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just-an-enby-lemon · 2 months

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Thinking about the complexities of a "losing your magic" story in a DnD (and similar) scenerio because what it means completly depends of your class. Because while not everyone is born with magic, everyone can have it.

How for a sorcerer losing their magic is genuinally about losing a part of themselfs, to suddently not being able to do something they always did. Losing your magic is like sudently losing a limb or one of your senses. And how besides being always theirs, their magic is ancestral how it can mean losing a connection with a part of their family history.

How for paladins is about morals. About breaking their vows whatever they are, dealing with the fact that they changed or maybe that morals were always way more complicated than they thought they were. (The Oathbreaker subclass changes things but I think it can work if Oathbreaker is one of the ways to embrace the emotional conflict that took your magic). Is almost phylosofical. Is the what makes Thor worthy?

How for druids, clerics and warlocks are different levels of losing a connection. For druids is with nature, with a force beyond their comprehension but that became a part of you for so long and who are you without this feeling? For warlocks is so many things, is losing a boss, a friend, is the price of freedom, is the loss of whatever you had with the sentient being that gave you powers. And for clerics is a mix, is about if their gods are feelings like nature or beings that talk to them, but whatever it is, for clerics, for clerics is a lack of faith. Is about what happens when you doubt your god, when you can't belive it or in it. Is also about what happens when your god doesn't belive in you.

For bards and mages is the loss of a skill. The bards might have the loss of their playing or voice but even if not, even if is just the magic that is gone, well they, just like the mages, studied hard to be abble to do magic. If for a sorcerer is like losing a limb, for them is like waking up in the morning and noticing your accent changed or that you don't speak a language you once did anymore, is trying to ride the same bicycle you used to go to work everyday and noticing you just doesn't know how.

#now since i'm listening to rqg #i need need to point out #that it started with me thinking aboug rqg wilde #and the differences between hamid's fear of losing magic and wilde's actual reality after losing his #and after getting it #thinking about how rq wilde speaks with a posh british accent #not a hint of the irish he had to have had #and thinking about how trying to do prestigiditagion and failing for him is actually similar to the day he realized it #the day he noticed his thoughts were not in irish gaelic anymore #also a thing hamid and him can totally bound about because hamid also lost his cairo accent #rqg #rusty quill gaming #dnd #pathfinder #ttrpg #loss of magic #in a less this specific podcast does degenerative disorders like dementia and Alzheimer affect bardic and mages magic?#does amnesia affect their spells?#are they muscle memory?#is some of them muscle memory and some not?

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sprintingowl · 2 months

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Romance Of The Perilous Land

So the thing about Romance Of The Perilous Land is that it's basically 5e. Classes, to hit roll, advantage, saves, proficiencies, spells as little pre-made bombs that you prepare at the start of the day, magical items that give you things like "avoid losing 1 HP once per day." It's 5e.

But Romance Of The Perilous Land does make some interesting changes, and not just in its shifting of the game setting from pseudo-Tolkien murder-wandering to Hollywood Arthuriana. There's a fair bit of OSR design that got poured into its cup.

Romance is a roll under system. You throw d20 under your relevant stat, of which there are only five (might, reflex, constitution, mind, charisma). Difficulty is subtracted from your stat, so on a hard roll your 12 Reflex might be only a 7 Reflex. Exact difficulty numbers are spelled out in the book.

This cleans up a lot of the murkiness of 5e DMs setting DCs. You don't have to fuss over whether something is a DC 13 or a DC 12, and you don't have to worry about that number not matching up with the way the player is envisioning the check in their mind. The roll is simple, regular, tough, or severe, and the difficulty for each is spelled out.

Romance also makes some similar changes to armor and spells. Armor provides refreshable HP instead of making you harder to hit. Your level is used to reduce the hit chance of enemy attacks. Spells are prepared by spending spell points, so you don't have to have X 1st level spells and Y 2nd level spells and so on all the way to 10th level. You choose what you want to prioritize, and spells can be prepared any time during the day as long as you're willing to spend time and spell points on them.

Romance's setting doesn't really click with me, but it's what you'd loosely expect from the word Arthuriana. This isn't an aggressively historical-feeling game like Pendragon---the Britain it gives you is more like what you'd expect out of a television show---but it's fleshed out and there's plenty of adventure and danger to be had, and folklore critters are everywhere to slay and bargain with.

Layout-wise, Romance is very easy to read and the rules are written in a way that makes them quick to skim. The book has a bunch of gorgeous art pieces like the one on the cover, and you can learn the whole ruleset in an evening.

For 5e players that want to step into the indie, Romance Of The Perilous Land is the easiest possible mechanical bridge. Everything 5e teaches you to expect from an rpg is here, plus a Camelots And Grails setting that 5e weirdly has some trouble doing---and the changes from 5e are easy to learn and generally for the better. There's a few published supplements for Romance (which is nowhere near the vast sprawl of the 5e third party scene), but they make the game easy to run out of the box.

Overall, if you're getting into TTRPGs, if you like Arthurian heroics, if you want to see what happens when you start making small system tweaks to 5e, or if you're in the OSR and you want to try something 5e-ish, Romance Of The Perilous Land fits all of these bills. It's a solid, professionally made TTRPG that doesn't revolutionize the hobby, but feels both familiar and fun.

