In the Krullian mountains of the stormy north lives a tribe of people. The environment is harsh, storms rage through the mountains sending jagged strokes of lightning to blast the rock and scrub during the spring and summers and during the fall and winter blizzards sweep through through the area freezing man and beast alike in minutes if they dare venture forth unprotected.
Guided and shaped by these forces of nature a clan of man grew strong as the weak were weeded from their midsts. Fierce, protective of what’s theirs and rightfully proud of their ability to survive these people’s bow to now man or god.
Trained to survive their environment where the very forces of nature join with the fierce humanoid tribes and groupings to seek to shatter them, bone, mind and spirit, they emerge the tougher, the more resilient, the more alive in spite of it all. Here then is the weakest of the lot, the teen boys and girls, the Thunder Clan Warriors.
The Thunder Clan Archer, Master of Storms and Eyes to follow…
Thunder Clan Warrior
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| HP 55; Bloodied 27 | ||||||
| AC 20; Fortitude 17, Reflex 14, Will 17 | ||||||
| Speed 6 | ||||||
 Warhammer (Standard) ♦ Weapon |
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| +11 vs AC, 1d10+4 damage. | ||||||
 Throwing Hammer (Standard) ♦ Weapon |
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| Ranged 5/10; +11 vs. AC; 1d6+4 damage. | ||||||
| Concussion | ||||||
| On any critical hit the target is dazed (save ends). | ||||||
| Anvil Toss (Immediate Interrupt, when an ally in an adjacent square is targeted by an melee attack) | ||||||
| Slide ally one square. | ||||||
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| Skills Endurance +9, Intimidate +7, Streetwise +7 | ||||||
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| Equipment chainmail, warhammers, 2 throwing hammers |
Editor Notes: Accidentally Published a week late.
My time lately has been tied up hard with Fallout 3. Easily the best RPG I’ve played since Baldurs Gate. I had a random thought today. Why are the quests in Fallout 3 so much more interesting and immersive than the quests in a MMOG? I mean I give a shit about finding a home for this boy who’s dads family was killed by giant ants, flame effin’ spewing giant ants by the way. Even though he’s nothing but a quest designer’s idle thoughts and a bunch of pixels and canned dialogue.
Oh and Left 4 Dead demo is coming out Thursday. Unless you’ve been under a rock or really pay not attention to computer games this may be a big deal to you.
I got a chance to play Touch of Evil over the weekend. Faster paced than I was thinking and with a Villian that’s played by the random placement of the Mystery deck it allows for a player count as low as 1 really although more are very much a good thing.
I bother posting this also idle nonsense simply because there’s very little new under the sun to report otherwise. The forums are very slow, I’m guessing the initial rush is done, the bloom is off the rose etc. and people have either moved on or are feeling comfortable with the system and not finding any need to post questions or comments or thoughts or whatever or they’re just rehashing the same old things. “Monsters have too many hit points, fights take too long, players get tired of using the same 2 or 3 attacks over and over, players don’t do enough damage, skill challenges are too easy, too stupid, too hard.”
Been there and done that. 
This is how I envisioned it after a little thought being disapointed in the ’stands on their own’ feeling each movie had. (and aside from money/time/resources to get the game out for the 2008 holiday season this might be why we’re left to envision, in order to make our own story out of it)…
Prologue - A extremely communicable version of rabies is let loose in the world’s airports, the initial form has a 6-10 day incubation and is airborne. Thanks to the very small world we have now with international travel this disease spreads across the globe like wildfire. It mutates as it spreads to become more contagious and with a shorter incubation period.
0.5% of humanity is naturally immune to virus but not the swarms of rampaging raging infected that now infest every city, town and village.
No Mercy - Our four survivors have been trying to ‘wait it out’ in the city but the infected aren’t dying off like they’d hoped from thirst and starvation and now they’re mutating into other [I][B]things[/B][/I]. This is not good. Not good at all. The chopper flies past entreating any survivors to head to Mercy hospital. Our quad fights it way to the hospital and escapes in the chopper. Unfortunately the pilot has the disease and isn’t immune. He rapidly worsens but manages to bring the chopper down on a rooftop near the edge of the city.
Dead Air - Our quad kills the pilot and while wondering what the hell is next sees the airplane flying past. Okay, time to head to the airport on the edge of town! They make it there, get the plane fueled up and head out. Unfortunately, yet again, in 10 minutes you can’t completely fuel a plane and all the airports are overrun anyway so the pilot makes an emergency landing on a highway dying in the crash.
