I have my own language mappings in my homebrew. Most of them only appear as names since most people speak Common, but I did include some people in my game who don’t. (I make sure that they are some who speak a language that I speak too.) So the mappings are:
Common - English. We’re playing in English, duh. (Before contact with Elves, humans spoke “proto-Common” which would be mapped to German if I had to use it. Many humans still have German names.)
(High) Elvish - French. Yes, in-universe the Common language has plenty of Elvish influence. (Classical Elvish is Latin.)
(Wood) Elvish - Greek. Most Wood Elves speak High Elvish, but their names are Greek and many of them still speak their own language as well. The continents and seas are often named in Ancient Wood-Elvish (i.e., classical Greek) because they used to be the primary explorers before the rise of the High Elves.
Dwarvish - modern Dwarvish is Norwegian, old Dwarvish is Icelandic.
Halfling - Frisian. (Fortunately I haven’t had to say anything in Halfling so far.)
Gnomish - Welsh. (Again, fortunately I haven’t had to say anything in Gnomish yet.)
Orc - Russian.
Goblin - Mongolian.
Tellurian (not a species, but an influential country) - Spanish. Many people alongside the Bay of Luria speak Tellurian as their native language instead of Common or their racial language.
Sylvan - Finnish. (My go-to for weirder names as well. Many Fey-related creatures have Finnish names, as well as those who live near Fey portals.)
Giant - Hungarian. (They feature a lot in Hungarian folk tales.)
Draconic - Hindi.
Hashiman (not a species, but a group of eight islands - though they are also the Kenku homeland so most Kenku speak this as their native language) - Japanese-ish. The language comes in two dialects, Hanego which is used primarily by Kenku but also Aaracokra, Owlin, Tortles, and other creatures with hard beaks that have difficulty pronouncing M and N, and Hadago which is used by the rest. They are identical in writing, differ mostly in pronouncing those sounds.
Hiring monodrones is usually cheaper. They are the simplest Modrons, and they would be perfectly willing to work for a Lawful king (the evil-good axis doesn’t come into play) because it increases the amount of order in the multiverse. But every modron has Truesight.
Hell, maybe hire a whole team of modrons. Monodrones to stand watch at all ingresses, with orders of “raise an alarm if you see any disguised shapeshifter enter through that window / door / arrowslit / whatever”, and duodrones with orders of “patrol the castle and raise an alarm if you see any disguised shapeshifter”.
Magic missile can become a lot more potent than that (on average):
Make a Scribes wizard
Take the Elemental Adept feat and pick something that very few creatures are immune to, e.g. thunder.
Change the MM’s damage to thunder.
Now you can pew-pew to your heart’s content with each pew doing a guaranteed 3 damage instead of 2, and puming the average damage of the pews from 3.5 to 3.75. Not a huge jump, but if you upcast it to level 5 with 7 pews, that’s 26.25 on average instead of 24.5 with a minimum of 21 instead of 14.
And that’s why you as the DM can do passive skill checks (neé “taking a 10”) for non-stressful situations. A routine landing is just 10 + ability mod (probably INT on a big plane with full FBW) + PB. It’s only with 3 of the 4 engines down, the 4th on fire, the computers are fucked, you’re trying to land the 747 on a dirt strip, and oh, there’s a hurricane when you need to actually roll for it.
Though I’m also down with Esper’s idea of every class having a limited reliable talent. So every character could pick one class skill at level 7 and one at level 14 in which they couldn’t roll under a 10. The “expert” classes (rangers, rogues, bards, and artificers) would have additional picks at levels 3, 10, and 17 with full reliable talent being their capstone feature.
That will just turn the same dead commoners in that r=20’ sphere extra crispy. I don’t think there are any spells in 5e that increase their AoE when upcast and not the damage, duration, or number of targets.
(Either way, if the street is significantly narrower than 20’ then a lightning bolt is going to maximize the carnage.)
If it’s a common item with a listed price, and you’re in a city big enough to reasonably have that item in stock, just do your shopping “offline”. Sometimes I even include a low-level Forge cleric in small towns so the party could do their sub-100gp item shopping. (In that case the cleric charges an extra 10% donation for the Forgetemple, which they will use to feed orphans, create farming equipment, etc…)
If you want to set up a proper telegram system with D&D tech, Magic Mouth is a better choice. Let’s say you set them up onto poles that are spaced 30 feet apart, 4 magic mouths per pole. Say, the line is going east-west:
Mouth 1: If it hears a “one” coming from the east, it says “one”.
