Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Chronicles of Darkness, Other TTRPGs

[Earl Grey]

In which we discover that 'smart' and 'stupid' are not mutually exclusive.

Background: group is traversing a wintry wonderland, and the temperatures are dropping all over. There are no rest stops, and the party must figure out a way to make it through the night. The commander of the troops tells my wizard, Varekan and another spellcaster (bard), Ishtar to figure something out for themselves and the other men, since we didn't have tents (not our fault). We foraged for a lot of things. Food, wood, but discovered that the wood, due to the temperatures (?) or whatever were too wet to burn as firewood (hooray low Survival rolls). We kept trying to jerry rig the strangest things and trying to use magic when the commander, Wicker, came back.

Wicker: THE HELL Y'ALLS DOIN'.
Varekan: W-well... Trying to stay warm?
Wicker, angrily pointing at another group: The other group made a tent with shields, AND THEY'RE NOT SPELLCASTERS
Varekan: ...
Ishtar, whining: Too heavy, too cold! Okay, we get it, we're not good at picking spells.
[Later]
DM: [shakes head] y'all wizards supposed to be smart.
Me, OOC, to our frustrated DM: You know that thing where Voldemort coulda just [end credits theme.mp3] by yeeting Harry out of window but instead he had to, just had to Avada Kedavra an infant? Us wizards are also stupid, just in different ways. I call it the Voldemort fallacy.
Bianca, IC: Guys! I lost my horse!
Me: HOW THE HELL YOU LOST SOMETHIN YA ASS BEEN SITTIN ON
DM: SSSSSIIIIIGGGGGGGHHHHH
Me: You know what? I think we're all just that stupid.

 

[Earl Grey]

Literally any normal person: It's 2020!
me, a nerd and intellectual: it's the year of double nat 20

 

[Earl Grey]

I wish I could have a dice set for every one of my favourite characters. Look at how cool they get though. Really, look,

Arcane charge

The hazy blue of a lost lagoon

Glacier core

Simmering brimstone

Slate and fog taken from a faraway mountain

The remnants of a setting sun through a frosted window

Nights in the faery realm

Tempestuous ocean

 

[Lark]

Does anyone have any links to a random monster generator or a character creator?

That'd be awesome.

 

[Totenkindly]

I posted a hell of a lot of online character creators + other stuff in Cat's thread about starting a D&D game here on the site.

 

[Totenkindly]

Literally any normal person: It's 2020!
me, a nerd and intellectual: it's the year of double nat 20

It should have been called the year of double disadvantage and restarted at 0101.

 

[Earl Grey]

It should have been called the year of double disadvantage and restarted at 0101.

Agreed. My comment did NOT age well.

 

[The Cat]

Agreed. My comment did NOT age well.

Most comments don't.

 

[Totenkindly]

Our Chronicles of Darkness campaign has almost been going a year now (on Oahu, in Hawaii). It's been fun since we use Google Maps during the sessions and actually incorporate real locations in our gameplay and use the maps for navigation. The game is set in 2018, so pre-COVID.

Things just get stupid and stupid -- in the funnest ways.

Last week's session, we had to stop a small plane hijack before it took off at the airport there. We managed that, but a sniper with special ammo was taking out our changelings one by one while fleeing (he was wearing special gear that cloaked him a la Predator plus that allowed him to run very quickly).

My character had torn down some fencing with her strong porcelain arm (she's kind of like an occult cyborg with a medical/science degree) so the van holding our werewolf, a vampire NPC, and our group Mage could burn after him. My character wove a spell that let her run fast. She was catching up to the van, the werewolf was like "no way" and the mage cast an impromptu spell involving Velocity that rocketed the van immediately up to 300mph (oops) and plowed over the guy we were chasing. (Not much left.) Meanwhile, the van itself ended up ricocheting off the beach and skipping like a stone about half a mile out to sea before sinking. They managed to get back to shore okay, with the captive we had also taken.

This week we interrogated the captive. That was going okay, he was pretty cynical but was telling us everything he knew since his life was forfeit anyway. (his organization would track and kill him since he was "compromised" so time was short.) Clarisse scanned him for a tracker, found one implanted over his kidney, and the one changeling who could go intangible did impromptu surgery under her direction to extract it without an incision. When he pulled it out, we had about two seconds to recognize it had thin leads -- now truncated -- running off it. Everyone else (due to our past experiences) were already hiding in the bathroom or hunkering down behind the bed.

Then the guy just exploded, since the leads had been wired to his nervous system (Heartbeat monitor) and an explosive implanted elsewhere. Whoops. The changeling was still intangible and my character has some invulnerability, including to explosions, so they weren't hurt... but she was caked in blood. it was like a scene from Carrie or Ash vs Evil Dead. And we had just rented this hotel room --- and the staff was coming up to investigate, so we had to take off. (I was like, "Maybe we can just call to complain about the state of the room and request a new one.") Instead we just grabbed our stuff and took off.

