Our Curse of Strahd game is back on the road. The party are, as ever, nothing if not creative problem solvers. I love them. Spoiler: Spoiler for the Death House chapter inside! The problem: The Warlock just stepped up to an altar in the depths of the basement. Shadowy figures have manifested. They are chanting. They are demanding that 'one must die'. A couple of successful checks meant they knew that it didn't matter what died on the altar, only that something did. Potential solutions I'd been wondering if they'd field: Straight-up refusing, leaving, noping the fuck out - extremely reasonable!! My #1 prediction. Giving a sidelong look at the little bird our Paladin picked up the day before. Attempting to halfass a blood ritual and see if it *definitely* needed death or if just, like, some blood...? might do it? The actual decision: The Rogue says, "Hey, didn't the Paladin trap a bunch of centipedes inside a coffin upstairs? Warlock, hold on..." She runs off upstairs, gets the Paladin to unlid the coffin, scoops up a handful of centipedes, runs back as fast as she can because they're biting the shit out of her palms, and immediately smashes them on the altar. ....Thus completing the blood ritual.... ....And raising the monster the shadows were chanting for. Problem solved or problem created? That's just a matter of perspective.
Yesterday's session was amazing. We're sloshing our way through a natural corridor in something like a mangrove swamp when the cleric notices fish starting to zip between our feet. Rogue consults our guide, who is scouting on ahead, and we are instructed to RUN. Simultaneously, cleric sees a shark fin racing towards us... when it's pulled back underwater by a frenzied mob of sawtooth minnows. I think these are an invention of our DM because I tried to find a picture on some d&d sites and couldn't. They're finger-length silver fish with a mouth that looks like a lamprey's. Unlike a lamprey, they can buzz their way through metal. They're packed so tight and moving with such speed that getting knocked off our feet and pulled under is a serious risk, and they're leaping off their own mass to pick birds off branches. We book it. Spoiler: For length Problem 1: our cart is too big to take it off this natural corridor, which we realize is essentially the work of these swarms. Problem 2: our cart, which has all the supplies we need to survive in the swamp, is the slowest moving out of all of us. Problem 3: attacking the swarm to buy the cart extra time means halving your movement for the turn. The sorcerer is the first loss - she makes a dex save to avoid getting rammed over by the minnows, rolls a 4, then uses Tides of Chaos to reroll and gets a 20. DM decided, and player agreed, that this means she stumbles but recovers herself just enough to scramble out of the corridor and far away enough to feel safe. She then promptly fails her survival check and has to work to find her way back to the rest of the party. My dragonborn paladin Hrrkik is having a bad time. She attacks the swarm to buy the cart some more time, but only the searing energy of her Divine Smite keeps the minnows from damaging her longsword. It also means she's in close enough range for them to get up the speed to ram her, and her poor save means they chew through her shield. Only the cleric's healing spell keeps things from getting really bad. The rogue realizes this is his time to shine. Million-to-one plans are his Thing. He scrambles on top of the cart and unearths the keg of gunpowder he stole earlier, then trips a patch off his robe of useful items to produce a 12 foot rowboat. He shoves the boat onto its side so that the inside is facing the minnows, places the keg in it to funnel the blast at them, and keeps running. At which point Hrrkik realizes - the sorcerer is gone and there is only one person left who can ignite the keg. Her. She has two options: keep running, knowing that the rowboat will slow the swarm a bit while they work their way through it, or stand her ground long enough for the bulk of the swarm to be in range of the explosion along with her. Because of how the boat will channel the explosion, there's no chance of dodging to reduce the hit. The rest of the party starts talking over each other trying to offer alternatives. The DM tells them to stop - they're 60 feet away and running, and there's no way Hrrkik can hear them - and tells me it's up to me to say what she would choose, but option 2 has a very high chance of ending in her death. The cart has all our stuff, and the rest of the party is so very squishy. She leans back and hurls her magic longsword onto the cart because goddammit it was expensive and she's not letting anything eat it. Then she casts Sanctuary of Faith to sheathe herself in Astilabor's divine energy and braces herself for the perfect moment. She glances up, and swears she can see a ghostly, glowing set of scales. One side is piled with coins, the other with skulls, and as coins spill from the scales the skulls sink lower and lower. The ramming force of the first wave of minnows almost knocks her from her feet. The second wave chews through her plate armour. Hrrkik exhales fire, and the world explodes, hurling her backwards. As she stares up at the scales, a divine talon presses down on the side with the coins. This once, the DM didn't roll behind the screen. The dice turned up exactly enough damage to have killed her, except for the fact that as a golden dragonborn she has resistance to fire damage. The party pulls a 180 and races back to haul her back to her feet, and once she can breathe again she starts scolding them because "the point was to buy you time! Run!" There was no way the minnows were recovering any time soon, though, and in the end we all got away. Even got our sorcerer back, after her solo horror novel-esque experience. My DM is amazing and I love his work.
Also! My sister did a painting of my paladin sleeping and it is the cutest thing ever. (She's cuddling the party supplies because dragons gotta dragon.) Spoiler: Image
Got to play another one shot with my siblings group yesterday! It was supposed to be 90% combat 10% roleplay and ended up with 20% combat 80% roleplay instead because we WOULD NOT stop talking to people Or each other .... my siblings character had a huge hero worship crush on one of the other player characters and dissolved into a stuttering mess every time they had to talk to him and COULD NOT finish a sentence while looking in his direction so they'd start talking, rapidly lose confidence, and look over at me to finish talking. We did MUCH ROLEPLAY. also my character hates lying - hates it SO MUCH. cant stand it! and she's a cleric of Ioun... ... and one of the other players was a cleric of Vecna lying about being a cleric of Ioun so that was... amazing.
