I'm planning on starting a campaign actually and taking part in another one as a player soon to test run the system :P
I may actually be interested? GURPS has about 8 billion little issues, but I can't help but admire it.
The campaign is more than full already, and I don't really like playing with people I don't know well, especially not for my first run as a GM so >_> I could tell you how it goes though :P
Team Jailbird update: So, last session we returned to my character's hometown, and we finished with Faeleth the rogue and Tsalta the ranger peering over the local baron's garden wall to scope out his fancy garden party, hellbent on stealing a fancy cloak Faeleth lost the auction for. Over the break, @inchwyrm and Tsalta's player held multiple heist-planning conversations, covering all their potential plans. (Most of the plans were to the effect of: Seduce the guy with the cloak? Hell yeah. If that doesn't work, bonk him on the head and run off? Fab.) Next session rolled around. The expectation: the pair of them sneak off to pull the heist while Nuth and Fergus (our new dwarven monk) chill out on the barge we sailed in on, unaware of the shenanigans. The reality: they bring the rest of the party, enter by the front door, Tsalta gets entered into a posh-folk's tourney as the local 'champion' even though she's not even from around here, and long story short...incite a full-on brawl between the attending elven and dwarven nobility. Meanwhile, Nothing turns invisible, steals every coinpurse she can reach, and runs off back to the barge, fancy cloak under her arm. Honestly? Everything went better than expected. Who needs a well-laid plan?
My players progressed faster than I planned for, so I had to improvise and come up with a bunch of characters on the spot. My favorite is Carmen, mad biologist, who created the mushrooms I mentioned earlier (giant mushroom forest where the effects of eating, inhaling spores, or touching with bare skin are a random amount of distortion to everything the player does, determined by a roll of the dice where which die they roll depends on how high their constitution saving throw was. A 20 means they only have to roll a d4. A 1 means they have to roll a d20.) (although only one player was affected, sadly) and who talks very quickly in monotone. ("whatdoyoumeanihavetoapologizetothenaturespiritidon'thavetoapologizethenaturespiritcanthrowdown", very soft and intense.) (that's "what do you mean i have to apologize to the nature spirit i don't have to apologize the nature spirit can throw down", so you don't have to try to separate it) (she's the sort of person who speaks in lowercase)
Also my friend who I recently got into taz accidentally called the deputy head of security "director" when she offered the party a job. Also2, two of my other players concluded that they were being recruited into fantasy shield, which delighted me.
Pathfinder shitpost time: my friend and i were talking last night about how Cayden Cailean definitely has a smartphone and several social media accounts, so i made this
NPCs! Carmen, attack mycologist, and Esme, head of security, of the mysterious organization I got my players to join.
I started playing a Call of Cthulhu game. I gave my character a pathological fear of fish, as is appropriate. Naturally, this ends with them trying to retrieve a trout from a party member's pants to throw away and burn. Edit: I am now married to the lady whose pants I invaded for fish.
