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Dunno how to put it properly into words but lately I find myself thinking more about that particular innocence of fairy tales, for lack of better word. Where a traveller in the middle of a field comes across an old woman with a scythe who is very clearly Death, but he treats her as any other auntie from the village. Or meeting a strange green-skinned man by the lake and sharing your loaf of bread with him when he asks because even though he's clearly not human, your mother's last words before you left home were to be kind to everyone. Where the old man in the forest rewards you for your help with nothing but a dove feather, and when you accept even such a seemingly useless reward with gratitude, on your way home you learn that it's turned to solid gold. Where supernatural beings never harm a person directly and every action against humans is a test of character, and every supernatural punishment is the result of a person bringing on their own demise through their own actions they could have avoided had they changed their ways. Where the hero wins for no other reason than that they were a good person. I don't have the braincells to describe this better right now but I wish modern fairy tales did this more instead of trying to be fantasy action movies.
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Setting: The Kingdom of Xophena, Realm of the Pure
Though it is famed the world over for the piety of its people and the bravery of its knights, this kingdom holds a dark secret at its heart. If you were to see the scattering of fortress cities surrounded by horror haunted wilderness it would be all too easy to believe the legends: brave warriors sallying forth to do battle against the corruption that besieges them from all sides, slaying great foes and making great sacrifices in the name of defending the innocent. If you looked closer though you would see Xophena for all its faults, the fear by which its elite drive and dominate its populace, a tradition of martial glory that justifies any action or abuse of the warrior caste, a population forced to endure toil and abject subjugation or be exiled outside the walls.
Adventure Hooks:
While travelling through the realm of the pure as part of an ongoing quest, the party run into a retinue of outrider knights on their way to destroy a rampaging aberration hiding out in a gold mine. Some of the knights scoff at the party for being common sellswords, while others recognize them as fellow doogooders-at-arms. There's glory to be had if the party join them in their mission, and more importantly, potential reward and bragging rights.... if they can keep up, the mounted cavaliers aren't going to slow down on the party's behalf.
Xophen emissaries have made an appearance in the party's homeland, courting alliances, making trade deals, and generally putting their finger on the scales of power. Distrustful of too many good offers, the party's patron is planning on a visit to Xophena in the near future and would like them to come along as extra sets of eyes and ears. Renegade heroes have a habit of seeing through the haze of political bullshit.
Xophena would make a fascinating backdrop for a campaign, as Arthurian myth crashes into lovecraftian weirdness. The best place to start would be with the party as castoffs and exiles, eking out a living in one of the few hidden hamlets built by those outcast from the social order. How do they survive? When circumstances demand that they enter one of the fortress cities do they trick their way in, or beg favour from the sanctimonious powers that be? Can they last long enough to discover the secret that has bent the world into its current cruel shape?
Background: Only a few centuries ago Xophena was just like any other kingdom, periods of prosperity and stability that dissolved into infighting as the local warrior elite squabbled for position. That of course all changed when monsters known as the Delnbrood began to wriggle out of the earth like worms after rain, causing untold devastation and forcing a societal retreat to the increasingly fortified settlements dotted about the mountainous foothills. The fear and chaos of these years restructured Xophen society into a rigid hierarchy based around tradition, faith, and survival, which has only grown more ossified as time has gone on.
Both Xophen scripture and legend will tell you that the horrors that beset them began with a treasonous sorcerer Delndrek who sought to take the throne for himself through dishonorable means and darkest sorcery. He was opposed by Tanria brightspear, a saint of the everlight who foiled his every sly attempt to seize power, until at last she cornered him and forced his surrender. Ever the coward, Delndrek sacrificed his humanity rather than relinquish his ambition, becoming an indescribable abomination, that it took the bright speared saint five days to vanquish, dying in the process. It's said that the aberrations that beset Xophena today are born from where his tainted blood struck the earth.
Like many of the tales told about the realm of the pure, this story is a lie, gilded with just enough truth to make it stick in the people's memory. Delndrek wasn't just a sorcerer, but the sorcerer of the royal family, tasked with magicing away all the problems that backwoods dynasty couldn't solve through bloodshed or political marriage. The kingdom's goldmines had always been its lifeblood, and most of the fighting in those days about who could profit from what claim. Trouble was the royal family's mines were drying up, so they threw their pet mage at the problem said that if he didn't find a solution they'd torture him till they did. Dying mines and mounting stress forced Delndrek to look deeper and deeper for an answer, and eventually led him to communion with the outergod Jysh'parun who holds dominion over the secrets of mountains. A pact was struck, the mountains ate people and spat up gold, until eventually the saint found out and decided to put a stop to things.
Cut to today, and the dependants of that very same royal family are still trying to wriggle out of the pact they instigated, spending their people's lives to fill their coffers and fight back the creatures the outer god sends to assert dominion over the realm he was promised.
