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Author Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!!  (Read 825592 times)

Iduno

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8670 on: May 10, 2021, 07:34:00 am »

I think this is the blog of one of the current Earthdawn developers, sort of working on ideas or as a place to store stuff that doesn't quite fit with the game. It's a description of one of the Horrors (something like demons from the spirit realm that return when magic is powerful enough in the world to feed on any suffering they can cause). This one leans more into the horror elements of the game than the adventuring bits, and is entertainingly wtf.

https://pandagaminggrove.blogspot.com/2020/10/earthdawn-4e-anatomy-of-horror-13.html
Great stuff there! I'm currently running a kyton-heavy scenario, and something like this is great material for a bit of flavour to the scenes I'm developing.

Yeah, D&D 3rd (and again in 4th) did grab some ideas from Earthdawn, so I can see Earthdawn material matching nicely. I think a lot of the reason I'd like to play Earthdawn is to see all of the ideas and possibilities it has. Putting the requirement on themselves that everything has to fit together means a lot of things are more developed.
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Grim Portent

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8671 on: May 21, 2021, 05:16:08 pm »

So for a dark setting I'm working on I want to break up the mono-culture races that D&D tends to have, starting with the dwarves because I have to start somewhere. So I want to split them into culture groups, not all related to each other, with some being oppressed by the others, all with their own language and so on. I don't plan to be super specific, since I plan for dwarven politics to mostly only play into things in as much as they affect refugees and diplomats in a human centric part of the world, but I want to have a good feel for the basics and who hates who.

I'm aiming for 15 races/cultures, spread among about 9 kindgoms, with some dwarven races being minorities in some kingdoms, majorities in others, actively subject to genocide in others, or completely absent from some.

For simplicity I plan to split them into 4 groups, and I am going to provisionally just give them english names, but I'm probably going to find a few related languages I can butcher to give them better names in future. My current thoughts on them are as follows.

The four ethnic families of the dwarves are the great dwarves, the dwarves of the black lands, the lesser dwarves (not their preferred name) and the green dwarves.

The Great Dwarves consist of four races. For now let's just call them G1, G2, G3 and G4, because names are hard. The Great Dwarves speak a related group of languages and can communicate with each other in a faltering fashion. They are as a group taller than the other dwarven ethnicities and worship variations on the god Gann who they believe made the world and made the Great Dwarves to be his chosen servants. G1 and G3 include other lesser deities in their pantheons, G2 are purely monotheistic and G4 believe in a handful of cultural saints who serve as intermediaries between them and Gann. G1, G2 and G3 are the dominant races in five of the dwarven kingdoms, with G4 being a minority largely found in the other Great Dwarven lands. Great Dwarves in the lands of other dwarven races are subject to severe bigotry, generally being seen as spies or saboteurs working for their rather imperialistic homelands.

The Dwarves of the Black Lands consist of six races, B1-B6. Like the great dwarves the black dwarves have related languages and can communicate to a limited extent without translation, though B3 cannot communicate with B1 or B5. They are long limbed and slender for dwarves, with strong cultural trends towards modesty and the careful use of resources. This stems from their now fertile lands being the product of a series of volcanic eruptions that nearly drove them to extinction and brought them to worship the gods of boundaries, of bounty and of protection when they where offered the magic they needed to survive the harsh conditions that afflicted their lands for several years. B6 is a conglomerate culture of displaced members of B1-B5, that split off during the early days of the volcanic eruptions and the resulting turmoil, and maintain the old religion worshipping the goddess Arctus. Dwarves of culture B6 mostly fled into the kingdoms of the Great Dwarves as refugees, where they live their lives as an oppressed minority, but their faith is forbidden in the lands of their ethnic kin, where they face severe puishment if they refuse to convert to the new gods. B1-B5 are the dominant group in 3 of the dwarven kingdoms, but in kingdoms ruled by other dwarves they are subject to extreme prejudice and occasionaly genocide, which they are quite happy to return in kind.

