Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Tactical Wizard]

It was the primary setting until the Forgotten Realms shoved it aside was it not? I swear that I've never heard of it until I started watching Mr. Welch's channel. The TSR novels, video games and rulebooks I read, played or saw before switching to historical and semi-historical TTRPGs were for Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Planescape and Ravenloft. I only heard about Birthright which would've interested me but I bought Ars Magica by then.

I know that feeling. There was a time when I detested all kinds of Elves.

Original setting? Was it the original setting for Red Box Basic DnD? Yes. Greyhawk has the distinction of being the OG White Box DnD setting and then the original default setting for ADnD until Forgotten Realms shoved it aside. There is a theory out there that FR was acquired as a way to finally sever the ties between Gygax and TSR so that they wouldn't have to pay royalties to use his work. GH was then quietly shoved aside and later shelved until the WotC buyout because the WotC CEO was a huge GH fan.

Is it time to pimp the Gazetteer again? Yeah, it's time to pimp the Gazetteer again.

This book rules, flat out. It was also being developed alongside 3e and because they didn't have a clear picture of the rules and what they'd be? The only mechanics included are the class levels of NPCs. That makes it rules agnostic and you can slot in whatever ruleset you please!

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

Looks like White Wolf put out another VtM book. This time it is about managing the Succubus Club or your very own band. Because that's what we want in a Vampire rockstar game: business management.

Greetings fellow Kindred, what are the musings today in Ely....



By Cain's balls

 

[Snekposter]

For the cats, I've actually seen a rather large chunk of anti-woke/right-wing feline characters in fiction, and I do have a few ideas in mind for them. It's just that I don't have much interest in them outside of political jokes; comparing trannies to hyenas and rats is fun for a few campaigns, but it can get stale after a while. There are plenty of catfolk characters in fiction that I could take inspiration from, but... I dunno, I think I've just had to deal with furfaggots way too much on my end to properly think about it just yet. Still, they're a solid "safe" option, and I'll be happy to run one if the Tiefling doesn't work out.

I don't know if you're familiar with the Kzinti or the Ringworld books but Speaks-to-Animals/Chmee is a fun dude.

Mostly because the Kzinti are predatory cats instead of thieving cats, which means lots of eating of fresh red meat and a fondness for bloody murder.

 

[Rapier Ape]

It was the primary setting until the Forgotten Realms shoved it aside was it not? I swear that I've never heard of it until I started watching Mr. Welch's channel.

Yes and no as the primary setting. The timeline and Known World itself is extremely convoluted. Mr.Whelch rants about continuity are valid.
Basically after the D&D to Ad&D split they were running 2 product lines.
Blackmore was in the past Mystara.
A lot of the basic line module locations are suggested to be put in Mystara and or Greyhawk. DMs discretion.
Then they ran as separate worlds after.
Mystara got closed off to outsiders. Demons. Devils, Gods etc and the whole Immortals thing was put in place.
There is planar travel but getting in and out is its own thing.
Long story short Dungeons and Dragons grew into what would be Mystara.
AD&D grew into everything else.
But they were still interchangeable with a little conversion.
The products were side by side on shelves and labeled to their specific lines.
Also I'm pretty sure that Miyazaki lifted Demon Souls from The Nexus modules. The hub area + NPCs from DS are pretty damn close to The Nexus campaign content in Becmi & 3rd edition.
Regardless though Mystara gets deep and if you're running Rules Cyclopedia + Gazateers the game gets high powered and characters much more complex than Ad&d 1e. Probably even 2e if you're not playing with the Skills and Powers trilogy of books.
If the eye ever comes back up you should do a deep dive read on the Princess Arc until the end of the product line.
Just don't tell /tg/osrg that unless you wanna see that one skitzo go into nuclear level sperging. It's funny though. But ultimately sad.

For the record, that is the same Mr. Welch of the legendary "X Things Mr. Welch is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG" livejournal posts from back in the early 2000s. The man's got a pedigree (if not a working command of video editing)

Plus a love for Winona that probably rivals my own. I wouldn't even try to fix her.
I didn't discover him until maybe 3 years ago while searching for lore videos for background noise. I was blown away × impressed.
His only flaw is wanting Wotc to pick up Mystara. That Wish would get perverted then Monkey Paw treatment on top of that.

Is it time to pimp the Gazetteer again? Yeah, it's time to pimp the Gazetteer again.
View attachment 8447168
This book rules, flat out. It was also being developed alongside 3e and because they didn't have a clear picture of the rules and what they'd be? The only mechanics included are the class levels of NPCs. That makes it rules agnostic and you can slot in whatever ruleset you please!

