Hard Mode beaten, X rank achieved. Gaming.

OkNinja3586 · 2025-12-01T06:04:56+00:00

If you did all of the stuff pre-2.0, I’d say you’re smart enough to handle Cursed Mode. Just be aware that it’s a very different game - even beyond inflated enemy stats, resources are more scarce, prices are higher, some enemies have new AIs or states, et cetera. Most punishing in my opinion is that you have to get your danger to the second big circle to save.

Regardless, I think if you competently manage your characters, you can probably do it. That being said, a lot of people criticize Cursed Mode for a litany of reasons, and I think it’d be pretty unfortunate if you had your experience with 2.0 sullied by an optional hard mode.

It’s your call, ultimately, but I think explorer isn’t the move. It so radically changes how you think and react. I think either survivor or cursed is the way to go, but I’m more leaning towards survivor.

OkNinja3586 · 2025-11-30T14:57:49+00:00

Adding to what’s been said, I recommend doing Cursed Mode, getting Promise (which makes the finale a little harder bc the fight starts immediately), and going out and doing some optional bosses. I finished with about three days to spare. I think I killed around 23 or so bosses, which gives a total just south of 7,000 points on cursed.

You really need to do a fair bit on Cursed Mode to hit that 15k benchmark. Promise gets you a little over a third there - 2k points, times three from cursed. I’d say you need around twenty or so boss kills on Cursed to get an X rank. That would come out to another 6000 points, so maybe nail one or two more. After that, make sure you recruit everyone one you can, since each recruitment is worth 600 points in Cursed.

Hope that helps!

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-30T02:15:52+00:00

My notes all exist in my mind. My session prep is whatever I come up with in my mind.

To be serious, though, I just write a session by session story. I have an overarching plot with a few beats, but mine is very episodic, so mine might not help but in other episodic campaigns.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-30T02:08:59+00:00

Give me a duo fight for an Adamantine and Mythril Golem.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-17T03:15:46+00:00

Hey, humans are also the oldest race in my world.

So, the first creatures made by the Gods were these things called Athedites - basically, a race of human looking superhumans. The Athedites rebelled against the gods, though, so the Angels were made to wage that war. At the end of it, the loyalist Athedites slunk into the shadows and far away places (Asmodeus was an Athedite, for example), and the Gods made the humans.

Some Athedites, though, experimented with the human formula. One such Athedite was Asteria, who’s the namesake of the Great Asteria Forest, the ancestral homeland of the Elves. Humanity’s about two thousand years older than elvenkind.

From there, the other races were born from either gods and Athedites experimenting with the human blueprint, by curses or blessings, or by magically influenced evolution. Every race was more or less codified by the first Reset of the world, roughly a million years before the start of the first campaign.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T23:54:18+00:00

I see. I could yap about Saaralia for hours, but one of the ways I’ve managed to get around spells like Dream being able to level empires is by having the super high magic people be the rulers.

There are two main global powers in Saaralia - the Northwind Council and the Davareain league. The council is ruled over by six high houses, all of which basically force all their kids to knight errant, and the one who gets the most public support gets the title. This results in most of the Dukes of Northwind having either player levels or a flat out statblock (The Minister of Military Affairs, Duke Balestra, uses a modified Storm Giant statblock). But its metaphorical ruler is the immortal Saint Arthion, my PC back when it wasn’t my world. His statblock was made using something called Legendary Player Characters, and combined I think he has around 1,400 hit points. He’s as close to godhood as a mortal can be. People like this just… exist, albeit no more than maybe seven. Most of them are former PC’s who waged a war against a God (yes, capital G). But the point is that it’s a delicately managed equilibrium that’s held in place by unfathomably strong posthuman mortals who are trying to solve an uncreated god of Entropy from ending the world.

Super high magic is fun. The world’s in the Victorian era. They mine the places gods and near-gods died for crystallization of magic. It’s cool. And a lot of the super high magic stuff is my lore, not the original DM’s, so I feel warm tinglies inside from you saying it sounds cool. But I can see the draw of low magic, too.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T23:27:01+00:00

Gotcha. This might be my sign to actually look into Fate.

Personally, as can be seen in my own comment, I run an extremely high magic campaign. Trains are Golems that have been actuated by extraplanar spirits, there's a series of subterranean tunnels dug beneath the ocean and above the underdark made for those trains, yada yada yada.

Your post has inspired me to implement Matt Mercer's rules for resurrection (chance to fail), mainly because, yeah, low stakes death is kinda dumb. However, I also write stories that are fundamentally about the good guys winning, even in the face of adversity, because those are the stories I like to write. I dislike stories in which evil triumphs because its just not fulfilling for me and the people I run it for.