Setting Details:
The church of the everlight was always strong in Xophena, dating back half a millennia to when an adherent of hers was lost on a stormy sea for months and was only able to find land when the mist parted and he saw the dawn first alighting on one of the region's seaside peaks. The mountainous temple city of First Alight still serves as the heart of the region's faith.
That faith has become just as gaudy and hollow as the rest of the kingdom: Somewhere along the line it was decided that gold was the best way to demonstrate praise to Sarenrae, both in decorating her icons and paying to erect ever grander structures in her honour. While the common people pray for the hope and strength to lead them through lean times, their tithes go to fund an increasingly bloated clergy who spend their days finding reasons that the peoples' sinful nature forestalls their goddess's promised salvation.
You don't compose ballads calling your homeland "Realm of the Pure" unless you've got some hangups around cleanliness. Delndrek's corruption has touched more than the land, as aberrant sorceries and otherworldly mutations have begun to spring up among the populace. Those with influence do their best to hide these marks, those without are scapegoated, exiled, or made an example of.
For all their privilege and brainwashing, many of the realm's knights really do believe in the cause, having largely abandoned the ways of petty armed gentry and settling instead into martial orders. While they all compete to slay the most beasts and earn the most gallant reputation, it is a deepset longing among the knights to be able to find St. Tanria's lost spear, which in the right hands is said to be able to rid the land of its blight once and for all.
Arcane magic is viewed with suspicion in Xophena, as any rogue mage could be just another Delndrek waiting to happen. Exceptions are of course made for those spoken for by the nobility.
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This actually brings up something I am most passionate about when getting people into the hobby: D&D books (at least those made by Wotc) are a scam.
They offer minimal content in a badly curated format, filling up the rest of their space with bloat and flashy production value. As Evidence I will always point to the fact that the section on building Dungeons in the Dungeonmaster's guide, the book that is supposed to teach you how to play the game is only 6 out of the book's 320 pages, and 90% of it is filled with random tables and art.
It's the same candy coated emptiness as a bad marvel movie, and the reasoning is much the same: d&d books arn't game expansions the same way that marvel movies aren't works of art, they're products first and foremost, churned out on a predictable schedule to keep stockholder value high. They're set up to prey on the nerd instincts of completionism and merch acquisition, exploiting your love of the IP to ensure your quarterly tithe to the hasbro corporation.
This is why it always makes me so sad when I meet a new person or find a new youtuber and see that they've got a shelf full of WotC books. The company exploited their love of the game to con them out of hundreds of dollars that could have been spent on things that actually improve their gaming experience like dice, or snacks or 3rd party pdfs or (like dungeongal suggested) books that contained ACTUAL content.
It's another first principle thing that I think we in the TTRPG space need to internalize and pass on to our friends and especially the new players we teach: friends don't let friends waste money
I've briefly touched upon this topic before but here goes; I know you can play D&D for pretty much free because it's extremely easy to pirate, but I think we've settled by now that piracy doesn't actually hurt companies as much as they want us to think, meaning that pirating D&D isn't as big of a "stick it to WotC" move as it's often presented as. Of course if you absolutely have to play D&D (but, like, why?) you won't get any moralizing from me about piracy, like, ever.
But the point is: supporting another game either monetarily or with your valuable time is a much more direct and tangible way to stick it to the cultural monopoly of D&D than playing D&D and not paying WotC. I mean if it's another big-ish publisher I don't have a lot of faith in their working conditions being much better than WotC's, but in some cases it probably is so. As it often happens, the market leader can often afford to pay its employees worse simply due to those positions being more desirable.
But anyway who cares, there's lots of games out there where you can actually get a full game sometimes for less than the cost of a single D&D book and since those games are often built as more focused experiences than the D&D "forever game" formula you're actually more likely to get to experience all of the game instead of a lot of the content existing just as shadows on the cave wall.
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Adventure: A Draft Through the Door
An unnatural gloom creeps over the countryside, the shadows grow long and the dawn seems slow to rise. The townsfolk grow increasingly listless, and have asked your party to investigate the mage's manor across the lake, which seems to be the origin of this miasmic melancholia. Your journey will not be an easy one, as the landscape grows ever more eerie, and things are seen to move in the drifting banks of mist.
Of the many reasons that wizards take on apprentices (passing down knowledge, having a sounding board for new theories, an extra pair of hands to prepare spell components and do the sweeping up) one of the less discussed ones is how vital it is to have a second pair of eyes on lookout for when something magical inevitably goes wrong.
It makes sense when you think about it, a proper wizard's mind is too full of brilliance to bother with things like making sure that week's batch of potions don't boil over in the cauldron or that the stacked tomes of lore present a firehazard if they're not put away.
