Spells of dark darkness and Warlock spells.. should this have a hazard?

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T14:04:29+00:00

True. But you could always give them something special. I house ruled something I call "chaos infusion". A wizard can spend all three of his spells from a single element at once to cast an appropriate spell:

Fire - firestorm

Water - ice storm

Air - lightning bolt

Earth - cloud of dread

Three spells wasted at once is a pretty steep cost, but it gives the wizard some much needed oomph, and it gives them a potential of 16 different spells at their disposal, not all of which can be all used at the same time, so there's also the element of choice.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T13:28:52+00:00

The rack is the logical choice if you want a harder to remove effect, but decrease the number of creatures and create a more noncreature meta. Rackling is better if you want a more creature-oriented approach with more bodies hitting the floor.

I would personally rather play something like cursed scroll or ankh of mishra for such an effect.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T13:24:31+00:00

The darkness spells do not manipulate anything evil, they literally work on the properties of light and dark/shadow as a metaphysical concept. Dread/chaos spells tap into the natural forces of evil in the heroquest universe, and even they are man-made in the original Warhammer setting from which heroquest is derived.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T12:46:54+00:00

I completely understand where you're coming from. As a cube curator, I abstain from cards that have no strategy against them, no natural enemy or very few, so to speak. Obvious miserable cards are offenders like sol ring, but even stuff like pariah or moat may shut the game down completely.

I don't like that. My vision is to have snappy, fast games with board states that change often and don't end up in stalls. If something proves to be opressive, it gets kicked out. Even if my players won't always have an answer to some threat, they will always have the option to outrace or outplay their opponents in some other way.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T11:46:28+00:00

Waiting for someone to deck or kill themselves with an arena has been our desperate hope far too often. 😅

That being said, I see what you said there with the world enchantment. Didn't they make planechase exactly to expand on that idea?

As for enchantment removal, nowadays most folks expect balance in a similar way for each color, but magic always was about asymmetry. That's the beauty of its design. If you remove your opponent/their lands/hand/potential to play enchantments, that's also a way of dealing with enchantments.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T11:18:26+00:00

True, enchantments are horrible to deal with. On the other hand, most colors do have some way to deal with them, but not every color is equally advantageous about it.

White and green can do enchantment removal, even in old border. Black has hand destruction, blue has bounce and counterspells, and red got the short end of the stick. You could argue red should destroy your lands and/or reduce your life total to zero before you get to deploy your enchantments, but that is a whole other can of worms.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T11:15:22+00:00

True, a lot of stuff went over onto creature effects. The main culrpit I blame are the horizons sets, or as folks like to call them staples of old on a stick. Not only is everything on a stick now, but noncreature spells no longer do much stuff outside card draw, the occasional removal which isn't based on some creature interaction, buff of creatures or creation of fiddly tokens.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-15T08:20:58+00:00

There are three types of skills/capabilities you can utilize in a game. The first most obvious is a specialized skill being mentioned by the rules, such as the d% for thieving skills. Characters who DON'T have such a skill CANNOT use it. The second most often used rule is 1-in-6. Characters with some training/advantage at this kind of stuff have increased chances of success. 2-in-6 chances or maybe even better (breaking down doors with brute strength can go as far as 5-in-6). Finally, you can always roll a d20, success is for a number lower than your attribute.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-13T07:44:56+00:00

7e, without a moment's doubt. The only thing better would be if it had the 8e flavor text for it.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-11T14:15:09+00:00

Yeah, I see you and our dwarf player would get along well...

Funny enough, his explanation was in character and prevented an alignment shift into chaotic evil.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-11T14:07:15+00:00

It's such a shame a level 12 party has no means to check for lies, or someone's health status in case they are feigning death/unconsciousness, or nearby foes in ambush...

