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Shadowrun

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[IcyTea31]

The 5e spell Major Image says touching the Image reveals it to be an illusion if you touch as you pass through it, but what if you make an Image of something that can be reasonably passed through, like fog, smoke, or yourself saying "Bwahaha, you can't hurt me now that I'm ethereal!"?

I'd give the usual Investigation check to "spot the thread" and disbelieve an illusion in that case. After all, real fog and smoke still react to air currents, real ethereal things interact with light, and so on. You could argue that the spell can replicate those effects, but that's where the spell save DC comes in: it takes a good wizard to make it believable.

[Grim Portent]

Dumb idea for a group of NPCs, the Giant Knights of (Kingdom).

So basic idea is that an insane king decided to order a bunch of people to go tell chivalric romances to the hill giants that lived within the realm, hoping to keep them distracted so they'd stop raiding farms. It worked way better than expected and the giants started roaming around fighting bandits and slaying monsters.

After a while the king decides some of these giants have earned knighthoods, grants them their titles and has some blacksmiths make them weapons suited to their station. The expense is ridiculous and nearly bankrupts the nation, so the king decides to go to war with their neighbours in order to do some looting and beef up the treasury, the giants participate and perform well despite being thick as bricks. As a result their nominal leader is made a baron or similar title. As a further reward the king orders a castle be built for them, squandering the money taken from the neighbouring lands.

During the lengthy and costly process of building a casle big enough for the giants the various nobles get fed up of the king and his lunacy and foment a popular rebellion. The giants get tasked with stopping it, but after stepping on a bunch of farmers it clicks in their brains that the king isn't acting like a king from a chivalric story, and overthrow him themselves and let the other nobles pick a new king.

The new king then tasks the giants with inane ill defined quests to get them to leave the kingdom for periods of years and tries to get on with normal day to day stuff rather than managing a herd of 20 foot behemoths with the brain of a child.

As a result there's just a bunch of huge knights walking around bellowing questions about fountains of eternal youth, golden fleeces and holy grails at people.

[delphonso]

I want to be a steel-clad 20 foot tall rogue.

[Egan_BW]

Gough is best knight.

[Iduno]

"Quit smoking" is now a valid Shadowrunner background story.

[scriver]

It definitely is

"That's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in a shootout between a dragon, corporate aztechnicians, three trolls and a cyborg. Well, it all started the day I smoked my last nicostick..."

[delphonso]

That's so damn good.

[Grim Portent]

So I've been thinking about the metaphysics for a setting I'm working on, and I think I've hit upon a way to fit demons/angels and so forth into a setting with no other planes or provable deities.

They're made by mortals, not spiritually but physically crafted from dead bodies and objects and imbued with life by rituals that bind a spirit of dubious origin into the form. The spirits origins are a subject of debate, and they are extremely unhelpful about the matter when asked, so mortals attribute their origin to various gods, other worlds, the afterlife and other unverifiable mechanisms.

Angels and demons are mostly the same in terms of behavior, being generally sociopathic and prone to major personality flaws, but angels are made through a more costly ritual that allows them to be imbued with desired qualities, like loyalty, mercy or honour, while demons have to develop such concepts over time and through their own immoral worldview.

Demons are made by creating a fascimile of their shape out of human and animal body parts, a D&D bulezau for example being crafted from a decaying human corpse with it's arms and legs extended with the bones from another human, a snake's body attached like a tail and the head of a large goat or small cow placed where the human head would have been. After a ritual the being lurches to unwholesome life, ready to maim and murder, but capable of being pressed into service with magic or sufficient bribery or brute force.

Angels likewise require a body be made for them, but also incorporate precious materials into their body. The heart must be replaced by a ruby, sapphire or emerald of roughly the same size as the host's original heart, and their eyes must be replaced with spheres of pure gold. Each eye can be inscribed with a word, imbuing the resulting angel with that word as an unchangeable part of their personality. Due to their generally unpleasant personalities one of the eyes of an angel is almost always insribed with words like loyalty or duty, bestowing an immediate level of control over them to their creator. If an angels inscribed words conflict they cannot take the action that would cause the conflict, so an angel with loyalty and mercy could not execute a defenseless person even if commanded to, while an angel with loyalty and wrath could not refrain from killing an enemy even if commanded to.


