Apples 2017/11/08(Wed)23:19 No. 11479 ID: b4793d
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Gnawkers Shockbutt Blue Dragonborn Fighter, reporting for booty!

From toes to horns she is 8 1/2 ft tall and weighs 510lbs or their equivalent in fantasy weight units (a lot of that is in her tail).

Alignment: chaotic good

I'll work out her backstory and such when we see what the world looks like.

Hello yes I would like to join your crew of Very Large Adventurers. I'll need to think a little to pin down some ideas. If you could give a little more info on what sort of modern fantasy mashup you're thinking of that'd be really helpful.

System wise D&D 5e might be a decent fit. It's probably the simplest fantasy system I've played in.

Seconding 5E. It’s simple, elegant, and I already know how to play in it.

I will never NOT espouse the virtues of BESM as a simple universal cinematic role playing system, though I will say some people find the freeform spell creation a bit too open-ended for your traditional hack and slash fantasy.

Simple three stat system, rules light, customization heavy. Best for people looking to tell a fun story, because dedicated minmaxers can break it.

5E for reference, is six stats, rules light-medium, customization light.

GURPS seems to work well for play-by-post, judging by how smoothly Please do not [T]ake these Organs moves. I'd love to participate!

>>11484
Nominally this would be played by voice chat I think

>>11485
Probably yeah! I'll be hosting this on discord if I can. I'm working 40 hours this week so probably won't be able to start terribly soon, but let me spout on about the setting:

The main hub area is going to be Shantytown. Shantytown is a refuge for all unwanted dregs of society. Career criminals, disgraced heroes, politically unhelpful dignitaries, and visitors from strange worlds all make their homes here.

The town is owned by a reclusive wizard, one so powerful that he's managed to ensconce the town inside it's own pocket of reality with doorways flickering in and out of existence all over the place as needed.

The architecture of the place varies almost as much as its inhabitants, from twisted non-euclidean structures to towering monoliths of stone. Most common, however, are the titular shanty towers, shacks and huts and castle structures all haphazardly tossed onto one-another with no sense of decorum or taste held together by crystalline gravity.

The city itself is divided into three parts: the slums, the industrial district, and the upper crust.

The slums take up the most area. They tend to have a lot of warring mage factions, who have left the area a bit... nonstandard. Monsters freely roam here, and people eke out livings how they can amid the safe pockets that still exist. It's very easy to get lost amid the poor civic planning and ramshackle civilian constructions everywhere.

The industrial district is more orderly, but no less dangerous than the slums. Industry in Shantytown tends to be byzantine and varied, with factories and service centers taking on all kinds of appearances.
sure, there's the standard smoke-belching foundries and metalworking industries, but there's also structures that suck energy from forbidden planes to mass-produce telecom crystals and mobility golems.
Some even require regular blood sacrifice to carry on working, which often sees Foremen out in the slums seeking out juicy new blood.

Finally, the Upper Crust. This is literal, as the fancy part of town is kept seperate from the rest of the rabble by about two miles of empty air. The Upper Crust reeks of luxury and excess, playing host to everything from city planning offices to expansive entertainment districts. While the slums may have its quaint attractions, there's nothing quite like the Gawling arenas and exotic dimension dancers of the Crust.
Unfortunately, even the wonderland of the Crust has its own problems. Rampant corruption, fratricide, and sinister conspiracies plague the gentry of the Crust, leaving it in a state of constant power flux. Where it might be a utopian vision of egalitarianism and wonder, the next it might shift into a gestapo-run dictatorship nightmare.
It doesn't help that the magic keeping it aloft also ties the fabric of space time into pretty little bows.


There's plenty more to be found in each area, but the game will start at the gates to the slums and will probably feature more than a few plot hooks to bite onto.

Will you follow the little thief girl? Or will you catch a glimpse of a shimmering figure walk through a wall in an empty alleyway? Will one of you have a real purpose for being there?

Feel free to come up with ideas. Just remember, this is a society that's about as far along as we are. Tech here just doesn't have the same underpinning mechanics.

Always down for more D&D, although this week I've been struggling to keep up in my own games as I'm a tad busy.

I always enjoyed pathfinder, because of how technical and rules heavy it is. Obviously for many that's a bit of a turn off, but I'm always a strong advocate for letting systems do the work for you, and you just change what you don't like or don't need; pathfinder has done a lot more of the work for you, and I can just do away with anything that's cumbersome or confusing. The great thing is, unlike 5e, or gurps, or really most other systems, all the core information is really easy to find online, for free. There's errata and and lots of other info thats a little more obscure, but it's a lot easier to access than other roleplaying systems I've tried to learn before. Searching for rules and class features without 5e books or the right links in gurps is a nightmare, honestly.

That big eyes small mouth system sounds cool though, be interested to learn more through playing.

That's my pitch for game system, but I'd have to hear about the setting and the system before deciding a character! That's a pretty cool bird picture to start with though! When you say modern day high fantasy, is this a Sir Terry Pratchett
case of the toxic spell dump kinda deal, or more of a Percy Jackson kind of deal?