 

[The Cat]

In one of the campaigns I play in...

I play a fairy druid. The party is level six and the spell conjur animals allows me to summon 8 1/4 cr animals to fight with me.
The dm cave me permission to summon dinosaurs. Velociraptors are dinosaurs.
Several years ago I got into a web comic called manly guys doing mainly things. And one of the characters had a squad of velociraptors they used like a ranger... But the velociraptors were like these adorable plushy chicken lizards. Just super super cute. I'll post pictures later, but I had this vision of adorable plush lizard chickens harrying the large monster while the party constantly had advantage from flanking...

The carnage was immediate and immense. 8 velociraptors all with two attacks and advantage on each. At one point on one turn the velociraptors did like 136 points of damage. It was one of the most epic things I've ever seen in person.

Turns out zee Bradshaw did an animated spell book about that exact thing.

The threads of fate are tangled indeed.

 

[Totenkindly]

In one of the campaigns I play in...

I play a fairy druid. The party is level six and the spell conjur animals allows me to summon 8 1/4 cr animals to fight with me.
The dm cave me permission to summon dinosaurs. Velociraptors are dinosaurs.
Several years ago I got into a web comic called manly guys doing mainly things. And one of the characters had a squad of velociraptors they used like a ranger... But the velociraptors were like these adorable plushy chicken lizards. Just super super cute. I'll post pictures later, but I had this vision of adorable plush lizard chickens harrying the large monster while the party constantly had advantage from flanking...

The carnage was immediate and immense. 8 velociraptors all with two attacks and advantage on each. At one point on one turn the velociraptors did like 136 points of damage. It was one of the most epic things I've ever seen in person.

Turns out zee Bradshaw did an animated spell book about that exact thing.

The threads of fate are tangled indeed.

Yeah, that's their stat block
Velociraptor (5e Creature) - D&D Wiki

Only 14 hps, but if you have eight of them and the baddie doesn't have med/high damage AoE, that's pretty brutal.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Anyone know anything about Ravenloft? I 've been reading about it and it sounds like an interesting setting.

 

[The Cat]

Anyone know anything about Ravenloft? I 've been reading about it and it sounds like an interesting setting.

Yes. It's a gothic horror setting reminsicent of hammer films, classic victorian gothic monster tales such as frankenstein, dracula, were wolves, and the like...Jordphan, (The ph is silent) does a pretty indepth youtube series on it.

Ravenloft Explained | D&D Lore - YouTube

<----1st video

 

[Totenkindly]

Yeah, it has been around a LONG time. I think I was buying modules for Ravenloft as part of Second edition. (Well, actually the ones there in the front image of the video!) Looks like Clyde Caldwell did the one on the bottom right, I haven't seen him in Dragon art since the 80's and early 90's.

 

[The Cat]

there's also a series of novels...

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Yes. It's a gothic horror setting reminsicent of hammer films, classic victorian gothic monster tales such as frankenstein, dracula, were wolves, and the like...Jordphan, (The ph is silent) does a pretty indepth youtube series on it.

Ravenloft Explained | D&D Lore - YouTube

<----1st video

Oh cool, this stream is just about lore? I want to learn D&D lore, even though I've never played it.

 

[The Cat]

Oh cool, this stream is just about lore? I want to learn D&D lore, even though I've never played it.

Jord(ph)an is all aboot the D&D lore. you can get full indepth from the Forgotten REalms from the Age of thunder all the way through the time of troubles, wild magic times, spell plague and beyond....I think you'll really enjoy it. also he keeps it strictly to lore without trying to put a bunch of opinion or editiorialzing...

 

[Totenkindly]

Act 3 of our Chronicle of Darkness campaign is ending, so during the lull while the GM works on new content, we're going back to 5e in a setting that sounds like some kind of quasi-Ravenloft/Inquisition setting under the auspices of a medieval Suicide Squad. Apparently the religious community has a stranglehold on the culture, magic is really cracked down on (raw arcane magic) to wizards fubar'ing a bunch of stuff 500 years prior with irresponsible magic use, and now there are different factions vying for control of the culture. Mages need a permit at best, if not killed outright, and thus typically are endorsed/work for the church.

I'm going to run a wild shape druid/barbarian female dwarf called Mudds Bearbottom, who is kind of a casual-go-lucky hot mess into psychotropic exploration. (Imagine a generally pleasant but scatterbrained stocky youngster who plays video games in her parents' basement while smoking pot all the time and hustles pool down at the bar, so to speak, and who leaves a mess behind her anywhere she goes.) She comes from an esteemed line of a druidic family (the Bearbottoms) but the family is kind of embarrassed by her loud and sloppy social footprint and really wants her to do something more productive with her life that also doesn't attract so much attention from the legal authorities.