The Lesser Dwarves consist of four races, L1-L4. Their languages are related to one another, but L1 and L4 differ enough that they cannot communicate. Lesser dwarves are shorter on average than other dwarves, and are considered inferiors by almost all other dwarves. The Lesser Dwarves are found in all the dwarven kingdoms, living in ethnic enclaves or mobile caravans. They are more close knit than the other dwarven races, viewing even their most distant cultural kin as friends in defiance of a hostile world. L2 are the dominant race in a single kingdom, and drove the others LDwarves, including many L2 dwarves, out of their lands as a result of a schism rooted in conflicting interpretations of their gnostic faith. Lesser dwarves are the most commonly found in non-dwarven lands, fleeing oppression and genocide that follows them everywhere in the homelands. Among refugees populations L2 dwarves are generally disliked by other LDwarves, who resent them for their relationship to the dwarves that drove them from their homelands.

The Green Dwarves are a singular race, with a language unrelated to any other dwarven tongue. They live in nomadic groups outside the traditional dwarven lands, and tell tales of being driven from there an extremely long time ago. They have a cultural tradition of cooperating with humans, and over time have adopted a form of pantheism, worshipping every god whose faith their community has encountered in it's travels and still remembers to include in prayers. Green dwarves do not distinguish between the dwarven races from the homelands, which the refugee and expatriate communities of other dwarves they encounter find incredibly insulting.

Dwarves do not generally bother to distinguish between the ethnic variations from groups other than their own. That is to say, an LDwarf doesn't distinguish between a B1 and a B3, though the B1 and B3 hold themselves to be distinct from one another in important ways. Put another way, dwarves are racist. But everyone is probably going to be in the setting I envisage.
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There once was a dwarf in a cave,
who many would consider brave.
With a head like a block
he went out for a sock,
his ass I won't bother to save.

scriver

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8672 on: May 23, 2021, 10:33:37 am »

I like that, Portent! I think there a lot if interesting stuff to be gained from breaking up races into cultures like that. Just gotta think about not overdoing it, for example how many of FR's dozens of human cultures and culture groups can anyone recall existing?
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heydude6

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8673 on: May 23, 2021, 01:07:15 pm »

When I glimpsed your list, I thought you were having a dwarf only campaign (which you definitely have enough content for btw). I like it, I really do, but I don't think this is practical for a D&D campaign, at least if you plan on giving the other races the same treatment.

You've got 15 different dwarven subcultures here, each of which is going to need to be fleshed out or else the hole will be obvious to those playing the game and detract from the experience. Assuming you stick with the basic trio of humans, elves, and dwarves (the latter which you already started), you're going to have to come up with 45 different cultures in total which is a lot of work.

I believe you can accomplish this, the real problem is incorporating it into a game. That's a lot of information to hold in one's head, and running a session is already a mentally intense activity. You're either going to give yourself a headache trying to figure out how to bring up these different cultural groups in a given play session or your not going to bring some of them up at all. If the latter happens, then what was the point of creating them in the first place?

I do like your idea in principle though. Real cultures and ethnicities are incredibly diverse and it would be great to see some of that represented in fiction. I just see your task more as a fun mental exercise rather than something that can practically be used in a game. Don't worry, I've done this too. It's fun in its own way.
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Lets use the ancient naval art of training war parrots. No one will realize they have been boarded by space war parrots until it is to late!
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Grim Portent

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8674 on: May 24, 2021, 05:10:33 am »

My plan, such as it is, is to set the game I want to run in a single recently conquered province of a human empire. So the majority of NPCs would be the local human ethnicity, plus members of the empire's dominant ethnic group, other imperial ethnicities, small dwarven enclaves of various oppressed groups, maybe the odd dwarf of status from the homelands whose distinctly not part of the dwarven refugee communities, and then the elves as a nomadic monoculture due to some apocalyptic stuff that destroyed their homelands and left them forever damned.

The main human group I have in mind is called the Val, sort of a eastern europe/steppe cultures mashup. About a third of their lands were conquered by the Aurogentum Empire and the Val as a people are split into a few mindsets on the matter. 'Free' Val either view their occupied cousins as people needing their help to be freed, or as weaklings and/or traitors who allowed the empire to take their lands, 'Imperial' Val are divided on the empire, some like it, some hate it, some don't really care, some actively resist it even four decades after being conquered. The Val have their own religion, based around a unitary duality that encompasses all things, which conflicts with the main religion of the empire who revere a monotheistic goddess called Astarte and her saints, some Imperial Val have converted, some stick to their own ways, some have adopted a hybrid faith that's considered weird at best by the others.

Other than the Val I'll probably only really flesh out the main imperial human race, and the race of humans who are native to the province(s) bordering the Val, on the grounds that humans from the far away parts of the empire are unlikely to have headed or been sent there in a short time and the older imperial human ethnic groups will have started to blend together.

