The General D&D thread

Mmm, would be acceptable to have an Oathbreaker Paladin without an oath? Basically, instead of getting their power from taking a sacred oath or being corrupted by breaking it, they'd get it from OPPOSING an existing oath. No principles but opposition to a different set.

Well, if they staunchly oppose an oath they've never taken, conceptually, doesn't that mean that they've taken an opposing oath? This paladin isn't traditionally an Oath Breaker because they've never fallen or taken these initial oaths they now oppose. As such, I'd say it's more natural that they take one of the other existing oaths that best represents their opposing philosophy or values.

If what you want is the Oathbreaker mechanics, you can probably re-skin it as some type of Social Darwinist or Sith-like person who strongly believes the tenets of good are bad (I promise I'm not making fun a la Good Is Bad And Bad Is Good ) and straight up sworn an Oath to oppose them or serve themselves. Normally I'd be more open with the re-skinning suggestions, but the the description for the Oathbreaker does explicitly say they're evil, and the mechanics— pretty much back it up.

Yeah, it was mostly going for the necromantic antipaladin angle, in diametral opposition to Devotion paladins, and, well, in an ireedemable bastard kind of way, not that of a tragic fallen hero. Going by the Sith angle, a Sidious rather than a Vader.

(For the record, this is for NPC purposes)

That sounds pretty cool, this Necro Paladin could have sworn an oath against life (or for death), and it's only the quest for more power to achieve one of the better forms of undeath that keeps his heart beating.

Yeah, the guy carrying Gravedigger is an armored behemoth of a minotaur who uses the Champion statblock with a few alterations. Not a spellcaster at all. Other members of the squad include a War Priest of the Death Domain, an assassin, and an archmage.

No names for them now, just titles: The Archon, the Arbiter, the Shadow, and the Speaker. They're the greatest servants of the BBEG, and I refer to them as his "Bishops", since he has a cult that operates throughout the game world.

Edited by theLibrarian on Jun 2nd 2023 at 10:58:24 AM

I'll hazard a guess that the other Bishops have similarly powerful weapons that might be of interest to heroes of a certain class. Wonder if the lich has anticipated that and added certain... countermeasures to those weapons, just in case they should fall into the wrong hands? Or would that just be too Gygaxian?

You could also mess with the players by passing them rumors that the current Bishops weren't the first to carry their weapons, but after some past heroes killed the lich's previous lieutenants and looted their belongings, in due time those heroes had a change of heart and became the lich's loyal servants.

Well, the Arbiter has his axe, the Shadow has a Dagger of Venom and Shortsword of Life Stealing, the Speaker has a hammer that she can use to cast Destructive Wave three times a day, and the Archon is a wizard so he can just make magic items on his own.

Aww, poor Archon! I'm just projecting at this point, but I'd like to imagine the big bad at least offered Archon something for their loyalty and service, even if it was ultimately turned down.

More seriously, there's bound to be some magic items an (evil) cleric can create that a wizard can't that they'd find useful. If nothing else, pre-gifting them an unholy relic to turn into their phylactery horcrux style might be a nice thoughtful gift for them to "grow" into.

Give that witch some evil magic. Witches love evil magic.

I suppose the Archon might have some kind of suped-up staff XD But I'd need to think on it more.

(reads up about the Clutch of Orcus spell)

Hey, wait just a freaking minute...

Then again, Maruyama was greatly inspired by D&D, so it makes sense. XD

Clutch of Orcus is fun, but it takes a while to get to the satisfying part, you know? What if I want to eject someone's still-beating heart from their body right now?

Great Ones help me. Me and my big mouth have somehow convinced my friends to play a campaign set in Bloodborne.

Rather appropriately, my head is buzzing with story ideas, I expect the hard part will be narrowing it down to something interesting that's suitably "human" in the sense that there's comprehensible antagonist motivations. I don't plan on doing a Fromsoft plot that they have to piece out through item descriptions.

Any advice for resources I could use? I've seen several bestiaries, and entries for trick weapons, but I'm more curious about whether and how to implement a Sanity / Insight mechanic, and something similar to the "rally" recovering HP from doing damage after being hurt.

One big question I'm mulling over is how to handle Heavy Armor. Since the game makes a big show about them being "antiquated" due to being loud, slow and dangerously cumbersome vs nimble beasts, and it's baked into the aesthetics so I do want to do something. The easy option is to re-skin them as superior non metallic armors that are the same mechanically except for not imposing disadvantage on sneaking.

Alternately, I'm toying with replacing them with Medium+ armors. Basically, these have a higher allowed Dex modifier, and optionally Resistance to Slashing, Piercing or Crushing. Kind of simulating kevlar vs slash resistant modern armors.