Mudds could afford to shower and change her clothes more regularly. She's got sideburns and dyes green streaks in her matted auburn hair and has multiple piercings and inappropriate tattoos. She could be a little less destructive in public places. She likes to get into random shit in bear form, which as a part of the family name, is also embarrassing to her family. (The Bearbottoms deserve more respect!) Mudds laughs about "spazzing out" in bear form, tearing stuff up, instead of presenting the more dignified side of the ursine changelings. She is definitely the black sheep / green bear of the family. In fact, she doesn't do any of the respectable stuff with her druidic abilities (aside from growing shrooms and pot or messing with the natural order), she seems slothful, wasteful, and into experiences "as a rush."

[In Mudds' favor, she's very accepting, never mean, and is a lot of fun to hang with.]

Unbeknownst to Mudds, her aunt Murdeathra Barebottom wishes her dead -- or at least horribly humiliated -- in response to the negative attention she believes her niece has brought to the family, without ever responding appropriately to multiple interventions and talking-to's. Aunt Murdi has turned her into the local authorities, putting Mudds on the hook. All Mudds knows is that someone finked on her about some shit she got into and now she's in big trouble.

She was given the option of either languishing in prison with regular physical abuse, or being stuck on some kind of Suicide Squad-like mission team, which at least gives her a shot at fresh air.

I'm aware the team has some other members, including a pyromaniac cleric, a gun-toting artificer (who works for an arms supplier), a halfling monk wannabe, a failed guild accountant who hulks out in berserker form, etc.

 

[Totenkindly]

We played two sessions so far with our fantasy suicide squad style characters, and it's been fun. I haven't even wild-shaped yet but it's my first time ever being a druid and already I got to do something cool.

All six of us were riding atop a carriage with a noblewoman and staff inside, and got stopped by a tree across the forest road placed there by a mutated halfling who was in essence hijacking our ride. We could also detect a host of other mutated halfling in the forest. But they didn't want money, they wanted meat and we were told to fork over our own halfling + one of the horses. This did not go over well. Our sharpshooter took out the leader, and then we got jumped by wave after wave of green grotesque tribal halflings. (Green Inferno? OMG.)

The fun thing was, Mudds immediately cast Spike Growth on the groups off to our left, locking down about half of the attacking enemy, so the ranged and melee guys could just worry about the guys on the right. The thorns are 40' diameter and cause 2d4 damage for every 5' of movement + being rough terrain. The first clump of five halflings charged through the thorns and tore themselves to shreds and died before leaving the area, and the rest just freaked out and hunkered down, firing arrows.

We are playing with new crit/bleed rules (homebrew) so the occasional arrows that hit us were often brutal, but Mudds also stayed behind the wagon for cover and never got tagged, so she was able to keep the spell up while the rest of the group healed themselves and/or took out wave after wave of halflings coming at us from the right.

Since they weren't charging us anymore through the thorns, Mudds stepped out and thorn-whipped one -- it's a cantrip that does damage plus pulls someone up to 10'... and she basically whipped one of them, then dragged him through the thorns (doing damage to him of course from the thorns) until he collapsed, before stepping back behind the wagon. It was crazy; and since it's a cantrip, she could do it all day. The rest of the halflings proceeded to freak and hide in the foliage without moving, just popping up to shoot arrows, so eventually the rest of us (when the other side of the battlefield was cleared) would ready actions to shoot anyone that popped up, like a weird game of whack-a-gnome.

The DM has never played a druid either, so although he had my sheet, I think I caught him off-guard, rofl.

Spike Growth + Thorn Whip is pretty powerful, I was able to control half an outdoors battlefield (locking down at least 15 halflings), killing some outright if they tried to leave, and then start taking the rest out one by one. If they had been stronger adversaries, they could have escaped just heavily damaged, but they were weak enough that they were effectively neutralized even if it wasn't a fireball spell.

 

[Totenkindly]

How Dungeons & Dragons Helped Me Escape a Cult

For one writer, Dungeons & Dragons served as a gateway into role playing games, making decisions, and exploring identity.

nerdist.com

Quiverfull. Ick. But it's great to hear a "DnD saved my life!" story.

40-Year-Old D&D Magazine Has Stats for Cartoon Characters

Back in the early '80s, Dungeons & Dragons was so popular that even Bugs Bunny and Popeye got to have playable characters. The post 40-Year-Old D&D Magazine Has Stats for Cartoon Characters appeared first on Nerdist.

www.yahoo.com

I might actually have these issues stored in the basement. It'll be close. I know I have most of the issues numbered in the #50's.