Only a few dwarves will get actually fleshed out, those who have communities of refugees that have reasons, good or bad, to dislike one another. Dwarf groups that aren't prevalent among refugees will be left bare bones. So mostly the LDwarves because they'll be easy to base conflicts around with the emnity they have towards other dwarven groups and towards their L2 brethren.




Broad thrust of the actual game idea would have the players be Witch Hunters, with broad discretionary powers in dealing with heretics, unsanctioned magic users, fleshsculpters, wielders of the dark arts, cults, demons, monsters, dissidents and political malfactors. My plan is to run multiple shortish adventures, some for 1 PC, some for 2-3, and some for all 4 people in the group (not counting myself), with a mix of mystery, political intrigues, horror, and a bit of hack and slash.
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There once was a dwarf in a cave,
who many would consider brave.
With a head like a block
he went out for a sock,
his ass I won't bother to save.

Iduno

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8675 on: May 26, 2021, 12:14:38 pm »

Yes! This is the stuff I like.

Range 60 feet, and the z-axis isn't forbidden. Excellent.

Also, it's a level 3 spell, so it's affected (in 3.x) by a minor rod of metamagic, like extend (1.5x all numbers, including distance and number of animals summoned).

In addition, summoning a bunch of cows seems like a good way to bribe a dragon.


Edit: I'd still like to find a teleport spell that is either ranged, or touch (which becomes ranged with the reach spell metamagic). 20d6 from falling is always fun. And sometimes they end up outside, which makes it difficult/time consuming for them to be angry at you for it. I assume this is why wizards live in towers.

« Last Edit: May 26, 2021, 02:25:07 pm by Iduno »
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Kagus

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8676 on: May 26, 2021, 04:06:58 pm »

Yes! This is the stuff I like.

Range 60 feet, and the z-axis isn't forbidden. Excellent.

Also, it's a level 3 spell, so it's affected (in 3.x) by a minor rod of metamagic, like extend (1.5x all numbers, including distance and number of animals summoned).

"Wizard, you're up. The gang of bandits is moving closer, surrounding the party on all sides. What do you do?"

"I cast Bird."

Loud Whispers

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8677 on: May 29, 2021, 10:50:25 am »

I've got a question. Assuming no concerns for standardised/balanced speed, how many metres per second would a hill giant move when walking/running sprinting? What about their even larger storm giant cousins? I've been trying to wrap my noggin around this conundrum for some time

MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8678 on: May 29, 2021, 12:36:08 pm »

The largest land animal capable of fast movement is probably elephants, which even hill giants exceed at 15 ft to the elephant average of 10.5 ft. So if you're really, truly, going to put the square-cube law in DnD, giants probably have to move slower as they get larger. I suppose they could still charge much like an elephant can charge, at some risk to their own lives.
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8679 on: May 29, 2021, 01:48:18 pm »

That works for hill giants. For storm ones I decided to just wing it using the speed of a T-Rex. Slow boys who like plodding along at 3m/s and can book it a max 10m/s if they really feel like it. This compares to humans usual 3m/s and max of around 12m/s. Being chased by a storm giant might be fucking terrifying but you ought to be able to run faster and run longer than them, which seems aesthetically pleasing as a concept

Grim Portent

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8680 on: May 29, 2021, 02:09:21 pm »

Depends on the way their anatomy actually functions. If they're just humans but bigger because magic then they'd probably run pretty damn fast, at least compared to us, if their legs, bones and so forth are similar to those of other large animals then they'd probably be at most the same speed as humans or even significantly slower when at max speed.

The bigger an animal is the more impact force each step puts into it's legs, so bipeds past a certain size start having problems, especially if they walk and run like humans where sometimes a single foot takes all the impact force of the body running and jumping. So a giant massing the same as a large theropod dinosaur would presumably have to run slower than them or break it's ankles when it tried to sprint, and the speed estimates I've seen for large theropods aren't actually that great for such large animals, and it would have terrible balance because it's center of gravity would be really high up and shift whenever it leaned even slightly in any direction.

If a giant wanted to eat it would probably have to sit or squat and reach out with it's hands rather than lean, and would likely have to sleep in a squat, sitting or standing position. Without a tail to act as a counterbalance for their upper body leaning down to do anything would make them tip forwards, which would also make it hard to stand up in general come to think of it.

