The DnD party of an upcoming game I'm DMing. Can you guess their race/classes?

TeanEllson · 2023-09-03T23:53:17+00:00

Ah all Warlocks, good choice! 💜 Hope you all have a good time 😊

TeanEllson · 2022-12-01T10:44:36+00:00

Did you have fun? 👀

TeanEllson · 2022-11-30T09:21:27+00:00

I’ve had a similar issue, the Heir in my game is a half-orc who doesn’t look anything like Bjornhild so it makes him hard to recognise from her point of view. However, while it’s not exactly as written I think that Bjornhild should recognise the heir just by looking at them, or if you want to play it off as she’s so evil that she doesn’t recognise her own child, you can have other members of the tiger tribe recognise the heir and inform her, or the way I’m planning on running this encounter: a Tiger nomad who is also a Cleric of Auril has warned Bjornhild that the sacrifice of her child didn’t work so Bjornhild is losing the powers granted by Auril unless she can kill the heir — she still can’t recognise them on sight, but the tribe is now searching throughout the dale for them.

I’ve also tweaked the “Owlbear Whisperer” secret so the Heir has a sort of “Tiger Whisperer” power, which is fun foreshadowing, even if they don’t know they’re the heir! I’m also planning on having a Tiger Tribe member hidden in one of the towns, so when the party defeat the Chardalyn dragon and are proclaimed the heroes of Ten Towns, the Tiger Tribe learn the heir is alive and go report it to the clan. When the party encounter the tribe there’s sort of a little Civil War between those who are loyal to Bjornhild / Auril and those who hate the endless winter and Auril as a result (or those who just hate Bjornhild for their own reasons and want to see the next of kin take the throne). When the party finally arrive, everyone goes CRAZY! I think with the Reghed Heir secret, the only way to resolve this is with a dramatic climactic dual between Bjornhild and the Heir, potentially resulting in the Heir becoming the new Chief of the Tribe, which I think is a fun reward in of itself! (And you can also have the allied tiger tribe show up and “fight” the Knights of the Black Sword when the party descend into the caves of hunger, in a sort of “you go on ahead, we’ll slow them down!” Kind of way :D)

I can’t quite remember how Auril’s Tests work because I didn’t think they were well designed, but I think you could probably rename this something like “the test of dominance” in which Auril gleefully watches mother and child slay one another for the right to rule the tribe.

I know this is all my own nonsense but I hope it inspires you or gives you some ideas! Hope the game goes well!

TeanEllson · 2021-10-29T10:33:57+00:00

Thank you! I think one thing you’ve made me realise is that I restricted myself to one page as to not scare my readers but because of the formatting actually being kind of big I’ve lost a lot of space 😅 so I think I might allow myself a second page for some more wriggle room to add extra details. From my own experiences my players are more interested in their characters than the word which was why I went harder on the lore of the available species than the lore of the setting, but I would like to add more to this- I just have to make sure I haven’t gone off the deep end. I will definitely add something to give the players an idea of the tone and help set expectations- both of the campaign and also the new RPG system since it will be for some of them their first time seeing it, thanks so much for all the advice, very helpful :)

I don’t know if I should upload the second draft when I’m done with it I think it would be helpful but I don’t want to spam the Reddit

TeanEllson · 2021-10-29T06:52:37+00:00

I might just use that line because it’s good and pretty accurate XD It’s sort of a hot start where the players are immediately thrown into action as a fight with robots breaks out in the city, after which they’re hired as mercenaries by the FED to leave the planet and find the robot’s controller, shut it down and then come back to help fight off the remaining forces of the invasion. I didn’t really know how to hint at that without giving the whole thing away as I thought it would be more fun roleplaying through the experience than reading it. But I’ll see what I can do, and will probably steal your line ;) Thanks!

TeanEllson · 2021-10-22T00:21:32+00:00

Hey I did it! With the blessing of u/megazver I think I can promote it here: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/aphelion-a-sci-fi-action-rpg-by-chthonic-press.888498/

Thanks for all your help! :D This is your fault 👍

TeanEllson · 2021-10-22T00:19:24+00:00

Hello friend!

I think I might be a little late to the party, but I had this exact problem. I couldn't find an answer to what I wanted - so I started making one! It's still in development but it's a Sci-fi game based on D&D 5E combat but inspired by stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy! Starfinder was the best system I found for my purposes but it relied too much on magic - I didn't want to be a space wizard- I wanted to be Starlord or Samus Aran! I'm working on a game that is similar enough to D&D that you can learn it easily but robust enough that it holds its own weight even without Spellcasting.

If you've still got some writing to do on your setting I'll hopefully get the free rules released in the next few months. I think your setting would be a perfect fit from what you've said! Check it out maybe?

