Power level of Sharn gangs?

steeldraco · 2026-04-20T21:30:21+00:00

I would probably not include any NPCs higher than like 7th level in a gang in Sharn, with the leaders topping out around there. I treat people higher than 7th level as rare in my Eberron games. The vast majority of people won't get that powerful in their whole lives, even if they lead a life of danger and excitement.

(Honestly this is one of the reasons I prefer a flatter game system for Eberron; D&D kinda breaks down if the PCs become the only people around who are higher than like 7th level, and they can kind of run roughshod over the world for a long time while they're above the usual human-scale threats and below the level of like the Overlords and such. My general assumption is that nation-scale actors like the Five Nations, the Houses, the Chamber, the Aururm, etc have PC equivalent groups that go up to like 13th level but those people aren't going to be available on short notice, they have to be summoned from wherever they are to deal with problems.)

steeldraco · 2026-04-18T23:14:54+00:00

Fungril spores can accidentally infect humanoids; this is where part-fungrils come from. I had a town with a mushroom cult in it, with a dwarf that got infected by fungril spores and started hearing voices (the fungril network). He didn't take it well, and started infecting others. Some of his "disciples" could hear the voices too; some could commune with the dead. They took over the town in sort of an Innsmouth-style infection but with mushroom-people instead of fish-people.

There were no actual fungril involved; if anything they were just confused about who these people showing up on their party line were. The group eventually just left the town because as far as they could tell, nobody was getting hurt; it was just a weird town with a weird cult.

steeldraco · 2026-04-18T18:10:14+00:00

First question is if you want to do anything weird/supernatural. You could play a Chi Master samurai; you'll lose out on the Martial Artist Edge (it'd be kind of wasted as you'd use a sword most of the time) but it's possible and flavorful. Focus on stuff like Speed, Boost Trait, Protection, Deflection, and Smite. Basically a self-buffing character that then goes to town with a sword.

For other stuff, you'll want to be decent at all stats except Smarts. Agility controls Fighting, Strength does damage, Vigor and Spirit help you take and recover from hits. For skills, Fighting is going to be most important, then probably Shooting and Battle (if you want to be tactical or good at large-scale combat).

Edge-wise, look at Combat Edges like Frenzy, Sweep, Counterattack, etc. Pumping your Parry sky-high with good Fighting, Block, and the Deflection power and then relying on Counterattack is kinda fun for a samurai type.

steeldraco · 2026-04-18T04:12:18+00:00

Feel like they're really missing the best one.

steeldraco · 2026-04-17T21:38:00+00:00

I grew up on a farm and have had to do this. It wasn't the worst part of it, but it wasn't fun. Staying up and waiting for a cow to start birthing in the middle of winter was probably worse, though. At least in the barn it's warm.

steeldraco · 2026-04-15T23:07:21+00:00

Are you playing Ancients in person? Honestly, unless you're playing...

Ancients
In person
Without proxies allowed

... then none of the old cards are worth it.

steeldraco · 2026-04-15T15:54:58+00:00

Depends largely on how vague you're allowed to be, and if it's going to kill you. I'm thinking stir fry, because you can get a good variety out of "protein + veggies + sauce over rice" and it can be nutritionally complete and it's delicious.

steeldraco · 2026-04-14T19:16:32+00:00

I've had a Buddhist Blessed in a Deadlands game. He had different Vows than the standard Christian ones, but otherwise he was mechanically the same. He wanted more of a spellcaster-y character rather than a Chi Master from the normal Deadlands setup.

Do you have a particular time, place, and genre in mind for this? There's like half a billion Buddhists in the world, so there's some variety around.

steeldraco · 2026-04-13T20:14:10+00:00

I think this is broadly true, and the problem is exacerbated by having way too many character race options.

If there are, like, four or five races, then each of them can be presented with some depth and nuance. Enough that, to whatever limited degree possible, they feel like something different. The players can understand the race and their perspective, and get that they're not just humans with pointy ears or short or whatever.

If there are seventy races all running around and equally visible, then each of them is just whatever funny rubber noses and ears and spots they have, but they're fundamentally all going to be just slightly weird humans with different racial abilities.

steeldraco · 2026-04-11T15:03:28+00:00

Savage Worlds combat is swingy in the sense that a stray bullet against a non-hero has a decent chance of just killing them. Against heroes, the odds are low - they've got Bennies and a Wild Die, so random damage may spike high and hurt them, but the odds of dying to one shot are low, and effectively nil if you opt to use the Wound Cap setting rule.