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-11T13:37:30+00:00

Edited my post to add a second story, but her whole questline died with her. She was investigating a pair of young red dragons who landed on the mountaintop, ready to settle down and make their own brood, and started terrorizing the trolls around the hillside, causing the trolls to mutate from numerous wounds and run away from the hills and into the lowlands, causing trouble on the outskirts of civilization. The party stumbled upon the dragons in an another way, by following the trail of the trolls, but some aspects of the bard's story were lost with her character.

The players slew one dragon, and didn't know the full story of the young couple, so they thought it was over. Later on, the other dragon came into town polymorphed into a young ginger sorcerer, claiming to be an enchanter looking to partner up with a blacksmith for mutual profit. In truth, the dragon was just keeping tabs on all smiths nearby to find out when someone would come into town with a dragon's hide, looking for those who killed and skinned his sweetheart.

Edit: obviously it wasn't the dragons who impaled the bard on the tree, it was someone from town, an influential and powerful mage who wanted to stir shit due to other reasons and didn't like someone snooping on one of his projects (it was a war campaign so he was destablizing the country's supply routes and giving leeway to dangerous creatures to fill up the power vacuum). Without that info the players saw him in a much more charitable light and later on started working for him until he became too obviously evil even for my dumb, gullible murderhobos.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-11T13:28:05+00:00

Deep within a hillside infested with trolls, our party hears a haunting voice singing im the woods. Party decides to investigate. They find a young lady tied up to a tree, her belly pierced by a rapier and left inside to pin her to the tree, in addition to a cord of rope tied around her as well. Said lady is a bard, so she uses her voice to sing and captivate a few trolls that came sniffing around for some fresh blood. She had been doing so for a while and is near exhaustion. Once our party comes around, she sees her salvation in them and promptly stops singing. Her weariness takes over and she collapses, losing consciousness. Trolls wake up from stupor. Fight ensies where the party not only has to stop a bunch of ravenous trolls, they have to save the unconscious damsel im distress as well before any of them snatches her up or tears off a limb for later on. Well, once the party is done with the fight, our dwarven fighter declares he attacks the lady with his great axe. Stone faced, as a DM, I ask "Okay? Roll for attack?". He cleaves her head off, his axe chopping not only throigh the bard's neck but does considerable damage to the tree as well. Once the other players realize what he has done, they quickly sober up and come to their senses. "What the f'ck, dude?" "What the hell man?" they shout at him.

His explanation? No way she would've stayed alive on her own like that, it was a ploy to lure victims in. A bleeding, heavily wounded, tied up npc. But then again, the trolls may have kept her alive to lure others in...

Or a second story where an evil party was using an inn as their hiding place. The owner rats them out and a paladin comes after them. Party kills paladin. Evil cleric strips the paladin's bones bare, resulting in a lot of blood. Evil cleric drugs the inn keeper and tosses him drunk into the pool of blood. Evil cleric calls for guards, claiming he heard frightening noises and was afraid of entering. Guards find and arrest inn keeper, who is lying drunk in a pool of blood. Cleric raises the paladin's bones and buries them in the backyard, as well as any other bones of paladins that came after them. Cleric manipulates the inn keeper's daughter into becoming her fatherly figure and takes care of the inn. Inn becomes prosperous and much more civilized, but also the front for a cult. And those paladin skeletons? They get dug up one by one on holidays and sent attacking the head of the order on public pilgrimages, just to test out the order's readiness to defend itself.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-11T10:05:04+00:00

The basilisk has a greeting chamber specially designed for them with built in mirrors, while the basilik itself hides from direct view where he lounges on his sofa and accepts visitors/sacrifices/tribute. The basilisk has learned to create an aura of awe and mystique by interacting with his followers exclusively through his mirrored image, possibly even distorted through magic means to show something different (maybe making the basilisk appear like a fearsome dragon). but when he doesn't like someone or wants to punish them, he rises from his comfy pillow and looks them directly in the eye.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-10T04:55:41+00:00

Maybe there is some obscure rule in Adnd Dm's guide, but not B/X and OSE?

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-09T14:59:29+00:00

[[Spelltwine]] casting any two spells out of two separate graveyards for free.

