D&D General Flip or Twist A D&D Cliche

[GreyLord]

Doesn't seem like a trope at first...but...

Everytime you cast a spell or use magic it drains some of the world's natural energy from it.

Once you have used magic (cast a spell, drank a potion, used any magic item) you will also start draining the natural energy of the world with every breath you take. You take a breath...and it goes in, but it never goes back out (the magical energy it drains to keep you alive...the oxygen goes back out...the energy doesn't).

If you get strong enough, you will draw enough energy from the world to kill it when casting a single 9th level spell.

If you go up levels...the drain on the world gets worse. By 10th level, if you live 10 more years the world dies. By 20th...the world dies in a month.

Anyone in your party that is casting magic...they...they are the villains of this world whether they realize it or not. Anyone that has used magic and is leveling up...they...they are the villains of the world. As you level up and get more powerful...you do it at the expense of the rest of the world if you've ever used magic.

It's not the monsters you slay that are the real villains. Your PC's are the villains of the world. Their natural tendency to want to level up and get more powerful...they are not going to save the world.

They are the ones that will destroy it.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Trope: The adventure starts in a tavern

Subversion: The entire adventure takes part in a tavern. For a great example see ‘A Rough Night at the Three Feathers’

One time, when I started an adventure with the words, "The party is sitting in a tavern...", one of the players who knew me well immediately asked, "Is it on fire?"

 

[Corinnguard]

The party is a bunch of criminals who were offered parole by the ruler of a kingdom if they worked together to retrieve a powerful magical artifact from a neighboring kingdom. To ensure that they stayed true to their mission, they're forced to wear magical chokers around their necks.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The party is a bunch of criminals who were offered parole by the ruler of a kingdom if they worked together to retrieve a powerful magical artifact from a neighboring kingdom. To ensure that they stayed true to their mission, they're forced to wear magical chokers around their necks.

i dunno i think i've heard 'party of indentured criminals' as the premise more than a couple of times, but maybe that's just me

 

[Corinnguard]

i dunno i think i've heard 'party of indentured criminals' as the premise more than a couple of times, but maybe that's just me

Indentured by magic. That has a lot of creative potential where magic is concerned. "Think of all the things that can happen to you while you are in my service..."

 

[DammitVictor]

Dragons are part of the Celestial Bureaucracy, chromatic and metallic alike; their cosmological function is to beefgate insane, reckless, and/or unworthy mortals-- like every elf, ever-- from Immortality. The metallics focus more on fostering worthy candidates, and eating their failures, while the chromatics tend to focus on making humanoid society less conducive to the pursuit of immortality.

The ancestors of the orcs were originally elves transformed by evil magics... by the elves themselves as part of one of their many civil wars. They're not Always Chaotic Evil, but they are certainly predatory, aggressive, and conditioned-- naturally and magically-- to be hostile to elves and their allies. Humans who prefer the orcs find that the orcs prefer them in return, though their means of showing respect and even affection tend to involve more violence and bloodshed.

I like old school racial restrictions on classes. Elves can't be Clerics because they don't have souls and they're not mentally capable of prayer. Except for the draugh, of course, see above. Elves do just fine as shamans are druids, and of course as bards.

Dwarves are heavily matriarchal. While male dwarves work in the deep mines and man the trenches against the incursions of subterranean horrors, female dwarves work the hearths and the forges (which is why they cut their hair and beards shorter) and keep the ledgerbooks and the histories. There's only one Dwarven word for husband, but three for wife: a dwarf's oldest wife, the matriarch, all of his other elder wives, and all of his junior wives. The important thing to remember is that inside the dwarf's clan hall, all three outrank him.

I'm planning a Terminator game. The player characters are all the sole survivors of different Resistance cells whose members were captured or killed in the Eighties and Nineties. Using old machine-proof Resistance communications, they've found each other and schedule a meeting to try to salvage their individual missions.

They're all meeting in a tavern.

 

[Reynard]

I like old school racial restrictions on classes. Elves can't be Clerics because they don't have souls and they're not mentally capable of prayer. Except for the draugh, of course, see above. Elves do just fine as shamans are druids, and of course as bards.

This is one of those weird D&Disms that always rubs me the wrong way. Shamans and druids worship entities, too. A druid is just a kind of cleric. 2E had the right view with its specialty priests.

 

[DammitVictor]

Frankly, the way D&D has almost always handled polytheism is so offensive and gross to me, I'll take practically anything that replaces it as the "default priest" in a D&D world, whether the classic Cleric is excluded entirely or simply made into the weird off-shoot.

 

[Reynard]

Frankly, the way D&D has almost always handled polytheism is so offensive and gross to me, I'll take practically anything that replaces it as the "default priest" in a D&D world, whether the classic Cleric is excluded entirely or simply made into the weird off-shoot.

Really, the right solution is to just eliminate "priest" classes. You can create a healbot/buffer magical type without having to invoke religions.

 

[Corinnguard]

Really, the right solution is to just eliminate "priest" classes. You can create a healbot/buffer magical type without having to invoke religions.

Kobold Press had a Priest class for their Midgard setting that was essentially the divine equivalent of the Wizard.