@DampeS8N In that case I would recommend looking into drop dead studios. At least their Spheres of Power product. I have the pre order which gets me early access and it is not even done yet but it is awesome. There are still some minor balance issues but those will be ironed out I am sure. The product is meant for Pathfinder but is backward compatible with 3.5 as well.
My friends and I are due at some point (whenever schedules allow) to enter a researcher's lair, but I'm not sure what to make the adventure about. It's a Fate adventure, and it doesn't have to be fighting, and I'd particularly like this one to be not about fighting.
The researcher himself is absent, he's been turned into a werewolf - he had an accident with a serum he was developing to allow other people to turn into werewolves without some of the negative side-effects. The campaign focuses on some PCs in a Hellsing-type organisation: arcane stuff is rare in the world, and often dangerous, and they exist to keep it under control.
Most of the time, they do that through stamping out presence of the arcane.
The researcher, however, belongs to another organisation. His organisation uses the arcane in order to combat it: they fight fire with fire, so to speak.
In my mind, at the moment, the lair's a partially-underground castle/keep that's recently suffered an earthquake. He had a few imposing creatures locked up who've generally either escaped their cells or been killed in the quake.
@Aaron The party's a mechanic who's very clever with his machinery, a Cleric who's basically gone through some reality-wrenching Lovecraftian kind of experience we've yet to learn about (he's seen too much for one lifetime), and an assassin who serves both the Gatekeepers of Tartarus (their organisation) and the government.
@Aaron Not sure! It could be a mix. He probably has captives his organisation's captured who fell prey to some transfiguration, as well as original creatures. He likely had some werewolves locked up, and there is an actual werewolf pack who hates him and has either freed them or is going to free them.
There will probably be a Grootslang present, slithering around the hallways, which they will absolutely have to not fight because if they fight it they will die. They're also going to find some unidentifiable decomposing remains of something huge beneath a large amount of collapsed rock.
nice, the other thing is give them something to do in the lab in addition to finding notes and stuff. The guy is brewing potions...have them interact with the aparatus...
Few ideas: - one of the monsters that escaped is literally unfightable, directly. Something like Hulk level invunerability to damage. You can show that off with him like walking through explosions or some such, so the party knows that attacking him is pointless -- except perhaps as a delay. Then they party needs to either spend all there time evading this brute, so never stay in one place too long, or work out a clever trap to get him back in.
@waxeagle that's true. they are not there yet. I'm running episodic missions, and this mission hasn't started, so theoretically they start anywhere between HQ and lair.
You could say he completed a curative serum and they need to use it to cure the few ex human creatures. That would involve capturing the ex humans one at a time and using the serum. To make sure that they can't keep it for later put some notes nearby that state that the serum will loose it potency quickly.
@Oxinabox Yes! I'd love to use the Grootslang, or something like that, to give them something they have to evade and could possibly re-trap. The Grootslang in particular is a fearsome predator - it's extremely clever and a powerful hunter. In the African creation myth, the Gods created it in early times when they still were working out how to create life, and they considered it a horrible mistake, so they split it into the Elephant and the Snake.
(but one Grootslang survived, and from it all living Grootslang are descended)
(how did a Grootslang have children on its own? Who knows, it's a creation myth)
- at first it appears that the researchers lovery (if new and not fully trained) assistant is still around -- possibly cornered by a monster, or trapped in a seperate area. who can be join with the party as a NPC and feed them some information. Twist is that the assistant is infact a shapeshifting monster that escaped.
@waxeagle In their last adventure, they actually discovered the resesearcher - and a couple of his colleagues from his organisation. He was stuck as a werewolf and animal-minded, and attacking a small town. They agreed to head in with the organisation to his lair and try to find his notes so he could be changed back into a regular person.
Okay this is awesome. I'm gonna compile some stuff so far, let me know if I missed something: - Incredibly powerful creature they have to evade and can trap again to get it out of the picture. - Ex-humans locked up who they could free and cure. - An apparatus they could fiddle with to disastrous effect in the lab. - The notes and a lycanthropy cure in his lab. - A self-destruction mechanism they could end up activating at some point, and they can try to escape or try to deactivate the mechanism and preserve the place.
@BESW @JonathanHobbs A build onto that could be Cornered Mouse. If they do try to intimidate one of the creatures it lashes out with surprising strength. Maybe it turns into the Powerful Creature?
That would depend on the party though. How likely they would be to try to corner one of the creatures to talk to it and accidentally scare it into changing.
@JonathanHobbs Remember, as a consequence not only is it temporary, but you can introduce the Core concept that you have to take action to begin healing.
@mbriand sure, if the tag describes the content of the question and is the kind of thing people into hexcrawl / experts in hexcrawl would want to be seeing
> Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. > The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
> We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.
Cthulhu Dark's Descent mechanic is defined by the inability to move through the investigation in the wrong order, without dictating HOW the movement will happen or exactly what things are discovered.
Instead it lists general things of which a small subset must be encountered before the next list of things is available to encounter.
You have hear folktales of the Beast before you can see its footprints, and so forth.
When you gain a level in a class that gives +1 to a save every three levels, you instead treat it as +1/3 of a save every level.
Ditto the other bonuses that aren't handed out every single level; figure out how much of a fraction of a bonus it comes out to per level, and gain that much.
So, Cthulhu Dark has an adventure design mechanic called Descent.
It divides the game's progression into five levels/stages/layers, each defined by a short list of things to be encountered/experienced/discovered, like "Newspaper reports describing..." or "A glimpse of..."
Each "..." is filled in with something from the next stage.
