RPG Thoughts: Detect Evil

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Nenad

I have never been fond of the user of alignment in RPGs, it always felt unnatural, and an attempt to simplify the complexity of the world.

In D&D, the main argument for the existence of a distinct and defined good and evil in the universe (not just in the rules), are the Detect Evil and Detect Good spells.

So, what if those spells do not really detect good and evil, but rather something else? Here are a couple of possibilities:

The Spells are a Conspiracy

The Spells detect nothing, rather the users use them as a way to convince people that their side is right… This would work in a very dark fantasy game.

The Spells Measure Compliance with a God’s Law

In the case where spells are granted by a deity, the Detect Good/Evil spell measures the extent to which the individual target complies with God’s law. For a benevolent deity, this would mean that it would pretty much function as expected, but depending on the God, results may vary. Perhaps the God has a prohibition against eating fish, so all fishermen detect as evil?

This also explains how whole species in the D&D universe can detect as evil… The Gods just do not like them.

This also means that the followers of different Gods may get different results when casting on the same person.

The Spells Measure how Evil Somebody thinks they are

In this case, somebody could detect as evil when they are just guilty of minor things, while genuine psychopaths slip by…

RPG Idea – Seeking the Heroes

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Nenad

This is a simple idea which has always appealed to me, even despite the fact that I am not a huge fan of Fantasy.

A small village is being besieged by goblins. 16 years ago, a party of adventurers saved the village from another tribe of goblins, and then left.

The characters are the youths of the village, sent out to seek those heroes, so that they may help the village again.

Once they get to the nearby city, after some adventures on the road, they find the heroes, only to discover that they had fallen to various vices, and are busy wasting away.

Will the characters rehabilitate the heroes, or will they become heroes themselves?

Of course, given the timeline, it is entirely possible that some of the characters are actually children of the heroes…

When I originally came up with the idea, I was thinking of using Big Eyes, Small Mouth to run it, but if I do it now, I would rather use Legends of Anglerre.

Advanced Encounters: Terrain Toolbox – Review

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Nenad

I have never really used terrain in my RPGs, except purely as scenery. For those of you wanting terrain to play a bigger part in your encounters, Terrain Toolbox, from Sneak Attack Press, gives a lot of options.

Terrain Toolbox is a 32 page PDF, with the first part taken up with an introduction, and an overview of how to use terrain in encounters, and a specific set of rules. Each terrain is considered a level, which measures the effect of it. There are some mathematical oddities in the rules , for example, a terrain can do low, medium or high damage, but a terrain with low damage at level 1 does 1d8 +2, while a terrain with high damage does only 1d6. At higher levels the damage numbers start becoming what you would expect.

The bulk of the book is taken with terrain examples. They are extensive, and useful to almost any game, with plenty of variety, and suggestions on how they could make an encounter more interesting. The emphasis is firmly on their use in a combat encounter, and a discussion of other ways to use terrain would have been very interesting… Perhaps in a future supplement?

The layout of the book is very good, and it is easy to find the relevant terrain. It does not use any PDF features, but with its short length it does not really need any.

The Terrain Toolbox is available from RPGNow for $4.95, and is perfect to add depth to combat encounters, preventing them from getting stale.

This review is for the Pathfinder version of Terrain Toolbox, there is also a version for 4e available.

Dislaimer: This is a review of a free copy the I got from RPGNow.

RPG Idea – Price of Beauty

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Nenad

This is one of those ideas that prove that you can get ideas anywhere, in this case it is a monster inspired by contemplating beauty treatments.

The Beautifier looks like a giant worm. big enough to swallow a person whole. Its digestive system is not actually strong enough to wholly digest a person, instead its gut enzymes cleanse and rejuvinate the skin.

Since the trip through the digestive tract takes about an hour, a person needs to have some sort of oxygen supply while undergoing the treatment.

