The General D&D thread

is that fuckin beowulf's shield

Yeah, our DM hated the base shield rules, especially since he's a huge medieval weapons buff, so he added a couple variants to shields, which were basically split in a manner similar to Dark Souls with Light, Medium and Heavy shields.

tite

Yeah, our DM likes to make changes to rules he considers stupid on the fly, though most of the time he's considerate enough to let us know in advance or consult us before doing so.

Been talking with my D&D GM and we think we might finally be able to restart our campaign where I'm the only character old enough to legally drink! (me, a 30 something Rogue/PI, a really 300 year old Revanent Paladin who is technically still 17, 17 year old runaway Warlock from a far off land... and a 4 year old Harpy who crashed on our ship as we heroically ran away from an invasion of the city in which I was based)

Us adventurers never run away! We only ever perform Tactical Withdrawals. At least, that's what my character would insist on telling yours.

edited 24th Nov '17 6:38:40 PM by ITNW1989

Just as discretion is the better part of valor, so is cowardice the better part of discretion. So, by that reasoning, you can valiantly hide under your bed.

Not when your ancestral home is haunted. Chances are the underside of your bed is already inhabited.

i am pretty sure Kay put a bear trap under her bed, just in case

Laziness and lysdexia can be fun. My roommate bought the new book. Is it Player's Handbook 2? Player Compendium? No. So I call it the Zantac Book because my brain stubbornly refuses to store the title.

I haven't gotten too far into the book yet, but Xanathar's no Xanxost so far. Although that limited edition cover is pretty great. That goldfish is sweet.

Torog is an awesome god. Though while part of me likes the idea of the Far Realm a lot, another part of me dislikes the idea of those entities drawing power from worship. There are tasks they require, and they are beings on a scale and of a power most mortals cannot hope to comprehend, but even if you call them gods, they're not the creations of mortal dreams and prayers the way the gods of the Outer Planes are. They're beings of physical matter, albeit physics and matter which don't operate by the rules of the Prime Material.

All this talk of gods reminds me. Years ago now, I was running a 4e Planescape campaign where I was basically going to a lot of trouble to have the players witness the cosmological changes between 3rd and 4th Ed. Kind of a latter-day Time of Troubles deal, where most of the newcomer gods were members of adventuring parties who ascended to godhood— mostly possible thanks to Bane rewriting reality to that his ascension occurred progressively earlier and earlier, existing in the pantheons of more and more primes, until he was able to fight alongside the rest of the Dawn Warriors personally.

Avandra, The Raven Queen, Ioun, Erathis, and Melora made a Party Of Five female adventurers, the Sisters of Fate, who became the long-term rivals of the Dead Three. Upon their ascension, Pelor recruited Erathis and Ioun into His so-called Triad of Illumination in the Bright City of Hestavar (the three points being Light/Compassion, Community/Civilization, and Knowledge, respectively). The Raven Queen overthrew Nerull, as noted, but Nerull was just one of Myrkul's many escape hatches, like Bane and Iyachtu Xvim or Bhaal and his 'spawn — Myrkul kicked out the old Nerull, who was still around as the steward of the Three, Jergal. Bhaal, meanwhile, managed to start getting himself worshipped again by reinventing himself as Zehir, the *other* god of murder.

There was a bit of a complicated thing involving a Stable Time Loop where Ioun and the stones that bear her name came into existence simultaneously, such that they had all always existed, tying into her nature as the goddess of prophecy and thoroughly confusing anyone who somehow (mis)remembered an existence in which she didn't exist. Meanwhile Amaunator (Amun/Aten/Ra), god of time and the original, only god in his own mind, has left the Realms and is out to absorb all the other gods of the sun back into Himself, as part of some unfathomable ideas about order, purity, and good housekeeping. And Moradin, as a very old god, and a creator god, was somehow very important to all of the above, since he might be one of the few gods who still remembers the multiverse as it used to be, a multiverse in which the Dawn War never occurred.

It was all very convoluted and was going to end with the Lower Planes merging into Baator, the gears of Mechanus dramatically springing apart and falling into a great heap on the Outlands, and Arcadia shifting wholesale into its place, with a new L/LG plane popping into existence to replace it. It was a good time coming up with it, though. I don't think I have the time to run it right now, but if anyone finds any of it useful for their game, let me know how that goes.

edited 25th Nov '17 6:52:23 PM by Unsung

@Unsung: Yup, it is a SCP thing.

Has anybody had trouble trying to decide what climate a specific place is supposed to have?

Not too much. Though when I run Eberron I do have to constantly remind myself that Breland is supposed to be Tropical.

Not the weather I associate with a place whose emblem is the Grizzly bear. But then again England has a proud tradition of heraldic lions so...

edited 27th Nov '17 1:11:33 PM by Ghilz

The entirety of Breland can't be tropical, can it?

So, research helps sometimes, who'd have guessed? I completely forgot Lloth is basically the evil rogue god in addition to spiders and the always-evil race of chaotic good elven rangers. I think I just slapped her down as "drow goddess" without reading her entry.

edited 27th Nov '17 4:03:18 PM by Rotpar

That's quite the mistake.

Yeah, most of Breland is tropical to subtropical (IIRC, Five nation does say the northern side is "Temperate"). It's not all jungles of course. But all the important areas? Like Sharn and Wroat? Tropical. Which is weird coz the art for all the Urban areas never really gets the "Also it's fucking hot" aspect across. Like, some of the pictures have characters wearing REALLY thick clothing. Forgiveable in Sharn where I guess the super high elevation would make things cold.

Mind you, as much as I love Eberron, and I do. The weather has a big case of Patchwork Map. Lhazaar is the worst where it transitions from "Carribean warm oceans" to "The Arctic" in a few hundred miles.

edited 27th Nov '17 4:11:43 PM by Ghilz

i just like making every city desert or tropical nowadays

The party in my online campaign is currently going east, from a temperate (?) country, into a jungle that has another temperate (?) country on the other side of it. Meanwhile, my basic concept for the country west of the first is Skyrim. : |

Maybe at some point I'll just say that the people of Tendorica have for some reason been making maps where North is Left instead of Up. I mean, the sunrise and sunset directions in Minecraft are called North and South, right? Have North and South always been considered Up and Down on Earth?

EDIT: Yayyy, turns out it is completely arbitrary!

edited 29th Nov '17 10:10:25 PM by Knowlessman

No. South was up for a long time and the medieval T-O maps basically had East at the top of the maps.

You found it yourself while I typed.

...And I put a desert up in the northwest. Fucking...

Even if Sunrise is North, I fucked it; I can't neaten it up just by realigning the equator.

...Can you have deserts on the same latitude as... as Skyrim? :/ ...Okay, can you have jungles adjacent to - okay, if we got any cartographers in here who feel like helping lemme know and I'll PM you the shitty Paint file I have [been showing my players for reference for around a year now].

Why not? You can just claim A Wizard Did It if the geography doesn't appear completely realistic. Maybe the desert is caused because it is the domain of a fire god, or the area features an elemental fire node.

I wanted to have a 'desert' in my otherwise Skyrim-esque continent, so I just made one out of dried seabed. Nobody knows why the sea receded.

You can see this in the official D&D campaign settings as well: this map of the Sword Coast◊ shows that the desert of Anauroch directly connects to a goddamn glacier at certain points. So I wouldn't sweat it.

You could argue though that Forgotten Realms' world building isn't very good

In short: IF you need a desert, bigass fire spell in ancient times. If you need a glacier, bigass ice spell in ancient times. Simple, easy solution to problems.