NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Robbs" data-source="post: 2427173" data-attributes="member: 33483">Just Happy to Be HereFirst I have to say I just stumbled upon the whole ENworld thing a few weeks ago and started reading this thread as I am moving my group of heroes into higher level threats also. Then I got hooked on all the RBDM stuff and great story/monster ideas flowing. I've been trying since then to get up-to-friggin-date as I noticed the early posts were from years ago (but wanting to know the whole story before jumping in).That being said, on to the matter at hand...While a bad image of 'Young Guns' automatically flashes to mind ("okay, everyone got their peyote?"), with things like this I like to require it to be personalized to each member of the party. So each character would need a different method of entry so to speak. Since your post will generate a bunch of good ideas (what seems to happen pretty often is that there are multiple exciting ideas and you end up having to pick one or meld a couple) and you could mix & match based upon the peculiar elements that resonate with each character. Don't know if your DMing schedule allows for this but it would also be a great way to run a series of single player adventures that culminates with them all meeting ("So, how'd you get here? Well, I had to convince a cabal of para-elemental shamans to transmute me & imbue my essence to gravitate towards the center. You know, the usual."). Since this sounds like it might not require a lot of combat you could achieve the transport part of the story arc through email (which would allow you to tailor this to your player's desires since some will be more into this concept than others-they get more email exchanges) which would also allow you to run everyone at the same time (which is usually the biggest downside to soloing your players, the time it takes to run each one sequentially instead of concurrently). The overall concept being that since it is a 'meta-physical' center it requires something core to each person's beliefs and consciousness.  Plus you get the benny of tailoring the hook to your player's desires (your heavy player dramaticists get what they want while your combat monster player gets what s/he wants!Wait, I think I have this whole post thing backwards. Did I just post a way to make your job more complicated instead of less complicated?<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" /> Sorry, still getting the hang of this! I promise to come up with actual useful stuff too!Okay, in addition to the tongue-in-cheek para-elemental idea (and in keeping with the RBDM aspect of the strand) I think a natural transport path would have to involve one or more PCs placing themselves at the mercy of either a recurring evil, some fresh new evil (hot off the stove), or more generalized evil.  A quick one using some earlier posts could involve convincing an enclave of modified (thru PrC, templates, etc.) mindflayers to weave a psychic pathway that will lift the PC's minds and free them to 'find the center' (Let me see if I've got this straight, we strip ourselves of all magic 'cause it will disrupt the process, then lay down inside a circle of uber-illithids while they all focus their mental powers on us?  Right.  Well, OK when do we start!).  You get the conflict of good needing to work with evil, which always generates good party conflict, and the players have to work an angle to convince these creatures to go along with this and figure out some way to keep from getting screwed over in the process.I also have an image of something involving the silver strand aspect of Astral travel, maybe having to shift astral then having to enchant the strand to act as a lifeline when the second shift to the 'center' occurs.Anyway, a couple of ideas to poke holes in; but be gentle this is my first time...posting.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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