You can't experience things from one stage's list until you've experienced at least two things from the previous stage's list.
For some stages, there are also environmental requirements in order to progress; you can't hit stage five until you're in a place that's at least two of the following: dark, underground, ancient, alien.
So stage one might have "Newspaper reports describing unusual footprints," and stage two has the unusual footprints themselves.
My games usually run very quickly through stages one and two, spend most of their time at three and four, and then linger in stage five for a while before we actually hit the climax of the story.
It seems to be working for us, but I'm not sure it's intentional.
Of course, the adventure design guidelines pamphlet says its rules are untested.
After I've run a few more games I'm going to give the designer some feedback.
Two levels of Swordsage for that matter are nice because I'll get my Wis mod to add to my AC as well, and I'm good at dodging but I could use some AC boost.
Beyond that IDK. I did pitch the Fractional Bases to my DM, let's see what he says. Particularly for BAB that could prove quite handy for the other two members of the party (being front-line melee types)
It must be because I've always used NPCs from official adventures, but I've never felt like my PCs needed the extra BAB from fractional. They usually hit on a 4...
Ha, yeah, we had an orc 1 hit kill one of our party members, crit great axe to the face... d8 HD class too, at lv7-8 (I wanna say he was 8). Full health, got killed down past negative his Con score. (DM ruled negative Con is death, not -10)
Not to mention we're facing several of these guys at once, and they're riding tougher than normal worgs (the flavor I got was that they're from the mountains, therefore tougher and hardier)
We thought it best to flee through a tunnel left by a friggen Purple Worm, which is what led us to find that giant sleeping worm that needs demigods to kill according to legend.
Though I'm pretty sure this was a funnel method anyways. Between holing up in a damn sand covered cave and drawing orcs out little by little to kill them in our little very defensible cave... and the orcs.. and then a heat lightning storm that nearly killed every party member so far, and then the orcs bringing out two silver hemispheres that they used to collapse the damn cave we were hiding out in.... I think the DM was plotting for us to go into this tunnel.
And it's a thought, but there's a good 50 or so orcs apparently, one being a necromancer, and at least 20 or so worgs.
We might need to find out if this worm is tamable and convince it to rampage on the orcs on its own.
lightning strikes every 30 seconds right now, and it strikes sand or creature at random.
percentile decides if a strike hits something other than sand.
then it's a d6 die usually to determine WHAT it hits.
with 1-4 being a party member, 5 being orc scouts somewhere in the area, and 6 being whatever else happens to be there (last time lightning struck something important, the purple worm was popping its head up in random spots in the desert because the explosion from the cave-in woke it up, so it coulda been hit)
True, but this stinks of trying to hide a railroad attempt.
Particularly the conveniently placed ancient ruins in these tunnels.......
And a petrified orc matching the EXACT orcs we're fighting.
And the fact that an earlier orc we tortured for answers said "It would take an earthquake" in reference to trying to find a way into the temple of pelor they're squatting in OTHER than the front door.
An earthquake huh? giant sleeping worm... conveniently placed ruins... dates scribbled on the walls and doors to these ruins, petrified orc, lightning storm, overwhelming odds.............................
This is a railroad if I've ever seen one, but it's done relatively subtly. It's one of those railroads you don't notice until it all comes together and you're right where the DM wants you to be. Which is well done in my eyes.
I can already imagine that the egg we saw with the giant sleeping worm would be good bait, there's also likely some sort of documentation on this worm in here. The one guy we had that was like, uber knowledgable on this stuff is back in town... And we're going to kinda have to go back to town to find more about the worm... Whether or not the guy comes back with us, he's the party's knowledge whore.
Also, with a dead party member, I'm sure the DM's trying to find a way to get us back to town to bring in a new party member or allow us to try to res the dead guy.... (we conveniently stuffed him into our portable hole, along with the orc heads we're gathering thus far lol.
I'd be willing to bet my character's considerable amount of gold and magic items that most of this shit was planned before the party even left town.
Oh, and I'd be willing to bet his share of the dead party member's lewt too, considering it's very likely he won't be returning from the dead.
(player expressed that he didn't want to keep playing that character anyways, because the char's been quite useless in most encounters lol)
a homebrew thing the DM came up with and wanted playtested
the party cohort healer (idk the class) and the party associate/cohort thing who is a bard have both proven more useful in a fight (both with supportive stuff, and with direct combat)
He was useful once, had an ability called Great Thunderclap which pretty much forced all three saves and failing any one of the saves generally meant you were incapacitated. One sickened I think, one knocked you prone, and one dazed.
Shit was boss when we needed someone to stop half a dozen warriors from mobbing the poor rogue who's cover was blown until the barbarian type dude could fuck their day up.
Page 71 of complete specifies that eldritch blast is weaponlike. As eldritch glaive is a blast shape and thus an extension to the eldritch blast rules, it is also weaponlike.
The only factual difference between the two is that Jack Lesnie incorrectly refers to Eldritch Glaive as a Blast Shape Essence.
Well the rules are pretty specific : Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.
So really when you post an answer is mostly irrelevant
Well, it's more that mine is factually identical to Lesnie's, save for errors in his answer, so I suspect that his reasoning was more along the lines of "I want my post to be higher than this prior post."
Thank you, I was suspecting so because Lesnie has a habit of downvoting things (and a look at his meta questions shows an atypical love for downvotes as well.)
D&D 5e Overflow
Page 71 of complete specifies that eldritch blast is weaponlike. As eldritch glaive is a blast shape and thus an extension to the eldritch blast rules, it is also weaponlike.
