Recent content by zakael19

Ah, same way they reused most of the Crystal Shard stuff in Rime of the Frostmaiden. Edit: I'm sure there will be some shout outs to BG3 events in the book, for those that matters to.

The Murder in Baldur’s Gate module has a lot of excellent city stuff for the 5e historical transition.

This looks a lot like the daggerheart collector's edition style, love that sort of big bold color contrast and stylized tapestry-like / in-world mosaic type shapes. I have enough weird nostalgic fondness for the realms of my childhood I'll probably grab em to use with some other system, haha.

As an aside, I think you might say that urban fantasy a la Peter Grant etc romanticizes the idea of a time when (western?) humanity believed more widely in mystical things. They’re literally about taking the rational everyday mundane modern life and injecting magic back into it.

And also has some fascinating ideas about magic and demons that I’m totally tearing off for my Tuesday urban fantasy game.

We had a player duck out due to a medical issue last night, but one guy who has a ~50m drive was already on his way. Thankfully this game scales just fine down to 2 players, and we had a great session of reaching the Big City and starting to make inquiries towards the cult-activity they'd...

Empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the feelings of others. Empathic-altruism is the act of helping others because you understand that they're suffering. Empathy is correlated with pro-social behaviors because one part of that is understanding how others are affected by what you...

Actually, that tends not to be true? Empathy is about understanding somebody else's internal state and tends to be correlated with pro-social behavior; some studies suggest that the more power and status somebody has the less empathetic they are while those from lower social strata have...

Doesnt the 2024 DMG have verbiage literally about this and similar stupid BS? Just crib from that as a general "Power Recovery abilities trigger when facing a foe while in initiative. Don't be stupid."

Guess I'll just keep using Owlbear Rodeo for now then!

How'd you find that? That's fascinating, I was expecting you to go with the design or combat here and not scene framing! To me, the "continuous way" is far more gamey then scene framing techniques that narrative games have been emphasizing for a while; continuous style play is a very D&D-ism...

I definitely see most canon Settings of Despair as per OP not having a ton of space for PCs to fundamentally alter the path the place is on. At best you might hope to escape back to somewhere better or a temporary improvement of the status quo. Some examples that come to mind are Blade's Doskvol...

Whoa, definitely missed this when I was running a game of it haha. I don't think the context is quite the same as the latter which is more about how you want to cheer for characters by giving them opportunities to struggle? One interesting bit we'll get to later regarding characters is that...

The One Ring is pretty clear on how you’re fighting to keep the spark of hope alive until the King Returns & etc. You’re not going to defeat Sauron, but you can help ensure there’s a world to come after him.

Over the last year-ish I've been playing two games focused around community building/sustainment as the fulcrum of play: Stonetop and Songs for the Dusk. The latter is a post-post collapse/apocalyptic setting (Think: Destiny 2), but one where many of the institutions lean towards power-seeking /...