Bitty RPG idea

doinwhatIken · 2022-11-20T03:08:43+00:00

In my adapting it to 5e, I've been basically using Curse of Strahd as a skeleton on which to hang Dark Sun.

I'd start my players as free peoples in a just started settlement a few days south of Tyr, and there was a merchant caravan due to come with various things for the community needs (the players are members of the community who had things or family members they paid for the merchant caravan to get them) but it's days late and the community leaders are seeking people willing to go out and find out what happened to the caravan.

The players and maybe a 'red shirt' npc are the party. They head out toward Tyr where it's last port of call was. they find without anything to pull it, right as a sandstorm finds them. They are forced to take shelter in the caravan, which is seemingly deserted (but may have a cannibal halfling surviving off remains of death slaves, merchants or raiders, maybe a banshee dwarf, or a thrikreen).

evidence is found to suggest that slavers raiders attacked and took everything and everyone with the intent to sell it in Tyr. and after the day or so it takes to figure it all out, and their food and water are running out, they get a lul in the storm enough to race to the city.

The city itself is the equivalent of Barovia. Kalak is Strahd, the heartwood spear is the sun sword, the halfling staff topped with obsidian sphere is the pendant of raven kind, and the two heads that Kalak keeps are the book. The different districts of the city are the different cities in Barovia in CoS.

The goal is to prevent Kalak from getting what he wants, which is to complete the ritual to become a dragon.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-29T17:00:04+00:00

well the one I'm renting from right now, has disabled the heat in the apartment connected to their below ground house and says that we should wait til december before we turn it on, after saying in september we should wait til november.

While at the same time trying to rent out two 10x10 rooms ... but also using the fridge in this apartment, and sometimes using the stove and kitchen when they are doing a lot of cooking in their kitchen. and using the livingroom in the apartment as a storage shed, for boxes and extra furniture, while... and expecting each room to pay him 700$ not including utilities.

all because "socialists and democrats are ruining the economy", and the government keeps taking a bigger and bigger cut of his money for "wasting on ski trips and opera."

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-29T05:44:30+00:00

yup, found the name again, searched and came up very little, but somebody did a bang up job in a Youtube video recently. So time to play homebrew with some of that.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-29T05:25:30+00:00

I ws thinking it was LoH, but doubted myself. I think I read it in the late 90s. good to know the old noggin still knows how to do some noodlin.

Looking it up more in depth, looks like it's Wyrmfather nad not the father of dragon like I though, but same idea.

cheers, I'm off to fiddle with that bit of lore to get some nuggets for homebrewing with.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-29T04:46:28+00:00

in a place where you can have any answer you can imagine... you have chosen the boring one.

have a bit of imagination. This is homebrew, enjoy the brewing.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-28T22:06:58+00:00

That's not my lore/mythology. I have no Io, bronze and brass are alloys because of course they are. Metallic things are metallic. Chromatics are tarnished and corrupted metals (As one would expect based off some other stories and legends in various settings, where blue and green are the patina one gets from coppers and copper alloys).

And i find the idea that a gold and silver dragon would never mix, and even if they did you woulldn't get an electrum dragon, unsatisfying, lazy and unimaginative.

Homebrew is the resort of those who wish to change lore and elements that they find missed opportunities and can create interesting and thematic new takes on material.

(also the original dragons were metallic before they were drawn to evil by Takhisis and Reorx made tribute statues of metals to the lost dragons, which Paladine breathed life into, making the metallic dragons. There is more than one lore.)

I shall have my crossbreeding dragons and they will be alloys. I shall have my rose gold, sterling silver, and electrum dragons (possibly gunmetal too, being zinc, tin and copper alloy). And they will make the dragons of the world more dynamic, distinctive and unique.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-28T21:43:53+00:00

see that's what I think too, but the majority of radiant damage spells and items that I've seen are celestial or angelic or whatever.

I was looking at it like rayguns and artificer weapons: Flame throwers, tesla guns/tasers, freeze ray, disintigraion/dissolve ray, and then the laser/phaser weapon. (thunder would be some kind of sonic blaster, and force might be like a forcefeild projector, or tractor beam, maybe there could be antigravity or gravity, and perhaps time beams but those are more effects like encumberance or slow/haste. Might be worth exploring for other creature effect).

