Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Other TTRPGs

[The Cat]

 

[The Cat]

 

[Totenkindly]

So we were playing chronicles of darkness last night, and this is why I love this game: Because you can do fucking awesome things that have nothing to do with combat.

I'm playing my "mad scientist"" who used to work for a company that experimented on people to turn them superhuman -- implanting high tech or occult/magical things in them, sometimes to deleterious effect, until she was in an accident (this was part of my origin for her) and the company just turned right around and implanted shit in her while she was unconscious, turning her into something not quite human.

She is a cold personality in general, and her gradually changing body is leading her to seeming even less human as time passes.

But we are doing what amounts to a "dungeon crawl" in a facility that ended up belonging to this company, and on the lower levels we incapacitated the surgeons during one of those surgeries. We hoped to save the patient before she got modified, but she was already heavily modified with her heart removed. The only way through was forward, because if the new device wasn't placed in the patient, she's probably be a paraplegic the rest of her life. As noted Clarisse was a surgeon and this is the kind of surgery she did previously, and her skillset in game is this niche kind of area.

So she had 7 die pool rolls to get 30 successes. A few people in the group could provide minor aid. She managed to get her 30 (because she's that fucking good) in 6 die pool rolls, and used the 7th to try to improve the results of the operation. (She got 38 altogether.) She didn't even really care about the patient, ultimately: This was about proving she was still the best badass mad surgeon around and could also stick it to the head of the company when this person came to and felt indebted to us. [But hey, don't most surgeons have egos?] No one else in the group could have done this, and she rarely gets to use this skillset.

Then the group mage used his Life pool abilities to heal the patient's wounds back up instantaneously so that there were no infections or side effects.

I never had so much fun not doing combat but using other skills to try to do something phenomenal.

 

[The Cat]

So we were playing chronicles of darkness last night, and this is why I love this game: Because you can do fucking awesome things that have nothing to do with combat.

I'm playing my "mad scientist"" who used to work for a company that experimented on people to turn them superhuman -- implanting high tech or occult/magical things in them, sometimes to deleterious effect, until she was in an accident (this was part of my origin for her) and the company just turned right around and implanted shit in her while she was unconscious, turning her into something not quite human.

She is a cold personality in general, and her gradually changing body is leading her to seeming even less human as time passes.

But we are doing what amounts to a "dungeon crawl" in a facility that ended up belonging to this company, and on the lower levels we incapacitated the surgeons during one of those surgeries. We hoped to save the patient before she got modified, but she was already heavily modified with her heart removed. The only way through was forward, because if the new device wasn't placed in the patient, she's probably be a paraplegic the rest of her life. As noted Clarisse was a surgeon and this is the kind of surgery she did previously, and her skillset in game is this niche kind of area.

So she had 7 die pool rolls to get 30 successes. A few people in the group could provide minor aid. She managed to get her 30 (because she's that fucking good) in 6 die pool rolls, and used the 7th to try to improve the results of the operation. (She got 38 altogether.) She didn't even really care about the patient, ultimately: This was about proving she was still the best badass mad surgeon around and could also stick it to the head of the company when this person came to and felt indebted to us. [But hey, don't most surgeons have egos?] No one else in the group could have done this, and she rarely gets to use this skillset.

Then the group mage used his Life pool abilities to heal the patient's wounds back up instantaneously so that there were no infections or side effects.

I never had so much fun not doing combat but using other skills to try to do something phenomenal.

I adore Chronicles of Darkness <3 its one of the best out there imo

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I'm only Neutral Good in theory. In practice I'm Lawful Good or probably these days True Neutral. I'm not Lawful Neutral because I see that as being a rat/narc/Javert type and I'm definitely not that.

 

[The Cat]

I'm only Neutral Good in theory. In practice I'm Lawful Good or probably these days True Neutral. I'm not Lawful Neutral because I see that as being a rat/narc/Javert type and I'm definitely not that.

I see Odo from Ds9 as my exemplar of Lawful Neutral. In the sense that ime lawful neutral is more about order rather than balance(true) or freedom(chaotic).

I'm probably lawful evil. Maybe Neutral Evil. I sometimes think it might be fun to be able to afford to be chaotic evil. But I do like me a good sinister plan.

​

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I see Odo from Ds9 as my exemplar of Lawful Neutral. In the sense that ime lawful neutral is more about order rather than balance(true) or freedom(chaotic).

I'm probably lawful evil. Maybe Neutral Evil. I sometimes think it might be fun to be able to afford to be chaotic evil. But I do like me a good sinister plan.