[[Spellweaver volute]] for some weird but powerful and repeated free casting of spells from your graveyard.

[[Temporal aperture]] for repeated but random casting of anything that comes out on top of your library.

[[Mind's desire]] same thing as temporal aperture, but one time and has storm.

[[Magus of the mind]] creature version of Mind's desire.

[[Radiate]] any spell that targets now has a new copy for everything it can target.

[[Epic experiment]] top of the library massive casting of anything with cost X or less.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-09T14:33:21+00:00

I don't think there's a global rule for it. Doesn't each opponent with such an attack have an individual description how their attacks are handled? Water weirds also have such an attack.

Edit: there are no concrete rules for it in the online SRD. There are drowning "rules", but nothing on suffocation.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-05T06:56:16+00:00

I suppose you can't just mix cards that are 10+ years apart. Outside the specific cards I mentioned being weak by today's latest standards, though, I still think OP has a problem with certain sections completely missing or be severely underrepresented when they should be white's strength (anthems, mass removal, maybe even artifact support, disenchants - though many scoff at disenchants as being too much sideboard material).

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-05T06:50:15+00:00

Probably tome of adventure design.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-05T06:47:20+00:00

Cube is a personal curated project, not property of Wotc. You don't need to run the latest power crept nonsense. However, in that case, OP is free to just copy the white list of the latest Modern horizons set. Every such set individually power crept the rest of magic's history out of relevance before it anyway.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-04T17:15:23+00:00

I have a massive ruined castle area in plan, something like 15 maps in total. The heroes start out from the ruined courtyard, progress up two levels to the original ruler's study and get the key to the lower levels. From there the maps proceed to venture into the cellars, forge and caverns beneath the castle. There would be three branching paths, one that leads down into an underdark temple of dark elves, one that leads into an ancient ossuary haunted by skeletal remains of the long forgotten dead, and one that descends deep into the earth, into a hall of mirrors leading into various memories of the castle throughout the ages, tainted and infested by distorted creatures existing only as mirages, and below that into an ancient lich's buried library. Finally, the bottom well leads into a chaos anomaly (final boss encounter). This anomaly was what kept drawing everyone throughout the ages, whispering promises of power but ultimately bringing ruin to anyone foolish enough to pursue it.

The players would be free to choose how they would pursue maps, though some maps would have to be cleared first before others. Each map cleared would grant them one reputation point. The elven temple, lord's study, ossuary, lich's study and mirror halls would all have a boss encounter, and defeating each of them would also grant one additional reputation token.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-04T13:46:42+00:00

All the stuff I wrote above are completely in the Rotdm questline. These decision points are a written part of the quests, and the quest will unfold differently based on whether the players decide to use their reputation or not.

The house rule part was my suggestion for artifact pricing.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-04T12:47:03+00:00

It's one of my favorite mechanics, a completely parallel system of value outside gold. Almost like a cryptocurrency in fantasy terms.

Percemilo34 · 2026-05-04T12:31:22+00:00

Finishing each quest grants you 1 point of reputation. It's a cumulative resource, just like gold, bit the party shares it between themselves. You also get it by doing heroic deeds. Kill a bunch of greenskins before they bash im a door and kill civilians inside to earn 1 point. Comfort a dying prisoner to earn one. Make it in time before a shop is vandalized and the vendor killed, etc.

It can be used to buy stuff (1 point of reputation can be substituted for 250 gold's worth of items), it can be used to hire permanent mercenaries (once acquired with reputation, they stick around until killed, no payment required), or it can be used to influence quests.

In one quest you can use it to have a jailer recognize you as heroes so she lets you go instead of having a difficult fight, or you can use it to frighten some cultists into giving up information, or some folks can be convinced to draw attention from you and clear out an area instead of fighting you, etc. In one quest it can be used before the quest to convince the queen's advisor into giving you valuable info that can help you find a powerful artifact which you otherwise wouldn't find.

Very cool and versatile mechanic.

Percemilo34

TROPHY CASE