@KorvinStarmast I feel like my recent comment might have come across too pushy--I'm not trying to get you to cram all of ch4 of Peterson into an already-good answer, I just think a nod in the direction of "btw, much of this was already around" might be an interesting signpost for future readers.
@EnderLook I don't own it so I can't be sure, but when I search D&D Beyond for block of incense, one of the search result snippets is from Tomb of Annihilation, saying "A block of incense sells for 1 sp"
@EnderLook That is specifically insect-repelling Chultan incense--one block burns for an entire 24 hours! All for the low price of 1sp! (And a trip to Chult.) I dare you to find higher quality incense anywhere in the north!
@EnderLook Funny, my ranger has been stumbling around Chult for about three "in game months" and he disagrees that Chult isn't a very nice place. The jungle can be dangerous, to be sure, but Chult has a certain charm. You really should visit, and for sure, buy the repellant!
@EnderLook So is possible to use that outside Chult? Discuss with your DM. If you are the DM, you decide.
Talking about undead... how much is the chance of survival of a lvl 1 Cleric, Wizard, Paladin, Bard, Warlock and Roge (with low spell and HD) vs a Dragonlich... there was a leak of information from a source of trust that our DM is going to... use that in the next dungeous room. I'm am a bit scared...
Heyum, something doesn't sound right with this homebrew I worded. I can't seem to find any similar wording in the source books, can I run it by you guys and get some feedback?
> Each creature in the area must make a DC 10 Constitution Saving Throw or take 4d6 poison damage and is Poisoned, or half as much on a success and not Poisoned.
@EnderLook Yeah it's an action. Actually that's just the first part that sounds weird, there's a second part that's even weirder but I wanted to get the 1st part down for now
@daze413 I'm sorry but in my whole life as an adventurer, I only fought with 4 goblins, 2 hobgoblins and a quite strong gobblin that I don't know the name. Sorry
apparently it's: > On a failed save, a creature takes x damage, and it is X'edfor 1 minute. On a successful save, it takes half as much damage and isn't X'ed.
@trogdor It is quite possible, when we looted the corpse the DM didn't give us a Morningstar but if I sum the XP of all the creatures I've already killed and divide with the players fits fine
Just dropped an answer on meta.se that talks quite a bit about this community: meta.stackexchange.com/a/319091/311001. Lemme know if anything I said there seems dissonant with what you've seen around here, please.
(Putting the kids down, then I'll get to the last hour's pings!)
Also holding my breath: I find posting anything on meta.se very intimidating =\
ok so here's another mechanic I homebrewed that sounds weird to me, and I know is definitely _not_ in the source books: > A creature that does not have all of its hit points has Disadvantage on this save. If a creature has Disadvantage on the save and if the higher of the two rolls would still fail the saving throw, the creature also contracts a random disease.
@PeterCooperJr. In that case, they act as if they have all their hitpoints and have no chance to contract a disease.... hm, I haven't thought about that. I'll keep it as is but I'll let it simmer in my head for a while. Thanks!
@daze413 how've things been going on the gaming front? any sign of Dawn's player even? :) (if they turn back up, I'm still game for a little Dawn n' Serasha romp)
over here? got an on-and-off game with an old acquaintance of mine and a friend of theirs who's DMing the thing, as well as ToA with nits and co. which is going pretty well :) and what looks to be another game starting up in the near future, hopefully the 5e edition of my gnoll monk/priestess works :)
@daze413 First, we have to find it. That's been part of the problem . we got led astray by a guide, and we got set up as patsies for a mob hit ... and were banned from a fort ... but we did beat the pirates
It was the only job we had that seemed simple enough for level 1 characters, and it was a lead from our Paladin. Nobody ever lies to a paladin, right? (Oh, wait)
@nitsua60 I was spooked as heck when writing my post to the site meta. But I'm really happy to see once more we are a community where friendly disagreement is a thing (and in this case, yielded very interesting results!)
It's funny how often I fear expressing an unpopular opinion only to find it very popular instead
I feel like I remember a question on here, a while back, about (dnd-5e) whether Forge Clerics could use Artisans Blessing multiple times to craft more expensive items piecemeal? For example the upper limit of Artisan's blessing is 100g but could they use it twice to effectively craft (in two halves) a full suit of Splint armour worth 200g?
I've searched and can't seem to find the question - does that ring a bell for anyone else?
@KorvinStarmast Thanks! I also subscribe to the idea that the world needs dissenters from the (perceived) popular opinion lest we become too herd-like for our own good, but actually being that dissenter is sometimes scary :)
Every world or campaign setting has a timeline of historical events. Normally this has the format of a year number followed by a short description. For example:
−9800 DR: The Yuirwood was settled by green elves in the aftermath of the Crown Wars.
−6950 DR: The star elves began leaving other el...
@goodguy5 Kviiri was right; some game recommendations were on topic, some were not, and tool recommendations were at one time on topic. For reasons that are documented in RPG.SE meta, tool recommendations got added to the game recommendations as "we can no longer do this" and all around "this is why we can't have nice things" discussion. About two years ago, or so.