​

I think i just spend too much time agonizing about doing things by the book to be Neutral Good in practice. But I think my outlook and philosophy on life is Neutral Good. It makes the most sense and seems like it would be the most effective. But ultimately I realized I really do care too much about following the rules.

 

[Totenkindly]

When I was younger, I was more lawful -- because I was a people pleaser and wanted my parents/adults to be happy with me. Curse of the eldest.

As an adult, I'm Neutral Good, I will cut corners to achieve good and will generally follow the rules when convenient or if I logically think it will make things easier for everyone... but pretty much on my own, I will just do what I want and not follow rules if I don't feel like it. I don't really care much about the law in itself, if I think it's dumb, doesn't make sense, or breaking it will not hurt anyone. I'm more concerned about how my behavior helps or hurts others, and maybe sometimes I don't go out of my way to help but then I feel guilt about it. Generally I try to be helpful to others and enjoy it.

Still, I have had fun playing my neutral evil character.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

When I was younger, I was more lawful -- because I was a people pleaser and wanted my parents/adults to be happy with me. Curse of the eldest.

As an adult, I'm Neutral Good, I will cut corners to achieve good and will generally follow the rules when convenient or if I logically think it will make things easier for everyone... but pretty much on my own, I will just do what I want and not follow rules if I don't feel like it. I don't really care much about the law in itself, if I think it's dumb, doesn't make sense, or breaking it will not hurt anyone. I'm more concerned about how my behavior helps or hurts others, and maybe sometimes I don't go out of my way to help but then I feel guilt about it. Generally I try to be helpful to others and enjoy it.

Still, I have had fun playing my neutral evil character.

There was a one shot this week where my character ended up sweet-talking everyone. We never settled on alignment but I kept coming up with these lame excuses and deceptions that nevertheless worked. It was a lot of fun.

"What were you doing in the safe room?" "Oh, Lord Dudley wanted us to check out the quality workmanship of the safe and gave us special permission to go down there."

Actually, yeah, that character was probably neutral good. I think that was what made me rethink my personal alignment. But I don't usually seem to operate that way, or haven't lately, at any rate. I place a lot of importance on being truthful. Which makes me think that I might not attempt to make up shit in a real life situation analogous to that.

 

[Totenkindly]

Tonight in Pathfinder, we found the woman we were looking for in a cage in a cave way underground but she was acting funny and we suspected it wasn't her. We spent a while trying to get her to compromise her knowledge in some way but just quite weren't sure enough to kill her (we're all lawful good) -- and then she apparently charmed one of our group right as the cleric pretended to drop something, kicked it under a bed, looked under the bed, saw a pit, and suggested he couldn't reach it so the bed needed to be moved... and hey there's a pit there, how odd.

The fake woman (who was a greater succubus) wasn't detecting as evil either, so the pally used non-lethal to smack her once to try to keep her in the room. Finally got in her way and said, "Stop trying to leave, or I will make you stop" and summoned a smite on her in case she was evil. (apparently the succubus tried to charm the pally as well, but pallies are immune to charms after level 8 and she didn't even realize what had happened.)

Meanwhile, the warpriest kicked a stool down the pit to see how deep it was. It sounded like it hit something soft. When he went down in the pit to take a better luck, he was like shit, that was the actual woman we were looking for and the chair might have killed her. About then a huge scorpion came for him from the darkness and grabbed him and they spent a few rounds trading blows.

The charade upstairs broke when the monk tried to grab the woman (with a 33) and somehow she dodged out of that. yeah, that's not human. We got into a quick but brutal fight in the hall. She touched the pally and sucked a quarter of her health with necrotic energy. The pally smirked, did a full attack round, and did like 200+ hps of damage in a round, leaving the succubus screeching "I WILL KILL YOU FOR THAT!" About then the gnome hit her with an empowered scorching ray and she screamed and died. mua ha ha. It literally played out like a scene from the Evil Dead remake.

THe warpriest collapses after banging up the scorpion while the fire cleric is throwing flamestrikes down in the hole. the pally literally runs by, throws herself over the edge of the pit, somehow manages a half-presentable dive, and hits the ground 30' below with barely any damage -- then dispatches the wakened scorpion a round later.

There's a giant snake now upstairs that half the group takes 5-6 rounds to dispatch while the pally, investigator, and now-healed war priest are waking up the missing woman and making sure she's who she said she was. Luckily she could answer all the questions correctly, so we didn't have to kill her too.

 

[The Cat]

I think i just spend too much time agonizing about doing things by the book to be Neutral Good in practice. But I think my outlook and philosophy on life is Neutral Good. It makes the most sense and seems like it would be the most effective. But ultimately I realized I really do care too much about following the rules.

