Armored Combat

There is a video that is making the rounds that shows how effective full plate is, and how it little it encumbers your movement. This is not to say that the rules for armor should be changed, but it does give you an idea of how much brute force is involved in armored combat.

Fantasy Races: the Planetouched

Taking inspiration from the new 5th edition of D&D, I looked at their planetouched race, but unlike most other races they only have one subtype/subrace rather than a selection like the other races. Therefore, in addition to an infernal bloodline, I will have a celestial based bloodline in my campaign setting.

Planetouched Traits:

Planetouched share certain racial traits as a result of their planar ancestry. There are two separate  bloodlines of planetouched, those with infernal blood, the Tieflings, and those with celestial, the Aasimar.

Ability score increase. Your Intelligence score increases by 1.

Age. Planetouched mature at the same rate as regular humans but live a few years longer.

Alignment. Planetouched may not have an innate tendency towards good or evil in respect to their lineage, but many of them end up there. The obvious infernal traits of the Tiefling often lead them to being social outcasts, and therefore a tendency to question authority, whereas people with an Aasimar bloodline are often revered in society and have a tendency towards lawful alignments.

Size. Planetouched are about the same size and build as humans. Your size is medium.

Darkvision. Thanks to your planar heritage, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can not discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.

Aasimar Bloodline:

appearance text


Ability score increase. Your Composure score increases by 2.
Celestial Resistance. You have resistance to cold damage.
Celestial Legacy. You know the thaumaturgy cantrip. Once you reach 3rd level, you can cast the armor of agathys spell once per day as a 2nd-level spell. Once you reach 5th level, you can also cast the daylight spell once per day. Composure is your spellcasting ability for these spells.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Celestial.

Tiefling Bloodline:  

appearance text



Ability score increase. Your Manipulation score increases by 2.
Hellish Resistance. You have resistance to fire damage.
Infernal Legacy. You know the thaumaturgy cantrip. Once you reach 3rd level, you can cast the hellish rebuke spell once per day as a 2nd-level spell. Once you reach 5th level, you can also cast the darkness spell once per day. Manipulation is your spellcasting ability for these spells.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Infernal.

Game Mechanic Hi-Light: Epic 6

Way back in 2007 Ryan Dancey put forward the idea that D&D has four distinct phases of play: gritty fantasy, heroic fantasy, as paragons, and superheroes. Another way of putting this would be looking at what the players save. From 1st to 5th they save the town, from 6th to 10th they save the city, from 11th to 15th they save the country, and from 16th to 20th they save the world.

Epic 6, commonly referred to as E6, is a game about the first two phases of play. Character progression from level 1 to level 6 is as per D&D, but upon attaining 6th level advancement changes. Each additional 5000 experience past 6th level gives the heroes an additional feat.

The rules for Epic 6 can be found at this website.

Into the Darkness

I have been looking for a name for my campaign and I have finally settled on Into the Darkness. You would be surprised how many names have been taken for various dungeon crawl projects and how difficult is, at least for me, to actually wordsmith.

My last week has consisted of getting started on the new school year, and reading through the 5e Player's Handbook. I decided the easiest way to become familiar with the new rules, and decide on what homerules I want to include, is to type out the rulebook as I read through. This has basically turned into a project where I will have a somewhat custom ruleset, and an errata page to show what is different in specific.

Unfortunately, going back to wordsmithing, this lead me back to considering names for various custom races, and whether or not I should reuse names that other systems have already used. I am still not sure which direction I will go, but I have to admit if I had been the one who came up with the Aasimar race I would probably have a chuckle over the name, but having read it as someone else's creation I was less critical.

As with D&D 5e, I will be going with a few races/bloodlines, and each race gets two or more subtypes. An example of this would be the plane-touched bloodline, tentative called Soulborn, which give a core set of abilities, and then the Aasimar or Tiefling give different attribute modifiers and abilities.

To take an example directly from the 5e PHB lets look at elves. The base abilities you get from being an elf is +2 Dexterity, Darkvision, Keen Senses, Fey Ancestry, and a Trance you perform in place of sleeping. You can either be a High Elf, which gets +1 Intelligence and elven weapon training, a Wood Elf, which gets +1 Wisdom and some mobility related powers, or a Drow, which gets +1 Charisma and what we have come to see as the common suite of Drow magical powers alongside a weakness to sunlight.

Following this format gives the players, as it currently stands, ten different choices for racial abilities and ability score modification. This is more than an OSR retro-clone would have, which is what a lot of the recent dungeon crawl centric releases seem to focus around, but I see a lot of promise the the mechanics that exist in 5e, especially the bounded accuracy rules that are baked into the system.

Tactile Maps

 
Going through the older posts on various blogs I found two posts on Telecanter's Receding Rules and Aeons and Augauries about tactile maps. At its simplest a tactile map serves as a map, but as seen in the Aeons and Augauries post, the map could also be a key, and decoding the instructions on the tactile map could be a mission in and of itself.

I may very well use a tactile map as a seed for one or more of the adventuring parties headed into the megadungeon. It serves as another motivator for heading into the megadungeon beyond the rumors system that I gave as an example in the Rappan Athuk rules hi-light. It also allows for the tactile map to function as a treasure that has a delayed pay off.

West Marches Style Campaigns

Back in May I came upon an old post by Ben Robbins about a campaign he ran called West Marches. I was not aware other people had considered this type of set-up, but that is mostly due to having focused my RPG reading on World of Darkness related ideas rather than more traditional fantasy/dungeoneering sources.

 There are a few key rules that need to be adhered to when running a campaign in this way. First, the town should be safe and the wilds wild to help keep adventuring focused on exploration of the wilderness. Second, the DM should appear to be passive, giving the players a sandbox where they decide what they are going to do. Lastly, there is no set party and any players/characters can group up if they can get together.

Contrary to popular belief, the West Marches were not run as a hew crawl but instead used a vector based map. This front loads a lot of the development onto the DM requiring a high degree of detail when it comes to wilderness and dungeon sites. Especially when you consider that the players would be navigating via direction and landmarks. Personally, this mapping system would be too ambitious for me. As of now I feel more comfortable using a nested hex mapping system, starting off with a map consisting of 25-mile hexes, and then maps for more traveled or important areas consisting of 5-mile hexes, and if more detail is required maps consisting of 1-mile hexes.

Worldbuilding Day 18: The Day I Stopped

Today is decided to stop with the 30-day worldbuilding challenge. It would be great if I was focusing on writing a story, but role-playing is not about telling a story but instead about playing a cooperative game. It did help me make me consideration to the cultures found within the region, but I already had the seeds for those ideas before undertaking the challenge.