Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm working on a map for my D&D game and I just realized I have no idea of the scale of mountain widths. One mile across? Six? Fifty? I assume there's considerable variance, but I don't know the upper, lower, or average levels. That makes it really hard to scale the map.

So, playing Mount and Blade again has made me long for a game where I can actually enjoy taking (or defending) a castle. Stronghold 3 has terrible reviews though, so I'm sorta at a loss. Worst comes to worst I could borrow a friend's copy of Stronghold 2, but remember that game being a little clunky too. If I remember right, it didn't really bother with unit collision.

So what're some good games with siege gameplay, where I can watch catapults break down walls and batter through thick iron gates as marauding hordes meet disciplined steel?

So, I noticed in the new version it seems like you can cut any rock as if it were a gem- I'm assuming this is a feature for helping train your gem cutters.

However, you can also use the cut rocks to construct a Gem Window- It's very possible to have a window made entirely of granite.

So, a long time ago, I read an article in some nature thing or another. The article suggested that bees build their hives differently based on past events; like a more complicated version of tree rings. "Ah!" said the young bee "I see by the fact that the hive entrances are small and east-facing that we're at war with the neighboring hive! Good to know!" Regardless of how accurate this is in the real world, I connected it to dwarves. What if they had a (literal) hive mind?

Entire mountains given sentience by cavern halls covered in elaborate runes; or maybe just as a result of belief. Maybe something inherent to the labyrinth tunnels of the dwarves. consciousnesses that span millenniums acting as guiding forces for whole civilizations. Dwarven high priests learning to commune directly with The Stone. Maybe the really big, really old ones get to be demigods in their own right. Maybe there's a campaign finale where someone tries to bring the whole mountain to life, so it can scuttle around grazing on entire cities?

But then I had a thought. What would a map of a mountainholm look like? Well, your stereotypical mountainhome is going to have one massive cavern hall, and then maybe lots of little tunnels that branch off from it. Of course, you'd want a 3d map to be most useful. Maybe one you can carry around?


So then. There's some dwarves who are interested in retrieving some stuff from a mountainholm that got lost beneath the sea strange aeons ago. Archeology, pretty straightforward, not terrifying stuff. Maybe they hire the player characters, maybe they just keep cropping up on the sidelines. Then it turns out their plan is a bit more ambitious: They want to raise the whole thing and create a new island. The players don't see a problem with it. Then there's the reveal: The forgotten city probably should've stayed forgotten. Maybe the surface dwellers legitimately thought that they were just going to find priceless relics or happy-go-lucky long lost cousins, or maybe it's a cult trying to end the world. The important thing is that the dwarves that stayed below have adapted to their new environment, and coincidentally gone insane.

Now the race is on to prevent the Great Old One from returning to the world! It's time to go In The Hall of Cthulhu the Mountain-King


So anyway, that's the basic layout of the thing. I'll keep updating this post as I flesh it out a bit more and actually begin to write up primary NPCs and specific objectives and artifacts

So, I'm in a bloodlines game, and I was just handed the save file.

My predecessors are weak, and play the game with this set
The trouble is, that's somehow mucked up the save file so when I try to play it in pure and glorious ASCII, a lot of the symbols seem different, particullarly those for walls. They all have odd letters in them; instead of simply being a gray square, a weird little letter, like e umlaut on the limestone and some kind of unholy fusion of A and & on the microline.

How do I fix this

The sun rose over peaceful Westlingtonburyvilleburg. Captain-Man stood atop his skyscraper and looked down over his magnificent domain. Captain-Man had a secret identity: When not fighting crime in the guise of a superhero, he was actually fighting crime in the guise of the tough-as-nails vulgar-as-barf police sergeant Jeremy Walker. Jeremy Walker wasn’t real either, but merely a guise for mild-mannered reporter William Barnabus, who used his ideal position in the force to report on crimes as they happened.  William wasn’t quite sure how it had gotten this complicated; one minute he had been minding someone else’s business, and the next he had been bitten by a radioactive ordinary guy, and granted the strength and agility pretty much every human being has. Of course, since Williams was already human, this left him with twice as much.

From that day forward, he had battled evil on the streets and strived to maintain justice for the city. His charismatic fist had charmed the teeth from dozens of mafia kingpins and drug dealers, and the war on crime had been won. Of course, no war is ever truly over, and there was one force that always evaded his grasp: The Evil Doctor Doctor. Once an ordinary children’s physician, he had rocketed to supervillain status when he was bitten by a radioactive physicist.

Now, as Captain-Man watched, Doctor-Doctor’s face appeared on every television, cell phone, and reflective surface.  His voice boomed from every radio, iPod, and orphanage.
“Hello! I’m here today to make your lives worse! Or, well, that’s not true. I’m giving this speech to make them worse. My being *here* in the secret lair is just to end them. That’s uh, that’s all I had to say. Cower in fear, that sort of thing, I’ll be killing you all soon. Death Ray. I built one. It’s pretty great. Blows up an entire city per shot. Have tested it on several cities. Fires a ray of death. You’ve got about an hour. Goodbye!”

When the messaged ended Captain-Man was already flying into action. He couldn’t fly as a superpower, but he had used the profits from working three jobs to buy a small jet. Meanwhile, his sidekick, Idealism Lad, had his own idea of how to solve the problem.

Idealism Lad rushed to the news station, where he explained the situation and demanded to be put on all channels. They explained to him that the news station didn’t actually have the ability to put itself on all channels, so they were forced to improvise. Idealism Lad quickly exposed himself to radiation and then bit a lab tech. After a few moments of !!SCIENCE!! the broadcast was ready to go out.
Idealism Lad told the people of Westlingtonburyvilleburg that their hero was about to save them once again, but that this time he faced more danger than he had ever faced before, even including the time with the lava-sharks. He asked that they do everything they could to help, which was to believe in him, and pray for his success.  His stirring speech stirred many, and the entire city was united with goodwill towards their hero, which began to manifest itself.

Captain-Man began to glow with shining holy light and his jet whooshed towards Doctor Doctor’s lair even faster, but it was not fast enough. The death ray was already beginning to fire, so Captain-Man flew directly in front of it.

   The blast hit him like a radioactive train, but instead of granting him the powers of a locomotive, it just hit him really hard. Bathed in colorful light, he clenched his jaw and shouted: “I WILL TAKE THIS BLAST SO THAT THE PEOPLE I PROTECT WILL BE PROTECTED”

   After a few seconds, it was over. Captain-Man’s tattered cape slowly floated to earth, and the people of the city were silent. They had averted total destruction, but at what cost? Captain-Man was dead. Idealism Lad’s idealism was shattered.

Everyone was left speechless for a moment, but most speechless of all was the evil Doctor Doctor. Doctor Doctor suddenly froze, his hand caught midway through stroking his evil cat Flufficus, who had gained sentience after being bitten by a radioactive catwoman.

Doctor Doctor looked at the burnt blue fabric and a tear rolled down the side of his face that was not a robot. There was a long moment, and then, softly, Doctor Doctor spoke. He said
“Fire again.”

So, maybe I'm missing something here that makes the whole issue really simple.

But honestly, dealing with multiple Z-levels is a bit of a hassle. I mean, when it's just that my fort is spread over two or three to keep everything closer together, then it's not too bad.

But when there's caverns with 19 Z-levels and monsters spread all across them... it's hard to keep track of. Harder still to imagine and design defenses based on the idea that the enemy's gate is down.

Does anyone else miss when Fun came from the RIGHT and LEFT, rather than from above?

When I was going to fling things at an enemy bandit, I discovered that there was an entire toe stuck on one of my teeth.