A Sundered World: The Feywild

Seeing as how in my improv session my players ended up on the moon (or back, in the case of Lothelle), I guess I should flesh it out some more. This is how things have been going for my latest campaigns: I have a vague idea of what is going on, get the dirt on the characters, and start weaving a story based on a combination of what they tell me I want to do and what I want to do with it.

Kind of reminds me of my high school days, when a bunch of friends and I would be crashing at someone’s house, and someone would be like, “I have an idea, roll up some characters!” In a sense it is liberating because I do not have to think of an involved plot right away, but it is also frightening because I worry that my spontaneous ideas and direction will fall flat. If my college habits are an indicator of anything, I guess that it is I tend to work well under pressure.

So…the moon.

During the Sundering the archfey implored the spirit of the moon to save them. It agreed to help, and the archfey used their magic to “unravel” the Feywild from the natural world before too much of it was destroyed, and then “wove” the planar fabric to the moon. So the moon is a vast, gray waste spotted with thick forests, frozen mountains, and wild rivers. The Unraveling and Weaving were not perfect, so the orientation of fey cities and regions are not where they were (not that time and space had much meaning). Some things were also badly ravaged, so forests of spindly white, tree-like shapes and pools of silvery fluid are not uncommon.

The courts still wage their political wars, and the Winter Court’s efforts hinder Summer’s attempts to spread life across the moon. Due to limited space and resources (and sometimes ideologies), tribes of were-creatures and centaurs clash with the eladrin. The werewolves of Brokenstone Vale are especially violent, believing the moon to be their patron god and that it rightfully belongs to them.

To make matters worse not only did the Feydark get carried along for the ride, but it was also not put back in the right spot, so there is now a region of the moon riddled with jagged mountains and fissures that descend into the Feydark (not sure whether I will call this the dark lands, shadowlands, or something else). Mithrendain is a temporary fixture here, much as it was before, and helps prevent fomorian armies and clans of rampaging lycanthropes from spreading. The Feydark is a hollow space within the moon that is slowly growing as the fomorians expand, which has the side effect of damaging the moon’s spirit.

Reaching the Feywild can be done if one manages to spot the moon as it swiftly orbits the Elemental Chaos, though its path carries it through both the Inner Sea and the dark reaches beyond, so the best bet is to find a fey city within the Astral that has a gate.

5th Edition: Jack is Back

First things first, I got a shout out, made even cooler by the fact that I did not actively do anything to get it. While I had been aware of the RPG Carnival, seeing it here and there, though I am going to make a greater effort to follow it (as well as get featured).

Anywhoo according to the transcript from the Class Design seminar wizards are, at least currently, like 3rd Edition wizards near the end-run; they rely heavily on “Vancian” magic, but can take spell feats that give them at-wills, which remind me largely of Reserve feats from Complete Mage. While I am not a fan of daily resource management, at least rituals seem to still be intact. Rituals are great because it allows me to drop scrolls in adventures that anyone could use (which I did in the first A Sundered World session), as well as provide some flexibility to anyone that wanted to invest a feat.

One upside is that there is supposed to be a kind of “trade-in” mechanic, though I am not sure if it will allow wizards to cash in lower level spells for a higher one on the fly or as they level up. I know that somewhere it was said that fireball would deal a set 5d6 damage, and if you want to make it better you would slot it into a higher level. I like this idea because it would help greatly reduce the “power bloat”. Some 4E powers did this, but not all, and I think that would allow a player to keep an iconic ability around without having to find another that works “close enough”.

At least Bruce is on record for saying that they want classes to feel and play differently. In 3rd Edition wizards and sorcerers were too similar, what with sharing the same spell list. Though they tried to play up the bloodline angle later on with feat trees, it was not enough to diversify them. I feel that even 4th Edition did not go far enough, and I found it very difficult to properly evoke some sorcerer spell sources (especially dragon, which was the concept I theoretically should have enjoyed the most).

A Sundered World: Episode 101

After a brief foray In Search of the Unknown, we decided to start running A Sundered World a few players short. Initially intended to be a delve run, it ended up turning into the “pilot” episode. What happened was entirely improvised, and it was a lot of fun.


Cast

• Danh (goliath serpent shaman)
• Lothelle (eladrin bladesinger)

Lothelle travels from the moon in search of something that could help her defeat the fomorians. She ends up hopping a few gates to Hammerfast, and learns that while cold iron is highly effective against magic, it is only found in the bones of corpse stars. That, and it is extremely lethal to fey (ie, her). She heads to the archive, where a mimir informs her of a ruined eladrin city several days away. While not exactly unknown, it is the best lead she has so far.