Mouth 2: If it hears a “zero” coming from the east, it says “zero”.
Mouth 3 and 4: same but from the west.
Each pole costs 40 GP to set up, so this telegram is rather expensive, costing 7040 gp per mile… but once it’s set up, it doesn’t sleep, doesn’t need payment, doesn’t need maintenance, just two people on each end with a binary code table. You could say that these are skilled hirelings, working in 3 shifts that means that the upkeep of both ends of a line is 12 gp per day.
Peasants shouting the message… well, to make it absolutely sure that the message is heard, you need to put a messaging post every 100 feet. (Loud noises are audible at 2d6×50 feet per the DM screen.) If they are working in 3 shifts, that’s 6 sp per day per post, making the upkeep of the line ~32 gp per mile. Thus the magic mouth setup would become cheaper after only 220 days.
Monodrones are probably much more reliable for that. Or you can straight-up use monodrones to set up a proper Clacks system.
Exactly. The duration is one round, the distance is “any distance”, and the target can reply immediately. If it had lightspeed delay then the distance would be limited to 3 lightseconds.
A recurring villain was introduced on the first session. She was a human pirate captain with very pale skin. One of my players immediately thought that she was a vampire.
…
So she is a dhamphir now. (Couldn’t make her a full vampire, they met her in daylight.) Not like it gave her much of a boost except for a climbing speed and spider climb anyway.
Plan 1: Raulothim’s Psychic Lance. By the time I get to take that spell, I must have had at least one ASI so I’ll just take metamagic adept for subtle spell. I just have to know the name of the target and be within 120 feet of them (240 if the second metamagic option I take is distant spell), and it’s pretty close to a guaranteed kill vs. a commoner, no murder weapon, and nothing showing that I was there.
Plan 2: Clone. Claim that it’s some revolutionary stem cell rejuvenation therapy and sell it to the super-rich. (Though I might make it fail accidentally if it’s someone like Murdoch or Kissinger. Payment in advance, no guarantees, and I’ll do it on international waters.)
Clone. Doesn’t work post-mortem, but if they can last for ~120 days… and if they can’t, there’s always Imprisonment or True Polymorph to keep them alive until the clone body matures.
And then you start DMing, even as a beginner who has no idea what he’s doing you get 6-8 players at the table, that party size is unsupported by the balancing tools given by WotC so you wrack your brain trying to come up with challenging encounters for the whole group, burn out, stop DMing, and the imbalance worsens even further.
Just put your foot down and refuse to add more than 5 players until you’re experienced enough. (sigh I wish I had followed my own advice.) Sure, CR started with 7 regular players and sometimes they have even bigger parties with guest players… but that’s Matt Mercer, he knows what he’s doing, and the players are also good enough to avoid making it a nightmare for him and each other. You as a noob DM will have your hands full with herding 4-5 overly excitable cats and managing the rest of the game.
This was my motivation behind allowing more players in the first place. My previous group basically fell apart because I had 3 players and when one of them canceled last minute - which was basically all sessions - there weren’t enough players for a session. When one of those players dropped out permanently, I went online to look for more players, and I figured: “Hey, if I have 6 players with the same flake ratio then I’ll have a 4-person party most of the time. Let’s do this!”
But then the fuckers started showing up consistently for every session!
And even though I’m a noob (well, not so much since I’ve been DMing for a year now, 7 months of this for this large weekly group… but I still have no idea what I’m doing) I still have to make some new applicants take a number. Which just underlines how much of a DM/player imbalance there is.
(I’m planning to split the group based on player experience level into two biweekly campaigns of 5 players, that way I might be able to allow a couple of newer players to join and still preserve what was left of my sanity.)
I think over the course of the night we had 1 nat 20 (not counting the one that was rolled just as an “evens or odds” roll) and about 8-9 nat 1s. I rolled 6 consecutive single digits at one point. Fortunately the only 20 saved my character from being possessed so that was nice.
