Shadowrun's original setting is only a few decades in the future now and there was already the idea of NERPs ("New Exciting Retail Products" that caused explosions of consumerist violence a bit like the szechuan sauce riots some years back), so unless it was too uncomfortably close for my group or too on the nose, I was tempted to have a setting where a prevalent presence and potential threat was a bunch of affluent bazingas with combat drones that are scoring epic hero points for their battle passes and season passes and so on by remotely shooting undesirables (such as Shadowrunners) that are visually reskinned as zombies or whatever so they can be "just like in the treats."

If I wanted to go extra heavy on the meta-narrative the bazingas would themselves be fantasizing about being Shadowrunners while gunning down Shadowrunners, and they'd see Damien Knight (or the equivalent tech billionaire, though Damien really needs to catch up with actual contemporary billionaires for evil) as the "ultimate rebel" and the like.

Probably too heavy-handed, but might workshop it.

I have an idea for campaign in my head but I need to find a good system to run it. Main thing I want is a system that would allow people to play humans, humanoids, and non-humans, with enough system and character customization depth to make the differences feel interesting and meaningful. Basically, if a player wants to be a fire magic-wielding phoenix or a psychic cat, they should be able to do that.

Ideally the system would also have at least some level of support for typical fantasy adventuring stuff (dungeon crawling, combat, social intrigue, etc.)

idk we can workshop it

It's fortunate that Wizards of the Coast can't keep it in their metaphorical pants and keeps trying to go for all of the money in the most obnoxiously predatory ways and has done so since at least 4th edition and its attempt at a virtual tabletop monopoly and "blind bag" miniature peddling.

I need to train myself to stop saying "D&D" for tabletop fantasy games because I am not going back again. I left before, and this time it's permanent. Fuck WOTC.

Back when I was a kid I used to RP a bit on aol chat rooms nothing serious, dice rolls were usually fast and loose and we didn't use any set systems as they didn't exist for what I was doing (Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy).

I found this site that hosts PBP with dice rollers set up for different games systems.

Wondering if anyone here has experience with this?

Haven't seen everything in here but it looks like a lot. I know fans have been busy with Sword World 2.0 translating that but it's nice the older stuff has a following too. Great stuff for fans of Lodoss War.

Previous Thread

It's taken a few weeks to start moving peices (that is, the party finally stopped picking fights with librarians long enough to measure time in hours rather than rounds), but since their second night of resting after the murders they have been the targets of Nightmare spells, twisting their dreams. Unfortunately that's just been a soft chorus of clucking as they keep succeeding on the will saves, but it did prompt a round of worried discussion between the characters about whether chickens have souls.

After a new round of preparations they ventured back into the Gauntlight and started picking fights with librarians again. Also they tried to contradict a ghost administrator and got ghost slapped into purgatory for a moment, but eventually they got back en-route towards the first chicken ghost encounter: the smashed remnants of Krrrterra, who was obliterated with a landslide. Impressively, their first instinct was to go for diplomacy, apologising for killing it, and asking what they could do to help it move on to the afterlife. With a speak with animals spell and a critical success on a diplomacy check, I couldn't just have the chicken fly into a panic and cause a fight, so engaged in dialogue.
There were four issues here though: One, while ghosts are normally animated by unfinished business and can only be permanently put to rest by making right the injustices that created them, these ghosts are mostly reanimated by the giant spooky lighthouse that shoots beams of ghosts, so the primary answer is to destroy the 20th level artifact (they are currently level 4). Two, even without the lighthouse, they're motivated by revenge against their killers, so the secondary answer is for the party to be killed by the chicken ghosts. Three, ghosts are often unaware or in denial about their own deaths, nevermind what is needed to put them to rest. And four, chickens are not particularly capable of higher level thought, so the only thing their questioning actually established is that it wanted to eat some worms.

So they hit it with positive energy damage until it dissipated. It wasn't a difficult fight, a single PL-1 enemy, because even as a ghost a chicken isn't much of a threat (on its own), but it did teach them some embarrassing lessons about weapons attacks and incorporeal creatures while minorly inconveniencing them, as planned. The ghost chickens have been established as a fun callback, and soon a running joke. Once they start coming back (and in greater numbers), we'll have some good horror cooking and can really start the emotional rollercoaster, but I have to be sparse with details until future updates, as the Goblin Sorcerer's player is reading and I don't want to spoil too much for him.

New Art
It's bad. You wanna see some cool ghost chicken tokens, go back to the first post. First up, we have Krrrrterra, who was hit with a landslide:

get it? because she was... squashed. It doesn't get better.

Hyppokoko, bludgeoned and drowned by a blast of tsunami:

the file name is wetghost.png. like seriously i got no idea

And finally, and most [CW: meat]ly, Brrrkit, who was incinerated by a beam of pure heat: I'm sorry.