I dove into Dragonlance during the 3e era then shifted over to loads of 3rd party content (from previous TSR staff usually)
I'll give that a download and read ASAP.
I personally have a deep love for 3e and 3.5
It was a welcome switch in it's time for us.

Looks like White Wolf put out another VtM book. This time it is about managing the Succubus Club or your very own band. Because that's what we want in a Vampire rockstar game: business management.

Greetings fellow Kindred, what are the musings today in Ely....



By Cain's balls

Just have a story Arc about the building space bid wars when the lease is up × the actual owners want you to also foot the bill for the plumbing changes/foundation work. Then it gets bought out by olde' money Chicago Jews and turned into a daycare.
Ala IRL Club Neo in Chicago.
You could RP haggling, City permits, contractors. Not to mention the cut throat world of promoters trying to snipe the acts that you're also trying to get. That's a whole other problem in itself.
I kinda wanna grab it now to troll discord people with a "Hyper Realistic " Vampire game.
Just swamp them in red tape for a couple sessions and then end it with the gig getting screwed regardless because a drunk retard accidentally set off the fire alarm and yhe fire department had to clear the building of people then confirm it's safe to return an hour later.

 

[Adamska]

Just have a story Arc about the building space bid wars when the lease is up × the actual owners want you to also foot the bill for the plumbing changes/foundation work. Then it gets bought out by olde' money Chicago Jews and turned into a daycare.
Ala IRL Club Neo in Chicago.
You could RP haggling, City permits, contractors. Not to mention the cut throat world of promoters trying to snipe the acts that you're also trying to get. That's a whole other problem in itself.
I kinda wanna grab it now to troll discord people with a "Hyper Realistic " Vampire game.
Just swamp them in red tape for a couple sessions and then end it with the gig getting screwed regardless because a drunk retard accidentally set off the fire alarm and yhe fire department had to clear the building of people then confirm it's safe to return an hour later.

They didn't do that. Instead one of the writers, or possibly multiple writers, decided that pedophilic ageplay shit was more useful, since it happened several times. Did the math; they did ephebophilia bullshit every 42-43 pages. Also included fucking puppy play.

Actively horrible book that skullfucks Masquerade Bloodlines and decided to make Berlin by Night more canon than Charnel Houses again. It's a pathetic nostalgia grab by a complete hack fraud.

 

[Doggy Dog World]

Has anyone tried to introduce nuclear radiation into 5e? I'm trying to gather some ideas that wouldn't be too on the nose or immersion breaking that are also somehow fair.

It's going to be presented initially by the town as a mysterious magical sickness or curse that seems to randomly spread where certain rocks and tonics seem to stave off symptoms.

Right now I'm thinking a hidden debuff that stacks with different effects upon reaching thresholds based on CON. They lose a CON amount of stacks per day while outside the radiation zone. All effects are active until all stacks are removed.

Low tier exposure are things like -1d2 to healing relieved, headaches and nausea, tasting pennies, maybe one level of exhaustion.

Medium tier would be healing reduced by a quarter+3d4, minus stats, reduced max hp, more visual "sickness" symptoms like a "rash", hair loss, etc. Lose one health dice per day on a failed save.

High tier I'm honestly not sure besides get fucked and I hope you enjoy being a rotting bandaged melting leper.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

Small amounts of natural radioactive material in the area wouldn't be noticeable. Maybe people in that town are more likely to die early of cancer or something like that, it wouldn't suddenly happen.

I went with secret CON checks in a game I ran that took the players to an alien planet, and all but one of the characters fell ill on the same day (vomiting and diarrhea from the alien meat and odd trace elements in the water). The players loved it, and it made the planet a more interesting challenge.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

I mean this genuinely: I don't really care if Hasbro is trying to shove troons and nogs into my tabletop games (I could sperg about how they massacred my Ravenloft boy but I will not) - as long as they do not stink up my table and I don't give them a dime. I can see the arguments for not giving them attention via even touching their stuff but that feels like a path toward not doing anything at risk of abstractly supporting woke nonsense on a sub-atomic level.

Hoping I can reach that point, frankly; I'll fully admit that the woke can crate some solid ideas, it's just their general insanity that makes me hesitant on doing anything with them... that doesn't involved the business end of an axe, perhaps.

You've got a great group, I wouldn't sweat the embarrassing stuff from Current Year if you don't have some nose-ring kermit voiced fucker trying to shoehorn it in.

Yeah, my group is great; we've all been friends since we were kids, which is probably why we haven't beaten the crap out of each other in a dark alley yet.

Also... "nose-ring Kermit voiced fucker" might be my new favorite insult.

I know that feeling. There was a time when I detested all kinds of Elves.

You can blame that furfag vore campaign I brought up in the WoD thread for my issues; it left some scars.