There are several ways to use such a creature, it could be a background detail in a SciFi Setting, or a focus of a mystery, as a person is found suffocated with extremely soft and clear skin (somebody whose air supply failed during the treatment, disposed of in order to avoid lawsuits)

In a more post-apocalyptic setting, some of the beautifiers have escaped, and now roam the cities, still trying to beautify people…

Finally, perhaps they are a naturally occurring organism, and the players are hired by a spa in order to catch a couple of them.

RPG Idea : Deathtrap Maintenance

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Nenad

This idea was originally inspired by the stories The Trouble With Death Traps and The Ghost in the Death Trap, both by Marjorie James.

The setting is a very cliched, standard fantasy one, and the players are a groups of builders, smiths and planners whose job is to build and equip dungeons for those that want them.

The characters would have to deal with the poltergeists union, dissatisfied clients (a bit tricky when the client in question is a thousand-year old Litch)

There is still room for a classic dungeon crawl in such a campaign… Perhaps an trap needs to be reset deep in the dungeon, and the originals blueprints have been lost?

RPG Idea: Fantasy Characters in the Modern World

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Nenad

This is an outgrowth of a thread a read a long time ago on RPG.net (which I will not link to, since I cannot find it). It discussed what would happen if a bunch of High-level Player Characters from a typical fantasy setting somehow came to our world.

In my opinion, I think the result would be complete chaos, involving loss of life and property destruction on a massive scale (i.e. standard PC behavior)

So, we can use this in a game. This time the characters would be the people investigating these events, and trying to figure out how to deal with the superpowered troublemakers that have suddenly appeared.

For a more interesting game, you can do this with two groups, one playing the fantasy characters, and the other one the modern ones.

RPG Idea: Star Miners

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Nenad

Since the last couple of ideas I have posted have been SciFi in nature, I have decided do some fantasy for you.

In this setting, the sky is made of crystal, with the sun and stars being jewels embedded in it.

The few stars that came detached from the heavens and fell to Earth have been found to be a source of great magic, and now they are being mined from the sky.

The original miners used hot air balloons and magic to fly up to the skies, and in some places they still do so. In other places, they have established cities, hanging off the sky, as they mine deeper into the crystal, since the stars on the surface have been mined out long ago.

At least one kingdom is busy building a tower towards a rich constelation, to help with the transport of the mined stars back to the ground.

Of course, with all the industry in the sky, it is only a question of time until somebody break through to the other side… Miners have already started talking of finding passages in the sky, which no miner has ever seen before, with strange creatures living in them…

RPG Inspiration: Sucker Punch

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Nenad

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is a 2011 Movie directed by Zack Snyder, and starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone (IMDB Page)

Innocents in the line of fire

In the very first scene, we see Babydoll accidentally kill her sister (she was aiming for their stepfather).

In RPGs, we often ignore the possibility of collateral damage, with bullets and fireballs flying around, with no consideration of where they could end up. Bringing this in would make the characters more cautious. As a GM, you might want to mention the collateral damage that the characters are causing, and bring their attention to the innocent villagers that might get caught in the blast when the mage launches her fireball.

Imagination

Most (possibly all) of the movie takes place in the imagination of one of the characters. This is something that could be interesting in a roleplaying game, with the right group. (With the wrong group, it would just get silly and incoherent.)

To do this, you will need to create several “layers”… Probably in conversation with the players, and have them change layers as things happened.

Asylum

The action in the movie takes place withing an asylum, which I think could be a unique way to bring the party together. In a game with dimensional horrors that drive people insane, this could be used to bring together characters that have already encountered the mythos.

Running an entire session in an asylum is also an option. It is a perfect setting to induce paranoia and a feeling of isolation, especially as the stuff will not always take what the characters have to say seriously.

Collecting

During the movie, the main characters are trying to collect the items that they will need for their plan. The thing is, most of the items are fairly common, but in their situation, still hard to get to.

So, in an RPG, it might be interesting to put the characters in a situation where the things that they take for granted are hard to get to.

Rule of Cool

The Rule of Cool states that anything can be forgiven in a work of fiction so long as it is sufficiently cool, which is very obvious in this movie. This is just a reminder to the GMs and the Players out there, that while internal consistency and realism is all well and good, please do not let it get in the way of having an awesome game.

