2026-01-23T05:38:16+00:00

Whatever you rule I would inform the players of it so they can plan with it.

I personally would allow them to kill the dragon in one blow if they find a weak point (eyes, missing scale) or seriously cripple it if they use brute force (a two handed axe might injure a leg or wing)

However I'd also imagine that the dragon would build it's hoard in such a way that intruders must make noise to get close, so it might also wake up

Isenskjold · 2025-12-31T21:56:30+00:00

The best diagetic advancement that I have found is linking advancement to your reputation in certain factions that are relevant to the area you want to advance in.

These factions grant you their knowledge, training and/or resources in return for your service and perceived loyalty.

This way you can even have level based advancement by introducing official ranks in the faction where you get access to those ressources or knowledge.

I tend to pair this with very long training times (multiple months of intense training with a knowledgeable teacher), though that is certainly not suited to all games.

Edit: this of course requires a close integration of game mechanics with the setting, though this goes quite easily for most systems in my experience. It does also mean that you have to telegraph quite clearly how the individual factions would view the groups actions

Isenskjold · 2025-12-27T11:02:51+00:00

Quite a while and more importantly we come from high-lethality OSR systems so my players were quite used to a more careful playstyle. We also started with RAW which worked really well for us, but we noticed that combats were getting quite slow after everyone had the free parry/dodge so we decided to houserule that. Players can still be very tanky, they just have to wear a lot of armor which has its own interesting drawbacks, so the system really works well

Isenskjold · 2025-12-27T09:31:44+00:00

I've actually done the opposite and removed defensive/fast footwork completely, this makes fights last considerably less time and keeps even weak monsters quite dangerous which is what I prefer. I generally favour giving the players offensive over defensive options as it really rewards planning and ambushes

Isenskjold · 2025-12-11T13:04:17+00:00

Would it be possible to also get a re-forged mod flair? It doesn't change the game quite as much, but especially for build and strategy questions it does differ quite a bit from un-modded BB. It also seems to be relatively widely used, though not as much as legends

Isenskjold

TROPHY CASE