• Welcome to The Campaign Builder's Guild.
 

News:

We're back!

Main Menu
Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - Bill Volk

#1
That's something you have to deal with in 4th edition. It ONLY has rules for PCs fighting monsters, so everything that's not related to PCs fighting monsters has to be made up by the DM. However, I've found that this can be liberating at times.
#2
I thought that the PC classes in 4e are extremely rare parts of the population. So even if your city has ten or twelve PCs who can shoot off a flaming burst every six seconds or a force orb every five minutes, good luck convincing or forcing them to hang around in a mill using magic to keep a steam engine warm or something. After all, they're PCs and you're not.

However, you might have a whole little class of magewrights who can prestidigitate and maybe cast first-level rituals, like in Eberron, but they would be most useful in the service sector and wouldn't go a long way toward keeping a society running.
#3
If your dwarves are really advanced and have a lot of underground water sources, they could break water down into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. But once again, this probably requires burning something to get energy, and all the excess hydrogen creates the risk that everything will suddenly explode. Even worse, it'll make their voices all squeaky.
#4
And a steam engine requires fire, which requires even more oxygen and makes even more smoke...
#5
Another thing to consider: do these dwarves use fire to cook food and such? If so, how do they vent the smoke? If their underground environment is really deep, air circulation might be a problem as well. I don't think that mushrooms poop oxygen the way plants do.
#6
I tend to treat the underdark as the uppermost reaches of hell. No natural life exists deep down, just twisting mazes and metaphysical horrors. So basically it's one big dungeon.
#7
Mushrooms need food - their energy comes from whatever they grow on. So unless these are magical mushrooms, just having mushrooms doesn't solve your energy problem. A completely sealed, lightless "realistic" ecosystem would need plants that get energy from the earth's heat. I think a few of these actually exist in the deep oceans, but I don't know of any underground ones.

For orcs, you could always do what they do in Warhammer and have orcs that don't need to grow food because they themselves are weirdo plant/fungus symbiotes.
#8
I'm starting up a new play-by-post game and am looking for players. The idea is to mash together the original take on Planescape with all the 4th edition revisions to come up with something that maybe possibly makes sense.

[ic=The pitch]Here's the idea: five years ago, everything went all to blek. Due largely in part to Asmodeus finally becoming a proper deity, the Great Wheel cosmology shattered, and the outer planes went flying all over the place, leaving us more or less with the 4th edition cosmology. There are countless new planar refugees, escaped slaves from the Blood War, and clueless primes who got sucked into the middle of it all when the transitive planes changed. And as usual, the city of Sigil is a microcosm of it all. It survived the utter destruction of the Outlands and the toppling of the Spire, but its infamous interplanar gates still work just fine, with new ones being discovered by the minute. It's got more fresh immigrants and new troublemakers than perhaps ever.

The PCs are members of the Elephant and Castle Company, a somewhat seedy mercenary company in the Hive. Many of its members are Primes who had nowhere else to go after finding themselves Caged. Its guildmaster is attracting new members to fuel his personal mission - to reclaim the company's old guildhouse, which is literally a castle on top of a giant stone elephant.[/ic]

This game will be full of Planescape-y goodness, and I may give some kind of rewards for good roleplaying. If you're playing a native Cager and want to try your hand at speaking the part, there's a delightful reference here: http://www.mimir.net/cant/cant2.html

The actual game will take place here on rpol.net.
#9
Quote from: Scholarhehe, happy times. alternatiely, i've heard it characterised as "russian secret police with spaceships". though for the wasteland kinda setting, i want community spirit to be more dominant than suspicion (i know, i know, next i'll plait daisies into my hair...).

HERETIC! Go pick posies and play Tau.
#10
Quote from: Elemental_ElfHere's an experiment: what are the first 3 words and/or images that come to mind when I say "Fantasy"?



A motley band of swordsmen of all different humanoid species kick in the door of a room, kill everyone inside and take their stuff.

An omnipotent dreamer messes around with a world just for the fun of it.

Everything is so glowy and covered in sparkles that you can't see what the hell is going on.
#11
Would it be easiest to fit a character in as an existing member of the Diggers? I might be some kind of jolly epicurean old-style mummy who supports his lavish undeathstyle (and keeps the island a pleasant place to undie in) by rendering services to them and hassling anybody who disrupts the order of things. I imagine that was rather unhappy that all the nice things I was entombed with have been rotted and looted, and I've been quietly rebuilding my collection ever since.

It might throw a small wrench in the works if I'd have to follow some kind of code of conduct related to Ma'at, but with a liberal enough take on Ma'at I could still fight troublemaking wraiths, specters, demons and vampires as much as I like. After all, they're not really alive.
#12
If it's really GRIMDARK, you should consider the suspicion factor. Worrying that your teammates are heretics, or that your teammates believe that YOU are a heretic, is half the fun. Kind of like the new Battlestar Galactica RPG.

If a game of WFRP or Dark Heresy doesn't end with most or all of the original PCs killing each other, killing themselves, going hopelessly mad, becoming corrupted and switching sides, or just getting sucked headlong into the Realm of Chaos, I feel a little disappointed. Dark Heresy is like Call of Cthulhu with better guns.

My point is not to worry too much about advancement. If you want a class to be able to do something, make sure they can do it right at the beginning. If you're doing it right, many of them will not get much farther than that.
#13
It's true that Gygax dug up a lot of obscure mythological monsters like the catoblepas, and he also invented plenty of brand new monsters, mostly of the "pop-out-and-kill-adventurers-in-some-totally-unfair-fashion" variety like the Lurker Above and the rust monster, but also many of the "splice-animals-together-to-create-something-hilarious" variety like the owlbear. The original monsters that fit in neither of these categories, like the beholder and the githyanki, were so successful and iconic that they were later excluded from the OGL.

D&D used to be very freaky and very lethal. This style of RPG used to be the definition of vanilla, but resurrecting it now would be retro enough to qualify as not vanilla anymore. That's why the word "Gygaxian" now exists.
#14
Quote from: khyron1144Having said that, I know my tastes have evolved since then, but sometimes you feel like playing D&D and the basic rules set for D&D is suited pretty much only for vanilla fantasy out of the box.

Yeah, sometimes coming up with a detailed, high-concept setting just isn't worth it. It can be more fun sometimes to just make it up as you go. That way you're never bitching to your players that they don't "get" your setting.
#15
To me, vanilla settings are appeals to a common denominator. People use vanilla settings because people use vanilla settings. People only play in Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms because everybody else does and there's so much published material about them. Greyhawk started as a homebrew, back when Gary Gygax was still exploring D&D's potential and inventing things that would become cliches later, so maybe Greyhawk wasn't always considered vanilla. Forgotten Realms started as a setting for sword-and-sorcery fan fiction. Once again, it borrowed from generic fantasy tropes on purpose. After D&D was invented, it became another homebrew. Nowadays, people only use these settings because they're popular, and they're only popular because of the low standards of quality in the early history of D&D. It's a vicious cycle. But at least Greyhawk now seems to be fading into the obscurity it so richly deserves.

Note that there is no good way to summarize the premise of Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms. The closest you can come is by connecting them to real people: saying things like "It's the one people use in the RPGA" or "it's the setting that has an ass-ton of novels and computer games set in it." In other words, "It's the one that everyone else uses."

I don't know enough about Dragonlance to be able to say whether it's vanilla, but I've heard nothing but jokes and insults about it, so it must not be great.

Literally using Middle-Earth as an RPG setting is so seldom done that I'm not sure if I'd count it as vanilla. People tend to know less about it than they think they know. It might be so vanilla that it cycles back again and becomes daring.