So it was with the mage Milghram Brightstaff and his precocious apprentice Adaline, who lived a quaint existence in the manor by the edge of the lake filling their days with scholarship, experiments, and attending to the problems brought to them by locals visiting from across the countryside. That was until mage Milghram decided to pop off to his extra-dimensional storage unit by way of a shadowfell portal in the manor's basement. He thought he'd only been gone a few hours, but neglected to apply the protective charm required to spare himself from the memory-sapping defences guarding his vault. now Milghram wanders the land of shades in a perpetual state of "why did I come into this room?" while the essence of that dread dimension leak back through his unclosed portal.
Adventure Hooks:
The party might've been sent to seek out the wizard, or visit town on their own buisness. Either way nothing's getting done so long as the countyside is blanketed in memory erroding fog and creatures from the shadow realm stalk through the murk. After several nights worth of exposure the town's defenders have had the wost of it, having forgotten what they're guarding or why they've established barricades.. it'll take some guile or calm negoitation for them to let the heroes past the gate.
When the party eventually gets to the manor they'll not only find the place locked, shuttered, and in many cases barricaded, but also protected by a slew of arcane defences ranging from animated objects to teleportation traps that will hurl them out into the lake. Two thirds of the way through their magical B&E and likely expecting a mad wizard to emerge from the shadows and begin a villain monolog, they'll instead find an exhausted teen running through the manor hurling heedless spells at a fleeing bug-thing demanding they help catch it before it gets too big.
For a girl of only fourteen winters beset on all sides by living nightmares Adaline is handling herself marvellously. She's activated the manor's wards sealing the worst of the cursed mist in the basement (or atleast she had until the party chopped their way in) and has been using a borrowed wand to hunt down most of the shadow creatures that have begun to infest the manor grounds. She's deeply worried about her teacher however, and blames herself for the series of distractions that led the old man to forgetting to throw on his protective charm. Depending on how they play it, they can either have her charm them and venture into the portal looking for the errant mage, or attempt to distract her long enough to close the portal themselves and leave the old wizard for dead.
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Mystery: Oh, How the Iron Coffin Hungers!
There's been a rash of graverobberies across the kingdom that have the authorities suspecting necromancy. For their part, the necromancer's guild has nothing to do with these crimes and is willing to hire your party to help clear their name. The investigation will lead you to through tombs, black markets, and haunted crossroads of the realm, as it becomes clear the culprits are seeking far more than coin or corpses at the bottom of those defiled graves.
Clues & Complications:
A missing body is usually a dead giveaway that a necromancer has been involved in a grave robbery, as most criminals only care about grabbing what valuables they can and wouldn't result to bodysnatching unless someone was going to pay them for it. How unusual then when a few of the bodies begin turning up days after they were exhumed, one in an abandoned cellar, one on the side of the road, and one in a completely different town, which may give a hint as to the culprit's movements.
Working for necromancers has its benefits, the guild is aware of the habits of the corpse trade (only in a theoretical sense, you understand, yes?) and can use their magic to extract information from the cadavers. Strangely enough it appears all the corpses bear the marks of previous magical questioning, hinting that it might be information the robbers were after, not flesh or treasure.
The bodies all belong to minor gentry or well-to-do merchants, the ideal targets for graverobbers who don't mind breaking into a tomb or fussing with a trap (both of which the party might have to do during their investigation) if it means access to better plunder. If the party press deeper however they'll notice a recurring symbol, on a ring or a tattoo or etched into the gravemarker, resembling the crudest sketch of a jawbone.
Just like it seems the party is getting answers, the corpses they've been trailing sit up and lunge for the nearest individual's throat, transformed by dark power into a rampaging ghoul. Chaos ensues as this awakening occurs not just with those corpses that have already been found, but also with those that were previously undiscovered as well as a half dozen or more random bodies scattered across the countryside. Though they seem too possessed with hunger to be capable of speech, if the party manage to restrain one of the ghouls and sate its unholy hunger, they may just get the last few clues they're looking for.
Background: In life all of the bodies belonged to a secret society known as the jawbone club, a bad pun on one of the first mystical objects they'd obtained; a crude weapon made from the skull fragment of some great beast, unearthed on one of their founder's estates by some adventurers clearing a nest of monsters.
Their association started a few generations before as a mostly innocent affair, a nameless but exclusive social lodge where those in the know could smoke and gamble and make the sort of back room deals that occupy much of the energy of the idly wealthy. Those who took an interest in the jawbone realized that whoever held it had greater luck in their personal affairs, in no small part because of the unlucky and sometimes disastrous circumstances that would befall their rivals. They became secretive, an inner circle within the lodge that took on more authority as their powers grew, understanding emerging that if they fed their blood to the jawbone it would grant them power.