At the same time, Danh arrives on an Ironhand vessel bringing in a shipment of metal from Thunderspire. He is searching for fragments of the World Serpent’s spirit form, and so is traveling to as many islands as possible. He also learns about the ruins, and figures that hey, if the fey lived there then he might learn something. They both team up to split the charter fee and, well, safety in numbers.

They arrive at the island after avoiding a psychic storm and bladeling warship. As they explore the island they find the rusted remains of an insect-like golem, and are attacked by twig blights while examining it. After destroying the twig blights a treant helps them find the ruined city. Danh tries to communicate with nearby spirits, but find that the entire area around the ruins is completely devoid of them.

In the rubble they find another golem, which activates and attacks them while they try to find a way through a door. Unable to harm the construct, Lothelle teleports through the door thanks to a tiny hole in the center, and opens it from the other side. The machine almost kills Danh with powerful blasts of lightning, and they barely manage to get the door closed, trapping them inside an ancient laboratory.

They find a pair of trees, which Danh realizes only grow in moonlight. Both trees house weakened spirit-forms, who are barely able to speak. The machine starts wearing down the door’s wards, and Lothelle finds a ritual that opens a portal using the trees as a kind of frame. They search for ritual components, and find an enchanted robe with a silver key inside. The key is a focus for the ritual, but still needs energy to activate. The spirit-forms sacrifice themselves to activate the ritual, begging Danh to “stop them” as the trees crumble into dust.

The session ended with the characters stranded in an unknown wasteland on the moon.

Notes
The combat against the twig blights was ran without minis, and was very easy to handle even with the conditions and forced movement. I will probably not use minis for inconsequential encounters in the future, especially because not having to take the time to draw a map helps prevent the tension from ebbing.

Kiara, playing Lothelle, kept burning through her daily spells to restore the wards on the door, buying them additional time. I just had her make Arcana checks with a big bonus to secretly see how many extra minutes they got to ransack the place. It was an improvised way for her to use her magic not explicitly by the rules, and hopefully it will compel her to try doing it more in the future.

Again everything was made up on the spot, including the twig blights’ stats, the robe’s abilities, the key, ritual scroll, “moon trees”, everything. I also had them roll for loot while searching the lab. Basically I was like fuck formulas, fuck existing magic items. I’m going to have them roll for shit and just see what happens.

Back to Basics

In light of a looming edition, others are giving older editions a shot, so I figured I might as well subject mine to them as well. Partially because I wanted to see if there really was anything about them that I actually liked, partially because the only edition that some had played before was 3rd. So scraping from the bottom barrel, we started with OD&D, including the adventure In Search of the Unknown.

They managed to get through the first hall, swing a left, and run into an auditorium where they were gang-raped by six kobolds. The game ran roughly a half hour, and most of that was me rummaging through pdfs trying to figure out descriptions and rules (I guess I had heard that doors had a variable chance of being stuck or some shit).

Ultimately, their final opinion was that they “fucking hated it”, though I found elements of the play style to have some positive aspects. Let me break it down.

The Bad
My complaints have largely not changed in execution: the classes are very cookie-cutter and “samey”, and the premise of going through bizarre dungeons to loot the place for gold because it somehow gives you XP seems very “video-gamey”. The rules were not really complete, and I found myself having to keep a copy of Swords & Wizardry on hand to compare and contrast rulings. Basically, it was a fucking hassle and I felt like that I could have done a much better job if I had just made up rules the game myself (which for all I knew I was).

The players were likewise displeased that their characters had changed from competent heroes to paranoid murder-hobos. When you are able to take a few hits before going down, the game is not as swingy; you can get hit by something and usually have a chance to react to it, as opposed to instantly dying. With the characters having between 2-3 hit points each, the odds were better than half that they were going to die in one hit (and almost certainly the first encounter).

The other downside was the rolled attributes. Having complete control of your character, being able to play what you want and how you want is appealing. Personally I would rather use the Gamma World system (rolling for not directly-important stats), or at least have rolled stats be an option rather than the standard.

The Good
For the first time since I ran D&D, one of the players used a mirror to peek around corners. He also used a 10-foot pole, a practice which largely well out of use at some point in 3rd Edition. I think it was more of a nostalgic kick than anything. The player didn’t particularly care for it, stating that he only did it because he was afraid of getting randomly killed by…well, anything. To be fair that mind-set made things seem more immersive, I guess, as I would imagine people going to plunder their first trap- and monster-infested tomb being pretty damned paranoid.