Some Joking aside. I'd say Im chaotic neutral as a vessel with a few drivers. I dont like to advertise my good deeds and exaggerate my flaws with a certain flippancy born of a world weariness and acerbic cynicism masking a lonely urge for companionship despite deep seeded trust issues. My melancholy is tempered and fortified by a fey humor mingled with a reptilian remoteness, balanced by a genuine culinary ability and yet tortured by intrusive visions of hauntingly beautiful cosmic horror and a fractured personality....

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Some Joking aside. I'd say Im chaotic neutral as a vessel with a few drivers. I dont like to advertise my good deeds and exaggerate my flaws with a certain flippancy born of a world weariness and acerbic cynicism masking a lonely urge for companionship despite deep seeded trust issues. My melancholy is tempered and fortified by a fey humor mingled with a reptilian remoteness, balanced by a genuine culinary ability and yet tortured by intrusive visions of hauntingly beautiful cosmic horror and a fractured personality....

Hmm, I don't think I find anything beautiful about cosmic horror. (I suppose in the literal sense of cosmic horror a black hole could be both beautiful and horrifying.)

I moved the rest of this to my blog.

 

[The Cat]

Hmm, I don't think I find anything beautiful about cosmic horror.

I think that once you perceive what existence actually is, it's truly terrifying. I don't see anything beautiful about it; nobody has an answer for it. I guess some people find it liberating, perhaps.

This is one reason I love the Beyond the Black Mirror movie by the way. I feel like it's positing the idea that maybe you can have your consciousness expanded too much. Or maybe all of this is a reach and just reflecting the fact that I think I'm too conscious for my own good.

I see some of the best parts of continental philosophy as dealing with these questions.

As a liminal being I have no choice but to find beauty within the beast.

When Reality is madness... Art is life.

What is is that terrifies you about existence?
​

 

[Maou]

I'm only Neutral Good in theory. In practice I'm Lawful Good or probably these days True Neutral. I'm not Lawful Neutral because I see that as being a rat/narc/Javert type and I'm definitely not that.

After actually playing DND, I tend to be Chaotic neutral.

Though I have come to find its very difficult to play some alignments without destroying the fun/campaign for other people. Kind of hard to maintain a party when half of the party members want to go their own way, and the DM has to force you to work together lol.

 

[Totenkindly]

 

[Maou]

The best DM

 

[The Cat]

The Battle rages on...

 

[The Cat]

In other D&D news. My players finally got their ship powered up. Plus they have the ability to have two outfliers. It's a living ship/elemental airship hybrid created in direct defiance for WOTC saying in spelljammer that if the ent in a living ship died it can't be replaced by another one. The players love it and are excited to get underway to the next part of the adventure, their first offical job on their first offical airship. Escorting some traders to the kite festival in Cara Cara where they will play through a home brewed, beneath the hills of crooked sleep. Deep beneath the crooked hills something ancient is awakening...and the players have all shared dreams of a singing amber monolith....the rest of the multiverse waits and watches for there is a prophecy that when the monolith rises it heralds a reawaking of ancient numenara across the multiverse.

Looking back they just left the Town of Gumption with an open invitation to come back anytime on the house. They arrived to find the town surrounded by night by an army of the dead, the leader of which a Banshee; the ghost of an archfey known to one of the players's characters who spent 2000 years petrified and was released from stone in an art gallery of historical statues when a spell went awry and several statues turned out to not be works of art, but magical petrification. A manticore, a chimera, a griffon, and a few people were thawed. <The ship's navigator.