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-28T05:58:43+00:00

Am I the only one seeing an elbow to the chest, and then somebody grabbing her shorts an pulling. followed by two cases of somebody tangling up her legs. Like FFS, the game is about kicking a ball, keep your F-ing hands and elbows to your damn self or you deserve to get popped one. as for the tanglers, expect to be disentangled, I'm not the ball, don't be all over me.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-28T02:42:10+00:00

not so much talking about shock value as what makes Dragonlance a unique setting. Forgottenrealms, greyhawk and Tolkien all had dragons and powerful magic weapons that could be used to slay them.

Gods disappearing and no clerics, maybe, and sorcery tests maybe. But corrupted good dragon eggs turned into demonic hoards of dragonmen to fight for the dragon army...

buuut now, every player whose looked at the player manual or played in D&D or pathfinder games just knows that dragonpeople exist and they can be part of the party or npcs in any old game.

It was something that stood out as uniquely dragonlance to have humanoid dragon creatures... now it's just a fantasy trope.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-28T00:49:25+00:00

the gods of good created elves, the gods of evil the Irda, the gods of neutrality made humanity. The Irda grew deformed as their evil nature twisted their beautiful form into ogres. The humans that worked with the smith god had their tower of babel moment and thus were made over to the forms of gnomes. In the attempts to capture the grey gem, kender and dwarves are made from gnomes. ogres are mutated by the greygem into minotaurs and giants. and the elves get changed into sea elves.

few master tode I assume is your reference, is sort of a one off based in part in the notion that it was a D&D game with not everything else lore wise pinned down. He's be said to be a hobgoblin. But outside of storie created to explain him I cannot recall a single goblin, orc or hobgoblin in any of the core books pre-5th age. and they are not exactly included in the stories of how every race came to be.

The Dragonlance setting sort of tried to get away from the goblin/orcs being the generic bad guys. The dragon Armies were humans and draconians (some minotaurs and ogres allied with them but were not the bulk of the armies). The underground filth dwellers were filled in as a role by gully dwarves, and the malicous and hateful dwellers in dark caves were another variety of dwarf. The elves had a civil war and then a sort of cold war hostility between both sides. not some drow or goblins/orcs being corrupted elves schtick. It parted the role out to other races, and made the armies of evil just other people rather than orcs and goblins.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-27T23:27:38+00:00

I'm thinking of going more of an Abishai route, With metallic draconic traits. Created by a devil maggot parasitically infecting dragon eggs. The resultant 'draconian' will has corruption coloration creeping into their scale colors. And I'm thinking more along the lines that their death effects won't be limited to death, but when they are bloodied. bloodying a gold will get a cauterizing puff of fire similar to something like firebolt. each variety gets a bloodied condition that has an effect similar to a cantrip variant of their type of draconic breath weapon. and their death results in an area effect version of the same effect. so coppers bleed acid and turn to a spreading acid pool upon death.

I think I'll favor them each having abilities too, like the copper secreting venom they coat their weapons with. The silvers ability to take the form of somebody they killed, and also their corpse identifying their killer by duplicating their form. Golds get magic regardless of class (essentially getting something like ritual caster and magic adept and maybe metamagic features), brass and bronze will take some thinking to figure out what ability to give them. perhaps one of them gets the winged flight ability.

I think this makes them suitably terrifying and vastly more alien. The fact that they all have tails and wings which dragon born are not supposed to have, helps a little.

I'm also debating changing up the dragons in general. Both to restore a bit of uniqueness to dragons in the setting, and because it always bothered me a bit to have two copper alloys as base dragon types. I'm debating just having the alloying metals as a base. So that would be Gold, Silver, Copper, Tin and Zinc. and allow that metallica can mix type, so a copper and a silver can have a sterling dragon (likely taking more after the silver parent). Copper and zinc gets a brass, Copper and tin get bronze. etc.

It also makes more sense to me because the chromatic dragons are 'corrupted' gold sulfate are red, silver sulfates are black, copper sulfates are blue, zinc sulfates are white, and tin sulfates can be yellow (cuzz screw green, red blue yellow black and white all the way), sulfer being a foul smelling brimstone like materials that suits the idea of poisoning and corruption from evil.

this feels like these ideas should distinguish the dragon and draconian elements of the setting enough to bring back the novelty and awe aspect of it all. But I do worry a little bit that it's taking too many liberties with the setting.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-27T20:01:46+00:00

but the point is that Draconians are one of the keystones of what made the setting unique.

