Bay 12 Games Forum

Gotten an idea for an urban game oriented D&D PC.

Human Mastermind Rogue with either a 2 level dip into Shepherd Druid, or more ideally the Eldritch Adept feat for the Beast Speech invocation, and the Noble (Knight) background with the two free hirelings being a manservant and a maid. Strength and Con as dump stats in favour of solid Dex and mental stats, especially Wis and Cha. Skills likewise being oriented towards animal handling, being insightful and persuasive.

The character is an elderly widow, well off but largely ousted from the social circles a woman of her standing would normally be in as a result of her relatives pushing her out of the social heirarchy following the death of her husband, who depending on time period was either a noble, a wealthy guild member, or an industrialist. As a result she is rather bitter towards her ostensible peers, finding comfort in the company of urban vermin like pidgeons, rats and stray cats/dogs, and helping the lower classes in struggles against the wealthy because, 'they may be bastards, but at least they're honest about being bastards.'

Has a lot of cynical wisdom, like saying that a young woman should always have a knife hidden in their skirt and so on.

In combat mostly takes the Help action, providing Advantage to other characters, but will open a fight with a knife to the gut if an opponent is standing near her. Befriends various forms of vermin and asks them to do favours for her like stealing keys, spying, eating bodies, distracting guards and so on. Her motivation for doing things is largely spite, but also a desire to help people who are genuinely decent people when they fall afoul of people who are assholes like her.

Intended to mention this here a few days ago, but I went to a panto with my nephew and my sisters last week. Nice little affair, small scale, cast of six, parody version of Sleeping Beauty with elements of Snow White. Haven't been to one since I was very wee but it was good fun, nephew absolutely loved it.

He was sitting one seat from the aisle, and trying to hit the villain when she walked past from the doors to the stage or vice versa, and singing one of the songs for two days afterwards.

Bunch of risque adult humour for the grown ups, names based on the nearby towns, wordplay, slapstick, poking fun at the English, poking fun at the nearby towns, poking fun at parts of our own town, bunch of fourth wall breaks, singalong song parodies, one of the cast was in terrible drag as is required for a proper panto.

Villain's plan was to close all the shops on the local high street and get rid of anything fun in the town... which honestly is a bit too real. 

The poisoned apple used to put the heroine to sleep was replaced with a can of Irn Bru, because of course it was. 



Apparantly they do an adult version of it, a concept I find quite intriguing. Obviously they'd drop a lot of the skirting around dirty humour and leap straight into it, but I wonder if all the jokes would stay as funny without the wordplay that comes from trying to keep kids from noticing the dirty jokes.

So I'm still contemplating the Curse of Solomon, and have a few more ideas for what it could be.

So obvious candidates out of the way, a lictor, a mandrake, a daemon or a chaos champion, or the Beast, the foul xenos statted up as an example for the curse in the DH sourcebook.


Ideas I have: A mass haunting event, affecting much of the planet. Those who have died in darkness, in fear, in loneliness and so on aren't gone. They remain as an embodiment of the misery of the dying Hive World. Manifesting in the dark, as thick foul smelling liquid that drips from pipes, oozes from grates or bleeds from walls, which coalesces drop by drop into the undead visages of prior victims. These manifestations gather around their prey in great numbers, dragging them into the deepest dark, squeezing them into pipes too small for the human body, passing them through vents and grates, or pulling them body and soul into the walls and floor with the sound of cracking bone and bursting soft tissues. The curse cannot be removed from the world, though it can be defended against to a limited extent, with light, hope and courage.

An assassin. An agent of death and murder, adherent of a censured Death Cult native to Solomon which has largely been neutralised. Augmented and equipped to pass unseen in the dark, travel through tight spaces, and driven by the belief that Solomon can only be saved by the blood sacrifice of it's people to the Emperor. Bionic joints allow their limbs to contort, twist, compress and rotate, a bodyglove renders them into a sleek black shadow invisible to most scans, and implanted weaponry enables them to flense, pulp, break and shatter their victims into little more than slurry contained in a sack of their own flayed skin. .