Things we have done to rightfully piss off the locals, in order of Badness: -Horribly failed to flirt with the guy who owns the general store, TWICE. Eld(ritch) is consistently bad at talking but thinks he's suave. He is banned from the general store. -Accepted a fish from the local Drunkard No One Likes. (This lead to the fish keep-away that ended with my hands in my wife's pants.) -Asked for food that wasn't what had been prepared. She Spent All Day On That Chowder, Dammit. -Slept in a car within city limits -Gently lovetapped a child with the car, because he ran out into the middle of the road. -Accidentally burned down a barn because a possessed boar tried to murder us
Last night's session featured Team Jailbird getting lost as hell in a creepy foggy bog, searching for Stonefist - the guy who's meant to be driving our boat. (He went missing amongst a night-time ruckus where Fergus swore he saw shrubs moving and our boat came mysteriously unmoored, which is always a good thing to happen in the middle of a bog.) After following his distant screams and trying to follow some very unusual tracks, the party are now so lost that even our ranger doesn't know where we are in relation to our boat. It's going good, you guys. Everyone got exceedingly paranoid about the plantlife... Also we realised the cries for help were coming from more than one direction, so that's good! And then the 'abandoned campsite' we happened across turned out to be the top of a lurking shambling mound. Session highlights included: Nothing's nat 1 investigation roll causing her to full on rugby-tackle Tsalta's hair, mistaking it for one of those Mysterious Moving Shrubs. (Her embarrassed justification that she couldn't tell because it's grey instead of auburn made Tsalta panic for a moment before she remembered that in the dark it's grey to her too. No premature whitening happening to her luscious locks, thank the gods.) Nothing riding around on Tsalta's shoulders like a kid on piggyback, if kids on piggyback were inclined to shoot fire at any plant that moves funny. Fergus "Well, Someone Needs To Protect You Guys" McDougal being the sole party member to take damage of any kind, engulfed not once but twice by the shambling mound, eventually spat out unconscious. We love our self-appointed bodyguard, but that -3 strength modifier...oh no. @inchwyrm pausing at the start of her turn to consider, then rolling to decide, whether Faeleth liked Fergus enough to attempt to pull him out of the shambling mound. (Thankfully, the dice said yes.) Wyrm rolling to see whether Fergus being plant vored gave Faeleth any ideas for the ~novel~ she's planning. It super, super didn't. Quite the opposite. Plant vore is one for the squick list. It's gonna take some strong stuff to wash that image from her mind. (Now her career as a hired killer is behind her, and recently inspired by Fergus' Fantasy Mills and Boon collection, she's thinking of trading in the sword for the pen. She's suffering a little writer's block right now and was hoping for a muse...alas.) Every party member other than Faeleth had...real trouble with all things combat. Tsalta's bowstring snapped, Fergus was busy being buried in gross swamp vines, and Nothing busted out all her best spells only to discover the Soggy Boggy Boy was resistant to basically all of them. Turns out KILL IT WITH FIRE AND/OR LIGHTNING isn't always the answer...? But that's always been the answer! Luckily our resident assassin is also an excellent weedkiller. Will we ever find Stonefist? Will we even find our way back to the boat? Will the shambling mound succeed in running away as fast as its remaining viney legs can carry it so Faeleth can't finish it off? Tune in next week, I guess.... :P
So, have a new group/game for people who like watching or listening to people play D&D. The game is Escape from Semolo Plateau, the gaming group is called Dice Friends, and it's composed of people from LoadingReadyRun. There've been four episodes so far, coming each week on Monday. You can watch them play live on Twitch at 5pm PST Mondays, catch them on their youtube channel, or follow them on some podcast app or other. "Why should I do any of this?" you may ask. Well, it's the tale of four non-human adventurers in the land of Chult, currently home to the Tomb of Annihilation questline. There aren't any spoilers for it in the game particularly, it's more a contemporaneous story than anything. Y'see, the official description of Chult is basically "People only go to Port Nyanzaru and nowhere else" despite the fact that people clearly live in the rest of the continent. So as part of the setting, the DM is making sure to make Chult about as horrifying a place as possible, to justify why no one visits the rest of it. So the characters start in prison, in the only permanent settlement other than Port Nyanzaru, which is only permanent because it's almost inaccessible. Things get worse for them as they leave prison and have to deal with the wildlife, the wildunlife, and the people of the plateau itself. The characters are: Dande, a tabaxi monk based more on a Pallas cat than the usual shorthair examples of tabaxi. He was framed for something and thrown in prison just after arriving on the plateau, as he wanders the land following the whims of the Cat God. Morra, an elven rogue of merely 60 years. Was supposed to go to Waterdeep for an exchange program, but snuck off to Chult instead to free some lizards being treated poorly (lizard-rescue also being what got her tossed in prison). Her mother doesn't know she didn't go to Waterdeep, and if she has the chance she wants to keep it that way. Bontan, an albino dwarf cleric, was imprisoned for arcane spellcasting. Because he's part of a local nercomancer's school, and therefore clearly an arcane caster. Nevermind that he's a cleric, or focuses on healing. Snak, a batiri (goblin) fighter that's as small as it's possible to roll at 3'7". Despite this, he's very intimidating. Imprisoned for desertion from the militia, which he argues is totally unfair. He was more facilitating some of their gear deserting than doing so himself, y'see. Even more than the players, though, the DM is a real delight. A wonderful bassy voice, great bunch of ideas and characters, and a friendly atmosphere. Also, really, really good at making Chult seem monstrously unpleasant in humorous ways. Here's the first episode, from Youtube: Spoiler: Spoiled for size
I just backed the Kickstarter for the new and updated version of Spell and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on it! Maybe I will even actually kick my butt into gear to try and write up some new one shots or a campaign for it I even have people in mind who would be down to guinea pig for my experiments.