Power does not spring from nowhere however, as the weapon was infact an artifact dedicated to the ghoul-saint Doresain, the avatar of a hungry and terrible demon god who was in turn feeding on the hungry ambitions of the inner circle. Unconscious impulses became whispers became visions, as the tithe of blood raised to sacrifices of flesh and fingers, because what was letting the razor teeth of some dead beast scar your body if it meant your hateful old uncle suddenly took ill just after rewriting his will to leave you his fortune.
Things came to a head with Catiro Wayte, the youngest and least favored son of a large noble family. The Wayte clan owned land and mills aplenty and were no strangers to ambition, Catrio and his siblings were practically weaned on it. So when the opportunity came to take hold of his fortune at the price of only a little pain Catrio was only too happy to pay it, and keep on paying so long as he had blood to let and skin to scar. After they'd come to understand what it could do the Jawbone Club had made rules about how often its members could make use of the artifact, fearing not only discovery but one of their number growing in power above the others. Catrio begged, bartered, and blackmailed to jump the line every time he could, hacking away a little more of himself each time, not giving his wounds time to heal up between sacrifices.
One night, when the itch of pride and avarice overwhelmed the pain in his infected flesh Catrio broke into the jawbone's sanctum. It was too late when the others found him in the morning , he'd carved open his belly looking for more of himself to cut away and had died with the artifact buried in his guts. Such heedless sacrifice opened a door for the ravenous hunger of the gnawing god, transforming Catrio's corpse into its mouthpiece, hungry and cruel. For all their resources the Jawbone club were unable to slay their former friend, instead sealing him in the lodge's basement and later an iron coffin they had constructed. They had a select number of their most trusted find a place to entomb Catrio's body (along with the bone it still clutched) in some unknown location and swore all the rest to secrecy, dissolving the jawbone club and swearing never to speak of it for the rest of their days.
The Culprit & The Consequences:
Catrio left much behind on that night he met his end, including a commonborn mistress and a daughter named Heliana only a few years old. One could theoretically source his ambition to his desire to make a place for them in the world, but that would be making things far too simple.  Unrecognized by her father’s family and cut off from Catrio’s support Heliana and her mother ended up scraping to get by, with her ending up in the gravemaking trade out of one part practicality, one part wistful desire to perhaps one day find where her father was buried.
after nearly four decades after she and her mother were forced out on the street, Heliana’s crime spree began when by chance she found the first of the Jawbone marked graves. Remembering the stories her mother had told her about the club and its excesses, It took only a little convincing to have her fellow undertakers help her unearth the body, and a few charms learned from a travelling death priest to get the cadaver talking.  After that it was just a matter of asking which corpse knew what, tracing her way through the postmortem ranks of the Jawbone club until she found out what had happened to her father and where his body lay. 
Originally, all Heliana had wanted to do was give her father a proper burial alongside her some years dead mother, as she was told was always his wish. Plans changed when her father began to speak to her within the iron coffin after she’d unearthed it from its secret hiding space. Through the magic of the ghoul-saint he knew her, knew of her hungry years, and of the long dormant pride and ambition he’d handed down to her along with his blood: a desire to be recognized no matter the cost. He whispered a plan into her mind, a way for him to return to life and use the artifact he still carried to make everything as it should be. Naturally when they caught her agreeing with the corpse, most of Heliana’s muscle deserted her, and might give your party a much needed lead in their tall tales.
The animation of the other jawbone club members as ghouls was only a warning sign, a byproduct of Heliana breaking through the outermost layer of the iron coffin’s wards in preparation of something far more calamitous. Her father’s plan (or rather, the thing wearing her father like a mask) is to have Heliana burn the iron coffin along with her mother's bones in a ritual pyre at the heart of the Wayte estate. Catrio’s spirit will be free, devour the grounds (and his unwelcoming family) and use the power of the jawbone artifact to remake them all as they should be, with him as lord of the manor, united with his lover and child.  While she’s more than willing to even the score with the people who denied her birth and threw her mother out on the street, why Heliana doesn't suspect is the horde of flesh eating undead and other malign spirits that will be unleashed should the ritual be allowed to finish.  
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Dungeon: Grave Portent
Tormented by nightmares of a darkened sarcophagus in the depths of an infamous cavern tomb, a nobleman sends the party to investigate the source of these visions fearing one of his rivals is using dark magic in an attempt to ruin him, possibly from beyond the grave.
Once known as the graven sepulcher the necropolis was dedicated to Illmater and Located in a cavern thought to be the final resting place of one of his saints. For more than a century it was the go-to place to be interred if you were a pious elder of the temple or someone wealthy who wanted their lifetime of sins forgotten beneath a sacred slab. Then a war and ensuing famine broke out, and the temple of Illmater took it upon themselves to house the swelling ranks of the dead. Once the paupers outnumbered the proud and the pious the cavern tomb lost much of it's prestige, coming to be known in the common day as "the bone pit"
Adventure Hooks:
Given it's remote location few venture to the old necropolis anymore, with the few countryfolk leaving their swaddled dead on the interior stairs for fear of braving its darkened depths. The party may be asked to carry one of these bodies in return for asking for directions, sworn to see it to its destination less they suffer the curse of the bereaved and recently dead. Along their way they'll be pestered by a Yeth hound who wants nothing more than to eat and despoil the body, simply for the wrongness of it all.