Mecha in WWI

In the World War 1 Sequence, one of the characters is piloting a mecha… Of course, the use of mecha in WWI has left very little evidence, but in my opinion, this falls firmly under the Rule of Cool.

In an RPG, you can play around with that a lot… Perhaps one of the characters in a traditional Medieval setting gets a machine-gun? Or how about ancient greece where everybody has a smartphone?

Guilt-free Killing

In all the fantasy sequences, the enemies are not human, allowing the protagonists to slaughter them with no concern. In the case of a typical PC party, the idea of killing other people seem to be not much of a concern, but if you are running a more serious game, it might be fun to throw in guilt-free opponents that can be slaughtered indiscriminately.

The Gods and the People

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Nenad

Many fantasy settings are polytheistic in nature, with numerous Gods, in charge of various aspects of life. I have generally found that RPG mechanics do not reflect this very well.

My idea is to have a game in which the character’s relationship with the Gods takes center stage.

Most people in this setting spend their lives without ever attracting the attention of one of the gods, but those that do, either by working within the gods purview, or by opposing it, or sometimes even just by accident, find themselves in a difficult situation, since the Gods are now a+paying attention to what they do, and they may gain favour or disfavour through their deeds.

For example: The God of war may decide to pay attention to a might warrior, but from then on, if that warrior acts in a dishonourable fashion, he may find that hos God is now tuned against him.

To complicate matters more, the gods do not always get along, and their relationships are not always the obvious one. Perhaps the aforementioned warrior discovers that the God of War and God of Cookery are enemies, when he gets food poisoning after a meal.

The system for the game would have to track the amount of favour or disfavour that the characters gain, and have some way of determining how that would influence the setting, and the events in the characters lives. I think this would work better if the influence was subtle… Rather than the God of the Forge appearing to smite the character’s enemies, their sword rather breaks, due to flaws in its manufacture.

Light and Dark

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Nenad

The idea for this setting comes from the concept of tidal locking, more specifically, the situation where a planet always has the same side facing its sun, dividing the planet into a light side and a dark side. Of course, no known life form could survive on such a world, since the dark side would be too cold, and the light too hot, so assume that this setting is very soft scifi, at least in part.

So, the game would take place on a world with no day and night, with one side in perpetual darkness, and the other in perpetual night. It would still have seasons, although the weather would be very different.

This planet is inhabited by at least two intelligent species, lets call them the lightsiders and darksiders.

The Lightsiders are suited to living on the light side of the planet, they are fairly tall and thin. They are unsuited to operating in the cold or without light in any way. They do have buildings to protect them from the elements, but the buildings are often very open, with a lot of space to let light in.

The Darksiders are a bit bigger, furry, and have thick skin with plenty of fat. Unsurprisingly, they do not deal with heat well, and their eyes are extremely sensitive to light. Their rooms are spacious, although with few or now windows.

The two species have very little interaction with each other, and the communities further away from the terminator (the line that separates light from darkness) believe each other to be a myth, used to scare small children.

Of course, the two societies have started off an industrial revolution, each in its own way, and with that comes the hunger for resources. Each side thinks of the other half of the planet as an uninhabited wasteland, where people could barely survive. Only the insane, the brave and the desperate would try to live there.

Of course, the aforementioned colonists will be very surprised to find a civilization full of people living very comfortably in a place they would consider hell on Earth.

If I were to turn this into a game, I would consider making it a set of three books, a GMs guide, with the full story, a darksiders handbook, and a lightsiders handbook. Each book would detail the other side as subhuman monstrosities, with the GMs book giving the full story. I think that it might be an interesting exploration of different points of view.

I actually have a ton of ideas coming out for this setting, to the point where I am seriously thinking of actually writing this, possibly using FATE.

So, what do you think? please let me know in the comments.

Just Nenad

My contemplations and Meanderings

Tag Archives: fantasy