Death Toll - Our fearless quad hikes up the highway coming across a small town. They fight through the town and find a dock where they’re picked up by a boat to chug away down the river. Gas is a problem and eventually they run out and after drifting for two days end up beached on a sand bar in rural America. After hearing their stories about how everyone dies around them, the pilot decides he doesn’t want to be their next redshirt and heads off on his own.
Blood Harvest - Our group heads inland in search of supplies and comes across the train tracks and travels along it knowing most of America’s goods are shipped by rail, hoping to come across a boxcar full of Hungry Man meals and Jello Brand Pudding Pops (TM). They find more infected and a corn field watered in blood. It’s obviously they’re not going to take up a career as farmers with infected for neighbors but are rescued yet again and drive off in a armored personnel carrier even further into outback where they eventually hole up in a fully stocked ‘oh those crazy survivalist nut’s bought an abandoned missile silo, who’s laughing now’ complex along with other survivors which has become known as Vault 101 in the area.
We played through Versus mode on Left 4 Dead last night and it was a LOT more fun than I was thinking it was going to be. The biggest issue is that if the teams aren’t even in terms of humans then it’s very hard to win for the side with the smaller team unless there is a huge skill discrepancy. Also a single game with a full set of survivors getting to the end pretty much guarantees you’re going to win. It’s very hard to come back from being down.
In case you didn’t know in Versus mode you go through modified versions of the regular maps, they’ve been fixed so that all the normally ‘missing’ bits are put in because the infected end up in areas the survivors never see. So in order to make the games run as fast as possible each map is optimized by removing surfaces that in Survivor mode that they can’t possibly see.
Dropping down as a big boomer on top of close packed group of survivors and having one of them shoot you instead of ‘bat’ you away so you soak them all in zombie bile is fun. Grabbing the last person as a Smoker (50′ long tongue) and yanking him (or her) up to dangle choking? Also fun. Pouncing on someone who’s strayed away from the herd as a hunter and slashing them? Fun too. Of course some of the really fun moments are standing as a boomer (very wide model) in front of the witch knowing the survivors bullets cut through you like butter so that they hit the witch which is usually guarenteed death for at least one survivor. Yep, also fun.
Anyway if you enjoy First Person Shooters in the slightest, Left 4 Dead is definitely a game you might want to take a look at. And I hear it’s on sale at Circuit City this week for $39.99. That’s 20% off retail pricing.
Found an interesting and personally intriguing charcter creation concept that at first and even second glance I’m liking a lot. The base idea behind is the author’s world is humans against the monsters so the players’ race is all human. But to give them uniqueness each one can choose a ‘racial’ type and this gives them powers much like the races in the PHB.
Frankly I like the concept enough I plan on using it the next time we roll characters up. I’ll probably tweak it to some extent but I’m liking what I see here.
Played a 5 players co-op game of Touch of Evil over the weekend. It’s a fun game, pretty easy to pick up after a couple of rounds assuming a literate semi-intelligent ape reading the rules.
We ended up fighting the Were-wolf and it literally came down to the last roll. Being the wise but utterly suckstastic Playwright I didn’t contribute much in this fight, my high non-combat skills didn’t come into play at all.
But eventually we forced a showdown with the wolf although not until after he managed to kill two of the city elders and we had two rounds. He dropped us one by one but we were chewing through the 30 health he had by the time we managed to track him down and on the last roll he dropped the fighter played by temple who had four attack rolls and needed to get a 5+ on three of them in order to take out the were wolf’s last three health and I’ll be a son of a bitch if he didn’t do it. So the last member of our party dropped and the wolf collapsed on top of him.
The remaining town elders, there were only two left by then, rescued us from death and gave us a party and we were heroes.
You can find a unofficial preview video of the character builder (beta) that’s going to be up on the on Wizards of the Coast’s web site. I’m not sure but I think this might end up being the ‘free’ portion of it and if you want the ability to build 3D character pictures that’s going to cost the subscription fee? I could easily be wrong on that.
While I don’t particularily like the official character sheet, too much thin white text buried in blocks of black which prints out hard to read, I think this is pretty damn cool the way you can shift things around and essentially build your own characters sheet using their sections.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with Asmor but in case you’re not he (or she) has a new tool up for planning random encounters. Might be useful to you, I know I a lot of times will use randomness for inspiration rolling several times on charts or whatever until something strikes a spark with me and I can then take that and extend it.