Demons generally either kill their creator, if they were unprepared, or serve them until such time that the demon has reasonable cause to flee their service. Young demons do not fear death, happily fighting to the death in service of a master or simply to slake their own desire for bloodshed. As demons grow older, their mind develops complexities like any mortal, some become cowards, or tricksters or scholars. They never truly develop empathy however, always being unable to co-exist with mortals without the fear of immediate consequences keeping them in line.

Most angels, being imbued with loyalty, are immediately given an important task and accompanying restrictions. Most are made as guardians, protecting a person or place from harm, some are made to be fearless and obediant soldiers, though the expense involved is prohibitive, some are crafted to avenge a wrong inflicted upon their creator. Some are simply weapons of terror, imbued with hate and wrath and unleashed upon the lands of enemies. Angels made solely with benevolent words like mercy and charity are rare, but it is not unheard of to find a lesser angel crafted by a philanthropic ritualist giving what aid it can to those in need.

[heydude6]

Why would anyone ever create a demon then?

[Superdorf]

'Cos it's cheaper, of course!

[Cthulhu]

They kind of just sound like sentient golems in that case.

My game world has reincarnation, and gods occasionally pluck their greatest champions out of the cycle on their death, preserving the soul and remaking it into an angel, which destroys most of the person's original personality and subjectivity, leaving just the holy attributes that made that particular incarnation a divine champion.  Good and evil gods all live in their own realms at the top of reality and they all have angels. 

Devils live at the bottom of reality and extract crystallized sin from the heavy souls that fall down there, using it as currency and fuel for weird technology.  They're not really evil, their methods are excruciating but they still perform a necessary service for the cycle of reincarnation.  They're cynical industrialists and their only god is the almighty sindollar.

Demons are just the abyss wearing flesh.  The abyss surrounds reality and wants to digest it, just a miasma of hateful energy.  When the abyss leaks into reality it congeals into demon shapes, but the demons don't have any individuality or permanent existence, they're just appendages of the abyss and they dissolve when the portal is closed again.

[Egan_BW]

There are many gods for many specific things, and even more hells, each serving some nebulous and esoteric purpose, or none at all. There is no afterlife for any dominantly chaotic people, as that would make too much sense. Instead, chaotic folks are sent off elsewhere, to journey in even more nonsensical lands. Lawful folks, meanwhile, get to hang out with modrons until they get kicked out for having trace amounts of morality corrupting their lawfulness.

[Grim Portent]

They kind of just sound like sentient golems in that case.

I conceive of them as being truly alive once given form. Stitches, nails, staples or whatever else is used to hold the vessel together just melts into the new being, which then lives, and can eat, drink, sleep and assuming the plumbing is intact after the transformation, procreate (though I don't think they'd produce demonic/angelic offspring, instead producing mortals or monsters.)

Sort of like if you could turn a scarecrow into a flesh and blood human by inviting a soul into it, but with more meat. Unborn spirits birthed through dead flesh. The appropriately formed body is an invitation in itself, the rituals are like vacancy signs for the meat motel.

What I'm on the fence about is if the unclothed spirits can speak to people and teach them how to give them form, or if the way it was done first is something no living mortal or spirit actually knows and spirits don't entirely exist before becoming living beings. The former allows for powerful spirits that die and get reborn by their own artifice elsewhere, the latter makes them more mortal and unpredictable.

[Kagus]

In a new, different DnD game now thanks to the GM from the old one vanishing off the face of the earth and nobody particular caring to follow after him.

The bard player is playing a bard again, and is in fact playing the same bard that he's just ported over because he felt he didn't get enough of a chance to live out that character's story.

We've just had our first proper night in an inn, and the bard (who is very bard) made sure to have his first "I scan the room for wenches" moment. Almost getting clocked by a large she-orc, he was undeterred in his quest for romance and set his sights on new conquests.

Namely, me.

One natural 20 plus mods Charisma check later, and my bookish, socially awkward academic has had strange new feelings awakened inside of him that he never knew he could feel for another man. Particularly not one half his size. And obsessed with griffins.

Thankfully the DM allowed for awkwardness to win the day and I managed to resist the urge to follow this charming halfling back to his room for the night. If only just.



I have to say, I'm feeling slightly uncomfortable 

[Jimmy]

I once played a half-elf bard of ambiguous sex who I alternated gender pronouns when describing, and another player decided they'd solve the mystery by using their charismatic sorcerer to check "under the hood." Well, I let my character be 'seduced,' the two departed to a secluded location, we let the rest play out 'off-screen,' and I stated that the night was definitely enjoyed by the participants, but the sorcerer still didn't have a clue the next day.

I left it up to them to imagine how that one might have came about.