That final element has this amazing interplay where you feel that you’re burning your humanity (or species neutral equivalent term) as you use magic, and your innate or monsterous side comes through, it was a really cool design and I’d love to see it taken even further with a subclass that also incorporated hitpoints into the flow somehow, meaning that you are a tank before you cast your spells, but literally burn out your life force as you do so, revealing the monster underneath. It could be really cool for a vampire or something else that has an interesting interplay with harm, healing and magic.
The Order of the Lycan blood hunter has a similar mechanic. Every blood hunter has abilities with a HP cost, but the lycan might also go berserk if they start the turn with less than half HP.
TBF the only class that gets more than one extra attack is the fighter.
Now of course it would make sense to sum up the levels you have in classes that get multiattack, and if you have >=5, you get an extra attack. But since attack progression is far less regular than spell slot progression, getting something approaching regularity beyond that would be difficult.
Now if OneD&D wanted to boost martials and introduce some sort of a multiattack scaling across multiclassing, here is how that could work:
Introduce features called Special Attack and Signature Attack. (Simply because just stacking extra attacks in a way that gives a bunch of half-casters extra attack at level 5-6 would give full martials a ridiculous number of attacks per turn at higher levels.) Special Attack is an attack that deals double weapon damage (which stacks with crits), but other extra damage sources like smites don’t get doubled. Signature Attack is a Special Attack that can also force a save, either a STR save vs. being disarmed, a DEX save vs. being knocked prone, or a CON save vs. being dazed. You pick which one when you get the feature, and you can change it on level up.
Introduce an attack progression table which details how many regular and special attacks you get per warrior level. (IDK if Lemmy’s MD syntax allows tables in lists, so see the table below.)
Like for spell slots, some classes (fighter, barbarian, monk) count as whole classes, others (paladin, ranger, artificer) count as half, and some caster subclasses (bladesinger, swords bard, hexblade, etc…) count as third.
The table:
Warrior Level
Normal attack
Special attack
Signature Attack
0
1
-
-
3
2
-
-
6
1
1
-
9
2
1
-
12
1
1
1
15
2
1
1
18
1
2
1
So:
A level 12 single class fighter gets 1 normal, 1 special, and 1 signature attacks.
So does a fighter 6 / barbarian 6.
A level 12 paladin counts as a level 6 warrior so they get a normal and a special attack. (Also, in OneD&D the divine smite is a bonus action spell like every other smite, so the level 18 paladin can’t go too nuclear with 3 smites per turn.)
A fighter 6 / paladin 6 counts as a level 9 warrior, 2 normal attacks and 1 special attack.
Of course this could be refined a bit further, e.g., instead of a generic “special attack” they could pick power attack (must be a strength-based attack), precise strike (must be a dexterity-based melee attack), or pinpoint shot (must be a dexterity-based ranged attack) and they could swap this one on level-ups too. But I think this should be a start.
Casters also get proficiency up, that depends on total character level.
And higher spell slot levels still increase the character’s damage output and specific utility. Some spells - such as Cure Wounds or Hold Person - are pretty much designed to be upcast, and some others (e.g. Heat Metal) are unexpectedly great. Someone with Bard 3 / Sorcerer 4 might only have second level spells, but a level 4 Heat Metal vs. a heavily-armored target deals 4d8 per turn without a saving throw for up to 10 turns.
Not really, it replaces the attack stat with the spellcasting stat, kind of like shillelagh but only for a single attack, and then stacks some radiant damage on it at higher levels (+1d6 from level 5 then cantrip leveling). It can also replace the damage type with radiant. Useful for any weapon-using caster class that doesn’t get multiattack:
Clerics would be a great target audience for this, except it’s not on their spell list. sigh Magic Initiate (Druid) it is.
It could be useful for non-hexblade warlocks too.
It’s a great damaging cantrip for bards who severely lack those.
It’s good for even a sorcerer or a wizard, it turns the light crossbow into a long-range radiant-damage cantrip.
Arcane tricksters: could be useful depending on the build, probably pairs really well with a headband of intellect. (Edit: Or an extremely INT-focused Arcane Trickster with a 2-level wizard dip for the bladesong.)
Eldritch knights: really useful at levels 1-4 if you’re running into some monster that resists or is straight-up immune to nonmagical damage. Markedly decreases in usefulness once you get multiattack and/or a magic weapon.
Probably good for artillerist artificers (they are not in the UA so it’s unknown whether they’ll get this cantrip), might be good for alchemists, OK for battlesmiths until they get multiattack, and redundant for armorers.