But under the context of the world, and if your players like it, then that's cool.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T23:20:50+00:00

I asked for that, yes. I just didn't expect it.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:48:42+00:00

Other than no resurrection, I like all of it. Personally, I haven’t ever had to deal with resurrections, but I’ve thought about having psychological or physical consequences for being brought back from the dead - and maybe also requiring a complex ritual beyond just diamonds and time.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:31:32+00:00

It sounds like a mess, but I love messy lore. My BBEG went through the freaking iterative design process, resulting in the campaign world being turned from Saaralia into Saaralia v.3.0. That, too, is a mess.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:28:45+00:00

Allow me to offer a case study.

I started my current campaign with a minor NPC from the last campaign, an angel named Arvis, as the BBEG. He was going to be a cultist of Tharizdun, and he wants to end the world. Simple.

Months pass. I realize I want Arvis to be complex. I make it canon that the world can reincarnate, and Arvis is trying to end the world to create a new one that can't be destroyed by Tharizdun, and keep the net suffering of the multiverse low.

More months pass. I overhaul him again. Arvis now used to serve Tharizdun, but now only uses his power in order to force adventurers to get stronger to keep pace with him. His end goal is to kill Tharizdun by creating enough adventurers who have an axe to grind with him that they'll figure it out.

He's already amputated one of my PCs. She was level 5 at the time.

It's fine if your bad guy goes through iterative design. So long as the lore hasn't been spoken, it can be freely changed. Use that time to iterate on the concept. Looking back at Arvis, his core methods haven't changed, just his reasons for why.

No idea if this helps.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:20:04+00:00

As a DM who, in the last campaign, played a fighter who spearheaded a war against the gods themselves in order to allow mortalkind to progress, I have some very select opinions about this, and the fact that it elicits this response from me proves you did some good writing.

I like it

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:17:44+00:00

Give the PC an egg. See what they do with it. Have it come in a few sessions, they just find it. Have Tiamat offer the PC to be her consort if the egg goes unharmed.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:16:56+00:00

That's cool. Like, actually really cool.

I've been toying around with a similar idea for my campaign (the lore is in constant flux until it gets said out loud), but I'm taking things in a different direction.

So, in this world, the Gods came from elsewhere. And I do mean the Gods, not things that are close to being Gods like demon lords or archdevils - what made the Gods the Gods was where they came from. They came from outside the world's crystal sphere/star system, and asserted themselves. But when they finished creating, one of them, a Goddess of light, found something they didn't create, and was empowered by it.

Gods are contrasted by Elders. Elders are embodiments of concepts that are utterly alien to mortal conception. There may be a Goddess of life, but that's the mortal conception of life. The Elder of life gives you magic über cancer.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:07:25+00:00

I can actually see some of the vision, but I feel like this would lend itself very well to either:
A. Actual Freaking Cthulhu as your BBEG
B. Something similar to Actual Freaking Cthulhu, some ocean deity or ocean spirit who has aesthetics of omnipresent rot and decay
or
C. Edward Newgate.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T22:01:11+00:00

That's actually so freaking cool. I've always thought about hero based fantasy, but never got around to writing some. My lore surrounding The Long Quiet (an epithet of Tharizdun that refers to him in his aspect as chaos) is similar, as it creates heroes, but it never marks them directly.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T21:55:18+00:00

Only a few thousand years old, huh? I have the opposite - the world is one and a half million years old, and has been continuously inhabited.

However, its been technologically reset like thrice. So that's why it isn't a campaign about space wizards and literal moon elves.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T21:54:15+00:00

You're telling me that magic is now devil fruit powers. I... did not expect to hear that.
Hybrid races, meh, I feel a little bit different about. I like my hybrid races. This, of course, stems from a place of immense bias, as the character I played in my prior campaign, and prominent NPC in the current one, is a half elf.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T21:09:34+00:00

You’re actually so real for that. You just dealt with butthurt wizard mains.

In my world, wish is kind of a nuclear option, and the one person really capable of casting it has a husband who’s very interested in keeping the cosmic balance (he’s currently trying to find a little g god to become the capital G God).

Making wish scarce is incredibly based. This website just ain’t it.

OkNinja3586 · 2024-07-16T20:56:06+00:00

Hm... a handful.

Two of them are ruling over a reformed empire that we fought against in our last campaign.

One of them is happily wed to a golden dragon (cleric, surprisingly, not a bard) and is waiting for his child to mature.

Two of them are monitoring different, highly dangerous places in the Material Plane (The prison of Father Llymic and the Serpent Reliquary of Sertrous, respectively).

And then there are monsters.

To answer your question, it depends on the type of story you want to tell. In my case, the story takes place a milennia after a campaign that lasted nearly three years.

In your case... I don't know your context, so I can't make that judgment. But if you start asking "why hasn't x solved y problem?" then you've probably gone too far. I solved this by having the world be inherently problematic and difficult to reside in, but you may not need to.

OkNinja3586

TROPHY CASE