The other perk was how quickly combat could start; you just roll a d6, highest goes first. Since everyone can really only make what amounts to a “basic melee attack” it is more of a factor of if the monster you want to hit is within hitting range. They largely did not care for this, as they felt it stripped away any variety and tactical decisions that could tip the odds in their favor; getting bonuses to hit, keeping the kobolds away from the magic-user, etc.

Something that was kind of a plus was the kind of a lack of minis. With no real tactical decisions to be made, terrain to be utilized, or opportunity attacks I could basically just describe the room, let them tell me what they want to do, and have them roll. The real plus was that if a monster popped in the room there was no delay between rolling initiative and setting things up, which in practice kind of drains the suspense.

Would I Play Again?
Heeell no. Not enough variety when making a character, not a lot of note in in terms of advancement. In its favor the lack of hit points helps lay on the paranoia really thick, but honestly I want players to make characters with backgrounds and personalities and go through a story. While I could tack on houserules to make it easier for them to survive, the end result would look more like 3rd Edition without feats, at which point I might as well be playing at least 2nd Edition. Hell, why cannot they re-release 2nd Edition instead of 1st?

Anyway, next week we are going to give 1st Edition and Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun a run. They will be 5th-level, so we’ll see if we can eke out another 10 minutes of game time with this one. 😛

A Sundered World: Inspiring Images

While re-playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow last night, I reached Necromancer’s Abyss. Simply put, this level is awesome. Actually a lot of the stuff in this game is awesome, but the floating rocks and drifting pieces of broken titans was inspiring. It could give me something to show my players to give them a better feel for what things looked like, as well as help describe things.

And then there is also stuff from Magic: The Gathering.

D&D Next: +1 or Better to Hit?

Robert Schwalb talks about the dated “+1 or better to hit” mechanic. This was something I saw in 2nd Edition, might have been in 1st Edition, existed kind of in 3rd Edition, and surprise sur-fucking-prise…I hated it.

On one hand, having a monster that can only be harmed by magic sounds like it could make for some interesting challenges. If the fighter lacks a magic sword, or his plus is not big enough, then it is up to the wizard or cleric to save the day (which given how fighters do not scale sounds less interesting and more like foreshadowing)! On the other hand having a monster that can only be harmed by magic sounds really fucking frustrating.

The thing is, some monsters in older editions used to be immune to all damage from non-magical weapons, meaning that you needed a +1 or better weapon to hurt them. What if you group does not have a wizard or cleric? What if the wizard or cleric died or ran out of spells on the way? What if the cleric or wizard used up their offensive spells, or even the utilitarian ones that could just lock them down via save-or-screw? What was even lamer was that if the monster needed a +2, but you only had a +1? Fuck you. No benefit, period.

3rd Edition made things a bit easier by making it so that a fighter could hammer away at a golem, but you have to shave away damage from each attack to the tune of like, 20+ points of damage. The problem was that, oh yeah, fighters do not scale, so that basically meant that you were not going to do shit. Yeah, the wizard or cleric could buff you (and to be fair against golems they basically had to given the magic immunity), but in cases not involving golems it was probably better to just attack it with spells that A) were not affected by resistances, and B) scaled.

Revised Edition made things much, much better. Fey required cold iron to overcome, lycanthropes required silver, skeletons took full damage only from blunt weapons, zombies from slashing, and all the plusses were simply rolled into “magic”. Oh yeah, and the amount was dropped into the 5-30 range (as opposed to topping out around 50 or more). So it sucked for the melee classes, who were already floundering in it, but did not render them obsolete.

That is basically how I would like it: make it have an impact, but not so much impact that classes have to pack it in and go home. Earth elementals I guess could be resistant to non-magical weapons, but do not make it so that the fighters just shrug and watch the spellcasters win the game. On a similar note, I don’t want to see monsters outright immune to magic, or even item-eating monsters. I guess, ultimately, one could include both systems. Use damage resistance with an option for a DM to flip it to damage immunity or just ignore it.

A Sundered World: Acamar, The Corpse Star

In a Sundered World most of the aberrant stars drift in the Deep Astral, having escaped the Far Realm since the Living Gate was destroyed. Where they go they herald destruction and insanity, warping reality and birthing nightmarish horrors that can strip one’s sanity with a mere glance. Though many were destroyed before, during, and even after the Dawn War their shattered corpses are still dangerous; aberrants cling to them like parasites, and deranged cultists flock to them in hopes of rousing any lingering vestiges of intelligence or finding some way to restore them to what passes for life.

