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Nightlife: The second great city of Ostalin is Eshkital, which through blessings of the goddess Chebas mastered the river on whose banks it lies. One manifestation of this is a part of the city called The Rambles, formerly a sprawl of rocky islets that could be walked between during the dry...

Old Gods: The region known as the Pleian Basins was made up of numerous low mountain ridges creating dozens of small river valleys, enough to support isolated cultures but hardly worth the effort of sending caravans to for trading. They were mostly left alone and little thought of before that...

Excellent stuff with Myetharia and Shalosha.

Neat idea, but why is this image 15 megabytes? Ouch. This could have been a text file.

I ran the inspiration for WotBS back in 2003/04, and Rantle's player started his 'courtship' of Shalosha in the equivalent of adventure 3 when she showed up in Seaquen. She found him uncouth but appealing in a Han Solo sort of way. Then in the equivalent of adventure 6, the PCs were captured...

Arsonist governor versus cannibal healers.

The way I did it in Elements of Magic back in, oof, 2003 was that each level you got a number of magical effects you knew how to create, each of which had a Magic Point cost. And you could build spells on the fly, but doing so took two whole turns to cast the spell. However, you could design a...

I worked on A5E, and I dug parts of its complexity. But the combat maneuver system didn't click with me. It was too similar to Vancian magic, with a bunch of options differentiated by name and fiddly specifics, rather than a more mechanics-first system that I prefer. I favor, I suppose...

It has been a long time since I've had the opportunity to run a session longer than 3 hours. Normally we start at 8 and break a little after 11. But man, I miss the days of starting at 6 and playing 'til 2am or something. Of course, I also had a lot more time to plan ahead back then. And...

I'm not sure what to name such a class, but yeah, I'd like someone who operates kinda like, I dunno, Magic: the Gathering logic. You need to 'tap mana' from your environment to power your spells. So like, there'd need to be some system for gathering power one turn, then using it to pump out a...

I know I'm 140 replies deep here, but I'm curious what sorts of subsystems you like, and what value you derive from them.

You have to wait until 17th level for your Arcane Trickster rogue to steal spells? All them Arcane Tricksters should have chosen to be Last Raven wizards, who learn to filch magic from 2nd level. Last Raven | Level Up

I did a wholly inadequate amount of planning for this plot, though I like the idea of needing to win the favor of the temple of the love goddess. Turns out my party wanted to investigate a side quest I hadn't really planned, and so the romance plot will begin next week. --- Instead they spoke...

TL;DR - how do I make "arranging a marriage" into an adventure for a D&D party? Love is ineffable, but political marriages don't need love. So what sub-goals should the party need to achieve to make the marriage work? --- In a Bronze Age Mesopotamia-esque setting where stone tablets have...

Man, this sent me down a rabbit hole of looking for Bronze Age art, and almost immediately, I see this: Ugh. So like, I search for ziggurat, and I find both this really fabulous vivid piece that has text at the bottom explaining that it's inspired by Chogha Zanbil, an Elamite ruin that's one...

I was playing in a jokey game, and I made an absolute Drizzt knock-off, then used ChatGPT to create prompts like, "In the style of novelist R.A. Salvatore, what would a hero who fights with two scimitars say to a witch as he was attacking?" The point was to be derivative, not creative. We had...