@goodguy5 it popped up beause someone necromanced it with a bad answer, but I do not consider that to be "good riddance" personally. I liked the tool rec questions, and hated to see them die with game rec.
Yeah, RPG.SE also used to give new users who did that short shrift, down voting and deleting without so much as a how do you do ... but that has also changed.
@goodguy5 Hmm, I think that's actually a separate book, let me check my index ...
I think I bought that in the mid/late 90's, and in the middle of reading it I started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series because it was recommended in that guidebook. I need to dig around the attic, maybe I still have it. That guidebook itself was IMO pretty good. However, it might be with a pile of stuff that I left in an overhead compartment on a plane in greece in 1997 ...
... I left part of a short story there as well ... don't ask ...
It was the first example I got of how to start a continent with fault lines before mountains ... and how to logically place islands ...
@kviiri My first "world" map was an out of date NOAA nautical chart of Japan. I got the chart from the quartermasters on a ship (in 1977) as we were cleaning out the old charts and replacing them with the new ones. I cut out the section with Kyushu, and there I had it: my first adventuring world.
I had already bought Empire of the Petal Throne, and had Barker's maps, but those weren't "my" maps of "my" world.
I've got a large whirlpool at the center of the main continent. And the Spell Slag will surround that body of water. Which was created by this magic war.
@nitsua60 Somewhere on Rob Kuntz' blog, he has some of the early Greyhawk campaign maps that IIRC were superimposed on the Avalon Hill Outdoor Survival base map.
How do you think a species would view necromancy if they naturally became undead?
The thought came to me when I was diving through ES lore and while draugr are said to exist because dragon priests would make their followers undead shortly before their own death but there's a number of draugr that would logically have had nothing to do with dragon worship.
Title kind of says it all. There was a question I recall a from a few days ago that I'd commented on, but I can't seem to find it so it was likely deleted.
To clarify from a similar question, the question was not my own.
Is it possible to view this question at all or is it completely gone?
@Rubiksmoose Really? THe DNDbeyond entry for it still says "The game mechanics here are usable in your campaign, but at this time they aren’t officially part of the game and aren’t permitted in D&D Adventurers League events."
> Your 1st-level character is created using any race and class options in the Player’s Handbook, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron
@Rubiksmoose According to the book I just bought, no, it is not AL legal. I got the wayfinders guide ... pdf. My book said this: "The game mechanics here are usable in your campaign, but at this time they aren’t officially part of the game and aren’t permitted in D&D Adventurers League events."
I am reminded of E.G.G. 's rush to publish the original books, and the 1985 UA. The "rush to publish" WGtE strikes me as similar. Why didn't they bother to balance it with the rest of the content? Need to get another book to market.
Understandable, also given Eberon's popularity among the player base
@goodguy5 I don't like bloat, and to me Ebberon is bloat .... but other people can love that. Dragon Lance setting I initially liked, but as time went on I liked it less and less. Enjoyed some of the books ... it was a good effort, and successful at the time.
@KorvinStarmast Wasn't that the explicit instruction? "If you'd like to play overland adventures, use these rules and content from this other AH title"?
I fancy myself a Christian man (more like "couch Christian", but still). The show Lucifer makes him a sympathetic character and it made me feel weird, personally.
@goodguy5 I don't think I've seen a single depiction of Lucifer that didn't attempt to make him a sympathetic character (except for the Robot Devil, from Futurama).
I don't even blame you, it's like one episode and there's enough going on that you might be able to miss the fact that the antagonist of the episode is the literal devil. It's been a while though, so my memory over that might be unreliable
It makes sense to make him a sympathetic character. Having a crazy evil guy be explicitly evil just for the purpose of being evil is boring. Subverting expectations is a much safer bet for entertainment.
Which leads to the audience expecting their expectations to be subverted, which leads to a time-loop and the universe implodes.
Then there is The Devil Is a Part-Timer anime which I thought went super crazy the other way and making him way too sympathetic. It was ok but it was a major issue I had with it.
To anyone: When fiction media tries to portray a (semi) sympathetic devil character, is that mainly bothersome because it disagrees with your religious beliefs? Or is it an issue for other reasons?
@Yuuki I mean yes. He's that universe's version of Satan which is obviously significantly different from the one portrayed in the Bible.
@MikeQ For me, though I was definitely raised with strong religious beliefs, that was not the issue here. I just thought they really missed the boat on making the character interesting at all despite having a lot to play with with a character that is the King of Hell
The created a character, hinted at a really deep and somewhat fraught past, gave him the name Satan, made him King of Hell and then....did nothing with that and made a generic (I'll even say boring) anime protagonist instead.
@goodguy5 If it's anything like the Vertigo comics, it's basically a Lucifer who God forgave a long time ago but only forgave himself and quit Hell very recently.