>>11486
Based on that description, I'm thinkin about something bug/dwarf-esque I've always liked to imagine dwarves as ant like creatures that in mountainous dwarf-hills, a thriving colony that has an in-built love of the mound shapes and hoarding

First pass would be Chez Annual, disowned Merchant Prince who's turned to odd jobs in shanty town to get by after being kicked out of his cushy life in the crust; known for his cheery disposition, varied hats from all his different stalls and jobs he runs, and the fact that he speaks primarily through a tablet style device, relying heavily on emojis for quick communication given his mandible filled face A) doesn't articulate very well and B) doesn't really have the same muscles for smiling a human would. Open to lore based restrictions, first impressions, and comments or concerns really. I'm a flexible player, this is just what came to mind from reading the rules

>>11487
Bit of column a, bit of column b. This is DEFINITELY pratchett inspired, but there's not really a whole lot of medieval things going on outside of the brutality of the criminal elements and the instability magic provides.

There's plenty of differences between this world and ours, but where we've focused on hard science they've taken shortcuts that leave things a bit ramshackle and prone to exploding is all.

>>11489
But people still fight with swords and bows and stuff, right?

>>11484
I am not sure my results should be considered typical. I actually use a mix of Pathfinder, GURPS, and Exalted 2e. The latter two can both be a nightmarish morass of bookkeeping in combat and on other some subjects as well. It's like mental weight training.

As for actual recommendations, I've heard good things about Exalted's third edition. Haven't had the chance to actually play or study it in as much detail as I'd prefer for an unqualified endorsement, but at the very least the "Sorcerous Project" rules have been inspirational.

>>11486
>this is a society that's about as far along as we are. Tech here just doesn't have the same underpinning mechanics.
To avoid Tippyverse problems, I would advise you to think long and hard about supply chains, technological prerequisites, and externalities. One of my favorite parts of Exalted is the artifact crafting rules, particularly the rules for exotic components. Any given magic item is rated on an integer scale (mostly from 1 to 5, though reaching as high as 9 for certain cosmic plot-device level wonders). An item of level N requires N exotic ingredients, which are not necessarily expensive, and may even be reusable for many such items, but definitely involve some sort of story. They might be imports from distant lands, or products of dealings with powerful spirits... or they can simply be crafted, as items of level N-1. So, a 5-dot wonder might involve more than a hundred minor ingredients, coming together into sixty 2-dots, then twenty 3-dots, then five 4-dots which can finally be combined into the final product. Each step also has mundane material costs and months or years of highly skilled work (exponentially more difficult as the levels increase). If you're working from scratch, the invention and design process doubles the work involved at every step, and you have to do some of the design work just to find out which ingredients will be required. That same mechanic could represent gathering the shards of Narsil and a nugget of starmetal for delivery to the greatest swordsmith, or cobbling together chipsets and peripherals for a computer. In a well-rounded economy, lower-level work can be farmed out to apprentices and journeymen, and proven designs can be shared and refined rather than constantly reinventing the wheel, but some would-be Robinson Crusoe trying to make integrated circuits starting from millipedes, coconuts, and beach sand will have a harder time. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarcolony.php#id--Growing_a_Colony--Infrastructure--The_Deadl
ock_Situation

In a modern setting, there are wide-ranging supply chain dependencies for all sorts of weird things. A civil war in some country halfway around the world could cut off the supply of some rare type of dirt, from which some rare type of metal is extracted, and then that causes all sorts of ripples because of technologies which use the stuff - just a tiny amount per unit, but substitution is costly or impossible. What's the magical equivalent of tungsten, or tantalum, or diodes, or tiny little steel screws that you can buy by the pound at any hardware store, dead cheap thanks to some distant factory's economies of scale, but nearly impossible to cook up a substitute by hand from raw materials? What's the magical equivalent of gas stations and municipal water and electricity and internet and cell towers, the ubiquitous infrastructure that defines disaster areas or wilderness by it's unreliability or absence?

And finally, externalities. What ambient side effects does the magic have? When you summon or conjure something, where does it come from? What's the cost of it's absence? What are the magical equivalents of smokestacks, heat radiators, invasive species, deforestation, overfishing, pollution, climate change? Where are the fundamental limits on what magic cannot do, and, probably even more important, where are the practical limits on what magic definitely can do, but only at a cost too great to be seriously considered by any but the most desperate fanatics, or visionary engineers hoping to find a better way? As a tangent on the subject of efficiency, which technologies are relatively mature, with development focused on slight incremental refinements and application to new fields? Which are cutting edge, tempest-tossed on waves of radical invention and obsolescence?

>>11491
Noted! There's already plenty of thought on magic supply processes but I never thought to poke at the economic angle.

As for tech, yeah those exist but there's also magic rock sniper rifles and comparable things. Assume they're going to operate off bow and arrow rules unless I find more fitting things.

>>11492
http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/category/critical-hits/columns/dungeonomics/

>>11491
Magical Climate change is causing it to rain toads more and more often and nobody is doing anything about it

Arhra 2017/11/16(Thu)02:27 No. 11496 ID: ab737a
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Seppa Greensnake yuan-ti bard. She's gonna be a ssstar!

run shadow of the demon lord ha ha ha

It occurs to me that Unknown Armies might be worth looking at, depending on how you want to prioritize themes. Very easy to design monsters and accommodate unconventional solutions to problems. Core mechanic is percentile, and several important skills are derived from a character's psychological condition rather than, say, steadily increasing with training and XP. For example, seeing enough appalling violence that they become desensitized might make a character worse at making friends, but better at dodging. Then, later, going to therapy could make them better at making friends again, but worse at dodging.