How I’d improve it further:
Make its casting time 1 attack and limit it to once per turn in the fluff. That way it stays useful for eldritch knights, bladesingers (scratch that, bladesingers can cast this in place of an attack already), valor and swords bards, and the two multiattacking artificers (less so for the armorers, but even then, it gets them a good ranged attack in a guardian suit or a good melee attack in the infiltrator).
Add it to the cleric spell list. They are the full casters most likely to go into melee even without the multiattack.
Dunno. Arcane Tricksters tend to have a higher DEX modifier than INT (and then pick spells that don’t care about the spellcasting modifier), so they are better off with Booming Blade (if stealth is already off the table) or Green Flame Blade unless they run into something that is resistant or immune to nonmagical damage at levels 3-4 and don’t have magic weapons. Might work well with a maxed INT Arcane Trickster / Bladesinger build though.
That’s only for the blaster-caster subclasses though. The subclasses that are more likely going to go into melee (mostly the ones who get heavy armor proficiency: Forge, Life, Tempest, Twilight, War, and many other subclasses) get Divine Strike instead. So a cleric build that takes 8 levels of the subclasses that get Potent Spellcasting would be unlikely to use True Strike by then, they’d likely hang back and spam Toll the Dead or Sacred Flame (or a ranged spell).
(Even with a heavy crossbow (that most blaster clerics aren’t proficient with, but they can gain proficiency from racial features or multiclassing), at level 8: True Strike + 20 WIS + Potent Spellcasting = 1d10 + 1d6 + 5 + 5 = 19 average damage with +8 to hit; Toll the Dead + 20 WIS + Potent Spellcasting = 2d8/2d12 + 5 = 14/18 average damage with a save DC of 16. Not very much more powerful. And then you get to level 11 where TTD with Potent Spellcasting jumps to 3d8/3d12 + 5 = 18.5 / 24.5 average while True Strike with the heavy crossbow is 1d10 + 2d6 + 10 = 22.5. The cleric will more than likely spend the first turn setting up a buff/debuff/control spell, so the d12 damage dice will apply most of the time.)
Yeah, he was a condescending sexist prick to the Kiyoshi warriors (initially), and while it did earn him some beatings, it didn’t get him a restraining order and he even got with Suki in the end. That’s high CHA alright.
Well, I don’t think my players are here but I’ll put it in spoiler tags anyway. Those playing in a world called Yphilios, don’t expand this.
::: spoiler Frostfang’s equipment
The dragon they will have to fight, Frostfang, is an adult white dragon. But he is not your typical “huge polar bear with wings” white dragon. Frostfang found a nice little golden ring on the head of a wizard he ate that fits his claw pretty well, and this ring (Headband of Intellect) made him a lot smarter and enabled him to learn the spells from the wizard’s books (and other books that other dead wizards left behind).
In addition to the ring and the spells, he has been learning blacksmithing from an artificer he has kept captive for this purpose, and wears a breastplate made from the breastplates of all the paladins who tried to kill him. It is a Breastplate of Radiant Resistance. (There are three paladins in the party, sue me.)
He also has a Dagger of Warning. Partially because of the Warning property, and partially because this way he can cast Steel Wind Strike. Because I’m evil.
Maybe I’ll also give him a piecemaker. Lair actions are one thing, but a six-foot metal bolt flying at you at mach 3 is another.
Not a global reputation yet because he is fairly young (he is growing much faster than the average dragon due to the great nutrition he receives, namely a steady stream of adventurers from the nearby city) but he has been the bane of a small country (~the size of Luxemburg) for the last few months, and killing him is getting urgent because it’s already spring but the fields are still frozen solid due to his influence on the local climate.
Though a famed dragonologist did notice that his behavior changed considerably; instead of randomly raiding villages he started targeting Skyfleet installations up north, pushing the city’s Skyfleet back and getting them away from his mountain.
The basic setup will be quite simple: after ruining the country’s plans to set up proper anti-dragon defenses in the capital, he will land on top of the city hall and tell them that he is bored of random raids and now demands the respect and tribute that a dragon deserves. Namely, one million gold pieces and 20 of “their young” per month. First delivery expected in 15 days.
Diplomacy would be viable, if the party could somehow convince the country to give up a significant chunk of their GDP and 20 children per month. But I doubt they would do that.