Hill giants are, imo, the best designed d&d giant from a realism standpoint, with short legs and long gorilla like arms, some of them are depicted with proportions that would let them knucklewalk, which reduces a lot of the problems of being a giant biped. They also have disproportionately large hands and feet, and are very fatty, which would help spread their weight over a larger ground surface and cushion their joints from impact force. Their huge sagging stomachs shift their center of gravity closer to their hips than the muscle chested larger giants whose center is going to be higher up. They're also lethargic and spend lots of time eating or laying about digesting and napping, and can eat basically anything organic, which is not a bad set of things for a large organism.

Fire giants are a bit stubby limbed, essentially being giants with dwarf proportions, so they'd struggle with a lot of tasks that force them to lean to reach things and risk tipping over. The other races are all human proportioned or really gangly in the case of stone giants, so they'd all struggle with the fact they aren't anatomically designed to be huge. Stone giants would probably be in constant minor discomfort from their joints having barely any fat cushion, based on their usually scrawny and wiry depictions, like dairy cattle compared to beef cattle.
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There once was a dwarf in a cave,
who many would consider brave.
With a head like a block
he went out for a sock,
his ass I won't bother to save.

Grim Portent

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8681 on: June 02, 2021, 08:10:14 am »

So for the same setting as the dwarves I posted about above I have the following in mind for other major races.

Elves - nomadic wanderers, the hubris of their magi in ages past destroyed their homelands and cursed the elves with a spiritual stigmata that they bear to this day. Other races view them with fear and superstition and generally don't allow them into their towns and cities, and drive them away if they look to be settling down long term. When elves reach the age range of 650-750 they are supposed to commit ritual suicide according to their customs to prevent the curse that festers in all their souls from reaching maturity. Most elves face this death with acceptance, having had centuries to come to terms with it, but there are always some who seek to delay their death until it is too late, or flee from the prospect in it's entirety.

Humans - like everyone else, humans are kind of bastards. Superstitious, ambitious, clannish, and all the other properties of real life humanity.

Halflings - Much like humans, but able to reproduce faster and subject to a lot of prejudice, which they return vigorously. Slightly matriarchal and very clannish, with halfling women who bear enough children being able to form a large village in their lifetime and the resulting family remaining very close knit and living under the matriarch's thumb. Hospitable to people they don't know other than some bigoted rudeness, but with strong inclinations to more severe passive or overt aggression towards people from groups they have bad history with. If someone from a human village stiffed a halfling on a payment once, that halfling's community will hate the entire human village for a long time. Theorised by some magi to have been created.

Orcs and Goblins - created by a half-forgotten sorcerer-king of the dwarves, now revered in various different ways by the orcs and goblins. Orcs were created to serve as shock troops in dwarven wars, being faster and stronger than dwarves and naturally aggressive, while goblins were created to be domestic servants, their speed, dexterity and unobtrusiveness making them well suited to roles as gofers, maids, butlers and so forth. The use of these servile races fell out of fashion in the dwarven kingdoms, leading to the majority being banished and left to fend for themselves or murdered for the sake of convenience, but there are also established communities of orcs and goblins who had been granted freedom for dutiful service during the peak of their use, and some kingdoms still make use of small numbers of them. The general outlook of orcs and goblins towards other races varies by their communities' historical origins, with those who are descended from those who were pensioned off generally being quite amiable towards dwarves, while those who were exiled or escaped genocide take a rather dimmer view of their former owners. Relations between O&Gs and humans and halflings tend to be frosty, but are usually not outright hostile. The magically created nature of orcs and goblins makes them inherently heretical in the eyes of most human and halfling faiths, the priests of which encourage their congregations to avoid interacting with them.