With its many hiding places and forboding reputation the necropolis is a great place to lay low, which explains the gang of outlaws currently hiding from the law in its upper reaches after robbing a tax wagon. If the party encounter them they'll pretend to be peaceful pilgrims, but they're intent on not sharing their takings and won't hesitate to add a few more bodies to the bonepit if necessary.
Apart from the usual shades and skeleton warriors, the necropolis is haunted by a Mohrg spawned from the corpse of a wealthy noblewoman who thought it a delicious irony that she could pay to be buried among saints and holyfolk despite her secret history of serial murder. Only awakening after the tomb's consecration decayed and with hazy recollections of who she was, the Mohrg will observe the party from the shadows, following them back to town if it can to become an enduring thorn in their side.
In the depths of the necropolis the party will find the sarcophagus open and waiting, just as the nobleman described it. Beside they will encounter a death priest of Nerull, god of unnamed graves, who will council them about the vision's meaning: The sarcophogus is the nobleman's destined end, and should he not come to rest within it soon a great peril will befall the land. Its up to them to deliver the bad news and convince the nobleman to make a selfless sacrifice, or perhaps contrive an unfortunate accident and make off with his corpse.
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Due to a unique confluence of dashboard alchemy this March 15th (A Merry Ides to those that celebrate 🗡️🗡️🗡️) I had an interesting thought regarding fallout new vegas:
If you strip away the rhetoric and the goofy football pads, you'll find that the fundamental motivating factor of Caesar's Legion is male insecurity, with everything from how they treat women to their primitivist view of technology drawing from the same fear of immasculization that fuels all "redpill" movements.
(This is to say nothing of the use of roman iconography and the "retvrn" dogwhistle about abandoning modern "decadence" and harkening back to the rigour of an imaginary past)
This casts Caesar as our Andrew Tate figure, a charismatic ideologue who pitches a worldview that promises to impose order on the frightening chaos of reality. His philosophy is a salespitch targeted directly at his listener's insecurities but meant only to benefit him: " you are afraid of being weak. I know what strength is, listen to me. by internalizing my words and spreading my message you will become strong." Of course the difference is that Caesar's empire is built on expansionist violence where Tate's is built on insecure teenagers feeding misogyny into the algorithm for the sake of engagement. Either way it creates a hierarchy that doubles as an information bubble, where position within the hierarchy is determined by who best can adhere to/rebroadcast the leader's message, identical to how an mlm ships product.
This quite fits with a watsonian reading of fallout: the wasteland is a hostile and terrifying place formed in the shadow of an objectively failed 50s (styled) traditionalist patriarchy. Though society may have collapsed, the people who survived inherited that society's rigid view of what a man should be like (strong and driven by the acquisition of material and status) a view largely incomparable with the new environment (starvation, radiation, and mutant dinosaurs will kill you no matter who you are or how much stuff you have). Since institutionalized masculinity had failed, people in the wasteland were forced to look for new paradigms of what masculinity (read: strength) looked like, a void into which Caesar's ultraregresive worldview fit perfectly.
From a doylist perspective however, I'm not sure the writers were really thinking about gender all that much during the rushed development of FNV. Like just about every other aspect of legion society that wasn't cut for time, everything about them seems to be evil for the sake of evil. However If there's one thing you can say about the underbaked concept it was a real hit with social regressives incapable of reading deeper. Unironic pro-legion discussion of Caesar's ideology has been an on ramp to turn insecure nerds into fascists the same way that ideologies like Caesar's have been turning insecure jocks for decades. It's poe's law in action: the developers gestured at fachism but failed to do enough with it to prevent a portion of their player base from becoming radicalized.
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Squabbling city states also means plenty of mercenary companies to beat up and scattered brands of brigands to form your default low level bandit encounters. It also means war can break out as a means of raising the stakes without it being an existential threat the way that "The lands of men being overtaken by the forces of darkness" type plots usually are.
I'm always criticizing eurocentric fantasy worldbuilding, but one thing I think it's underused are city-states and trade republics and leagues. Not that they don't exist, but they're often in the background, the fantasy genre is so focused on monarchies and dynasties and noble drama, while those systems have so much room for intrigue and stuff without getting into "who's the TRUE heir of the super magical monarch" (yes, I know they had aristocratic families that ruled almost as monarchs, but trust me, Medici drama is another beast from regular feudal stuff)
Venice with its stupidly complex election system and their eternal rivals in Genoa, Florence home of the Rennaissance, the Hanseatic League, and lesser known examples like Novgorod, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Taifa of Córdoba, the Consolat de Mar (technically not a republic but kind of an Iberian Hansa) and if we go farther back, the leagues of city states of antiquity... you know what, I'm bored of feudalism. Next time I do a fantasy setting, it will all be city states and republics. Fuck feudalism.
