The General D&D thread

The Plane of Shadows was more of a Dark World than its own thing, and was mostly limited to the Forgotten Realms. But the Shadowfell is more or less a combination of the Plane of Shadows and the Ethereal Plane, along with the Demiplane of Dread, I'll grant you that.

What kind of adventures take place there though? Mortal humans and other sapients apparently live there but have they just always been there or were their ancestors brought in from other planes like the domains of dread? Do they know the Raven Queen lives in their realm? What's the economy like in a place that leads directly to an afterlife judge? Are these things even discussed in official material?

I've heard of Gloomwrought but all I can tell is that it's just a very corrupt town, which to me seems boring since you can just have that on the material plane.

edited 27th Jun '17 11:22:41 AM by Braincogs

'very corrupt' undersells the idea by a mile. It's supernaturally corrupt, just as a beginning.

Living in Shadowfell drains one's will to live, and permanent residents leans as far into hedonism as they can safely manage in order to stave off the crushing despair that the constant reminders of your own morality saddles you with.

Gloomwrought in the largest city in the realm. To claim the city is 'haunted' or 'cursed' will earn you blank looks from the citizens, because obviously it's haunted and cursed. What tipped you off, the district where undead are the majority population? Or was the way the street and buildings keep moving around and shifting, and sometimes collapsing with people inside, only for new buildings to take their place.

Even claims that the city itself is living, malevolent entity sustained by the collective suffering of it's inhabitants won't produce much more than a 'meh'. Because, like, even if that's true- and no one can say for certain one way or the other- the city's still safer than anywhere else in this nightmare of a plane.

So that's the basic overview. Though to answer your specific questions:

• Most mortal inhabitants are ancestors of people who came there from some other plane.
• They absolutely know the Raven Queen lives in the plane, and hence worships of all other deities, even the normally benevolent ones, are confined to weird cults. Though the Raven Queen's stronghold is remote and inaccessible enough that her presence isn't really a matter of day-to-day importance.
• Economy is broadly similar to anywhere else- there are a decent number of plants and animals that don't quite work anywhere else, and extraplanar travel will never not open up new trade routes. Just, y'know, try not to mess with the whole undead thing.

It wasn't at all. Most of Return to the Tomb of Horrors (which is Greyhawk) takes place in the plane of Shadows. It also featured in Planescape.

edited 27th Jun '17 12:05:47 PM by Ghilz

Think of normal people forced to live in a gothic horror world and you'll have some idea. The Nightmare Before Christmas honestly isn't a bad place to start, but taken more seriously. All the old Universal Horror movie monsters have a place here, along with serial-numbers-filed-off gypsy stereotypes (the Vistani) and classic D&D monsters and gods. Things are more post-Renaissance rather than medieval for the most part.

Adventures should probably focus on devil's bargains and games with death, curses, hauntings, revenge plots and murder mysteries. Probably go a bit more soap opera than you usually would in a D&D game, since even relatively small stakes can and should end in murder and betrayal. Corrupt families, missing persons, mistaken identities. Vampires, revenants, mummies, werewolves, necromancers. You can get away with making combat less frequent but more deadly, and depriving the players of their usual chances to rest and restock— though you might want to let your players know that's what you're going for, depending on your players.

Read up on Ravenloft if you get the chance, though. I'm not saying you could run it as written, but there's a lot of good fodder for inspiration in those old books, or even just the Ravenloft fan wiki.

I thought that was the Negative Material Plane in Return to the Tomb of Horrors? And everything turns up in Planescape since that's the point of the setting, but most prime worlds (ie. campaign settings), while there's no reason they couldn't have a Plane of Shadows like Toril, make do with the Ethereal Plane, which can be similar in places.

edited 27th Jun '17 12:12:47 PM by Unsung

Try playing Grim Fandango for inspiration.

soooooooo Slaanesh?

So for my setting I have an orc town, and I've been debating on how to make it's culture and all that. Then it hit me - I'll make em Warhammer 40k/FB orks in essence. Just because I'm gonna have a blast running games in that town.

I love Warhammer Orcs/Orks/Orruks. They're fucking hilarious.

That said, they're only really funny from their own perspective. From the POV of the average Imperial citizens who get captured and worked to death in hard labor by them or turned into a meat farm, they're not that funny.

edited 1st Jul '17 11:35:53 PM by M84

New to playing 5 and I got a question.

How do proficiency in skills and tools interact - or rather, whats the point of tool proficiency for tools that are obviously covered by skills. Especially when the game seems to hand out skill proficiency WAY more than tools.

The obvious ones are Performance and any Musical instrument, as well as Survival and Navigation tools. The game is pretty clear that you can't add proficiency bonuses twice, outside of stuff that explicitly breaks this rule (Rogues' Expertise for example).

Take the Entertainer background, it makes you proficient in Performance, and one instrument of your choice. But when would you ever play an instrument and have it NOT be covered by performance? What's the point of the instrument proficiency?