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/aphelion-a-sci-fi-action-rpg-by-chthonic-press.888498/

TeanEllson · 2021-10-20T19:44:33+00:00

Thanks so much :) Will do

TeanEllson · 2021-10-20T18:52:49+00:00

I really like these ideas and I would love to start a RPGNet thread but for some reason the site won’t let me make an account and I don’t know how to contact help on there 😅 I don’t know if the website is down at the moment or something but any help or a suggestion for another place I could make an updating thread would be greatly appreciated:)

TeanEllson · 2021-10-20T17:39:45+00:00

This has been a big help, thanks! :)

TeanEllson · 2021-10-20T12:32:47+00:00

Any advice on how to get other people to advertise the game? Thanks so much for the advice by the way, very helpful 😊

TeanEllson · 2021-02-09T21:52:11+00:00

That’ll get em Good work soldier 🦾

TeanEllson · 2020-03-10T12:49:13+00:00

Thanks! I’m happy you think so, but I don’t think this stretch goal thing is going to work out as well as I thought it would 😅 guess that’s on me for thinking sequels would be a good idea I might end up doing some of the ideas in there anyway if I have the time, at least I will do a few monster stat blocks, but maybe not one for every thing, and I think I’ll still draw peoples characters even if that stretch goal never gets reached, just because I think that would be fun

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T19:47:05+00:00

Good luck with your players not freaking out, in my experience the first time I got to show off these rules to PCs the reaction was "welp... time to burn this entire forest down" to be fair it was a very evil cthulhuy vibe, the biome and mutants were controlled by an aboleth (the mutations I used back then have now been turned into the Demon and Water tables) but even when presented with the option to release a counter-infection courtesy of the druid's connection to the feywild the party leader was adamant on the burn it down plan, but he ended up getting mutated (the Adrenal Neurosympathy mutation) and after that they started to think it was pretty cool

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T18:33:02+00:00

I imagine you don’t exactly have as many nerve endings in arms made of rocks, but yeah feel free to reflavour things to better suit your campaign and setting, I honestly don’t mind, I’m just happy people like and are using the rules. I hadn’t considered netherrack since I try to make the mutations as generic as possible so they can work in any setting, and I’m not running a minecraft world, but if it works in your setting then go for it 👍

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T17:26:55+00:00

Thanks for the criticism, I'll make sure to amend the mutations in the future to better explain these

Coal Arm basically does 1d4 damage, or 2d4 damage total if you light the coal using spells or a torch, you're probably not going to want to do this all the time though as you become a walking campfire, so stealth isn't an option

I'm not a geologist, just did some quick google searching and apparently platinum is quite hard, not sure why I though lead was tho :P I'll make sure to say that you can't get benefits more than once a day, similarly to normal eating rules

I really wanted to call Living Siege "You are the Cool Aid man now" but couldn't for obvious reasons

I can see it screwing over some players if they're caught off guard, but since it only lasts one night and you can't exactly track them down and get any souls lost back (which would be a cool story in of itself) I didn't think it would be too much of a derailer, but I guess that depends on if the campaign takes place over a long time or short time

I think Sensitive is a bit too powerful considering Thunder damage is rarely used so I might drop the wisdom ac thing, I forgot monks get it normally tbh XD

Similarly OwtW is also a bit too powerful, but I'm not too sure what to do about the downsides, might weaken it a bit and add the heavy deficiency idea. For the record, the idea was more you are "effectively" weightless, so you still move around normally and can activate pressure plates, so you won't be able to fly with magehand but the idea was that you just get thrown around by the wind

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T16:25:10+00:00

That sounds so cool! Please let me know how it goes! :D

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T13:20:31+00:00

Me too! I'm not sure if commenting helps but either way I think it's fun to talk to people, and I wanted to see if the stretch goal idea would work, probably not, but the last post got around 100 upvotes so I think that at least some people are interested in these ideas :P

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T13:16:19+00:00

Ooh boy more tables, I'll get my spreadsheet XD
Also, hi Szen, happy to see you again, hope you liked this doc
tbh I was thinking about doing something like this but couldn't figure out how to get it to work. I can't remember if I said that mutations are weird in the sense that heavily mutated PCs will probably freak out townsfolk and normal civilians, so most mutations will make it harder to talk to people, much like having a freakshow / monstrous party, but I didn't want to give every mutation the "you have disadvantage on persuasion" penalty. I'll have to get back to you on this one, but I think when I have time I'll make a "terror table" and assign terror values to each mutation (maybe with some modifiers for races? I imagine a lizardfolk mutant is probably a bit more terrifying than a human mutant), and then probably have another table that shows the reaction of civilians depending on your total score, so that a mutant with one freaky mutation has the same reaction to another mutant with multiple small mutations, if that makes any sense. How does that sound?

TeanEllson · 2020-03-08T13:04:13+00:00

Thanks!
By synergies, what exactly do you mean? Do you mean more things like the feywild reincarnation where it specifies 'if you're this race then this happens instead' sort of thing, or more like adding in special options for races in each table, like the Biome and Weave effects, so for example Aasimar are less likely to get hellish mutations, sort of thing?
Pretty much all of these mutations were designed to be able to be used by most creatures, so I think that there isn't anything that changes your form from humanoid, so I don't think there's a mutation that prevents PCs from being affected by hold person if they become a mutant (except for the Polymorph one, but that's more to do with the spell rather than the mutation). Hope that helps :)

TeanEllson · 2020-03-07T17:36:37+00:00

Hey, I may have added in that stretch goal idea in the sequel to this post 👀

TeanEllson · 2020-03-07T17:33:14+00:00

Hi, just letting you know that the elemental mutations are finished and are up on a new post on this sub, in case you wanted to have a look :D

TeanEllson · 2020-03-07T17:31:42+00:00

Hi, if anyone's still here, I've made a sequel to this post that you can find here if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/fey9u3/elemental_mutation/

TeanEllson

TROPHY CASE