I don't know if you're familiar with the Kzinti or the Ringworld books but Speaks-to-Animals/Chmee is a fun dude.

Mostly because the Kzinti are predatory cats instead of thieving cats, which means lots of eating of fresh red meat and a fondness for bloody murder.

I'll take a look at those books when I get the chance; any ideas at this point are welcome, really.

They didn't do that. Instead one of the writers, or possibly multiple writers, decided that pedophilic ageplay shit was more useful, since it happened several times. Did the math; they did ephebophilia bullshit every 42-43 pages. Also included fucking puppy play.

 

[Snekposter]

I'll take a look at those books when I get the chance; any ideas at this point are welcome, really.

After one of the Man-Kzin Wars ended a vengeful human with nothing to lose since his family had been killed in the war went and landed on their capital, stormed the imperial palace, set off a bomb in the Emperor's harem that wiped out most of them, and then took a whole bunch of giant, flesh-eating felines to the grave with him. The Kzinti decided to honor what a badass gigachad he was by having his remains put back together, stuffed, and then put on display in the palace hall in the same way a human hunter might treat a man-eating bear he finally tracked down and killed.

They're absolute savages who only give names for those who have accomplished truly worth deeds, hence Chmee, ambassador to humanity, being known as Speaks-to-Animals as his job title in the first book, and after Kzinti are granted names their scar patterns in their fur act as recognition and proof of those names. Chmee gets forced into joining with the protagonist in the second book because another alien gave him a life expansion treatment that also got rid of his scars, and unless he's able to present a sample of it as proof of what happened to him nobody's going to recognize him, his deeds, and his name anymore on account of being unscarred.

 

[LovisXVI]

For the cats, I've actually seen a rather large chunk of anti-woke/right-wing feline characters in fiction, and I do have a few ideas in mind for them. It's just that I don't have much interest in them outside of political jokes; comparing trannies to hyenas and rats is fun for a few campaigns, but it can get stale after a while. There are plenty of catfolk characters in fiction that I could take inspiration from, but... I dunno, I think I've just had to deal with furfaggots way too much on my end to properly think about it just yet. Still, they're a solid "safe" option, and I'll be happy to run one if the Tiefling doesn't work out.

I don't know if you're familiar with the Kzinti or the Ringworld books but Speaks-to-Animals/Chmee is a fun dude.

Mostly because the Kzinti are predatory cats instead of thieving cats, which means lots of eating of fresh red meat and a fondness for bloody murder.

I'll take a look at those books when I get the chance; any ideas at this point are welcome, really.

As far as ultra-conservative space-feline alien races of warriors and conquerors go (weird that there are two, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Aslan are derivative of the Kzinti), I am preferential towards the Aslan from Traveller, which is more suited to tabletop, since it is itself an RPG. Helps that they are far less odious compared to normal human morals and standards, with a (in my opinion) more interesting sex dynamic, with males being culturally incapable of understanding things like money, only relating to things of hard value, specifically land. So females pull the slack and are the pen-pushers of their Empire.

 

[p1138]

They didn't do that. Instead one of the writers, or possibly multiple writers, decided that pedophilic ageplay shit was more useful, since it happened several times. Did the math; they did ephebophilia bullshit every 42-43 pages. Also included fucking puppy play.

So out of morbid curiosity I checked...and sure as shit you were right on both counts.

Maybe some day the franchise will finally just die, or we'll find out why it's so fucking cursed.

 

[AnOminous]

They're absolute savages who only give names for those who have accomplished truly worth deeds, hence Chmee, ambassador to humanity, being known as Speaks-to-Animals as his job title in the first book, and after Kzinti are granted names their scar patterns in their fur act as recognition and proof of those names.

They're less savage than they were prior to the Man-Kzin Wars because the Pierson's Puppeteers (a super-intelligent but incredibly cowardly and Machiavellian species that reproduces like digger wasps by implanting another species with their fertilized eggs) deliberately threw the war to the humans by diverting an Outsider (space merchants who live in interstellar space) trader to human space, so that they could then sell the humans the first FTL they got, resulting in the war becoming a one-sided massacre.

They did this because the only Kzinti who would survive would be ones capable of diplomacy and actually biting the bullet and giving up. Chmee finds out about this and decides not to tell the Kzinti about it because the ultimate result would be the genocide of Kzinti. Cowardly or not, Puppeteers are incredibly dangerous with their backs against the wall.

They're so cowardly that their ambassadors and explorers are considered insane back home because only an insane Puppeteer would be willing to interact with humans, much less Kzinti. (Speaker-to-Animals is also a diplomat, hence his name, because Kzinti consider non-Kzinti inferior animals.)