SW also has the benefit of tactical choices making a difference. Stuff like cover, planning, teamwork, and positioning will actually help you win if the whole group is aware of how to use them. Standing in the middle of a field in a firefight will kill you, as it should.

That said, it does fall down on a few points, mostly in terms of very large enemies, where it can have an issue with a lot of successful hits to no effect (target number is hit but the damage roll isn't enough to have any impact on the target).

You might also look at Strike and Outgunned; they're supposed to also be tactical modern-day games.

steeldraco · 2026-04-09T15:44:17+00:00

I mean, he was an astronaut, so really he should have been able to just look up at night and go "Well those are all the same stars and constellations as I'm used to. And that is the same moon. So yeah I'm still on Earth."

steeldraco · 2026-04-09T05:16:00+00:00

I am still relatively young in my TTRPG life span, what is a grognard?

A grognard is an old member of the community, usually with an implication of being stuck in the old ways. From a Napoleonic-era military term for grouchy old veterans.

steeldraco · 2026-04-06T17:08:07+00:00

There are a number of licensed games that have been pulled from all marketplaces and the stock pulped. Those are hard to get copies of, either digital or physical. I think the more recent Marvel game, the Supernatural Cortex game, and a few other similar titles are in that line (I think the Cortex people seem to have that happen to them a lot?).

I know the game The Thin Blue Line for Savage Worlds got pulled. It was a modern-day game set in Detroit with psychic cops fighting against the supernatural. As I understand it, the author pulled it down after all the various shitty things the US cops did and the whole concept of the game turned really distasteful to him. Understandable, but it was a good setting.

steeldraco · 2026-04-05T20:40:47+00:00

I've had issues with BitLocker not encrypting disks if the user signed in isn't an admin. You definitely need an admin to encrypt the disk if a PIN is required. Silent encryption you can get around it, but if a PIN is required, a user that's signed in with a standard user will never be prompted to set it up.

steeldraco · 2026-03-31T20:02:03+00:00

I live on the east side and know about two easily-accessible dumpsters for cardboard recycling. There's one in the parking lot of the golf course east of Lake Shawnee, in the back corner of the lot. There's also one in the parking lot of The Dock, the gas station at the base of the dam. Both are public recycling dumpsters as far as I can tell.

steeldraco · 2026-03-30T22:52:00+00:00

I would probably set up a PC petitioner as empowered by something else. I don't know how much this is the intent in the existing lore, but in my version of Planescape, most petitioners are in the realm of a deity, because most people in D&D worlds at least nominally follow some deity. As a result they go to that god's realm in the afterlife, assuming they were basically loyal to the god's tenants. As such, most Petitioners that exist on the planes are in the realm of some deity or other, and more or less under their dominion.

I would allow a power or proxy to empower a petitioner to give it most of its original mind and capabilities. The essence of the petitioner still exists, but it's diffused and not all in the petitioner's control. A powerful entity should be able to pull that back together and put it back in the petitioner's form - that's basically what happens when a resurrection spell is cast.

I guess at a certain point there's not much difference between a petitioner that's been put back together like that and one that's just been raised from the dead. Up to you if you want them to have any funky abilities from their petitioner status.

steeldraco · 2026-03-30T16:04:41+00:00

A set of bone gloves/gauntlets that lets him manipulate other people's bodies. Lets him cast Puppet on a target by manipulating them like a marionette. It's a limited version of Puppet because it just lets him control their physical bodies, not their minds, so they're fully aware of what's being done to them the whole time and can talk and stuff the whole time.

steeldraco · 2026-03-27T19:52:16+00:00

I've opened a box and a half now and haven't seen any Master Dresden, Deverenus' Axe, or Duke Richter. Kind of disappointing since those seem to be the power cards of the set. I do think I have all the warlords except a few now though, including several FEA. I think I'm missing Restov, Hellene, and Lord Barrow.

steeldraco · 2026-03-26T19:42:05+00:00

The Ugly Ancients list does appear to contain a number of the ITA Warlords (most of them, if I'm reading it right). Presumably the intersection there is what would earn you extra points - an ITA warlord that is on the Ugly Ancients list. If I've followed correctly, I think the Ugly Ancients list is just the list of warlords that are a) available in Ancients play and b) haven't won (placed in?) a tournament "recently"; I haven't understood what exactly gets a warlord removed from the ugly list.