There’s a trip to the Twin Valley’s over on the EN world forums and just for the heck of it I’ll link directly to the module here. Its a free module for 4th edition and it’s a big one, 50 megs zipped although that doesn’t mean much with PDF’s
It includes battle maps of all the important things to scale so that’s always a plus IMO. As usual though with first level adventures you’re going to be fighting goblins or their alternate kobolds although in this case it’s goblins. The settings while not necessarily unique to me personally is fairly different in that it’s set in a charcoal valley where they make charcoal which if you didn’t know isn’t just dug up from the ground and put into Kingsford bags.
The author is from Sweden so english is not his primary language and this does show in some places but does not detract from the module itself.
Sorry, if you’re here for 4E news, the forums are pretty lackluster now, of course it might have something to do with an inability to log in “Service Unavailable” error from the web service to actually you know post something. Apparently people who still have cached can though.
I could do a rehash, the Rules you didn’t realize is still going strong with almost 400 posts, an EXCELLENT place for DM and Player alike to make a pit stop in on their way to gaming nirvana. Or at least official correctness.
YYYASCS (Yet yet yet another skill challenge sysetm) is up for grabs, this one with lots of examples which is always good. It looks workable at first read through.
Personally I just think the skill system as the base idea is broken and attempts to fix it are bandaids at best. The idea that everyone gets equally better at every single skill as they level is just a non-workable solution but obviously we have to have something and this is semi-equitable although the discrepencies is fairly big and is better than nothing. At least the official system has the advantage of simplicity really.
A new take on an old spell. For some people the Magic Missile’s ability to hit multiple targets and do it automatically is always going to be a thorn in their side.
On this post there’s some talk of a replacement and here are a couple of the ‘winning entries’. YMMV of course and I’d seriously recommend testing things.
| ye old magic missle | |||||||||||
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| Magic Missile Wizard Attack 1 You launch a silvery bolt of force at an enemy. At-Will ✦ Arcane, Force, Implement Standard Action Ranged 20 Target: One creature Attack: Int v. Refl Hit: 2d4+Int modifier force damage Miss: Int modifier force damage Increase damage to 4d4+Int modifier force damage at 21st level. Special:Counts as a ranged basic attack. |
One DM has fixed a few things he wasn’t happy with in 4th Edition and some of them seem actually workable. I know, I say that like most of the time it isn’t. Well yeah.
Anyway here’s the intro and here’s a link to the full posting as well as the followup discussions.
Disclaimer: This thread isn’t an attack on 4e. However I am preparing to run it and I wanted to make some tweaks to make the game run as best it can for me and my particular group. I figured that I’d post a thread about it so that I can get any additional feedback that folks care to give. And if somebody likes some of the ideas presented and wants to adopt them for their game then that’s great too.
So yeah, I’m gearing up to run my first 4e campaign since the game came out. I’m really excited about the setting I’ve come up with (maybe I should start another ENW thread about that…) and I think that 4e will be a good fit for our group’s playstyle at this point in our gaming careers. However it has a few rough spots that I wanted to polish up to make that fit as perfect as possible for me and my group. So here are the places where I think it needs a bit of work and what I’m doing to fix them:
Skills - I like the new skill system in general. I like that the list is shorter and has fewer skills covering broader areas. What I didn’t like so much was that some skills that add a bit of flavor to the game were cut out. I’m speaking of Craft, Perform and Profession. This was an easy fix and it goes like this: At the start of the campaign, I ask each player two questions about their character. “What did you do to earn a living before becoming an adventurer?” and “What does your character do for enjoyment when not adventuring?” The answers to those questions become skills at which the PC is trained. We figure out an applicable ability modifier and we now have a skill bonus to that skill. Voila.
Well the demo has been short but very sweet. Single player it’s marginally better than similar games, the frenetic, frantic times when a zombie horde is rushing you in some ways feels a lot like certain levels of Serious Sam, especially the one where you get locked in a large football stadium sized walled courtyard and crap just keeps on a comin at you and it becomes a game of nothing more than backpeddling.
Which brings up a pet peeve of mine, in FPS’s a character can run just as fast backwards as forward without any issues at all. I’d love to see one where you can’t do that, where you’re slower and you have a chance to stumble and fall. Assuming they release the SDK for Left 4 Dead I may get VS installed again and see what I can do there.
People have already started trying other maps in the demo and they work to a certain point. The map is filled with zombies but unless the map has nav points they don’t move. So the posted claims about the zombies being able to path and move and such don’t seem to jibe with reality. They still use the same breadcrumb navigation system of the other source engines.
There have been a huge outcry over the craptastic console based matching system they attempted to force up on the PC world but luckily they left the old server browser system in the code, all articles to the contrary, no that wasn’t patched back in, it was left in and there from the start, it just took people awhile to figure out the console commands to bring it down.