Trolls - A very old race, fashioned by an ancient practitioner of magic from human stock to serve as living siege weapons. Trolls are essentially like D&D ogres and hill giants, huge deformed humans, rather than regenerating green monsters with long noses. Trolls are born much larger than humans, and mature rapidly. They have no known maximum height, growing steadily until the point they die. Their bodies are afflicted with what is essentially a form of exaggerated gigantism, their bones and tissues growing and distorting starting at a young age. This process is painful, trolls are subject to headaches, migraines, joint pain, muscle fatigue and various other ailments. Understandably this makes them generally pretty angry creatures, with a short temper and a tendency to lash out at their surroundings. Trolls are as intelligent as any normal human, but their living situation makes it difficult for them to learn or engage in healthy social interaction. While the original trolls were essentially just big grumpy humans, their children found themselves trapped in a downward spiral of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of their parents, which became progressively worse as each new generation was less functional than the last, to the point that many modern trolls are little more than apes, unfamiliar with language or the use of tools. With help from others trolls can be functioning members of a society, albeit prone to substance abuse to relieve their pain, but on their own they struggle to cope with their intergenerational traumas and physical suffering. Most cultures view trolls as little more than animals, with even those that have 'domestic' trolls viewing them as subhumans.
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There once was a dwarf in a cave,
who many would consider brave.
With a head like a block
he went out for a sock,
his ass I won't bother to save.

Jimmy

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8682 on: June 02, 2021, 05:30:34 pm »

Nice write-up! The elf section gives a fair bit of grey room for some interesting story hooks, especially what happens when one doesn't commit ritual sudoku(sic). Are we looking at Tolkien elves, tall and fair, or Grimm fairytale elves, small and sprightly?

Also, trolls are great. I like their flavour, which reminds me of the old trolls that would live under bridges extorting billy-goats.

Speaking of fairytales, are you going to include gnomes and the fey? I've always loved the concept of the fey as an antagonistic element to the world, and some of my favourite fictions such as The Dresden Files or A Practical Guide to Evil feature the fey as a major player in the story. I've long wished I could run a campaign that features them prominently, but I'll freely admit my own intelligence simply isn't wired to properly come up with the twisty schemes fey are famous for. I tend to do much better with writing plots involving straightforward threats.
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Grim Portent

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8683 on: June 02, 2021, 06:25:55 pm »

The idea behind the elves is that when their curse matures they turn into horrible distorted monsters, or a natural disaster. Ranges from small things like a manticore or a house fire, up to dragons and major earthquakes. For the most part the actual role of their curse will be along the lines of 'human authorities suspect an elf has run away from it's people because it can't bring itself to die, and the community failed to force the situation. Go track the fleeing elf and deal with things,' though I do envision a race of humans who lost their homeland to an elf refusing to die and making the whole peninsula sink into the ocean. Physically they're similar to humans, except with pointy ears, eyes that go fully black as they age and a patch of raised red flesh that resembles a tentacled mass that slowly moves about their body over the decades. If they dress up heavily they can pass for human, which helps avoid people throwing rocks at them.

I like the idea of races that are worse than humans, but it isn't their fault, which is the premise behind the trolls. They're victims as a species, but no one is really able to help them because most people don't even know where to start so they get pushed away and continue to spiral downwards.

Gnomes are probably not going to be a thing, though something similar to them and fey in general might be a thing. I have an idea for a loose collection of deities called the Witch Gods, whose whole thing is being the gods of magic in a setting where magic is feared and distrusted. All magic knowledge can ultimately be traced back to one of them teaching someone the basics and that person then taking things from there, and some of them have really weird followers. Several are served by witch covens, warlock cabals, post-human hags, and some have creatures that serve only them. Fey will likely be reskinned and used as the eldritch servants of these gods, some transformed from humans, some transformed from animals, some from the same unnatural places as the Witch Gods themselves. So far I only really have one group of Witch God servants really fleshed out.


The Witch Folk draw on the kidnapper elements of some fey, and a bit on races like the Beastmen from Warhammer. I'm also thinking of making bugbears a type of fairy like creature based on the folk song Long Lankin, which in some versions has the titular Lankin as basically a boogyman, but in other versions he was meant to be a leper who murdered a child to try and cure his disease with the babies' blood. I figure I'll mix the two ideas and make Bugbears a type of deformed spirit that pursue various macabre folk cures to try and heal themselves.
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There once was a dwarf in a cave,
who many would consider brave.
With a head like a block
he went out for a sock,
his ass I won't bother to save.

Grim Portent

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: The Barren Snowflake Wastes
« Reply #8684 on: June 24, 2021, 06:04:07 pm »

Got more of my setting notes I want to bounce off people. This time focusing on gods and spirits.

To start with there's Yahg the Primordial and the demons.

Spoiler: Yahg and the demons (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: More details on demons (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: The Creator Gods (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: The Witch Gods (click to show/hide)
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There once was a dwarf in a cave,
who many would consider brave.
With a head like a block
he went out for a sock,
his ass I won't bother to save.
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