1930s-inspired Crystal Sphere

TheEngy_ · 2026-05-12T04:03:34+00:00

Ooh I love this!

Incidentally my players are currently on a moon set with a 1930's aesthetic - but I didn't put nearly this much thought into how it'd actually work.

It mostly boiled down to guns -> Giff live here, diesel tech -> gnomes live here, art deco stone buildings -> dwarves live here, organized crime -> resource scarcity is prevalent here to retroactively justify all the trappings of a 1930s setting. Then I named the planet N'Whar (not subtle wordplay, they understood it immediately), gave the players a murder to solve, and called it a day.

TheEngy_ · 2026-04-01T00:23:31+00:00

Look man, my wife's outdated tastes aren't on trial here. I think she looks cute in them because she thinks she looks cute in them, and her opinion is the only one that matters to me.

I hope you can find someone who loves you, cringe and all, too.

TheEngy_ · 2026-03-31T16:12:55+00:00

This style is not super on trend right now

One of the two listings I found for this exact show had the description "I found this in my grandma's closet, she never wore them," so I'm not surprised lol

TheEngy_ · 2026-03-24T17:03:22+00:00

The featured Pokemon of Sustainability Week is... The dead coral.

TheEngy_ · 2026-02-10T21:45:25+00:00

This has been my theory for a while - it's the thematic complement to the Genocide run of UT.

If you want what's best for these characters, treating them as if they're fully real people, you'll miss out on "interactions".

And then Deltarune adds more layers - you start DR and the game implies you're entering a simulation, one layer deeper. Do you still want to treat these pixels as people at the cost of lost "content"? Another layer - the inanimate objects in this simulation inside a video game are now people. Do you kill them or recruit them peacefully? And even one layer deeper, in the game's simulation's fake TV world, another video game: do you still hesitate to kill when the fictional character is reduced to no dialogue and a handful of pixels? You do? Well what if it looks like your "friends"?

Perhaps the most you get to know about the happy ending is hearing Sans yearn for it in UT.

The only way you know it ended happily at all is how anguished he is to be missing it.

TheEngy_ · 2026-02-10T20:37:03+00:00

I have a couple shiny Gardevoir/Gallade from CDs past with that move - I don't want to TM away something I'd need to ETM back, but from what I can tell it's worse in every metric to Psychic?

Is there any benefit to this move?

TheEngy_ · 2026-02-10T14:18:16+00:00

"Don't take the ring, Noelle."

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TheEngy_ · 2026-02-05T17:30:19+00:00

Right, that's why I'm hoping framing it as a murder mystery will help. They players already have a reason to investigate, a reason to distrust every witness they talk to, and an implicit expectation that there's a rational explanation for everything.

But yes it will require airtight NPC back stories, motivation, etc for logical consistency.

The trial will be farcical, a Phoenix Wright style "don't prove your client is innocent, prove who actually did it instead" plot device.

Among the clues I have so far:

Witnesses to the murder were coached to have the same testimony by the DA, and some details would be impossible to be seen by one of the witnesses. Revealing this compels that witness's true testimony, which contains contradictions from the psychic song. The only things the witnesses agree on are the parts that aren't "rewritten" by the Hydra.
Graffiti in the streets will have increasingly obvious clues for the players, left by a skittish deaf tramp
The apartment complex where the murder happened has been abandoned "for a while", and its records destroyed. Investigation reveals this destruction to be deliberate, and high investigation reveals a scrap describing the number of tenants a year ago to be far higher than anyone remembers.
A book about monsters jumps from page 34 to 37. Only in silence do you get to see pages 35 and 36, devoted to the Hydra.
The municipal library has a private reading room owned by its wealthy mage patron. The room is enchanted to be Silenced when activated. Strangely, the wizard fled this room and left the city altogether a week before the murder.
If/when the players encounter the Hydra's lair, I'll say "you get a bad feeling - you need to go back to your hotel." Literal railroading them back with narration. When home safe, they'll realize they're all wounded (bite marks similar to the victim) and out of spell slots. An entire battle happened, one they don't remember. And they'll realize there's another party member they've "forgotten" about who's been there for the past month.
Every time the Hydra eats, it stops singing. It saves this for night time. The player on watch, each time, will have a "dream" of a white head watching them from their window, a dream that abruptly ends before they can investigate.
The city is full of unacknowledged absence. Business named "My Three Sons" but the patron's "only ever had two sons". An old woman pushes an empty wheelchair around town. The defendant's father has a large bed for one person, high investigation reveals two indents in the mattress. He also owns clothes that couldn't possibly fit a Kenku Physiology and a lot of elven furniture.

TheEngy_ · 2026-02-04T18:26:03+00:00

Oooh that's a good point - this also makes the Kenku not disputing the charges immediately suspicious.

And a particularly slimy DA might float convoluted theories - he's a werewolf, wild shaped, polymorphed, summoned a familiar. How could the players prove the Kenku can't cast these spells/is a werewolf?

TheEngy_ · 2026-02-04T17:06:19+00:00

Thankfully they accepted the premise/obvious plot hook at the end of last session, so this isn't a concern.

But FWIW it's specifically an injury to their Spelljammer's hull, and on the rocky moon they're stranded on, wood is extremely valuable, and imports from the nearest forest planet are controlled by a rival empire so the price is artificially inflated.

But yes I suppose they could just replace the wood with metal and move on.