After which, they will have those two weeks to cross the frozen northern wilderness (a hex crawl with 100 traversable tiles) and confront the dragon directly. There are a number of set encounters and locations on those hexes (the most notable is Clawhold, the only permanent settlement of the Tabaxi tribe who populate the north, and the 13 abandoned mountaintop fortresses that they might come back and clear out even after they take care of the dragon). The dragon himself is nesting in the far northeastern corner of this map (the party starts from the southwest, obviously) in a mountain named the Pillar of Lights.
Condition: “(The decanter is uncorked and thrown, then gets within 1 foot of a creature other than who has thrown it OR six seconds after someone says ‘Geyser’) AND nobody has said ‘Frixfraxfrux’ in the last six seconds”. What to say: “Geyser”.
Condition: “Six seconds after someone says ‘Geyser’ AND nobody has said ‘Frixfraxfrux’ in the last six seconds.” What to say: “Geyser”.
Resilient Sphere in a Ring of Spell Storing given to the familiar.
Tell the Familiar to ready an action: cast Resilient Sphere on a given enemy just as the decanter is within 1 foot of them. Then uncork the decanter and throw it at the enemy.
When the Decanter is within 1 foot of the enemy, your familiar casts Resilient Sphere to encase the enemy, and MM1 activates, saying Geyser. The decanter starts producing 30 gallons per round because MM1’s activation activates MM2, and MM2’s activation activates MM1 again. And so on.
I’ll switch to metric because I like units that actually make a modicum of sense. Let’s say a medium creature is at most 8 feet tall, that’s 2.4 m, the enclosing sphere has a radius of 1.2 m. The decanter produces 30 gallons per round, that’s 113 liters. The enclosing sphere’s volume is 7.23 m^3 which is 7230 liters. A bipedal medium creature that tall is likely going to weigh around 150 kilos, if it’s a humanoid then its density is roughly equal to water’s so that’s 150 liters of the sphere occupied by the creature. This leaves us 7088 liters to fill which is unfortunately much more than what the decanter can fill in 1 minute. In fact, it would take around 6 minutes to fill the sphere.
Bummer.
Maybe you can tie together 10 decanters?
(Though TBF a bit of alchemy could likely create a CO-producing bomb. Doing that with the familiar-spell-storing-ring trick could work, enclosing the enemy in a sphere of lethal gas for 1 minute. But even that is an awful lot of prep for suffocating someone when you could use the same spell slot to summon an azer and hug the enemy to death or 4 magma mephits and roast them in their armor.)
I have a 10-page summary of the rise and fall of the Third Civilization, starting from the Soul War ~500 000 years ago, then the Age of the Giant Kings, the Curse of Forgetting, the antique era, the Age of Conquest, the Dark Age, the Empire of the Diamond Vault, the Arcane Age and the Ascendancy Period, and finally the Collapse.
The game takes place in the Fourth Civilization, 10 000 years after the Collapse.
I’ll have to put it in series of comments. Lemmy doesn’t seem to have a comment length counter but it has a comment length limit. Even then, this is the TL;DR version of the full document.
Dates are given as BAR meaning Before Auberentian Reckoning, the time in the game currently is 1622 AR.
Stirrings of Sapience (~30 MY BAR - ~500 kY BAR)The Third Civilization is the first time sapient organic life has evolved in this multiverse. The First Civilization came from another multiverse 30 million years in the past and left ~12 million years ago to another multiverse. The Second Civilization was made of pure spiritual energy, evolved from the echoes of the First Civilization’s souls around 9 million years ago (from the game’s perspective); they could only manipulate the physical realm by possessing some animals. (Their favorite targets were simian creatures because of their useful limbs.) ~5 MY ago they found the natural pathways to the outer and inner planes plus the Feywild and Shadowfell-equivalents where their spiritual energy could embody without having to possess creatures and left. Currently they are known as gods and high-ranking celestials, archfiends, archfey, and the highest of the primordials. And then ~2 MY ago those simian creatures that they liked possessing started evolving true sapience and sentience, climbed down from the trees and started walking on two legs, etc. Some groups of these beings (basically Homo Erectus) even made their way into the more friendly inner planes (the plane of Earth and the plane of Water), the Feywild-equivalent, and even the Shadowfell-equivalent. As their society and culture evolved, so did the complexity of their brains (also spurred on by the use of fire which started on the Material Plane by the group that would evolve into Homo Sapiens Sapiens). The Second Civilization entities noticed that after death their more complex neural patterns didn’t dissipate but instead passed on into the outer planes they inhabited, empowering them enough to affect changes on the Material Plane.