Anyway part of the point of this is Known Space as a setting is phenomenal for a game because the diversity of locations, planets, species, and massively deep lore makes for a very flexible setting where you can play almost any kind of campaign you like just by picking the right location.

Even just the Ringworld itself has 3 million times the surface area of the Earth, so pretty much anything you could want is there somewhere even if a fair amount of it is inhospitable or unliveable due to the deterioration of maintenance.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

They didn't do that. Instead one of the writers, or possibly multiple writers, decided that pedophilic ageplay shit was more useful, since it happened several times. Did the math; they did ephebophilia bullshit every 42-43 pages. Also included fucking puppy play.

Actively horrible book that skullfucks Masquerade Bloodlines and decided to make Berlin by Night more canon than Charnel Houses again. It's a pathetic nostalgia grab by a complete hack fraud.

The only kind of puppy play I'm interested in Vampire is BvD.

 

[Snekposter]

They're less savage than they were prior to the Man-Kzin Wars because the Pierson's Puppeteers (a super-intelligent but incredibly cowardly and Machiavellian species that reproduces like digger wasps by implanting another species with their fertilized eggs) deliberately threw the war to the humans by diverting an Outsider (space merchants who live in interstellar space) trader to human space, so that they could then sell the humans the first FTL they got, resulting in the war becoming a one-sided massacre.

They did this because the only Kzinti who would survive would be ones capable of diplomacy and actually biting the bullet and giving up. Chmee finds out about this and decides not to tell the Kzinti about it because the ultimate result would be the genocide of Kzinti. Cowardly or not, Puppeteers are incredibly dangerous with their backs against the wall.

They're so cowardly that their ambassadors and explorers are considered insane back home because only an insane Puppeteer would be willing to interact with humans, much less Kzinti. (Speaker-to-Animals is also a diplomat, hence his name, because Kzinti consider non-Kzinti inferior animals.)

Anyway part of the point of this is Known Space as a setting is phenomenal for a game because the diversity of locations, planets, species, and massively deep lore makes for a very flexible setting where you can play almost any kind of campaign you like just by picking the right location.

Even just the Ringworld itself has 3 million times the surface area of the Earth, so pretty much anything you could want is there somewhere even if a fair amount of it is inhospitable or unliveable due to the deterioration of maintenance.

Yeah, I read the full Ringworld series back in high school which was... let's just say an uncomfortably long time ago.

 

[AnOminous]

Yeah, I read the full Ringworld series back in high school which was... let's just say an uncomfortably long time ago.

I had to buy Ringworld a dozen times or so because every time I loaned it out to someone they fucking STOLE it.

 

[Gingervitis]

Also I'm pretty sure that Miyazaki lifted Demon Souls from The Nexus modules. The hub area + NPCs from DS are pretty damn close to The Nexus campaign content in Becmi & 3rd edition.

Wait, which modules are these? I don’t think I’ve heard of the nexus modules.

 

[Rapier Ape]

Wait, which modules are these? I don’t think I’ve heard of the nexus modules.

The 3rd edition was The Book of Eldrich Might 3 - The Nexus. By Monte Cook.
The Area itself is damn close to Demon Souls + there's an NPC present that's suspiciously almost identical to Priscilla from Dark Souls 1.
He's commented quite a few times that he was a TTRPG guy back in his youth. Plus used it for inspiration.

 

[Uzumaki]

My GURPS campaign TPK'd. One of the most well recieved of my GMing career, owing mostly to the fact that the PCs were corrupted one-by-one to join the group corrupting everyone else.

One the one hand its sad to see it go so soon. On the other hand there is now a 15-year-old girl who has played in 2 different GURPS campaigns on purpose. I am doing the Lord's work.

 

[Brain Problems]

Thinking back to my previous comment about the old D&D pre5e modules being still tons of fun it got me thinking: there are so fucking many of them... what are peoples' favourites that you would still recommend playing today? Just seems like a vast library of adventures with fun ideas to plunder but I personally have no idea where to start or what to look at outside of some niche Ravenloft related ones.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

Thinking back to my previous comment about the old D&D pre5e modules being still tons of fun it got me thinking: there are so fucking many of them... what are peoples' favourites that you would still recommend playing today? Just seems like a vast library of adventures with fun ideas to plunder but I personally have no idea where to start or what to look at outside of some niche Ravenloft related ones.

You absolutely have to check out Vault of the Drow, it's basically a mini-campaign set in a Drow city, and it's a follow-up to Descent Into the Depths of the Earth. It absolutely begs the DM to fill in the gaps in the setting with whatever crazy ideas of his that wouldn't fly on the surface world, and evil and neutral characters will have a wild time getting involved in intrigues between noble houses and kicking ass in the city of Erelhei-Cinlu.