Since I plan on having my players go here at some point, I don’t want to reveal too much about the corpse star Acamar. Suffice to say, it is hollow, surrounded by a ring of debris from when it was slain, and has a massive city constructed on part of it:

Oh yeah, astral sharks.

5th Edition Musings: Playing With Powers

Note: There is no official information about 5th Edition, here. This is merely some thoughts on the direction I would like to see WotC take. I guess think of it like me throwing ideas around to see if any stick (or if anyone else has a better idea).

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Powers are a really nice 4th Edition addition, especially for classes previously that did not get many options, were rapidly eclipsed by spellcasters, and/or lacked the “scalability” to remain viable for more than a handful of levels (coughfightercough). It was nice being able to make a fighter, rogue, or ranger and have interesting things to do that helped separate you thematically and mechanically from each other instead of spamming a routine melee attack over and over. My problem with the power system was that for all the powers that exist, there are still occasions where I cannot create the character I want without having to invent my own powers. This is fine for me and mine, but I know that groups that only allow “official” content (and not even all of it) are legion.

What would really fix this whole power bloat issue, while helping ensure that players still get what they want, would be for WotC to just give us a formula or system that would help us create our own content. Like, recommended damage, conditions, ranges, effects, etc. It could be a point system, where you just buy everything with a power budget based on the level and power frequency. Keywords could be used to restrict effects based on power source, so that martial cannot get their grubby hands on teleportation. Also, a shitload of examples with components would be handy (and allow for drag-and-dropping other elements) would be handy.

They could also try moving away from the power system as-is. I would not mind seeing something along the vein of Essentials, where martial characters can choose effects or kickers that they could add to their attacks like power strike. They could adopt a power-point like system, so that martial characters utilize “stamina” or something to boost their attacks. This would make things more flexible and help avoid the whole “argument” of why you can’t hit something really hard more than once (not that I paid any heed to the latter). While I wouldn’t use it for every class, I could also see this being applied to wizards using a magic point system, and there could possibly be a mechanic for burning healing surges to give you a stamina/magic boost (kind of like 3rd Edition’s Body Fuel feat).

Someone also suggested using pre-reqs for various powers, which sounds similar to how Exalted works. Some powers might require a combination of ability scores, so fighters would need a good Strength and Dexterity for heavy blade powers, or good Strength and Constitution for hammer and axe powers. Hell, you could just make a huge-ass list of martial exploits and let rogues snatch up exploits thematic for them, while allowing characters with good Intelligence or Charisma nab leader-like exploits. Want to take it a step further? Skill training could open up more stuff, or if you want skill ranks (whether numbers or descriptors).

What do you think?

A Sundered World: Thunderspire

One of my players wants to play a goliath shaman, while the other wants to try a human warlord channeling Malcolm Reynolds.While two leaders is not normally a problem, a shaman with a snake spirit that is also carrying a fragment of the World Serpent’s shattered form and seeking to be joined with the other fragments is, especially when there really are not enough evocations around to emphasize the concept.

So…I let him whip up some new evocations that did.

• Strangling Serpent: This is a nifty melee attack that originates from the spirit companion, which wraps around a target and makes it hard for them to properly defend themselves. In game mechanics the target grants combat advantage from the next attack made against it.
• Snake Swarm: A swarm of spirit snakes writhe and bite enemies within an area 1 burst. It is friendly-fire, does not do a lot of poison damage (Wisdom modifier-only), but gives allies a power bonus to damage rolls against them.
• Tail Sweep: The player likes the idea of the snake being able to trip someone up, so this encounter attack deals damage, knocks the target prone, and for a turn any enemies that start next to the spirit are immobilized. More of a controller-type thing, but he wanted some of these powers to be kind of controller-y anyway.
• Spirit Cascade: This is his daily, and we wanted it to be a doozy. Basically the character calls upon his World Serpent fragment, causing it to manifest briefly and rushing through enemies, poisoning them. Enemies take poison damage and ongoing poison damage, while allies get a defense boost based on his Constitution. 

Are they balanced? Dunno. We used existing shaman and controller powers as benchmarks. The better question is if I give a shit, and I don’t, because this is for a homebrew game and I want my players to be able to do shit that they expect their characters to do.