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I think the seed of this largely exists in the 5e homebrew space, with people proposing total overhauls to the classes, alternatives to the rules, and slowly bringing in better design practices from the indie ttrpg space.
What I want to see (and what I think could be likely in the wake of all the 5e alternatives inspired by OGL crisis hitting market over the next couple of years/the inevitable onednd flop) is dms being very vocal about what "hack" they're using for the 5e ruleset. I want 5e fractured through a prism, with different groups working to make the game better in their own particular way crosspollinating until we have a thriving "do it yourself" the way the OSR community has.
So, train of thoughts.
Somewhere in the middle of 2010s (I forgor) Games Workshop closed Warhammer Fantasy line completely with the destruction of the Old World and started the line of Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
The goal was to draw new players and the change was like massive. Imagine if Forgotten Realms were destroyed by cataclysm and "continued" by Planescape, like that much of a difference. And it's not only about setting but about the game as well, it was not just different rules, it was whole new assumed mode of play.
So as a result, a lot of old players felt completely dissatisfied by it and decided to make their own fan version of Warhammer. There were numerous projects, but the most successful is The Ninth Age. It started as just patched version of 8th edition of Warhammer but slowly developed both somewhat different mechanics and different setting, very reminiscent of Warhammer but different (some things that I can say is that it handles non-European human cultures way better and gives more personhood to orcs and goblins). And what's more importantly, while I can't describe the exact process, all of it was collectively created by forim residents.
My initial (optimistic) thoughts were that we could together create like Collective TTRPG. "Generic Fantasy Adventure Game" is a pretty popular concept, and with the combined power of nerd minds we would be able to make a modular game that can be easily scaled to any degree of complexity you desire (or a family of related games if it's easier), and that, much more importantly, wouldn't be affected by corporate need to sell more products. Like there are already thousands of free indie games for generic fantasy, but we need to make a game like this a default somehow.
Those were my dreams, and after that I thought "lol, imagine if after the release of OneD&D 5E players will just do this"
I think a truly community made and community owned alternative to D&D 5e would be really cool! there have of course been a few 5e-based rulesets like A5E (which is actually really cool imo) that seek to do something new with the core of 5e, but A5E specifically feels like an expansion of ideas from 5e than just a "D&D 5e with fan patches implemented." Still very cool and worthy of checking out definitely.
And yeah incidentally should such a project arise WotC actually made the community's work easier last year by releasing the SRD under Creative Commons. But yeah, I think it would be cool! How likely it is to happen, I don't know.
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All art is an extension of language, and language is all about communicating ideas. What any storyteller or artist is trying to do is to take an idea that's in their head and transpose it as vividly as possible into yours, a process which might have more or less success depending on the skill of the artist, the complexity of the idea, and the clarity of the language used to communicate.
Themes are as key to understanding stories as shape language is to understanding visual art, they're the backbone that both helps the artist compose the message and the audience begin to make sense of the details.
This is why AI text/art is mostly slop: it copies the form of communication without any ideas to communicate.
"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).
Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.
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Villain: Jysh'parun, Outergod of Unwelcoming Earth
As distant and ancient as a mountain, as scornful as an axebitten tree
Many philosophies debate and negotiate the relation of mortals to their environment. Some see nature as a thing to be tamed in the name of survival, domesticated, exploited. Others proffer a more symbiotic path, a holistic system to be protected and stewarded.
Beyond these there are the ravings of those claimed by Jysh'parun, who claim that mortals have no right to exist at all, and survive merely by the beneficence of the trees and stones. While all but the most foolish agree that heed must be paid to nature, none but those under the unwelcoming earths dominion would think that there is some geological-feudal hierarchy to which we must all submit.
This then is the paradox of the Unbowing Mountain: a god that claims the worship of things that do not traditionally think, but views nature through a distinctly mortal lens of domination and hierarchy. It's an absurdity bordering on being a joke, atleast until Jysh'parun's influence washes over the land and the forest marches off to war while the rivers start demanding tribute.
Adventure Hooks:
Having come into possession of a disused tract of land, a young farming couple were picking the stones from their new field in preparation for planting when they came across the petrified remains of some indescribable horror. Resembling nothing so much as a horse sized mandrake-root with teeth, they've reached out to neighbours, the sheriff, even the local wizard looking for advice about what to do... only to wake up one morning and find the thing gone. Theft or reanimation are both equally alarming possibilities, and the whole region has been on edge since.