I'm a big fan of LRR and I can confirm the first two episodes of Dice Friends are cool. I particularly liked the vaudevillian sequence with the cursed rocks!
Right? I just love the whole idea of Curse Rocks in general. The next time I have players in a prison or anything similar, I'm definitely stealing the idea. For those who haven't watched it, every time the prisoners leave the prison to go on work detail, they're given curse rocks. The players draw cards out of a hat to represent them, each card comes with a description and a curse code which lets the DM look up the effects in secret. The effects mentioned in the series include: You bleed more easily and more profusely; You get a persistent ringing in your ears; You get a nasty rash; Your ears fill up with ear hair; You generate all the static electricity; Your skin glows, which makes it hard to sleep; Nothing! It's a dub. The curse starts out very mild, but gets worse over time and as you or your group break laws (if you fail saving throws, at least). The curse only dissipates when you get your rock back into the bowl they get taken from. Between the narrative potential and the way to turn those petty annoyances into serious problems over time... it's just such a wonderful idea.
Team Jailbird x2 Update Combo, Part 1: Session 16 (Because a lot happened over the end-of-arc finale sessions.) We made it out of the swamp! And found our boat driver! Poor Stonefist had ended up in the posession of a slaad - all those moving plants and the shambling mound we tracked to his camp were under frogboy's command. Luckily the slaad was amicable enough - once we arrived, all he wanted was for us to piss off and stop asking him questions. (We pretty much abandoned the slaad's other captive to his fate. To be fair, he was a complete stranger, asleep, and the slaad was telling us to 'only take one' and making it very clear he'd sic his pet vine monster on us if we tested his generosity. The decision to leave Dwarf Captive #2 behind did not sit well with Faeleth, who muttered the whole way back to the boat about oh, i see how it is, leaving people to be eaten by frog monsters is fine but when faeleth kills a few goblins by completely unintentional mass arson then that's murder and it's bad, fine, hypocrisy abounds.) Eventually we ran out of river and had to take the rest of the journey on foot. After a long trek, a brief vandalisation of some very nice musical wind tunnels, and a very tense last evening's camp, we made the last leg of the journey under the driving rain and finally made it to the Ruins of Gheimas where the Collector awaits. Led by Nothing through the network of catacombs beneath the city, the party managed to avoid detection and sneak up beneath her castle, avoiding the need to fight anything save for one very horrible and very traumatic encounter with a twisted bony entity that has left Nuth scarred for life in the most literal sense of the phrase. (It could have been much worse, but as always Faeleth came to the rescue just when it was starting to look like the party was seconds away from becoming a 3-person team.) So, the good news: We snuck up on the Big Bad, and only one party member got messed up along the way! The bad news: The Big Bad got to Bobby, the gnome bard who had spent the last decade protecting our Ranger's daughter (the subject of a quite worrying prophesy that involved her blood being ideal for the ritual we're trying to stop), before we did. We found him at the base of the stairs leading up towards the castle, by some hastily-scrawled runes to place an arcane barrier across the stairs, and a message in gnomish that read, "Forgive me, for I have failed." Most of the party kind of hated Bobby, because he was cocky and abrasive and useless at fighting despite his bravado, but.... oh no :( oh noooooooo. At least that solved the problem of 'oh god, how do we break it to him that the nephew he only just learned about died horribly a couple of days ago', I guess. Silver linings and all that?? Spoiler: The Longer Story + Highlights. Warning for some body horror?? Session 16 highlights included