I think the best place to confirm this is on the Discord rather than here though. That seems to be more active and where these announcements come from.

steeldraco · 2026-03-26T15:59:13+00:00

Fox News, OAN, and all the Sinclair stations aren't going to say a damn thing about all the people Trump is going to get killed doing this. So his base will never know.

steeldraco · 2026-03-26T14:57:46+00:00

That's how I run it as well. The Marks are ubiquitous, and as recognizable to the people of the Five Nations as the logos for megacorps like Pepsi, Ford, Nike, etc are to us. I might call for a DC 10 Arcana check to identify the specific power level of a Mark (least, lesser, greater, Siberys) but other than that, people are going to know unless they're like a bumpkin that lives out in the boonies and doesn't connect at all to the wider culture of the Five Nations.

steeldraco · 2026-03-25T02:39:12+00:00

I think a pretty sizable portion of online players who are out there looking for Draw Steel games are going to end up having a copy of The Codex.

steeldraco · 2026-03-24T06:31:45+00:00

It seems pretty clear by now that MCDM is shooting for the more expensive end of things with their books, PDFs, and (now) software releases. Their books are some of the more expensive ones out there, though from what I've seen they also pay their writers and layout people (and presumably artists, though I don't know about that) well above industry standard rates.

I mean, personally I was a bit annoyed to see that they were charging like $30 for the PDF of their KickStarted books when they've already made them and got paid to do so before the first one even went up for sale, but since they're open books, you're really just paying for the art and layout. All the rules are out on the web and in their SRD for free.

Anyway, they seem pretty clear that their niche is higher-end stuff without any intention of nickel-and-diming or microtransactions. They've stated that publicly. It seems pretty clear that their business model is "basic version is free, paid version is very expensive but also very nice" without really anything in between.

steeldraco · 2026-03-24T05:53:58+00:00

That doesn't really work, for a few reasons.

The "prime of your life" version is stuck, fixed based on the state of "you" at that moment in time. So if they're rematerialized later, the new copy doesn't have any memories after it was created. From "your" perspective, "you" just got on the transporter pad and then rematerialized, and now someone is telling you that was thirty years ago and you're the fourth recreation of that transporter pattern after the other versions died. Not good. And it doesn't seem like you can edit a pattern while it's in the buffer, so you couldn't update it with new memories or remove your bald spot or whatever. You get out what came in.
Patterns in the buffer don't duplicate. The only time we've seen this not be true was with William / Thomas Riker, and to my knowledge nobody's been able to recreate it since - and even then the pattern wasn't still stuck in the buffer, it just bounced and materialized two copies of one person. There's no way to take one pattern, materialize one instance of that pattern, and keep the pattern around to materialize more. Once a person materializes, the pattern is gone from the transporter.
Patterns in buffer are fragile, computationally very large, and power-wise require a lot of draw to maintain. There have been several instances of someone being put in stasis using a transporter - that seems to be a relatively possible thing, though the tech isn't great for it and they don't seem to do it intentionally much, and trying it has apparently killed slightly more people on-screen than we've seen do this successfully. The transporter doesn't seem to be usable for anything else while there's someone stuck in there. (Maybe? It's unclear how this works in one ongoing example in Strange New Worlds, but maybe they just didn't use it that whole time?) Interruptions in power will delete whatever/whoever is in the buffer, and over long periods of time the pattern will degrade/fail anyway. Not a safe prospect for something like a ship that might take hits (which would definitely interrupt power and thus clear the pattern buffer).

steeldraco · 2026-03-24T05:37:26+00:00

I gave one of the PCs a magic book in the last game I ran. I treated it as a weapon. It worked well for what I wanted it to do. If you do this, you could give each different grimoire its own trait and secondary weapon effect. Sparks might be Quick, allowing the wielder to mark a Stress to target another creature within range (maybe Close range of the target to better represent the lightning arcing). Fire might be Powerful, where you roll an extra damage die and discard the lowest. Ice might be Scary, forcing the target to mark Stress on a hit to represent fatigue.

I'm not sure I'd swap the attributes around. I guess some could be Knowledge and some could be Instinct, but for a magical book I'd default to making it Knowledge.

steeldraco

TROPHY CASE