Started the homebrew campaign with other kintsu folk on friday, loved it! My character would already stab a bitch for @IvyLB 's because Aglfyr is such a precious bby. a 7 foot tall one But Still.
I DMed a one-shot with voice chat today! I've been DMing a text-only game for the past two years, but I've always been afraid of doing voice because of auditory processing issues + hearing impairment + social anxiety. But I got some friends together who I trusted to be patient with me and I think it went well! I did go over my planned time (I'm terrible at pacing) and I ran them on rails a bit, but they did some fun RP and I was able to functionally hear and respond! \o/
Ahhh... one of my parties wanted to find an artifact, despite being at fairly low level to do so, and got told it was in a dungeon somewhere. Not a regular one, though. As the person relating the story of it to them put it, "It wasn't designed just to hold something captive or keep people out. It was made as a 'fuck you' to anyone that wanted to claim the artifact. A sadistic series of so-called tests. I'd recommend against going there to look, regardless of what treasure might lie within." They, of course, ignored all of that and made a beeline right for what they're calling the "Fuck You Dungeon". They're about 2/3s to 3/4s of the way through, and it's been so much fun to run them through it. A series of traps, puzzles, and horrors that've really challenged them, but not been utterly impossible to think and/or fight their way through despite their low-for-the-CRs levels (in part due to solid tactics, good stats, and lots of magical items even coming into the thing). Spoiler: The first room, and what happened there The first puzzle might be my favourite, in some senses, just for the simplicity of it. Three stone golems in a room with three doors, each standing between a pair. One door leads in, one to the left fork, and one to the right fork. After deciphering the incredibly bad poem in the center of the room (took an Investigation check to make sense of, even with Comprehend Languages, and a Wis save to read the whole thing for anyone with the Performance skill or an interest in songs/poems/art, because of how bad it was. We're talking 20+ verses of off-rhymes, bad meter, and pain, that they should be grateful I only summarized rather than subjecting them to.), they worked out a few things. One path led to a sloping passage, a crystal room, and a treasure hoard. The other one didn't. No other info on what the other path held. Also, each person could ask each Golem a question about anything regarding the dungeon and receive an answer. Of course, if they tried to leave without the artifact after going through either door, the Golems would beat them to death. If they tried to communicate anything about the dungeon to anyone outside, they would be cursed, and beaten to death by Golems as soon as possible. Of course, even that wasn't so simple, because while each character got one question per Golem, not all answers would be of equal value. One always told the truth, and one always lied, so that part was easy, but the third one alternated randomly between lying and truth-telling (and I rolled before answering for any golem, to make sure it wasn't obvious). They managed to work out which was which, eventually, though it was a close call (they forgot that it was communicating that caused the curse, not trying to leave, but I let one of the characters make an Int check to remember things correctly since I didn't have the handout because I ran out of time making bad poetry for other rooms in the dungeon). Then they asked probably the best question of the truth-teller they could: "What's the biggest danger to us in each of the rooms of the dungeon?" The answer? "Arriving without the key, the artifact itself, gravity, greed, the golems, lack of faith, the light, trust." After all, they hadn't specified an order, so they got alphabetical. They're at the key room with it in tow, leaving just the artifact and trust rooms left to experience. I still don't know if any of them will be dying or surviving. When they're done, would anyone be interested in a full write-up of the whole Fuck You dungeon? I'd be more than happy to share.
Nope! Definitely not even a little bit inspired by it. (The Wandering Inn's dungeons actually served as more direct inspiration for some bits of it. In particular that of a dungeon built not to hide something or serve as a test or provide a sanctum, but as a general "fuck you!" and method of enacting a terrible revenge upon the world.) Although, honestly, the Tomb is... not actually that great, generally. Like, it needs particular box text and even illustrations to work well, and still doesn't have as much warning as it ought to, I feel like, beyond being the Tomb of Horrors. Of course, that last one also serves to the Tomb's detriment, as well. Many of the "puzzles" need to be reasoned out, and if someone knows the basics, well... they either know to be wary of everything, or they know to avoid specific traps, a lot of the time. Plus, mine only has eight rooms. Not quite a five-room dungeon, but it's a lot easier to run something small as being constantly intense or dangerous as opposed to something that's got twenty-odd rooms in it. Though if I were redesigning it completely, I might add a couple more to bring the total up to 10. For legit pacing/design reasons, too, not just a numerical preference or anything.
Does anyone do Homebrew crunch? Races, classes, shit what needs balancing? How do you make it not sucky and broken?
I do some. Not any out-and-out classes, but have done a subclass, plus races, monsters, items, and such. Not sure there's a great way to tell for sure without some testing, but one bit of advice that's stuck with me for homebrewed player options is to generally make it a bit on the weaker side, just to be safe. Happy to look over things if you want another pair of eyes, though. Or to answer more specific questions, because that might help knock useful information out of my uncooperative brain. EDIT: Other reason for homebrewing in a bit of weakness is that a lot of the time, homebrews are a way to give someone options that fit them better. With a dwarf or elf or dragonborn you probably have more aspects that are nice but not 100% what you want for your character, while homebrews tend to be closer to ideal.
Join the Broken Sword group again and see what Spelljammer and our DM throws at us. This time we're on the stormy sheep filled Asteroid of Croylean where we will probably not find ghosts or eldritch beings! https://www.twitch.tv/aulddragon
Current comedy of errors: the only member of the party who's good at intimidation (+6) rolled a nat 20 to intimidate some guards and as they're interrogating them the other two (+3 and a -1 to intimidation) try and fail to roll anything above a 5 on the die.
Little goblin I was painting last night. Not visible because of lighting - her teeny gold buttons and red tooth necklace.
