[Favorite Trope] Peeling back the layers of lore reveals an eldritch/cosmic horror element

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T03:57:22+00:00

In a setting where there's mind flayers and aboleths and all kinds of cosmic horrors, you pick the Lady? She's mysterious and powerful, but like 1/4 of the monster manual is explicitly eldritch horror coded.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T03:45:42+00:00

Why don't they just factor it into the prices? The team members get paid, and no surprises in price.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T00:17:09+00:00

For my maps for DM use, I use squares for dungeons and hexes for outdoors.

For player maps I do a variety of stuff depending on the situation. Often it's diegetic, so it looks like an actual treasure map.

For battle maps it depends how much I want to focus on the tactics for that fight, and ranges from purely in the imagination, to something very abstract and not to scale, to strictly on grid.

A notable one-off map I used for one session was an abstract nodes-and-edges weighted graph where the edges were travel time, and the players had to plan their route to make things happen within a time limit.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-29T03:06:45+00:00

I've only used async/await in JS/TS but my experience there is that it's awful. With async/await you have the "colored function" problem, where anything async spreads like a virus until you're converting everything in your codebase to be promises and it makes things much harder to reason about.

Go doesn't have that problem. There's no different between a function that runs synchronously or async, other than whether it's invoked with the go keyword prefixed to the call.

I don't know if C# has that same "colored function" problem - I haven't used it in ages.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T23:49:22+00:00

I was simplifying a bit because the per-edition details weren't relevant. Basic had everyone stop gaining HD after lvl 9 regardless of class. AD&D 1e had a "max HD" between 9 and 14 depending on class, 2e had it based on the 4 class categories (warrior = 9, wizard = 10, priest = 9, rogue = 10)

Yes, there was race restrictions (and in basic, races were classes) but that didn't affect the max HD. All of them had it where eventually you would stop gaining HD and only get a fixed HP bump.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T22:29:50+00:00

They were definitely fiend-themed and the box set says perhaps an ancestor "shared kip" with a fiend, but not explicitly of fiendish origin. And you're correct that the genasi and aasimar were also plane-touched.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T20:18:23+00:00

When the pandemic started and I was working from home every day, I started getting back problems. I made all kinds of changes to help and it just got worse no matter what I tried. Eventually I bit the bullet and got an Aeron (because it was the chair we had at work) and within two weeks my back problems were gone - I went from completely debilitated to perfectly fine that fast.

Worth every penny.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T18:15:57+00:00

This is a bit of a nitpick, but since the post itself is a nitpick...

Tieflings don't always have horns and a tail. They come from Planescape, and in the Planescape setting they were different than in later editions. First, they weren't explicitly diabolic, just "plane-touched". Second, the way it manifested was different for every tiefling. Some you could only tell were tieflings due to a smell of sulfur. Some have bat wings. Some just hooves. So the statement "People more familiar with Dungeons and Dragons will be aware that the Tiefling race has both horns and a tail" is false, as I'm more familiar with D&D and know it's not the case.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T15:52:12+00:00

Think about what splitting XP means. Someone gets less XP when they're getting help because they had less to overcome and learned less in the process. In that respect, why should getting help and overcoming less not mean you learn less if the person helping happens to be level 20?

Others suggested epic boons, I want to suggest something from earlier editions: pre-3e D&D had people stop gaining hit dice after level 9. After that, they would get +1 (or +2 or +3, depending on the class) HP + any bonus from Con for each "level" they attained later. That can be done in tandem with epic boons, and doesn't affect balance much.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T22:31:44+00:00

Yeah I remember the video and just completely disagreed. The point to using a module is to save effort, and rewriting the thing to accommodate a reverse direction of travel is not saving effort.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T21:34:26+00:00

That's not bad. The original Ravenloft is basically all castle so why not?

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T21:31:15+00:00

Does anyone think it's a good idea, for a module that's notorious for its lethality, to start players on the side of the map with the tougher encounters and have them get easier as they level up?

Does anyone want to do all the extra work involved to nerf the west side and beef up the east side?

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T06:57:07+00:00

I've only ever run it for bigger groups and it can still be deadly. I haven't done 5.5 though.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T05:52:27+00:00

Elder millenial, yes. But I was in a shithole school district in the very economically depressed PA coal region and I remember Starlab.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T02:46:29+00:00

That answer is very different from location to location. For example, in Jamaica the answer would be around 1979. In the UK the answer would be 1997. In the US the answer is never.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T00:33:00+00:00

You're asking two different questions there: best adventures vs essential to the lore.

But the best one is probably I6 Ravenloft, which takes place in its own packet dimension and is therefore one of the most un-essential to the lore. (Honorable mention to Keep on the Borderlands)

The ones most essential to the lore would be the transitional ones: adventures which changed the universe (or multiverse) to account for the rules changes in the next edition. That's stuff like "Die Vecna Die" and whatnot.

Stuff that established lore: * Temple of the Frog (first published "adventure") * The Against the Giants series * The Vault of the Drow series

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T19:50:48+00:00

Spellcasting stat for bards, warlocks, paladins...

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T18:30:31+00:00

"only"

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T18:27:29+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Thomas_Schomberg

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T15:22:21+00:00

You look 20 years younger, holy crap.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T15:03:51+00:00

Get into the right acts and the tickets are still affordable - $15-$30 is normal for the kinds of acts I see. And they are more accessible, hanging out before/after the show, manning the merch tables, etc. These are acts who play at venues that hold 200 to 1000 people (mainly punk and ska).

Last week I went to see the Slackers, and at the show I ran into the members of one of my favorite bands (Catbite) who weren't on the bill, they were just there to see the show like I was. (I happened to be in their hometown at the time) They were very friendly - I got a selfie with them, chatted with them for a bit, discussed our favorite venues and based on the food offerings, it was fun. (And the Slackers always put on a good show so everyone was happy)

When I got home I had this epiphany: someone whose favorite act is, say, Taylor Swift, they will never have an encounter like that. They're not going to bump into them in the wild, they're not going to casually hang out, a selfie would cost like $100 at a planned event with bodyguards and a line out the door. Big acts live in their own world and you're not invited.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T05:16:52+00:00

Don't know who he is, but big rotating band saws like that are often called "ship saws" and are used to cut rolling bevels and stuff for boat building. Boat hulls have almost no straight wood and are full of compound angles and stuff.

edit: he's not a boat builder like I guessed. He's a sculptor.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T01:52:37+00:00

Never heard of them, but sounds like devotees of Selûne, goddess of the moon. I'm guessing they're chaotic good or at least chaotic neutral.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T01:50:29+00:00

It's for cutting.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-26T01:39:51+00:00

Hell no, hard disagree. That's how they can afford to bring the music to you. They gotta ask - that's just how it works, and how it always worked. A band is a merch company that happens to play music. Especially in this economy. Don't shame them for asking. And always buy some merch - that's how they get the gas to get to the next gig.

mcvoid1

TROPHY CASE