The Soul War and the First Divine Concordat (~500 kY BAR - ~200 kY BAR)This sparked the Soul War, ~500 000 years ago. The Second Civilization entities on the Outer Planes were divided on how they should proceed with these new creatures. Many saw them as creatures similar to the First Civilization whose spark of sentience eventually led to the evolution of the Second Civilization, and as such they considered them peers worthy of respect (or at least free-willed creatures that might end up making good allies or powerful servants). Others just saw them as a convenient power source that needs to be captured and harnessed. This ideological split led to the groups currently known as the Gods and the Fiends. The Primordials and the Fey were initially neutral in the conflict. The war raged on for 300 000 years, using the Material Plane as the battlefield and many of the early hominids as pawns. When it rippled into the inner planes, the Primordials and the Fey tried to play peacemaker but the differences between the gods and fiends seemed irreconcilable. After long debate they joined the war on the side of the gods. In response the fiends started developing weapons capable of massive multiplanar destruction. The gods were willing to fight to the bitter end, but the Fey-Primordial alliance offered a compromise that was acceptable to both parties. The war ended with the victory of the gods but the fiends were allowed to build three thrones for themselves, and those who sit on the thrones would have the powers (and responsibilities, and limitations) of a god. (These were the Throne of Tyranny, the Throne of Corruption, and the Throne of Destruction.) This was also when the first Divine Concordat was signed, severely limiting the direct contact between the outer planes and the material plane, and limiting the powers of fiends and celestials. (Elementals and Fey got a special exception since their planes are more closely-linked; they are capable of entering the Material Plane uninvited but their power there is only on the level of a mortal.) Part of the Concordat was also the reconstruction of the Material Plane and the inner planes; gods, fey, primordials and even fiends were allowed to create new sapient races (with an ever-evolving set of limitations, e.g. after the creation of dragons they limited the maximal size and lifespan of the new races, and so on). This is the start of the Third Civilization in its earnest.
The Rise and Fall of the Giant Kings (~200 kY BAR - ~30 kY BAR)For ~150 000 years most races lived as primitive hunter-gatherers. But giants who evolved to colonize some of the more inhospitable regions (that were also affected by the magical fallout of the Soul War) had much longer lifespans, and this helped them develop their magic and technology. When they saw that the smaller races also started developing technology similar to their own, they knew that they wouldn’t stop, so the Cloud Council decided to conquer them in order to prevent them from becoming a threat. This started the Age of Giant Kings ~50 000 years ago, with most humanoid settlements on the Material plane and the elemental planes being ruled by a fire giant or ice giant in the name of their cloud giant emperors. This didn’t last too long however. The cloud giants required tribute, and the fire and ice giants, wanting to curry favor with the cloud giants began teaching magic and technology to the small ones. This was forbidden by the cloud giants, per se, but they ruled so distantly that this was rarely enforced. The small ones organized resistance cells and began teaching these technologies and magic to other settlements whose giant king didn’t do so. Then ~30 000 years ago the organized resistance achieved their first success, slaying one of the cloud giant emperors who ruled over the continent that was the ancestral homeland of the humans. The next couple of decades were a series of rebellions, ending with 90% of the giants dead. The smaller races were aided by the fey, some giants who were sympathetic to their cause (mostly fire and ice giants), and some rumors say that even the gods helped them since the giant rule was uncomfortably similar to what the fiends wanted. In the end the Cloud Giant High Emperor enacted the Curse of Forgetting on the world: everything that the giants knew would be forgotten and nobody would be able to re-learn it for 100 generations. He warded his own palace and close circle of advisors but unbeknownst to him one of the advisors was a rebel and he sabotaged the wards, leading to not only the smaller races but also the giants forgetting their magic and technology. What the High Emperor didn’t account for was that the smaller races had their own homegrown technology and magic too, so the Curse of Forgetting completely backfired, making the smaller races the dominant people on the planet. This ended the Great Giant Civilization overnight, with the remaining giants retreating to the elemental planes or the most unhospitable reaches of the world. With Giant lifespans being much longer than those of the smaller races, their 100-generation curse also lasted much longer; they only began reclaiming their knowledge well into the life of the Fourth Civilization.