On the topic of inventing things we also created his “home base”, as I had not considered the origins surrounding goliaths. Honestly I was hoping that people would play the more fantastical races like gith (zerai or yanki), bladelings, shardminds, and devas. I even wanted to reskin kalashtar to be humans infected with intelligences encountered from corpse stars or sailing along the edges of the Far Realm. What we came up with was this:

Welcome to Thunderspire. This island is presided over by a blue dragon, who permits a guild to mine the mountains in exchange for tribute. The island is also inhabited by a goliath tribe, and possibly orcs and ogres. I often needlessly fret over the ecology of this sort of thing, so I initially designed it to be quite large in order to support some manner of life. Ultimately it is not important. What is important is that Kamon’s character hates the dragon for devouring his mother, and will ultimately go back to slay it and claim all the accumulated treasure.

Really the only problem I ran into was trying to justify the forests and rivers. Rivers I am going to say are either due to elemental vortices created during The Sundering, or are spirits (so are forests, mountains, some islands, etc). Astral stuff, I have decided, it is mutable through conscious effort, and how the gods crafted their dominions and how the gith create their silver swords. It can also be channeled into living things via worship, granting them power. So spirits need the prayer of mortals, as it causes astral-stuff to empower them, allowing them to perform miracles and thrive. Theoretically if enough mortals worshiped another mortal they could ascend to godhood given enough time, but they do not yet fully understand how the Astral works.

5th Edition Musings: From Concept to Character

Note: There is no official information about 5th Edition, here. This is merely some thoughts on the direction I would like to see WotC take.

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With a new edition of D&D coming out, one of the things I am largely concerned about is what characters will ultimately end up looking like. While I am not worried that they will be reduced to the handful of cookie-cutter classes that were introduced in OD&D, I am legitimately worried that we will see character diversity and class flexibility shored up to be more inline with 3rd Edition’s often rigid class structure.

I sometimes wonder if D&D should get rid of levels. On one hand, I like classes and levels because they make it very quick and easy for a player to figure out what the class is good at, as well as generally how tough they are. As a DM this makes things extremely easy to design and challenge my players. However, the level and class systems as executed lack the granularity of other games, namely Dresden Files and Exalted. As a player it makes it easier to figure out if my bonuses or whatever are average, good, or the best of the best.

To compare, in Dungeons & Dragons if you make a fighter, then you can wear heavy armor, use most weapons (and use them pretty fucking well), and are pretty damned tough. 4th Edition even went so far as to provide mechanics that made weapon categories matter more and give them a way to actually keep monsters from mauling her allies to death. In Exalted you do not have classes. You choose a caste, which basically just lets you know which things are easier to learn and improve. For example, the Dawn caste are your archetypal melee warriors, and can learn skills like Melee and War faster than castes.

The drawback as I see it is that it is more difficult to accurately peg challenges for your party, and probably even harder to make challenges in which everyone can meaningfully contribute. I ran into this problem in 3rd Edition when designing monsters; things that were hard for the warblade to hit were basically impossible for the cleric, bard, and rogue, and if I made stuff that they could hit about half the time, the warblade was basically guaranteed to fuck it up. Same with monster attacks and saves; the cleric and warblade’s Will saves were so far apart that the warblade could not hope to make without rolling a nat 20.

The benefit is that if you want a fighter to have a knack for magic that you can have greater control over how much. In 4th Edition you could multiclass into wizard and pick up a spell–which makes more sense than spontanously blossoming into every cantrip and a bushel of 1st-level spells–or find some way to hybrid a fighter and wizard into a functional character (especially with an understanding DM). A system similar to Exalted would let you adjust the dial and probably very easily make a fighter/wizard that requires less houseruling and optimization just to “make work”.

Even better, as your character advances you could advance the character in a direction that makes sense, picking up a bit more magic or improving her martial skills organically. Hell, you might even find yourself branching into something else entirely. Mind you, I do not want to return to 3rd Edition’s wonky multiclassing that unfairly hinders spellcasting classes, but I think a more flexible system is in order. I don’t want it to be FATE or Exalted, because then I might as well just play those games. Ideally I would like it to be some kind of modular class system where you could, I dunno, drag and drop a power source, role, and shuffle some other bits around to basically build your own class that best evokes a concept you have in mind.

Of course, I have no fucking clue how, or if, this system would work. I think that done properly we could avoid having classes like the swordmage, which by the way I am not knocking: I just think that it kind of sucks for people who want to play a fighter/wizard and have to end up waiting for WotC to invent a class that lets them do that from the start. That will be one of my barometers for 5E: can I play a fighter/wizard type at the start of the game, which having to fallback to houserules or stretch my character too thin.