The game is a hellish blast with friends on a private server on difficulty 4 (Expert / Impossible). Anything lower than that and it’s a cakewalk.
I’m guessing the PC difficulties mimic the console difficulties and that’s a bad thing. What’s hard on a console because of the controller isn’t on a PC. What I want to see is the ability to dial in the damage the regular zombies do, their total health, and the amount of friendly fire damage a person takes on a hit of said friendly fire. I don’t like blanket difficulties in this manner.
I’m looking forward to mapping for this thing also. HL engines have always been my favorite games to map for because unlike something like BF2 or other FPS’s the automatic download from the server or server pointer means other people actually get to see your maps.
Peace and if you hear a thundering horde of infected footsteps heading your way, I highly advise you to get your back in a doorway and your shotgun ready.
Although a little late, there’s a horror based module for your use if you’d like it and it can be found here.
Here’s a little snippet:
This island was once the hold of a dwarven runesmith and his family. Given his skill and talent, the smith had his own forge and foundry, along with a small village of his clan that had come to join him. The smith chose this island both for its reclusive locale and its abundant natural resources. The island is the tip of a long-dormant volcano, and not far below the surface are ferrous ores rich in the minerals the runesmith needed for his crafts.
The smith lived and prospered here for over two hundred years. On the eve of their two hundredth year celebration, the runesmith’s wife fell from the keeps parapets and died. Over the next weeks and months, the runesmith called in all of his favors with local lords and kings who had benefited from the dwarf’s quality wares. Priests and arcanists were shipped in from lands as far away as the green coast (which, at the time, was the property of the black kings). Unfortunately, no form of resurrection seemed to work, and as time drew on, the runesmith became more and more obsessed and deranged. Many of his clan attempted to bring him to reason, but being dwarves, they had no choice but to trust in and honor their quickly degenerating lord. Then, exactly one year after the accident, the entire keep’s contact with the outside world cut off. Not long after, when ships arrived to restock the dwarves’ supplies, they found nothing but old bones, decrepit and brittle with extreme age.
My time lately has been tied up hard with Fallout 3. Easily the best RPG I’ve played since Baldurs Gate. I had a random thought today. Why are the quests in Fallout 3 so much more interesting and immersive than the quests in a MMOG? I mean I give a shit about finding a home for this boy who’s dads family was killed by giant ants, flame effin’ spewing giant ants by the way. Even though he’s nothing but a quest designer’s idle thoughts and a bunch of pixels and canned dialogue.
Oh and Left 4 Dead demo is coming out Thursday. Unless you’ve been under a rock or really pay not attention to computer games this may be a big deal to you.
I got a chance to play Touch of Evil over the weekend. Faster paced than I was thinking and with a Villian that’s played by the random placement of the Mystery deck it allows for a player count as low as 1 really although more are very much a good thing.
I bother posting this also idle nonsense simply because there’s very little new under the sun to report otherwise. The forums are very slow, I’m guessing the initial rush is done, the bloom is off the rose etc. and people have either moved on or are feeling comfortable with the system and not finding any need to post questions or comments or thoughts or whatever or they’re just rehashing the same old things. “Monsters have too many hit points, fights take too long, players get tired of using the same 2 or 3 attacks over and over, players don’t do enough damage, skill challenges are too easy, too stupid, too hard.”
Been there and done that.
This is for me but if you’re playing Fallout 3 and want a spoiler about bobble head locations then you can click the read more or whatever it says below. If you don’t want to know then don’t click.
Sorry if you experienced intermittant glitches in the comments forms. The issue this morning with site accessibility was the fault of the ISP. I took advantage of the unplanned down time to update and clean up several plugins and put in a fairly nice plug to do daily scheduled backups of the database and weekly dumps of all the entire site. If you’ve ever lost a site due to error or malicious mischief you know what a heartache it can be to lose all those posts.
I’ve had that happen, malicious mischief destroyed a site I had and cost me years of posts due to lack of verified offsite backups. So word to the wise, get your backups off the server you have fronting the web and onto permanent media and test them on a regular basis to insure you can restore them. Stupid thing is, professionally that’s what I do. I just never had reason to think that the backup files themselves weren’t fine but you live and you learn.
So there’s your IT tip for the day.
You can find a nice collation of the various classes and races that have been created or proposed by the community.
While you do have to sign up to download it, you don’t actually need to verify your email to get it so feel free to use bite@me.com or privacy@isgood.com or asdfwoaiiwejo@asldfkjaowiwjef.com if that floats your boat better. Or you could give them your real email address. I’m sure they only want it to add to their collection and would never sell it to a spammer or even semi-legit advertiser…
A wilderness encounter that I’ve come up with goes as such, it’s pretty combat only but should give a good party a feel good moment and a bad party some extra income.