Having been thought dead for years after being lost in a winter storm, a dwarven cartographer descends from the mountains claiming to be their mouthpiece and demanding sacrifices in their name. Her words at first go unheeded, at least until the glacial rivers begin to run with noxious acid, transforming back only when something living is thrown in. Farms and villages are drying out and grisly offerings of livestock now fail to meet her standards she claims the mountains will only be satisfied when the people of the realm throw their rulers in and swear fealty to the peaks on high.
The king's palace is in chaos after a coup took place in the royal gardens, specifically when the great tree that shaded his majesty's favourite thinking bench stabbed him in the back with one of it's branches and then skampered off to replant itself on the throne with the crown in tow. Before Anyone knew what was happening, greenery had overtaken the palace locking most outside while trapping certain vital hostages inside.
Inspirations: Something that's all too often lost in the "madness and tentacles" misinterpretation of eldritch horror is that much of the genre is spun off from the particular phobias of HP lovecraft. When we use the iconography without understanding the anxieties behind it, we risk creating a shallow B movie version of the horror we want our audience to feel.
To write good horror then, we need to draw off fears we understand, and with Jysh'parun I wanted to tap into climate anxiety in a way I don't think I've seen before. We've all resigned ourselves to the fact that climate change is happening, with the understanding that its being driven by the bullheaded egos and greed of people who are so powerful their perspective on life bears no resemblance to anything we could possibly conceive of. Translate their willingness to let us suffer for the sake of profit into a psudo historical fantasy context and you get the Unwelcoming Earth: widening sinkholes that demand tolls from passersby while an approaching tsunami proclaims the divine right of kings. It's not only absurd it's fundamentally idiotic but that it doesn't mean it won't destroy you and everyone you know.
Worshippers: Delusional druids and geomancers. Goliaths and dwarvenkind who get too into being "children of the mountain". Sentient trees, Living crystals, and other elemental entities who seek to put themselves "above" other forms of life. Corrupted primoridals.
Signs: Aberrations that resemble roots or stone spontaneously emerging from nature, acid flowing from normally clear running springs, statues of lordly alien figures carved from erosion, not tools. Proclimations in an unknowable script engraved deep under the earth or on monumental scale.
Symbols: A glyph resembling a mountain range or branches of a tree in the shape of a crown.
Titles: The Unbowing Mountain, The Insuperable, King of all Corners,
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Ooooh, not only does this design fuck but it solves one of the oldest problems with mimic fights (the mimic being outnumbered after the initial ambush) by introducing the swarm of "fools coin" parasites to act as backup.
If you wanted to be REALLY mean (and you should) have the parasites have a str or dex impeding poison that softens targets up for the mimic's grapple attempts.
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I accidentally spent 80 hours painting my own take on a Mimic. Please take a look.
Can see higher res here
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WotC KNOWS if they change anything it's going to cause the 5e playerbase to startle and bolt like a frightened deer, and all of the moves it's made for the last 5 years or so (the dms guild, slowing down the production of content, buying dndbeyond, not publishing pdfs of their own, developing the onednd tabletop) has been an attempt to gently construct a fence around that playerbase and turn d&d into a subscription service.
They've been trying to do this since world of warcraft was the geek hobby dujour, and since their last attempt at enclosure with 4e was dead on arrival (not the game system mind you, the attempt to make the game into a subscription service). They think they've learned from their mistake and that they can manage to sell fortnite style d&d battlepasses so long as they don't change the name.
Ironically I think the asker was on point and a wide swath of the fandom really would be excited for a "5e advanced" edition, letting the crowd that's gotten familiar with the game over the past decade jump into something more involved.
What's the point of WotC not calling things "new edition"? Like I think that people would only be more hyped if it was called that
I of course can't read their minds, but my suspicion is that it's informed by a fear of splitting the fanbase. Wizards of the Coast has 3 editions one of which went through a major revision (D&D 3.5, a lot of people compare 4e Essentials to 3.5 but it was nowhere near as big a shift to be entirely honest) and thus knows that an edition change can in fact trigger a mass exodus of players into other games. Even though 5e was massively successful and maintains a huge player base, I suspect the people at WotC are afraid of a potential split in the player base unless they're very careful about presenting One as a revision instead of a new edition.
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Reading these notes feels like looking into a mirror dimension. I love concentration as a mechanic, I love how it makes you have to think about which of your big punchy spells you're going to use this combat, about how it acts as a game of caster keepaway with the enemies.
This is to say nothing of the badguys using concentration spells, which is where high mobility/ranged characters shine.
i dont like the concentration mechanic in bg3
i end up not using the majority of my warlock spells over just casting either hunger of hadar or hex + eldritch blast every turn bc you can basically only cast one spell at a time
so many of my spells feel useless or not as good as hunger of hadar or hex or too situational to give up concentrating on those 2 spells
i literally have haste and call lightning and greater invisibility and never use them!!!!