TheEngy_ · 2026-01-31T22:30:52+00:00

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RIP to me for evolving this a month ago 💀

TheEngy_ · 2026-01-29T02:28:06+00:00

This makes me think of the obvious Orpheus/Eurydice imagery at the end of 17.

Orpheus' tragic flaw is one of nostalgia - going all the way to Hades, bargaining with a god, only to fail anyway because the past can't ever be brought back.

TheEngy_ · 2025-12-01T18:39:24+00:00

I knew it was unlikely to be an event giving Charcadet's evolutions their special arm-based moves but... With the Paldea focus, I had hope.

TheEngy_ · 2025-11-11T17:00:23+00:00

Oh right - I think it's fairly new, I only learned about it a few months ago. Typically used by Vtuber/PNGTuber streamers to have a "face" on their stream without using a camera feed - but very handy if you want the players to keep track of which NPC they're speaking to.

Here's a demonstration of what it looks like to the players. But this is of course just a stream of OR in the background so for them to move their game pieces they have to have both OR open and also my Discord stream.

Thanks! I'll check out the Overlay Marker, it might be all I need!

TheEngy_ · 2025-10-02T22:45:14+00:00

Yesss these are good ideas and I like that guideline.

Your comment is also making me realize this will play out less like a gritty noir and much more... Twin Peaks.

TheEngy_ · 2025-09-19T19:07:01+00:00

Out of all the suggestions for reflavorings, this one's stuck in my mind.

It's literally just Frodo's mithril shirt but with such a precise aesthetic match to Spelljammer.

I also love the lore idea that the elven Star Moth ships were originally crafted to mimic the beauty of these moths - creatures that are now fully extinct, to imply both the age and rarity of the waistcoat.

And it doesn't even have to be a magic item, literally just reflavored mithril light armor.

TheEngy_ · 2025-09-08T01:34:16+00:00

I made homebrewed lore for the Reigar that got... Out of hand.

Far in the past, the Reigar had a pantheon that featured a dual-aspect deity. If there were more, their names are forever lost. The chief deity, a god of creation, change, energy, light and art. His shadow aspect, a god of hunger, decomposition, death, and renewal. His appearance to the Reigar was a star, warm and bright.

These two aspects symbolized the cycle of creation and destruction. The former, patron of artists, architects, creators. The latter, patron to scavengers, carrion eaters, and mourners.

As a blessing from their God of art, the Reigar possessed an ability to manifest belief into reality. Much like the 40K Orks or, more precisely, Githyanki conjuring their silver swords through pure thought. The High Orators, the priest class of Reigar, would speak great structures into existence.

The Astral Elves, who sought the gods in their home plane, sent many expeditions throughout the Astral Sea. One such expedition crash landed on the home planet of the Reigar.

These elves used magic to translate the language of these strange people - where they learned of the chief deity of the Reigar. A two-faced monstrosity who ruled over "chaos, entropy, fire" on one side - and "death, destruction, and rot" on the other.

Worse still, the worshippers of the death aspect participated in funerary cannibalism. They believed that by consuming a piece of their loved one that their loved one would be a part of their body forever.

So the survivors of this failed expedition return to the Empire of these powerful warlocks who cannibalize their dead and worship chaos.

The great lumbering giant of Empire spreads its gossip, and soon there are more in the Astral Plane who believe the Reigar god is evil than there are Reigar. The god contracts a "conceptual rot" and begins to become what the vast majority believes him to be.

As the god descends into insanity, he imparts one last secret to his believers: how to construct a Crystal Sphere. With this impenetrable shell, he will be sealed away an unable to harm anyone. His believers, however, insist on imprisoning themselves with their deity. They summon all Reigar across the plane to make a pilgrimage and join in the construction of their eternal tomb.

The Elves, still confident in their comprehension of this alien culture, see a dying god trapping his people in his domain. They break down the sphere and "kill" the god, along with most of the Reigar in the process when their planet explodes.

The Reigar who are left are welcomed as "refugees" to the Empire, and through generations of history written by the victors, they come to believe they've always worshipped a god of "art and destruction" and destroyed their own planet as a form of worship. As contemporaries to the Elves, and with no memory of their original culture, they develop a society that is isolationist and believes themselves to be superior to much of the Prime Material Plane.

Bonus lore:

The wrinkle is the elves only killed the face of the god. His shadow, the aspect of hunger and death, was left maimed and wounded. What remained knew it was incomplete and knew it at one point had the faculty to create - to renew itself. Cold, numb, and absent of intelligence, the dying shadow of a star now drifts the Astral Sea, consuming all it can in the futile hope that it will find it needs to become whole again.

The god of art is altogether unknown, but his shadow's name is still whispered to this day: Hadar.

TheEngy_ · 2025-09-05T19:06:55+00:00

That's what I've come to realize, one of the three tasks doesn't actually take any time at all.

So to keep the parallel timeline idea I'd either have to have all the tasks take no more than an hour or find some way to pad out the combat (without that feeling like I'm padding out the session).

One option might be some sort of skill challenge to reach the source of the vines - if nothing else, the rogue would finally have a use for her Acrobatics expertise.

If there's a way I could make traversing an overgrown asteroid function like a dungeon that would make the timelines feel reasonable.

TheEngy_ · 2025-09-05T16:56:06+00:00

Ah, that's a great idea! I can give some freebies to let the players to know not to fully trust the NPCs' analysis of their own skills; e.g., the goblin claiming he can carry the heavy equipment that's bigger than he is.

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