#ttrpg #ttrpg homebrew #ttrpgs #ttrpg design #indie ttrpgs #rpg #indie ttrpg #tabletop #dnd #rpgs #arthurian #osr #5e #british folklore

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a-being-of-pure-vitriol · 3 months

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forcing my friends to play fiasco and ending up with every character dead on the floor of my kitchen has to be one of my favorite pastimes

#ttrpg #i fucking love fiasco guys did you know this #we played a murder on the orient express based one and it got so fucking angsty it was great #i played a sad divorced british man who lost his medical license and became a train conductor or something #then the estranged former friend coworker buddy pal show up like “hey there's a serial killer on the train btw”#and i went “eugene what the fuck”#genuinely just throw me into a void at this point

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plot-hooks · 1 year

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This requires your party to have a bag of holding or its equivalent.

Over time, have the party make progressively easier perception checks. Once they pass one, they notice that their bag is moving somehow. Should they choose to investigate, the head of an very nice and polite freedom fighter pops out and apologizes.

The freedom fighter is simply trying to cross the border with a minimum of fuss. You want to play the freedom fighter as unfailingly polite with a modicum of embarrassment at having being discovered by the party. Their original plan was to leave the bag of holding the first night after they crossed the border. The kind of level of embarrassment and politeness we're aiming for is... very British. Maybe Midwestern American

#dungeons and dragons #dnd #dnd5e #pathfinder #pathfinder rpg #pf2e #ttrpg #ttrpgs #midwest #british #freedom fighter

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roll-britannia · 11 months

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In this week’s episode, The Buccaneers finally make land, home once more there's lots to be done, Keth opens a door, Derek learns the true meaning of interior design, Jeff get's a food delivery, and Milo discovers the power of repossession. Will our boys put their trust back in Timbers? Will Gnome Bargins lock the doors when they see the boys coming? And why do I suddenly feel the need for a cheeky wurst and chips? There's only one way to find out, join Tom (Keth), Paul (Milo), Alex (Derek), and Chip (Jeff), led by James (the Dungeon Master) and Roll Britannia. NEW STOCK AVAILABLE IN OUR MERCH STORE - https://www.rollbritannia.co.uk/shop | #THEDICEDUNGEON - Promo Code ROLLBRIT for 10% OFF - https://thedicedungeon.co.uk/ | #WEPRINTMINIATURES - Promo Code ROLLBRIT for 10% OFF - https://weprintminiatures.com/ROLLBRIT | JOIN OUR PATREON - http://www.patreon.com/rollbritannia | CHECK OUT OUR OFFICIAL WEBSITE - https://www.rollbritannia.co.uk/ | Feedspot Best 100 Dungeons & Dragons Podcast #16 - https://blog.feedspot.com/dnd_podcasts/ | Fiction Horizon 50 Best D&D Podcasts To Listen In 2022 #9 - https://fictionhorizon.com/best-dd-podcasts-to-listen/ | DungeonMasterUK TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/dungeonmasteruk@dungeonmasteruk | Roll Britannia is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.

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decaeysa · 1 year

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may be joining a vtm chronicle soon so expect me to shit out another oc at light speed because i definitely don't have enough of those already

#* misc : out of character.#when the mental illness finally allows u to speak on voice to sb u have never met before #thank u kind brain curse for letting me do the thing #man it's rly weird being a ttrpg enjoyer and #trying to find new games to play #i have a handful of people i just usually play with #and i forgot how Scary finding smth new is #the ST is also british tho so we vibed over that #i hope i am cool and pogchamp enough #prayer hands only time will tell #but now i have 50 fucking character concepts living rent free in mi brain #screaming crying #remi stop making ocs challenge (failed miserably)

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mell0bee · 2 years

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finally getting to watch the gms of exandria roundtable and listen i may be a newbie gm but the voice time thing is too real. even as a player i’m like doing voices in the mirror and my brother walks past my door with the most “the hell are you doing” look on his face i’ve ever seen

#the problem with me is i want to do voices but i can do like 3 total voices #british new york and like the world’s worst slavic accent #and like when am i ever gonna do a new york accent in a fantasy game huh. HUH???#dhjdjdkdk #i tend Not to do accent voices but i do like alter my pitch or whatever #critical role #gms of exandria roundtable #idk how to tag #bee post #bee watches cr oneshots #im here doing voices in the bathroom and my poor brother who is just trying to do his homework can FULLY hear me #bee’s ttrpg adventures

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rannadylin · 2 years

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Rarely do I see a ttrpg so tailored to me... XD

#links #great british bake off #ttrpg #imagine this as a critrole oneshot though #with jester DMing? :-D

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theplotdoctor · 1 year

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Layline press stall from Dragonmeet. Great humans, great games.

#ttrpgs #british ttrpg #leyline press #dnd5e #dnd #dragonmeet

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guywithbeer · 7 months

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Check out my quick review of the tabletop roleplaying game 43AD on my RUTUBE channel.

Subscribe for more like this.

#43ad #review #ttrpg #romanempire #rome #tabletopgaming #rpg #britain #britishisles

#43 ad #43d #ttrpg #rpg #tabletop rpg #roman empire #rome #british isles #britain #roman legionnaire #fantasy

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dykepuffs · 3 months

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How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.

#worldbuilding #world building #fantasy races #racism in fiction #nomads #romani stuff

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