Edited by Earnest on Jun 11th 2023 at 12:33:47 PM

I don't know how well it would work with the Bloodborne setting, but I'd go for a story set in motion by simple human greed. I'm thinking of something set at a time right before things turned to hell, with the world still appearing relatively "normal" on the outside. Kinda the way the Cthulhu mythos is presented in Lovecraft's stories, where most people are still unaware of all the cults and conspiracies. So I would try to make a story that is recognizably set in the Bloodborne universe, but have the supernatural elements still be more hidden at this point.

Anyhow, I mentioned simple human greed as the catalyst. What if there is a formerly rich mining town, that then went through lots of economic troubles when the vein ran dry, but then suddenly a new richer vein was discovered, making it a boom-town anew? This miraculous discovery would be directly the result of the town patriarch making a Deal with the Devil, with the new mineral having strange qualities that over time cause the populace to mutate into monsters. This is basically the same plot as the backstory for Bloodborne, but the nastiness would not yet be as obvious. There would be plenty of opportunities to make it an occult detective mystery for the first session, with the Zombie Apocalypse beginning only after players have arrived.

I think the DMG has a set of optional rules for sanity, though i´m not 100% sure. Alternatively max. HP could represent sanity and seeing too much could reduce it (though i think that one might need some additional tweaking).

I haven´t played Bloodborne but for a setting i would probably go with what Mara said and just have the world at the time shortly before everything goes to hell. That opens up a plethora of potential motivations, such as simple greed, mistaken beliefe in the goodness of the outer beings, true beliefe in doing the outer beings will, grand scale planning (i.e. planing to sacrifice humanity to create a "good" outer being), etc.

Also i would welcome some suggestions myself. I´m running a Spelljammer campaign and in my setting you can´t just think yourself to a location in the Astral Sea, but the systems stars are visible. My villain group has essentially constructed a magical equivalent of a dyson sphere around their star and are now stealing other systems solar and thermal energy, as even the entire energy output of entire star is not enough for them anymore. Thing is, how could the players engagingly locate such a system if they can´t see the star (due to the dyson sphere)? I could think of ways to do it in sci-fi, but am a bit stumped with fantasy.

I've never played Spelljammer, but it is essentially a Space Opera where Magitek replaces sci-fi technology, right? You can always make up some excuse that the Dyson Sphere either leaks some type of low-level magical radiation, that makes it possible to track its position. Or then it is the abscense of something else, that makes it stick out even when invisible.

Thanks! Yeah, setting between hunts and blood moon would be ideal to allow for RP. It'll still be dangerous at night, just not at in-game levels where everything tries to kill you. I hadn't considered a heist set before a Hunt, that could be interesting, with the Party trying to find the thieves before the Hunt makes tracking near impossible.

A couple of ideas. They may have a star chart that shows the location of a star system that is not "visible" but still has gravity.

An astrolabe or compass that can guide you anywhere; even places no longer visible or on the map. Finding either of these can be the first leg of the adventure.

And then there's the accidental discovery. The players may be on a cargo run to Planet Perilous, and while at first they don't see it, suddenly it gravity catches them and they nearly crash (or do crash!) onto it. Afterwards, they notice the glossy black surface of the Dyson sphere around their star, a cruel mirror reflecting the light of distant stars.

Edited by Earnest on Jun 12th 2023 at 7:34:24 AM

As mentioned, the 5E DMG has some optional sanity rules, which aren't bad, actually. A Sanity score you test upon like other ability scores, to determine whether a character can withstand blasphemous knowledge or the visage of squamous cyclopean horrors. Fail some checks and you pick up a temporary or long-term form of madness from an earlier table.

Buuut I'm not sure that would be appropriate for a game of D&D, even one styled after Bloodborne. D&D is a setting where even a low-level mage can animate a shambling corpse, fiends are conclusively real and after your soul, and there are so many degenerate horrors beneath the surface that they spend more time fighting each other than troubling the surface. Small groups of adventurers routinely delve into monster-infested dungeons to kill and loot anything inside, then pack up and hit the road to do it all again somewhere else. In Bloodborne, the beastly scourge is a fact of life, as are the Hunters who dedicate themselves to putting down such creatures.

So you don't want to try to run the game like Call of Cthulhu and call for a Sanity Check every time the party bumps into something with more tentacles than vertebrae. It can be assumed that the heroes are made of sterner stuff than ordinary people, and are ready if not eager to try to stick a sword into a walking nightmare. This is why the 3E CoC book, in its section on how to adapt its rules for D&D, recommended giving PCs a "Sanity Resistance" score that increases as they level up, so they don't go insane from bumping into a zombie or troll. Instead, I'd recommend saving any Sanity Checks for true Lovecraftian horror - revelations that the underlying assumptions that the world is a rational and neutral place are a sweet lie, or contact with utterly inhuman and incomprehensible intelligences.