Everyone but Fergus being absolutely terrified of a 'monster in the distance' thanks to a collection of dismal Perception rolls, and working one another up into a panic theorising about what could be making such a big noise from so far away. It was literally just a glorified weathervane - one of the nearby hills was fitted with funnel tubes that caught the wind and made different tones depending on the wind direction. Never mind the urgent matter of a blood ritual that needs to be stopped - TIME TO PLAY WITH THE HILL TUBES! Faeleth threw some ball-bearings into one to make a pretty windchime sound. Tsalta mistook her own strength and vandalised one by denting the side with a rock. She had to lower Fergus down on a rope to repair it, because she felt immediately guilty and also the tube was making a bad noise. ("Drop him", mouthed Faeleth, absolutely deadpan. It's a good thing everyone's used enough to our rogue's sense of humour to know when she's joking.) Tsalta being the sweetest, most wholesome party member - during her night's watch, the rainfall grew into a storm so vicious that our little mountainside alcove wasn't much protection from the downpour. So she took out her cloak, secured it to the cavern opening, and sat on the hem for the rest of the night so everyone else could stay dry. She had to roll Constitution to avoid hypothermia, and that still didn't stop her - she just knitted her hair into a stand-in cloak and weathered it. It's safe to say the whole party was touched to discover the lengths she'd gone to when they woke up. Faeleth gave her a full-on hug, and Faeleth is a very emotionally repressed elf who hardly ever engages in expressions of affection. Tsalta is the party's cinnamon roll and we don't deserve her. A very tense Gaze of Two Minds recon mission where our rogue went alone into the ruins to scope it out, with Nothing watching through her eyes and relaying everything she saw to the rest of the party. Faeleth's final verdict on being used as a living GoPro: "A bit invasive," and, "My brain felt like it was going to be sick." Do you know what a fun game is? A fun game is being a secret warlock trying to follow directions from your patron, but those directions result in leading the party into a dank and spooky abandoned operating theater full of old bloodstained implements and having to convince them that...yes, this is good actually despite what it looks like, and we should DEFINITELY go down the trapdoor in the back. Definitely. Oh also that trapdoor leads to a crypt. Oh also that crypt looks like it used to belong to a necromancer, because oh okay that gated room has a zombie in it. Oh, and that room has some dancing skeletons in it. Oh, and THAT room has an eyeless zombie beholder in it...and is that a rat's nest but made of bones? Gross!! (But on the plus side, the party have to concede that Nothing's weird hunch is legit, because instead of stealthing/fighting our way through a bunch of jackalweres in the ruins, we can now travel directly under the city straight to the Collector's lair without her getting wind of our arrival.) And now I break bulletpoints to get to the highlight (lowlight?? combination highlight-lowlight??) of Session 16: our DM is the worst and we love him, because oh my god, the Wretch. We found this raggedy little human man chowing down on a rat in the middle of a corridor in the crypt. Everyone's creeped out, but nobody wants to just straight up attack because he does look like a human guy. Nuth tries to skirt past him, but he stands up and blocks the way, and he starts babbling at her - Flash back to late 2017, when I made the mistake of showing our DM the Jelly Belly Gummi Pet Rat video. Tsalta's player reacted immediately by saying 'don't you DARE put that voice in our game'. And our DM laughed, and said he loved it but didn't feel he'd be likely to actually use it, and like fools we believed him. -Back to 2018, and it's that bloody voice, because of course it is. The raggedy-man carries on his sing-song burbling and starts trying to pet Nothing's horns, and she freaks out and tells Fergus to knock him out (because she's pretty sure any of her magic would kill him and she just wants him to stop grabbing at her horns). Fergus smacks the guy on the back of the head with his quarterstaff...and things get so bad so fast, you guys. With an outraged scream of, "NAAT. VEER-AI. NICE-EEEEY!" and a sickening series of cracks he gets abruptly a lot less human as he straight up transforms into a lanky, spiny bone monster. And then he pins Nuth to the floor. She's grappled to hell because she's tiny and weedy and useless without the ability to do the somatic elements of her spellcasting, so that's not great. Even less great is the serrated bony spine it starts boring into her temple with, doing frankly brutal amounts of necrotic damage every time she fails to fight free of its grasp. The rest of the party's attacks did not deter the Wretch - even when Fergus punted it across the room with his staff, Nuth was dragged with it (which was HORRIFYING, by the way, the fact that only did her a single point of damage was a miracle). I cannot begin to describe the intensity of the Wretch battle??? We all knew this was not a situation where death saving throws would apply, like you don't come back from hitting zero under these circumstances, it was looking Very Bad. I was pretty sure she was going to die the session before the finale!! And then Faeleth did what Faeleth did best: putting a very sharp object through something that's about to kill Nuth. For what is probably the fifth time? It's almost like she feels obligated to protect the kid and make amends for killing her parents or something. Tsalta did her best to patch up the damage with magic but it wasn't quite enough to fully repair it, so Nothing now has a pretty sick scar: a deep and perfectly circular indentation on her right temple. WHAT A FIGHT. It's been like a fortnight since it happens and I'm still not over how close that was....i cannot imagine losing Nuth in the penultimate game of the arc, IMAGINE. [muffled screaming into hands] Spoiler: Also I wrote a limerick in Bobby's memory, because bard RIP, brazen Bobby the gnome tried to give Tsalta's child a safe home. But the girl he protected still done got Collected, and he died in a crypt all alone :)
Just finished with episode 5 of Dice Friends on Twitch. It contains one of my favorite exchanges of anything, I think. Spoiler: not really a spoiler, but... maybe gross? idk Dale (DM): "These guys are kind of like centaurs, but not quite. Instead of a human torso, they have, like, a gecko-lizard torso, kinda green and scaly, with very skinny arms. But that's the only reptilian part of them." Kathleen (Morra): *whispers* "The other half is spider." D: *"reassuringly"* "I'm not using a spider." K: "Oh." D: "So, the bottom half is millipede and the head is a housefly." Beej (Bontan): *laughing* "I'm dyin'." Graham (Snak): "That sounds..." K: "So much worse." What really sells it is how they all seem more surprised that they're surprised than actually surprised. It's very much a "Of course, what else would it have been?" sort of moment. Also, I love how everything is good news. Dale is just so full of good news for the PCs. It's amazing how much difficulty they have when almost all of the news is just so, so good. Seems like. No awkward conversation, no more annoying bravado, and he got some kind of ward up. All good news. And, hey, the Big Bad didn't raise him as an undead, leaving his "body" there to attack you while you mourned, so that's another plus.
...A solid reminder that we probably ought to retrieve him and give him a proper burial, actually. While the Big Bad wasn't a necromancer (mind control was more her forté - ah, lamias), the existence of so many benignly animate skeletons down in the crypt aimlessly acting out the things they did in life might mean there's some latent necromantic magic around the place. Wouldn't want ol' Bobby down there playing his Pipes of Haunting to the zombie beholder and getting into dance-offs with the skeleton with the invisible fiddle. Actually, you know what, maybe we should leave him to it. Even in death he might liven up the place.