If you don't have proficiency in a musical instrument, your DM prolly won't let you add profmod to checks made using that instrument. A well-trained performer who has not been trained in an instrument they're given is nevertheless not going to have a great time on it, and has only their Charisma to rely on.
Performance covers a lot more than music, and someone might know how to play an instrument well without being overly comfortable with other possible applications of that skill. This way, a character can have the characteristic "can play a banjo" without necessarily having the characteristic "can do anything related to acting or doing other performance stuff."

Though this makes logical sense, it does make it kinda funny that Fighters and such get proficiency with all weapons, as opposed to picking a few to have trained with. A DM who decided to rule as such could easily say that having Performance just gave you the ability to use any instrument you want; some less-serious works do that with entertainer/comic relief characters anyway.

There is no Navigation skill. Navigator's tools are pretty much only for use when sailing, or perhaps planning a trip with maps or something, and are unrelated to any skill. Survival is for tracking things and, well, doing survivalist kinda stuff, which tends not to involve tools that complex. Profiency with vehicles, particularly land vehicles, may or may not overlap with the Animal Handling skill, and one who can adequately drive a carriage may well not be terribly great at riding a horse.
...*suddenly wants to see a Rogue smuggler with expertise in land vehicles*

lets face it, picking up a warhammer for the first time and smashing skulls is a damn site easier than just grabbing and playing a violin

Yeah, most of my DMs don't allow players to add Performance proficiency or expertise to a player playing a musical instrument they're not proficient in, so just a flat Charisma check. If it's a particularly difficult instrument like, say, a lyre or a lute, sometimes a couple DMs (at least in my history of playing) also toss in a disadvantage roll to that.

Then what's the point of Performance. If the Instrument expertise overrides the skill expertise, why ever waste a skill on perfomance if your bard for example, will only play the lute.

Why would music be the one specific thing that requires two proficiency to get your proficiency bonus on the roll?

Survival's description explicitly lists finding one's way through nature as it's example "Guide your group through a frozen wasteland". There's no reason to assume Survival stops working when on water. (Or that it only works in the arctic)

edited 5th Jul '17 11:14:51 AM by Ghilz

Like x4 said, the Performance skill applies to more than just instruments; oratory, dancing, storytelling, just to name a few. It's usually up to the DM, but basically: Instrument proficiency is knowing how to play the instrument well, Performance is knowing how to entertain with said instrument.

If I recall, though, Mike Mearls once said it's up to the DM if playing the instrument requires either Performance or Tool proficiency, since there's no specific RAW for tools.

It's a nonexistent difference. you entertain people with music by playing music well.

(In fact, the ezact words are "Delight an audience with music". So yeah, Perform covers playing music well)

edited 5th Jul '17 11:22:04 AM by Ghilz

In 3.5 rules, you can obtain synergy bonuses for having related proficiencies.

I suppose tool proficiency could cover composition and tuning the instrument, I guess.

It's just a wonky bit, like a lot of things in 5e. If you have Performance or Thievery or another skill that works with a given set of tools, that overrides your tool proficiency...but you still need that proficiency for that to work.

That's how I read it, at least. 5e is meant to be more open to interpretation than 4th or 3rd. Individual tool proficiencies are there as much so that you can have expertise in a given set of tools but not the related skill as much as anything, it seems to me. Bit of a corner case situation.

personally I would rule that you don’t need performance to add proficiency when playing an instrument you know, so you don’t need both. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, i’d also say you can use either performance or tool proficiency to play a thing. Entertaining a room of drunks? Use whatever. Trying to play a concerto? Tool proficiency only. there are so many edge cases, which is why the DM exists.

Pretty much. 5e reinforces the importance of DM fiat. This is the kind of fiddly rule that can and should vary depending on the situation.

"Fiddly"... I see what you did there.

Anyway, to me it makes no sense from a gameplay standpoint to separate out technical proficiency at playing an instrument from the ability to put on an entertaining artistic performance unless you set the skills up synergistically.

It doesn't. It's wonky. It's 5e. It should probably be *either* skill proficiencies, which are broad, or tool proficiencies, which are specific. D&D tries to have it both ways. Honestly, though, it's not much worse than Knowledge (Whatever) in 3e.

It's probably a holdover from when the system was going to be more modular. Personally I've preferred the background proficiencies variant since 4e: if it makes sense for your character's established backstory, treat it as a trained skill, using whatever ability score seems appropriate.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think Performance covering music is a mistake.

All the skills cover stuff that don't require specific tools (Stealth, Athletics, History, Arcana, Survival).

Stuff that requires tools is all covered under tools (Herbalism Kit, Thievery Tools, Artisan's Tools (Painter/Smith/Etc...)). You aren't picking a lock with your fingers, so it makes sense it requires tool. Etc....

I think they intended performance to cover arts that don't require tools (Singing, Poetry, Dancing, etc...). And someone fucked up and added music in the description, despite instruments being listed as tools.

edited 5th Jul '17 2:09:38 PM by Ghilz