The party is traveling for whatever reason and comes across an empty village that appears to have been overrun by [insert a plausible humaniod tribe]. A few bodies of civilians and perhaps one [insert humanoid] dead.
Skill Checks will uncover the following:
Healing:
Passage of Time:
DC 10: The bodies have been dead perhaps two days.
Autopsy / Examination of the Bodies:
DC 10: The wounds were primarily made by [insert some weapon not typical to humanoids chosen]. Example if you use orcs and they normally use axes then these wounds appear to be mostly stab wounds from swords or spears perhaps. This works best if your players have already encountered such axe wielding orcs and can notice this on their own rather than being spoonfed the information.
DC 20: Some of the bodies wounds look to have been inflicted while the bodies were laying down in the spot they fell.
Perception:
Tracks:
DC 10: There appear to have been maybe 8-12 members of the attacking party judging by the tracks.
DC 15: A series of wagons came through the village after the battle perhaps only hours after the battle which occured no more than two days prior to the party showing u.
DC 20: Someone has gone to trouble to hide the path the attackers came in from and it’s impossible to see where they entered or left and only the fact that it was hidden in some fashion is apparent.
The party could collect some resources here if they wish to rob the dead. Barrels of flour and onions and garlic hanging by the weave from rafters, apples stored in baskets in the root cellars, plenty of common clay or perhaps tin dishes and the like, some slabs of bacon and that kind of thing. Also mention some farming tools, specifically shovels and toss your players a karma point or two if they take the time to bury the dead.
If the party continues on and pursues the wagon which should be going in the same direction they were going in anyway, they’ll come across a wagon train that appears to be a small circus with some bears and semi-fantastic beasts in caged wagons. The personell will consist primarily of what will be introduced as roustabouts, the heavy lifters with perhaps one acting as a lion tamer or whatever and a female that dances and a couple of others.
The ringleader is actually the woman ‘dancer’ who is in charge of this slaver’s party. THe caged wagons hold the women and children of the village, the ones they deemed suitable to take. Through the use of ritual magic the bodies of the villagers are hidden by an illusion of wild animals and are drugged to prevent any noise. The body of the orc (or whatever you chose) was also a villager and another ritual has set a long term illusion on it of an orc that will survive typical perceptions without revealing what it actually is.
The party will have a few clues as to what the actual ‘circus’ is made of. Perhaps a faint whimper barely heard on the air? A bloodstained sword (or whatever) that matches the wounds of the villagers. Maybe a dress that’s tossed on a pile that matches the cut and coloring of the villagers. A child’s toy found along the path to the circus.
THe party might just suspect the circus of having stolen goods from the village as they passed through it. Or perhaps they might think something darker is going on.
The slavers are never unarmed and always suspcious of things that are going on. One doesn’t become a successful slaver without a little brains, guile and paranoia. Because really most people are out to get them.
I could provide some stats for slavers here but it’s very level based and anythign I provided wouldn’t work well. My recommendation is find the closest humanoid in the MM and just fluff it to be a slaver.
D
Here’s a single sheet character sheet that might help save space. It has all the pertinent bits cramed into one sheet in a fairly viewable format and even self calculates some of the information for you. Combine this with a set of power cards and you have a fairly space saving format to play.
There’s another necromancer class to take a look at, links in the thread by TheLordWinter. I don’t want to direct link to the pdf files incase those change due to updates etc.
Snippet from the class outline:
Common peasants speak of them in hushed and fearful tones – necromancers are said to be the most terrifying of all magi. They traffic in death, have no fear of the undead and laugh in the face of the
Gods’ pronouncements against meddling in the affairs of the dead. Yet when the local vampire has decided to make the princess into his bride or a child’s ghost will not leave his parents in peace and move on, they all secretly seek out the necromancer.
Yours is the power over life and death itself – your studies have gone were few others would follow.
Unlike the cleric, who can create the energy of life and death from his or her God, you must draw it
forth from others. You are skilled at manipulating the very fabric of what keeps people alive, and can
even compel them to service from beyond the grave.
Necromancers walk a fine line between an ally and a liability – their powers draw upon pain and
suffering, often at their allies’ expense. Yet they are more than easily capable of restoring those same
allies to life if they should fall or healing wounds that may take days to heal. It would be foolish to trust
a necromancer, but so long as your goals and his remain the same, you will have a powerful ally.
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