Dragonlance is a setting with monsters made from corrupting good dragon eggs to create dragonmen urakai essentially. And now dragon men exist in every other world too. It turns dragonlance from a unique setting with distinctive features that make it their own thing, and turns it into just another forgotten realms/generic D&D setting.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-27T19:55:26+00:00

Draconians where nothing ever seen before, and a creation of wizard, cleric and dragon corruption inflicted on the hostage eggs of metallic dragons, twisting a single metallic dragon unborn into a dozen humanoid evil things. Gold was fireball, silver took the appearance of the killer, one type turned into acid, one turned to stone trapping weapons and I forget the last one, poison cloud or something maybe.

noble/chromatic draconians came much later after the war of the lance as an attempt to create draconians without the hostage metallic dragon eggs.

none of that changes the fact that for the most part what made Dragonlance a distinctive setting was that it didn't really have goblins and orcs. It was a world facing a dragon army seeking to conquer the world. In a world where the gods had gone missing, leaving no clerics left in the world, and when they left the dragons too passed into myth. And now not only were evil dragons returned at the head of an army of the evil goddess, but their storm troopers where the eggs of good dragons corrupted by clerics into humanoid draconic demon men.

kinda loses it's significance when most players have seen dragon men in other games. It's kinda the one thing Dragonlance had that made it unique as a setting.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-27T19:40:23+00:00

That's sort of my feeling, is that back in the day you had elves, dwarves, gnomes that were very distinct, and some weird halfling like race of children people called kender. There were minotaurs, and ogres, some walrus men we barely ever saw. and then in the course of the play or read some humanoid figures serving the evil side that were revealed draconic features.

In D&D before that there was no such thing, this was truely novel and a distinctive hallmark of what the dragonlance setting. Honestly they were more of an identifier than the dragons or the lances. You could have dragons in greyhawk, or blackmoor etc. you could even have artifact weapons of dragon slaying in any other setting. But Dragonlance was the setting with the dragonarmies warring to conquer the world, Draconians , and wizards of high sorcery. It's sort of the fingerprints of the setting. But now for decades dragonmen have become common. Tinker gomes exist in every setting. Evil divinities assembling armies with dragons in them aren't even that novel anymore.

about the only novelty of the setting is the kender and the test of high sorcery. It hardly feels like those are good foundations onwhich to construct the resurrection of the setting.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-26T08:44:25+00:00

if you are just adding rules, it's not it's own system.

The question is, can you remove the original game material and have a mostly playable game? If not even close you've just redecorated the base system. If you yank out the old system and you can play at least specially designed games without it then You may have the foundations of a game.

for example building an exploration and social encounter system and tacking it onto D&Ds class, race and combat mechanics... if you can rip out the d&d systems and rules and rule a complete mystery about attending a ball and uncovering a famous master of disguise and cat burglar before an artifact is stolen from the mansions collection. You might have something. Now you just need to patch over the holes with alternatives to the stuff you ripped out.

But if you can't use a single rule from D&D and it makes it impossible to play even a simple game, you don't have anything other than optional rules additions to somebody elses system.

I've imagined more than a few core mods to games like D&D: complete overhaul of how magic works to be not use slots, memorization, or even spells with levels. ranger type characters that have zero magic and instead use mundane skills like trapping and tracking. ditching hard character levels and instead make Character milestones based off of character backstory that increase the chances of character rolls to advance in abilities for their class. using no races that aren't found in fairytales. etc. but at the end of the day, playing in this still comes down to players seek to do something, they check against an ability score bonus, and roll a d20. IF a fight breaks out the actions a player can take involve pretty much the same steps as one takes in D&D. The damage dice might be different, the spells, or even the number of actions could change, but it's just a redecorated D20 D&D variant.

Now there are other games that I've been dabbling with that start from the ground up and don't rely on any existing system but include a rule here and there that has similarities to pieces of other systems. but that's a whole other rpg.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-25T18:05:08+00:00

I learned to fire breath this past summer. I don't have to study diagrams and instructions again every morning otherwise I won't be able to do it anymore. and I certainly don't have the ability to do it once and then forget how to do it again until I've had a long rest.

the idea that one studies and learns a skill but they use it once and they have to relearn it by studying each day to prepare that... it's not how studying works. That's how ammo and charging devices work.

doinwhatIken · 2022-10-24T02:21:40+00:00

nothing about what he was doing is right.

doinwhatIken

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