4e flurry is a no-action non-attack that deals a small amount of automatic damage and gives a small secondary effect (for him, slide target 1 square). It triggers 1/round on a successful melee attack.
I'm experimenting with the Miss: shift 6 squares thing. It's a way to consolidate power and utility without giving me more choices or things to keep track of. And it makes misses interesting while still making the players feel like their defenses are useful.
Yup! A lot of good reference and source stuff, some really great basic questions elaborating on common confusing ground...
It's helping me get a sense of FATE before I have a chance to play it (I'm just itching to, but it really depends on when which members of my group leave island).
Okay, context: the party has been sent into the enemy capital, to negotiate with the city's three leaders. The party knows that a terrible Lovecraftian horror is going to pop into the world in or near the city very soon. The city will become the beachhead for an invasion of the star-gods, which is bad for EVERYONE, and thus desperate times might make for strange bedfellows.
The party wants, at the very least, to convince the leaders of the threat.
The head of the first House is actually a duo: brother and sister. Krumos and Kaieta Zolfura are very probably incestuously involved with each other. They've both taken on elemental traits: he's fire and she's ice, visibly so. They're always together, often hanging on each other. It's said that if they get too far apart they might both blow up and take out the whole city.
House Zolfura is elementally inclined, binding the raw building blocks to the world to its will. They call down rains of acid and fiery hail in combat.
The second House is run by Baron Barathas Kahlir. He's... think if the Baron Harkkonnen (from Dune) had been a vampire.
He's a grotesquely corpulent vampire who has learned to drain a man of blood with a hungry look at fifty paces.
His House specializes in fleshcraft and charm magic, creating supersoldiers and subtly manipulating their enemies' minds.
The third House's leader is Matron Jorhara Barikdral, or at least that's probably true. It's a necromancy House, and nobody's actually seen her for decades; she speaks through undead mouthpieces because her very voice can kill a man and reanimate him as a slavish zombie.
And that's basically all that I have from canon. Everything else is up to me and I haven't done much with them.
Oh, and they're all tieflings who rule the most powerful city in a tiefling-run 'human' empire that spans half the world. All non-humans and non-tieflings in the empire are slaves.
@CarolinaLoza how would you say, in English, "Ah, peccato!"? As when you want to convey the impression that you had some silly idea, they show you what it really was intended to be and you want to be ironic by telling them you still favor yours?
Sadly I don't have much to work with or any ideas. She... had a voice that could kill people, and used to fly around to impress people and remind them how powerful she was, but now she doesn't.
does she regret that? Wouldn't she be fine with just going out and killing everybody else in the city becoming the leader? Is she afraid of the vampire guild leader for he would be immune and stronger?
@Zachiel that was what I was going for - but if they ever do see her then that sudden stripping away of her power and dignity is going to be a big dramatic reveal.
I'm inclined to look at the other two leaders and think about what balances or imbalances them.
We've got someone who wants to control everything and everyone, and someone who could control everyone but is too proud to show herself in her condition.
Now we've got a pair who are the living embodiment of balanced extremes.
Those balancing aspects can go into the Events aspects though. The High Concept and the Trouble are about the core of the character rather than the world around them.
Zolfura Twins High Concept: Opposites Attract; Pity Anyone Caught Between Them Trouble: A Love So Forbidden, Punished to Be Side-by-Side Forever
Okay, so I've got one event already.
The Baron had a lovely dryad cleric he was using to keep his subjects alive during nasty supersoldier experiments, and after she escaped he nearly retrieved her... but the Matron interfered on basic principle.
He was using blood magic to teleport the dryad back, and the Matron basically hijacked the leyline he was reeling her in on, grabbed the dryad, found her terribly boring, and sent her back into the wild just to tick him off.
Okay, so without going into details I think I can give the Matron that backstabbing aspect re: the Twins and give the Twins an aspect about only being able to trust each other.
As I see it then, balance is maintained by the baron and the twins pushing for power, with the Matron holding on to hers strongly and striking at anyone who shows weakness like a violent teacher.
Given that two of the PCs were instrumental in dismantling one of the Baron's supersoldier programs 118 years ago, "I Never Forget or Forgive" might be good for his PC-related aspect.
The very first mission the PCs were ever on was to defeat one of her minor relatives' attempt to summon demons as shock troops in an invasion.
And the dryad she took from the Baron and then set loose was a PC.
The dryad's long dead now, and only one of the original PCs is still around--the Zolfura one.
These days she marches on the battlefield through proxies, raising the corpses of the slave armies to attack their enemies from the rear.
The party's heard of this but the campaign's running too fast to have seen it.
Actually!
The very last mission the PCs were on, she provided such a massive necromantic threat in a far-off battle that the dragonpope had to leave his city, which meant only the PCs were there to stop a coordinated attempt to raise the ghosts of evil dragons beneath the city.
Well, destroying the dragonpope's city would effectively remove him from the war, which would mean that her necromancy has little to stop it.
So... pretty darn upset. It was a brilliant plan that actually worked, except the dragonpope used time travel to force the PCs into a grandfather paradox that stopped it before it happened.
@SimonGill Quite probably. Two of them are time-travelers, one's slain a demi-god and returned from the dead 80 years later, one's a personal student of the dragonpope...
They've been in the Right Place at the Right Time for 118 years of war, and from the very beginning prevented her sneakiest plans from undermining the enemy before it knew what hit them.
She's a survivor, right? How would she handle the arrival of something she thinks can defeat her if she stands alone? Especially given her needling of the other houses of Vor Kragal.
While I'm loading that, alternate concept: one of them is the only one who speaks. The other doesn't make any signals or sounds, but the speaking one frequently seems to be communicating with them anyway.
@C.Ross I'm using the FATE concept of aspects to flesh out the character and backgrounds of the leaders of three very hostile noble houses my party's going to be negotiating with in an intense RP session.
We're pretty much done with that part: docs.google.com/document/d/… and now I'm speculating about voice and mannerism inspirations.
@SimonGill My group tends to be the kind of player who prefers to sink himself as deep as he can go into a system, wallowing in it until we're absolutely sick and tired of it.
I've never really paid much attention to our FLGS(s?). I started playing in college, and when I got back home the friends I played with included at least one guy who would've bailed if it hadn't been a very close-knit and predictable group.
@CarolinaLoza This is why he was in his mother's garage ...
@MadMAxJr My local place has plenty of M:TG and Warhammer (mainly 40k, but some fantasy), but they also have a good RPG selection and comics and general board games
