My party is headed to a famously dangerous swamp to figure out where previous parties have gone missing. (Look, the pay was Really Really Good.) The DM has mentioned a couple times that any specimens from the swamp would probably fetch a great price at the university, so I've been thinking over how to make the most of that. Our druid has some art skill (he was previously a forger) so I'm thinking a field notebook would be a natural and valuable accompaniment (and a straightforward enough thing to turn into a skill check) Anyone got any experience with plants/what would be useful from an academic's/collector's point of view? (I'm googling this too, but I figure someone with experience in RPGs as well would have neat ideas)
shitposting aside, anything that's Super Fucked Up (goddamn asplenium fern complex, nepenthes, etc), has Interesting visual features, or whatever medicinal qualities you wanna make/look up would be my guesses (isoetes are Living Fossil Not-Grass, so they look super bland but are actually super fucked up)
[Dusts off her botany course] Also: you wanna take as complete a specimen as you can. For many you gotta have the thing from the ground to the tip to get leaf arrangement etc to identify them properly so bring a big notebook or take small plants If you can't dry/press the plant, accurate sketch is good but it's gotta be accurate wrt to stuff like leaf veins, petal number etc Seeds are SUPER useful because then you can grow the thing, and they often don't need a lot of space. Take notes on grow spot of the adult plant. Shady?sunny? Submerged or semi-dry? Parasitic to other plants?, makes it easier to grow specimens elsewhere later Basically 95% of science is 'detailed accurate notes', i'm sorry
@Loq @TheOwlet Those are v helpful ideas that I will pass on to our druid. While I'm sure our DM has some plants he's come up with, he likes it when we've got our own ideas. Having some idea how to actually store specimens should help lower the DC for selling them later, too. @jacktrash Carnivorous plants are a great idea! My paladin's plant knowledge basically consists of "generally green, sometimes poisonous," but a carnivorous plant is something even she would recognize as a rarity.
Taxidermified rare animals too (or monsters, though a Good-aligned university would probably prefer non-sentient monsters.) Harder to pull off but maybe worth it? There's also detailed notes on the life cycle and habits of creatures from very hostile environments. In real life, the first detailed observations of emperor penguins in the wild required basically a high-level adventuring party. But your character may not have time for that... Alchemical/potion/spell components. (Are they fire swamps?) Now I want to play a grad student PC who's adventuring to get field research...
I played an NPC that way one time (his major was necromantic archaeology). A+ fun, would make a great player character.
Tomb of Annihilation has both the Archaeologist and Anthropologist backgrounds, and I know you can find them elsewhere online, too.
Ok so. I have ended up trying to make my own school times rpg type thing that so far is equal parts persona and world of darkness. Might scrap this all later and make a full on world of darkness hack instead, who knows, least of all me. It's still in wip thought process form though.
my cecil is a ranger who is Very Excited about insects. this has so far only been flavortext and rp, but his minor in scientific illustration has come in handy a few times.
DM said I could use my cursed academic necromancer girl who i thought was too unbalanced to be playable :D and i’ve finally named her! her name is Myria!
Spoiler: big going into the final battle with three and a half casters is some WoW-tier pre-raid buff shit
Do you know that feeling when you spend time creating a character and nailing down their backstory and trying to figure them out and then you finally say one thing in character and you realize "oh, this is just Dave Strider."
TO BE FAIR TO ME they aren't just Dave Strider. They're like a Dave/Rose mashup. Their name is Scavenger but they go by Aven and I love them.