A xenos predator placed there by the Beast House, implanted with bionics that record it's killings, driven by instinct to prowl in the dark and prey on the weak. Recordings of it's hunts are sold by the Beast House, or shared with their blood hungry patrons. I imagine a creature akin to a feline serpent, like a leopard stretched out, hunting people and taking their corpses to the high places of the lower hives to feed on them in secret.

An architectural murder machine. In the early days of Solomon it was found to be the site of a Dark Age facility, one that could not be moved nor dissasembled. The facility was built to process human remains into resources, creating a more palatable and nutritious version of corpse starch, as well as other resources. The Imperium was delighted to have such an asset, but as is often the case it was eventually lost. Forgotten in the deep dark pits of the world. But the facility hungers, it needs to produce corpse starch, to feed the swollen populace of Solomon. Programming in the ancient cogitator banks that rule the facility dictate that it must feed, so it may nurse mankind on it's own recycled remains. But Solomon's population is vast, so very vast, and the Imperium no longer feeds corpses to the facility, it must hunt and so it finds the wretched, the lost, the dead and the dying. Mysterious techology abducts the living as readily as the dead, feeding them into the hoppers of a vast abattoir, a network of machines that break down and reconstitute organic feedstock into resources, which are then dispensed through a network of dispensers, doling out a ration of food, fuel and crude textiles to the populace. An unsustainable cycle, drawing out the agonising end of the world.

Monstrous hope. Superstition, paranoia and desperation have driven elements of the impoverished masses of Solomon offer sacrifices to the Beast, but those sacrifices do nothing. People die, they dissapear, they dwell in pain and misery and their desperate attempts to assauge their suffering did nothing. Then someone, or several someone's decided to try and make people think it worked. If your prospective sacrifice to the darkness is found having died of dehydration still shackled to a pipe, then your sacrifice meant nothing. If the person is gone, lost to the dark and the unnamed horrors in it, it at least gives the hope that it might have meant something. So all across Solomon there are those who have looked into the eyes of their frightened children, held their lovers as they weeped for a futile sacrifice, and come to the conclusion that if there is  no beast, then someone must take up that role to ease the burdened minds of those who cannot face the horror that is Solomon.

No. They would do a terrible job.

None of them have any experience administrating such a large empire, navigating the political landscape of such a hostile nation or the proper use of Imperial assets. They wouldn't be able to run any of the agencies that make up the Imperium, understand it's wars, economy or anything much of it really.

They'd all likely wind up dead within a few years as ambitious underlings murdered them or they fell afoul of the Inquisition, Assasinorum, Custodes or Astartes for being incompetent.

Gandalf would probably become a daemon. He feared the ring's power to corrupt him, and the Warp has so much more power to offer. Of course being an immortal spirit already, Gandalf would probably be a daemon simply by existing in 40k.

My only quibble is that mankind's civilisation was always a dystopian nightmare in the 40k setting. Based on some of the tech that survived the Long Night the previous civilisation was big on slavery, genetic experiments and mind re-wiring technology in addition to their super lasers and time based weaponry.

Silly idea rattling around my brain, The Conspiracy. A group of druids and other shapeshifters who can turn into ravens or swarms of ravens and act as a spies guild/cult. Individuals refer to one another as The Conspiracy, refer to the themselves as The Conspiracy, and the organisation as The Conspiracy when dealing with outsiders. Few known the actual goals of The Conspiracy, having joined to promote personal goals but being given tasks that also further a purpose beyond themselves.

Something of a slightly goofy but also creepy depending on execution idea for a thieves guild type of organisation, which a PC could belong to.

Put another way, they have a banner carrier, a priest, a cheap priest and a commisar.

It's a fairly standard array of support characters, comparable to what you find in a lot of imperial factions except for the lack of a psyker.