Antiquity and the first great empires (~30 kY BAR - ~23 500 BAR)The Antique Period of the Third Civilization started with the First Bronze Age, during which people were unable to learn iron working or stonecutting, those being technologies that the Giants taught them. So this age was dominated by small settlements of wood, clay, and bronze, with bronze working, woodworking, and pottery being technologies they knew even before the giant conquest. 3000 years later the shorter-lived races suddenly found themselves able to invent ways to cut stone into shapes more complex than axe-heads and knives, and even smelt that elusive iron. The longer-lived races followed in a few millennia. For the next 3500 years this civilization developed similarly to civilization on Earth, but their reliance on magic led to some differences (i.e. they never discovered gunpowder or steam power; that is a technology unique to the Fourth Civilization). At the end of this period the planet was dominated by three superpowers with ever-shifting alliances between them, locked in a cold war. This cold war heated up at the end of that period, and the use of powerful arcanotech weapons led to an increase of volcanic activity which pushed the planet into a centuries-long volcanic winter. Crops failed, trade faltered, and starvation caused a population collapse. Some technology was preserved in religious and secular institutions but the surviving population was reduced to iron age levels. It took the climate millennia to stabilize and allow the population to start increasing again.
Shield master doesn’t work against fireballs, it only works against single-target spells.
As for tieflings… well, a wizard with the elemental adept feat can just ignore fire resistance (and ensures that the minimum damage on the fireball is bumped to 16). Or a Scribes wizard can just have Spirit Shroud in their spellbook, cast necroball, and be done with it. Or a sorcerer with transmuted spell can use another elemental type too, though for them it costs SPs.
Well. Now I know what I'm doing (lemmy.world)
Okay this is annoyingly clever (lemmy.world)
Worse than legos (ttrpg.network)
Fuck autofailing skill checks (lemmy.world)
The chosen one (startrek.website)
This is the fun part (startrek.website)
A downside of being a party of narcoleptic adventurers. (startrek.website)
Good advice for DMs old and new alike (files.catbox.moe)
Edit: Spleling
Good thing my -2 strength will help me escape! (ttrpg.network)
Sometimes my rogue goes off on her own for stupid reasons. This time it was because of a stupid mistake. But we survived so it’s fine! :D
#SorryNotSorry (startrek.website)
Sound advice... that I regularly ignore. (ttrpg.network)
Just let them have their fun (lemmy.world)
What is your business plan? (startrek.website)
Finding a group (lemmy.world)
Haha I'm in danger! (startrek.website)
irl dice curse? (ttrpg.network)
I think over the course of the night we had 1 nat 20 (not counting the one that was rolled just as an “evens or odds” roll) and about 8-9 nat 1s. I rolled 6 consecutive single digits at one point. Fortunately the only 20 saved my character from being possessed so that was nice.
The true story of me discovering the fabled Mystic class (lemmy.ml)
Fireball, the cause of (and solution to) all adventuring problems at lvl 5+ (ttrpg.network)
Martials don't even get anything from a 5th level multiclass into another martial class (ttrpg.network)
Subverting expectations (startrek.website)
Let the DM finish talking....or else (ttrpg.network)
Poor Chidi. Only one in the party with Intelligence above 10. (startrek.website)
No longer the worst cantrip, especially for weaponcasters. (feddit.de)
"My first girlfriend turned into the moon" (ttrpg.network)
The real, true hero of the show
I am stealth (files.catbox.moe)
I am as stealthy as a fog horn in the night.
Behold: My 10 second class on how to make your dragons not suck (yiffit.net)
I can also give a 5 hour class on the matter if you’re interested.
When it all comes down to a single roll. (comicpress.socksandpuppets.com)
This comic is part of an ongoing story that might make more sense with full context....
Why an underbarrel shotgun will give you the edge in a wizard duel (diyrpg.org)
The Rule of Cool Has Limits (lemmy.sdf.org)
Spellslot well spent (lemmy.world)
Happened at our table a couple of months back.
And they'll likely only read parts of it (startrek.website)
My Eldritch Knight lives in fear (ttrpg.network)
Help.