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Villain: Laormoch, Archfey of the Wild Unknown
Embodying the primal awe and terror of those places beyond the edge of the map, this ancient spirit of the land exists to test and torment those who stray too far from the safety of the familiar.
Though the old stories call him the" thane of the faroff" or an "invisible giant as big as the sky", it is hard to put Laormoch's physicality and the fear it evokes into words: How do you describe being lorded over by ancient trees, or the scornful glare of unfamiliar stars? His shape is only ever suggested by how it bends the natural world, but he is always distant, though always so immense that it feels like he may reach out and crush the viewer.
Adventure Hooks
The party stumble into a village to find its inhabitants struggling to recover after a disastrous hunt. Some wretched beast tore through some weeks ago and was only dispatched with great effort. It was a cause for celebration, at least until the thing was seen stalking in the woods, reading for another attack. To prevent it from assailing their walls and destroying their homes the village's best hunter leads the village's strongest on a sortie, downing the beast only after injuring many and losing a few. This has happened three times so far and the village's defenders are wearing thin. Perhaps the party could lend their aid once the beast is spotted again, and perhaps spend the intervening time trying to find its obviously supernatural origins.
Almost inconsolable, a great lord calls for the party's aid in rescuing his son and heir, who he claims was stolen by the sky itself: snatched out of his tower window by a great hand and carried off into the clouds. The servants and courtiers are skeptical, everyone knows the lord was so protective of his son he barely let the boy leave his rooms, let alone the castle, and it's likely the lad finally managed some means of escape. While they're considering exactly how to search for the lad the party will be approached by the Lord's bastard daughter, she was denied her inheritance by her father's traditionalism, and sees the opportunity to have herself recognized if the true born heir is never found. She'll ask that even if the party does find her younger brother, they either help him escape or leave him where he is, as it would be better for the both of him if he doesn't return to the castle.
Backstory:
Seeking to prove herself against a boastful rival, a hunter ventured far from her village into the deep wilderness, where she found and slew an elk of ethereal beauty, eating its flesh to sustain herself and taking its antlers as her trophy. Though she returned in glory, the beast had been marked by the Thane of the Faroff, who has raised its butchered body as a reverent and gifted it bloodthirsting branches to replace what was taken. The revenant won't stop until it's killed the hunter and torn her body to shreds, which will likely be sometime after she's gotten a good portion of the other villagers killed because she's too good at hunting and too stuborn to die without a fight. The revenant has more than one trick though, the branches animating its body bear seedpods which it scatters as it dies or gores others to death. These seeds eventually grow into twigblights, which are slowly massing in the forest waiting to overwhelm the village's defenders and open the gate for the revenant's final rampage.
Wishing more than anything to get away from the suffocating confines of his home, the young heir has found himself on the wrong end of a fairy bargin. Whisked off by Laormoch to his castle beyond the horizon, the boy has been forced to serve as the archfey's cupbearer as repayment for his captor's "kindness". The party will need to dig deep into the local folklore to figure out how and why the sky might snatch up a forlorn youth, potentially missing him entirely until they run into him while visiting the feywild for a completely different adventure.
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What makes it even funnier is that we're dealing with people who's area of expertise is finding ways to break reality, meaning that the more entrenched you are in your wizarding studies the more likely it is that you'll find a way to make reality confirm to your inherent bias.
This leads to your tenured litches/elven archmage professors LITERALLY unable to share rooms with eachother not only because of academic rivalry but because they have conflicting (and centuries outdated) theories of how physics should work and having them get into an augment would likely rip a hole into the astral sea.
Yeah, a lot of what bothers me about fantasy settings (especially D&D) is that people try to run wizards like they're academics, but their only exposure to academics is authoritative professors telling them The Truth, so they don't realize that all academics are always 5 seconds away from trying to strangle each other over questions like 'does time really pass or does it just seem to pass'
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Dungeon meshi is one of the only "realistic" fantasy IPs that earns the moniker because in addition to it's unrelenting dedication to the practicalities of dungeon exploration (both good and bad) it also shows people being people, flaws and all.
It actually engages with the prejudice that's baked into the fantasy genre in a way that's not just saying "racism bad" or using it as a throwaway attempt to be edgy/mature.
Our heroes and extended cast have absorbed the prejudices that are common in their world, the same way that we all end up with any other hangups and biases, and they overcome those prejudices the same way real people have to: by encountering truth that challenges their worldview and allowing themselves to change for the better.
its a shame how ryoko kui managed to make a series with such a realistic portrayal of sistemic and internalized racism only for people to have it fly over their heads and go 'x character is racist!! how dare you like them!!!' when like. literally every single character has said something racist. your blorbo is racist. my blorbo is racist.
marcille hates orcs. kabru has dehumanized kobolds. mithrun said a slur. laios and falin treat mountain people like savages. analyse these traits meaningfully or perish
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