Mechanics
Applying the ghost template to a basic bird statblock didn't get me close to an appropriate challenge for the party, so I altered a ghost commoner statblock in different ways for all chickens. Krrrterra had the weak template applied, the Kinetic Assault ghost ability added, and a handful of minor additions and changes:

We're a small TTRPG group on Discord that's been active for a little under 2 years and for various reasons a number of our members have dropped out. So far we've played mostly stuff for/built ontop of D&D 5e, but we've also played a little bit of Roll For Shoes and Everyone Is John. The plan moving forward was to play some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e (namely, the central Enemy Within campaign) but this may change based on how prospective players fit with the existing players (including EstraDoll and GarbageShoot)

We usually meet on Sundays around 6:30-7:00PM EST and end around 10:00, however the weekends of May 26th and June 2nd are kind of up in the air, which seems like a good time to recruit new players.

CWs are sort of hard to predict, however, when I find/build something that seems like it should be CW'd I will post such in the Discord server.

Comment or send me a DM to Join up today! Experience Role-Playing with reclusive author Thomas Pynchon as D/GM!

oky ghost chickens and it's so fucking stupid.

So they found the Dooms of Tomorrow in B29 and after some experimentation determined that the Annihilation Beams were specifically triggered by creatures passing by rather than having a physical trigger that could be interacted with. Their first plan to disarm the hazards ended with the inventor's construct companion getting Annihilation Beam'd into lots of tiny little pieces, so they decided to buy some chickens and lob them in. They were hit with beams of pure tsunami, inferno, earthquake, monster, and undead. First two were pretty easy, I went with falling debris for the third, big godzilla hand for the fourth, and void energy for the last. Gonna be real with you, the description is "From Monster" and I just don't know how that works as a beam.

The thing is, quite apart from the ethical issue of throwing a defenseless animal into something called an annihilation beam, the whole campaign explicitly revolves around a spooky lighthouse that makes undead. I've been more subtley referencing it through various random encounters, but the first big event of the story is the lighthouse shooting a giant beam of light that creates undead where it lands. And there are a bunch of haunts and undead inside. Like there's basically a sign over the entrance saying "Undead made here". So now the chickens' ghosts need revenge on their murderers.

Honestly, no idea where I'm gonna go with this, but I've made tokens for an undead ghost chicken and a kaiju ghost chicken, so I'll give them some nightmares next time they go to sleep and see where that takes us.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2581574

Another CYOA (Choose your own adventure) for my fellow Hexbears.

Pick one option.

I probably would choose the Diner. Since free and good food sounds amazing.

It was great, I remember being part of a Mortal Kombat rp session where I made an OC and we used a dice roller for combat (kombat?). I also remember being part of a Final Fantasy one based on ShinRa's military. Creative stuff.

The rogue went down at the end of a running chain of 4 encounters the party charged through, right as they decided they had bitten off more than they could chew and turned tail to run. Just walked off and left him with the remaining mini boss. If it weren't for the mini boss's tactics of getting other people to do things that require him to leave his throne, the PC would have been killed on the spot. As it was he regained consciousness about 10 minutes later, and slowly and carefully crept away with the aid of some great stealth rolls while the morlock tried to work out how to get a second casting of telekinetic manoeuvre.
And then the next morning he decided to be the bait in a plan to lure a drake out of its lair, got stuck trying to scrabble up an embankment out of the way, and was obliterated in a flurry of teeth and tail lashes. It was brutal, even with PF2e's generous dying rules he turned from alive to dead in only 4 seconds as the first strike knocked him unconscious and the next two burnt through his dying condition.

Luckily the player already had a backup ready so when the party turned tail and ran again I was able to maintain a natural flow of roleplay to reach a point where I could introduce the replacement, but it was sudden and shocking for all of us. For the players it was shocking because in a single turn the drake turned him from slightly damaged to chunky salsa, and for me because its not actually a difficult fight - I mean, a drake is still a dragon, so it is more dangerous than raw stats make it look, but if they'd put the tank front and centre instead he'd have easily withstood the initial barrage and they would have steamrolled it.

They're going to be so mad when they realise it's only as tough as the minotaur skeleton they took down instead in order to get some xp and level up before taking it on again.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2435866

Anyone else love TTRPG history?

PC and monster weaknesses are very easy to look up and apply, but finding out what the actual people at the table will fall for is a lot harder, so what have you noticed your players always get pulled in by?

I'm not good at making maps and I need a simple whatever-dimension battle map for a simple 5e encounter along a small path with a mountain face on one side and a cliff with a misty bottom on the other.

DM me or ask here for more details, thanks for any help!

Campaign or one shot premises, world building, systems or mechanics, whatever ttrpg related stuff you've come up with but not filled out yet.