It's kinda disappointing to me that the only anime where the protagonists have non-standard/boilerplate character strengths and "flaws" are pretty much grimdark and tragedy.
It's also disappointing that sympathetic bad guys in most media have the same kinds of flaws that aren't really flaws.
And inevitably, their personality problems and pitfalls are someone else's fault.
Like the Lucifer from the TV show we're talking about. IIRC, God in the show is depicted as a pretty terrible father so of course Lucifer has "problems" because he was raised poorly.
Re: cultural attitudes to undeath above, there are plenty of real-world cultures where the dead/not-dead/dead-but-interactive line is already quite blurry.
For cultures and faiths where one's deceased ancestors are already an active presence in your everyday life, it might be concieveable that ghosts or other undead would be taken relatively in stride, depending on the exact form the undead take.
@MikeQ Which is also a little odd because the dominant Westers religious paradigm features biblical literalists who venerate a figure who returned from the dead and place their hopes in a promise that he'll come back again to resurrect them all.
@MikeQ In a modern context, I think it's more useful to think of necromancy as evil because it interferes with free will and/or intended afterlife protocols.
@nitsua60 yeppers. Of course, only one DM I knew had the Outdoor Survival game; the rest of us winged it. :p
@GreySage Al Pacino's devil was not sympathetic (Devil's Advocate)
@BESW Which puts a certain poignancy into the lyrics of this song (by the hooters)
The problem with the devil as a character is that he's a Mary Sue if played as the deep lore of "the most powerful of archangels who fell/disobeyed" model. Even Superman in full "I can fly around the world and reverse time (Reeves, Superman 1)" would have trouble with him.
The more usable model of the devil is as the master of lies, who tries to get someone to "do the wrong thing" ... that puts the conflict in the hands of the character in question.
@KorvinStarmast Characters that are defined purely in the physical will always have trouble with characters that are defined in the abstract/figurative.
@kviiri I get the feel of OT Satan operating in master of lies mode, in terms of "get someone to do the wrong thing" though I can see how the book of Job is read differently than that
I mean, it's been a while since I last read the book of Job, but if I recall correctly Satan's motive there doesn't seem to be malice or desire to tempt Job to evil --- rather, he seems to believe Job's piety is shallow in the first place and just wants to build a case to prove it. (And he turns out to be wrong)
It's useful to remember that our contemporary vision of Satan/the Devil is a messy mashup of thousands of years of violent cultural intersection, with a great big dollop of modern commentary on top.
Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Baal, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Angra Mainyu...
John Milton has a lot to answer for, specifically.
There's no way to actually collate all those sources into a coherent character model.
Even the Bible (the ostensible original source for the modern perception of Satan) has quite a handful of Satans or... err... Satanoids?
In the OT, there's the Snake in Eden and the Satan who causes Job hardship. In the NT, there's the devil who tempts Jesus and the various devilish apparitions in Revelations
Those are the ones I remember off the bat, and there's probably some I forgot. But the point remains --- that's a fairly diverse bunch of characters that somehow is supposed to represent one single person
And that's before later culture kicked in - the Dante Alighieri Expanded Universe, the Paradise Lost...
@MikeQ Hmm, personally I can think of cases both for and against, but I'm such an amateur that it probably doesn't make much difference what I think :P
The only strong case for the Snake being The Satan or something similar is that he seems to understand good and evil before humans do, suggesting that he's something more than just an animal among animals
Another weird case is "The" Antichrist --- often portrayed in pop-culture as a single demigodly devilish influence to cause nastiness near the end times, but in the Bible usually referring to a whole category of people who oppose Christ (hence the name!)
It's hard to say. The modern concept is an amalgam of different religious symbols that, over time, various scholars and non scholars sorta combined into a single archetypal figure
It's also weird how the iconography of DnD paladins and clerics, as well as several gods in the pantheon, are very obviously Judeo-Christian -influenced, but they exist in a very different religious atmosphere
But my problem with that is actually God himself,.... Can anyone tell me why the ultimate force of good and justice would for one second allow the worst creature to ever exist both of those jobs?
Basically the themes and structures and attitudes toward deities and worship in these fantasy universes are just reflavored Western monotheism, plus the characterizations of Greek pantheism
@trogdor eh there are definitely reasons that people have come up with that make as much sense as anything else. My dad is a minister so I'm pretty versed in them lol
@kviiri I believe in Revelation it mentions him being trapped there. It's been a while since I've read that, and opinions on when exactly the stuff in Revelation are supposed to happen/have happened vary.
Some of those gnostic dualist churches that got wiped out during the Middle Ages believed that the closest equivalent to Satan is actually the creator of this world, who imprisoned our spirits into cages of matter.
Most sources that remain of them are written by their enemies though...
So the original judaic beliefs didn't have dualism. IIRC the idea of an independent supernatural evil, responsible for worldly evil, came from Zoroastrianism. And those attitudes were popular in the setting when commentaries were written about the old texts, so the idea was kinda added retroactively