For me its the Star Spawn Emessary I mean, look at that thing. But for real the entire Far Realm take on eldritch horror type monsters is just fascinating to me and one of my favorite fantasy types.
Once heard a guy tell me about a game he was in. When a player didn’t show up the character turned into a gold coin. And when the player returned the coin would turn back into a character. During the game the party found out the BBEG was the one doing rituals to turn people into the coins.
It’s not even though. Tolkein was very deliberate about what he included in his world, whereas Forgotten Realms is just “we need to make up some shit so that everything can go here”
Kinda disappointed by the article (Waterdeep, but no Myth Drannor, or Icewind Dale, or Thay? No Underdark?!!?!), so in protest I'm gonna post the OG D&D world - Greyhawk - the origin of Vecna and the late, great Gary Gygax's personal campaign setting.
Generally speaking, I think it’s the ideal use case for AI art. You wouldn’t likely otherwise be buying art assets, and most likely just be finding whatever comes up under a Google search anyway. Meanwhile you can dial in to a clearer representation of what you want to depict from the art without necessarily having to “make do” with “oh, it’s like this but imagine he’s an elf instead…”
First iteration I simply took some small post-it’s wrote the spell slot level on it and attached them to whatever spell I used them on. This worked fine for a bunch of sessions. If the glue would lose its tack I could simply write another sticky.
Second iteration I made myself a fancy A5 sized spell book in NanDeck, slots were still tracked by post its but I fashioned little bookmark tabs that were affixed to the pages so I could pull them out to indicate the spell was prepared and push it in to for those that were not. This again worked pretty well. The tabs would get partially pushed in when the book rattled around in the storage box but it was generally not all the way. Biggest gripe was that I didn’t actually need to know which spell had which slots used on it. The post it’s were overkill in that regard.
Current iteration now has a front page with paper sliders for the number of spell slots I have. It’s prepared all the way to max level. All I’ve got to do is use scissors or an exacto knife to extend the sliders to their proper length. The preparedness of spells is also indicated by paper sliders on the respective page. I originally used bookmarks so I didn’t have to browse the whole book but I found myself doing that anyway so they didn’t serve much of a purpose. On the contrary I find it quite thematic that my cleric would rummage through his spell book to find the correct incantation for the situation.
Both second and first version had their spine punched in regular spaces with an office hole puncher and then bound with string in my player color. When I get more spells I simply have to print the additional pages and can rebind the book.
I just have a series of “pips” that I colour-in when used and erase when claimed back. Super simple, easy to see at-a-glance, and robust so it’s not going to get messed up in my bag. Added bonus is that it works when being DM too and you have several casters to track simultaneously.
I have seen people that don’t track spell slots for NPCs and just have them all at-will, which I think is an interesting idea. But I tend to give players non-combat objectives in their encounters, which prolongs them significantly so spell slot usage can become important for balance for NPCs in those cases.
Those in the Skyrim community knows that Gamerant just skims reddit posts and puts up stupid shit like, “you won’t believe what this Skyrim player discovered today!” sort of nonsense.
Anyway, I just write down I, II, III, etc. and mark down with tics every time I cast a spell and at what level. I mean, do you need to get more complicated? This seems like extra work.
Damn I got really excited about this idea and then your comment made me realize all the players at my table know Warhammer better than I do and would get it immediately
Don’t be discouraged! As a player, the only thing better than an entirely new fantasy concept is one that I’m familiar enough with to recognize and role play my spin on it! I’m sure your players will enjoy spotting the similarities and a appreciate whatever you do.
When you put one existing thing in your game, it’s stealing. When you mix two existing things together and put the resulting mixture in your game, it’s called being creative.
The canon keeps it pretty ambiguous whether or not he’s actually alive IIRC. Several of the alien races refer to him as a “corpse emperor”, and obviously human sources in-world are unreliable. Either way, since he hasn’t actually been seen for 10,000 years, the effect is the same as OP describes.
Like I said to the other person, don’t hesitate to use it just because someone else has done it first. As the quote goes: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal”.
As I understand it - Basically it’s assumed he is kept barely alive to keep the astronomicon (the beacon for warp travel) working. Some people think he is a perpetual (someone who can revive after death) but if he leaves the throne the warp in Terra won’t be kept in check anymore and will be lost. Most likely they’d lose the ability to travel the warp as well.
The Emperor’s body is physically about as dead as you can get, but he is such a powerful Psyker (read: magic user) that they keep his body alive on life support in order to harness the powers of his brain. The life support system (Called the Golden Throne) is so demanding that they literally need to provide him ~1000 human sacrifices per day, specifically people with psionic/Psyker capabilities.
However, a huge amount of the Empire’s logistical infrastructure depends on him, since his mind provides a beacon (called the astronomicon) that allows ships to navigate the Warp (another dimension, full of Eldritch horrors, useful for FTL travel, similar to D&D’s astral plane).
Most of the empire has become convinced that the Emperor himself is a living God, that he is omniscient and can enact his will around the galaxy. They are somewhat justified in this as well, since praising the Emperor is an effective way of repelling demons (IIRC this is just because believing in anything with enough zeal will repel demons).
Also, as soon as someone begins to doubt the divinity of the emperor, the chaos gods are able to start influencing/corrupting them, so it’s generally considered a dick move not to praise the emperor. Agnosticism, atheism, and even just having your own interpretation about the imperial cult literally represent a threat in the same way a terrorist might.
There’s an in-world story in the Stormlight Archive about exactly this. The emperor of an island nation is so fearful that no one dares enter his tower. They are generally totally peaceful, but brutally murder anyone that makes a mistake, because their “Emperor won’t suffer failure.”
The characters in the story go to confront the emperor because they can’t stand for these murders, and find that the emperor is just a desicated corpse because no one has been into the tower for like 50 years. The island is thrown into chaos as the people are forced to come to terms with the fact that they’ve been killing each other for decades for no reason.
My setting has a kingdom whose last king died and their heir went missing; the last king had become a bit of a mad tyrant when they were alive, so the people are in no hurry to have another one. The country is ruled by a Regent’s Council with the elected Regent as a sort of chairperson. Every session of the Council starts with a statement that the King can’t be present and that the council will make decisions in his stead. It’s been so long that the king’s heir, who was a toddler when the king died, would be middle-aged by now, but they’re in no hurry to find him and the heir himself has no intention of coming forward, if he even knows that he’s technically king. They’ve basically become a democratic republic while still being a kingdom on paper - which is deliberate, because there would be political consequences to not being a kingdom any more. For years everyone’s just politely pretended not to notice.
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