The ship's captain, who spent several years in their backstory possessed by a demon, only to return to themselves and find that their wife had vanished without a trace...a few sessions back they ran into a hag in the swamp who seemed to recognize him, and spoke glowingly about what a wonderful negotiator he was, and what a hard bargain he drove, and how most mortals would balk at doing her kind of business but he'd made her an offer she just couldnt refuse...and how well it's worked out for her, and made an off handed comment about doing business again. (The party was hunting some rogue "Commodore Drakes" (Komodo Dragons) that had once been well trained by a drake warden ranger, but after having somehow escaped from their pen, they consumed a gnoll and were infected by the demonic ichor, as the infection took over the drakes were xenomorphed into shoosova and were hunting and killing large beasts in the swamp, including a young black dragon and a Catoblepas(which is how they ran into the hag) the captain gave the hag one of their riding lizards in exchange to let the party go unmolested, and she turned the lizard into a new catoblepas. Well the party teamed up with an enclave of rangers that i had the players each play one during combat so instead of five level four characters going up against two shosoova they had 9, and one loaded with explosives...(my players were out of character really worried they were gonna get tpked((mainly because the monk has nearly died(and one time died died in almost every session lol)))Anyway...they ended up defeating the giant telepathic demon dogs and finding out that they'd not killed anyone inside the walls of the town, because the army of the dead protected it from them...so the party started to put together some things they'd discovered over the last few sessions...the drakes had grown too large to have left the kind of tracks found around the town, and there had been some sabatoge inside the town, and the druid had noted that the tracks left by the lizardfolk ranger had looked familar...as the kenku rogue ranger was gathering their explosives that hadnt been used during the ambush (the party wiped the fiends before they made it to the boom traps) he rolled a one to disarm the trap and so he blew up, and because he was literally laden with explosives and bombs...he red misted into black feathers. When the party confronted the lizardfolk he failed his deception check and the party succeeded their insights, and so he tried to shape shift into a giant frog and swim away but the party caught him and brought him back to town for trial, where in he was kicked into the garbage pit in the center of town and before Kevin the Ootyeh(a local tourist attraction) made short work of him, he looked up at the party and swore that the Lord of Hunger would hunt them till he tasted their flesh, a gnoll ripped out of his flesh and the party artificer disintigrated him with a natural 20 using her laser pistol. Session ended with the Night hag watching them celebrate with the townsfolk from her cauldron while talking to someone. "We'll be seeing them again soon, and he might not survive the coming test...that won't be a problem for you will it?" And the captains Missing wife all sithed up steps out of the shadows and says: "Not with me." The players loved it which was fun for me. Well last session the captain had a lucid dream where he got to role play through some of his amnesia for his missing time...discovering that the demon who'd possessed his body was a servant of the Demon lord of hedonism and pleasure(a good one for a bard) Graaz't and thanks to the captain, this prince of desire had gone from 3 levels of the abyss to four, with more expansions going well ahead of projection. While the captains body was possessed his soul had spent most of its time in the Argent palace as a VIP guest and during that time managed to put themselves in a postition to learn things that will come in handy for future campaign things; but they spoke with an avatar of the demon prince himself, his true form is beyond the captains mind to process, so a "presnetable human looking avatar steps out of the giant shadow form and is connected by a tether of shadow, and speaks to the captain like an old confidant(which the bard player loved) they made a deal of sorts. (nothing like the disingenuous legalese weighted contracts of the devils...no this...is an agreement among businessmen and gentlemen, because the captain reminds the demon prince of himself back when he was a mortal eons ago...so the captain asks for a way to deal with some "old friends" who tried to have him killed, and a soul to trade to the hag for his wife back... he wakes up with a bottle with a demon soul inside and an obsidian dagger(an artifact known as a vestige of divergence, the blade of obsidian mirroring, given to the Champion of the Prince of Desire...

 

[Totenkindly]

Oh, another fun bit -- Our Chronicles of Darkness games is set in Oahu, Hawaii (the island Honolulu is on) in 2018-2019. So for much of the campaign, to create a running map, we'd just google shit and use actual locations on the island. Like, wanna stay in a hotel/motel? There's one right over there. Want to explore a golf course for a missing person? Let's use that one over there. There's an incident at the air port? Pull up the map and let's look at it. We even know where our home bases are, etc.

One of our favorite places to go (as a group of characters) is the local iHop in Honolulu. There's even been weird shit that has happened there, but we've visited this place for dark-morning breakfast a number of times during the campaign.

Our game is canceled this week because our Game Master has to go to -- you guessed it -- Honolulu for work. While he is there, he's going to do his best to go to the actual iHop and send us pictures from inside.

 

[The Cat]

Oh, another fun bit -- Our Chronicles of Darkness games is set in Oahu, Hawaii (the island Honolulu is on) in 2018-2019. So for much of the campaign, to create a running map, we'd just google shit and use actual locations on the island. Like, wanna stay in a hotel/motel? There's one right over there. Want to explore a golf course for a missing person? Let's use that one over there. There's an incident at the air port? Pull up the map and let's look at it. We even know where our home bases are, etc.

One of our favorite places to go (as a group of characters) is the local iHop in Honolulu. There's even been weird shit that has happened there, but we've visited this place for dark-morning breakfast a number of times during the campaign.

Our game is canceled this week because our Game Master has to go to -- you guessed it -- Honolulu for work. While he is there, he's going to do his best to go to the actual iHop and send us pictures from inside.

It sounds like so much fun are y'all playing as mortals?