As for Insight... well, you could make it the upside of having a low Sanity score. Yes, a character whose mind has been ravaged by discovering the blasphemous horror being worshiped in the basement of a supposedly-saintly church might have picked up some... nervous tics, but maybe they also get bonuses on resisting the mental attacks of eldritch creatures, are able to discern weakpoints and other vulnerabilities, and can better ferret out which of the seemingly-normal people around them have been exposed to similar burdensome knowledge.

Mithral.

Strong as steel, light as aluminum, the metal of choice for professional Hunters that separates them from amateurs who slap a bunch of iron onto themselves and die their first night. In such a situation, mithral mines become a vital strategic resource, and the smiths talented enough to work the metal are valued experts that organizations compete to recruit, one way or another.

This could also feed into the "elf-dwarf" rivalry in an interesting way, since mithral is associated more with elves in D&D. Maybe the dwarves have their own adamantine-clad juggernauts who sneer at mithral-wearing Hunters spending so much energy chasing after and dodging the attacks of their quarry. Instead, dwarven Hunters are masters of setting up blinds and ambushes, knowing their prey well enough to put themselves in its path, and then waiting for potentially days until the time is right for a sudden, brutal attack where there's no time or space to roll around like a moron, you have to kill your enemy before it tears through your armor.

"Hey, you got one of those ships that can fly into the night sky, right? See, we've noticed something odd about the constellation Kord Slaying the Dragon, like one of the stars in it has gone out for some reason, and he just doesn't look right without his left nipple. Could you go check that out for us?"

Alternatively, sun gods are pretty popular, right? So what happens if the star associated with one gets put in a magical cage, cut off from their worshipers? Maybe one of the god's prophets can act as a navigator, or the party cleric can follow the divine distress signal.

I remember there's a heavily Bloodborne-inspired homebrew coming up.

Alternatively, look up DM-Tuz's Hunter's Guide; that is straight up homebrewed Bloodborne stuff.

Thank you! I managed to find a full downloadable version in archive.org.

I'll deep dive the madness rules, but on thinking about it, I probably shouldn't overburden too much with mechanics, especially since there's a new player. To be honest what I was envisioning was a sort of dual Madness / Insight mechanic where yeah, the higher the madness, the more insight, and it opens up pseudo True Sight but enemies do different / stronger attacks.

I think... I may give them points of Insight that work like Inspiration. Not sure if it'll be for discovering horrific secrets, passing checks against madness / horror, or both. I could secretly track their total earned (not held) for purposes of seeing things like Amigdalas or weirder fare.

And that's a neat mechanical interpretation of Adamantine vs. Mithril. I think I won't implement different mechanics, but make monsters super keen to hear clanging metal (bonuses to Perception and Initiative if anyone in the party is wearing it), and give context clues like shop keeps looking at them funny for wanting heavy armor. I'll probably drop the price point on Mithril armor, or make it a reward for quests from the Healing Church or Workshop.

Ok, I think I have an outline for the plot, thank you all for the help!

Edited by Earnest on Jun 12th 2023 at 9:16:30 AM

This is just a general question but I've been reading a lot of Theros and Ravnica-related third party materials, so i just thought i'd ask for those that are fans:

What would be your personal choice for the next MTG setting to get an official sourcebook? Personally, I think i would go with Innistrad since there is a lot of material to work with, and i have a soft spot for it since it was the first set i played with when i got back into MTG a decade ago.

Some of my top picks were already covered by the Plane Shift articles Wizards did before they started to release them as full setting books, but I'd love to see newer realms like Kaldheim or the Neon Dynasty incarnation of Kamigawa as settings. I was initially thinking of New Capenna too, but I think I could actually get pretty far by just reskinning Ravnica material.

Ravnica would definitely be close, yeah.

Honestly I think if I was gonna try to run a New Capenna game, I would look at Eberron, including the stuff Keith Baker has been publishing somewhat unofficially lately.

For me, I'd probably also say Kamigawa, or perhaps Kaldheim.

Or, thirdly, an actual full book on Dominaria, considering how important it is to Magic cosmology to begin with.

Haven´t played magic in a long time, but pre-Eldrazi Zendikar could be cool. I have also always just been a sucker for Lorwyn/Shadowmoor.

Thanks for the help with detecting a dyson sphere in a fantasy setting. In the end i have decided to go for the "ancient star charts and modern ones don´t agree" peppered with some old, hopefully somewhat confusing, notes from planets the antagonists already attacked to get the players on that trail. I also gave them a book with which they can cast Legend Lore once per day (it still consumes the 250gp worth of incense) so if they get lost they have an option to get back on track.