drunkonduty

Many fine games mentioned. Also, Gamma World.

I like when a player adds to the campaign world. If that's in the form of NPCs I'm cool with that. 

But yes, it's possible for someone to oversaturate the campaign with their NPCs. I don't think there's a hard and fast rule as to how many is too many. But I'll know it when I see it.

I do think there's a difference between Hunteds and DNPCs on the one hand, and general supporting cast on the other. All characters should have supporting cast. These are the NPCs who ground them in the game world. They are the depth and richness that comes from having known and (somewhat) developed characters in the game world. 

I wouldn't want to see more than 1 DNPC per character. I mean, I could be talked into allowing it, but generally 1 is enough. That one may be a group, say the orphans of St. Mary's, but they always come as a single group.

Hunteds can come in larger numbers. But if a player chooses to have a bunch of hunteds they have to accept that sometimes this will lead to a Sinister 6 scenario - all the hunteds showing up at once.

Other times I'll skip a hunted showing up if a single character's background has been coming up more than others. All the players should get equal chance to have their time in the limelight.

Would Suppress do the job? (Is Suppress still a thing in 6th ed?) Also, I suppose you'd need "affects desol" on the suppress desol.

I've gotten rid of CON in my house rules. I'm just using BOD wherever it says CON. I'm only a few sessions into my campaign but no problems so far.

1 hour ago, theinfn8 said:

 

But, for the sake of running a game, we make exceptions. How many people actually play the "Real Armour" part of the disads? How many people charge their players for the upkeep (replacing buckles, strapping, pounding out dents, etc)? Make the players spend time doing maintenance while adventuring? Good armour is going to require a lot of maintenance in the field to protect it against the elements and stave off rust and rot. Some of the real major disadvantages of plate are distinctly *not fun* for most play groups.

I cover maintenance and such as part of the background play. Costs are part of the general cost of living and field maintenance is what people do in the evenings while sitting around the camp fire. So I acknowledge it in the narrative but don't make it a big thing.

On 8/12/2022 at 5:13 PM, Lord Liaden said:

V'han is "multiversally unique." Neither she nor we know why, she just is. I would suggest that includes Parterres versions of her, because otherwise her uniqueness is diluted. The general rules clearly don't apply to her, since she continued to exist after accidentally wiping her own parents out of ever having existed.

Absolutely, that's the canon. And I admit my maunderings on Imaginal V'hans do contradict what is written in canon.

3 hours ago, steriaca said:

So your saying that she is the reason she is unique in the Multiverse. Intresting...

 

As in sometimes she comes across other versions of herself and either kills or absorbs them (think Jet Lei's The One movie) and beco.es stronger. And then makes sure nobody can remember that the other her (or sometimes him or it) existed at all.

Somewhat. 

Beings of the parterres are created (or possibly moulded) by the beliefs of the people of a world.  Given that V'han holds such a huge slice of the communal consciousness in any place she rules she is in danger of causing parterres versions of herself to come into being. To counteract this her media machine plays at 1984 with the hope that the constantly changing stories make it impossible for parterres to form versions of her. Not that anyone in the media machine necessarily knows why they do what they do. In fact it would work better if they don't. In fact V'han probably had anyone who knew about the real reasons for this policy killed long, long ago.

But this doesn't explain why she has no dimensional doubles in the parallel dimensions. Which is why I suggested maybe it's because she's a Brialic being. If this is the case  then she has no parallel selves because she originates in a place where there are no parallel dimensions.

I hope that makes sense.

I agree, her media machine would probably say many things across different worlds and/or dimensions as needed. Few of the stories would be true and many of them contradictory. Which could lead to some interesting versions of her (yes, I'm well outside of canon now.) And given V'han's rather, um, strong and definite ego, she would NOT take well to her different selves. And they in turn would probably not like her.

Maybe, in order to prevent Imaginal V'hans, she has set up a Ministry of Truth a la 1984. The constant revision of history is the way she stops imaginal V'hans from forming in the first place.

And yet another random thought on V'han.

Is she just Urizen's plant? An agent he is using to "bring order" to the lower realms?  Or maybe an avatar instead of a truly separate being.

It would explain her being "dimensionally unique" or what ever the phrase is.

33 minutes ago, Steve said:

So, is there only one Faerie or are there infinite versions of Faerie unique to each universe?

 

I am away from my books at the moment so I'm going from memory. Also , I could be talking out of turn here given the man who literally wrote the book is posting in this thread...

That said... officially each planet in this dimension has it's own parterres.* Each parterre reflect the beliefs (spiritual, ethical, scientific, etc.) of the beings who inhabit those worlds. So the worlds in this dimension each have their own parterres that are unrelated to the parterres of Earth. This suggests to me that, as each other-dimension parallel will have it's own unique each planet with it's own unique history, evolution, etc, each unique other-dimension world also has it's own unique parterres. 

That's my interpretation of official Champions sources. 

Personally, as I said in my previous post, I like the idea that the parterres are connected cross-dimensionally. By cross-dimension I mean across parallel realities.

*These other-world parterres may or may not reflect the four way tensions of the higher (Brialic?) realities in a manner that is is similar to how Earth's parterres reflect the higher realities.

On 8/1/2022 at 6:45 AM, steriaca said:

It probably should be noted that she probably doesn't officially forbid worship of the gods in her universes. She knows the worse thing she can do is tell people that they can't worship what they wish, for forbidding something is the best way to say everyone give their power to someone or something to defeat her.

 

She has probably encouraged her media/fiction beings to start interpreting the gods of the universe she conquered as villains of some kind. The best way to discourage worship of gods is to either make them seem like evil or make them seemike fools. Discourage the belief of gods is a way to weaken them.

So, does anyone think that, given that the imaginal realms reflect beliefs, is it possible for there to be imaginal V'hans that exist in the many (or not so many, see my above post) parterres of the worlds? Not the real V'han anymore than Zeus is the real Urizen; but pop-culture V'hans that are influenced by the popular media culture that the real V'han creates around herself.

Or am I just disappearing up my own backside at this point?

Off topic a bit but...

I like the idea that the parterres of different dimensions are connected. Those connections may be quite round-about and difficult to use but they're there.

I assume it would only be continuing spells.

You could make it a limitation on magic in your campaign. A sorcerer must make a skill vs. skill roll to take over another's spell. 

Maybe you could only try to take over a spell you know; or maybe in the same school of magic, if you're doing schools of magic.

Definitely FASERIP. Had loads of fun with that. 

The Praetor is... impressive. Good luck to your heroes.

7 hours ago, Grailknight said:

 

Use Dresdenverse elves. Good take on classic Sidhe tropes moved to modern times.

Yeah, this is a good idea. The question is how modern should the elves be? I think some should be pretty well acculturated, others less so. Yet others who think they're acculturated but aren't.

17 hours ago, Chris Goodwin said:

If they do exist, what's their history in the world?  Why are they showing themselves now?  Can players choose to play them?

At this time I can only answer the third question: yes.

The setting is as yet too undefined for me to be able to answer "what their relationship with the mortal world was/is." Buuuuut... I think I'll take on Dean Shomshak's suggestion and base them on actual folkloric creatures. This suggests to me that they've been around for a long time and their interactions with mortals have been varied. Very varied. Some good, some bad. 

7 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Urban Fantasy: As in, "Modern world with myth and magic secretly alongside"? In that case, an easy place to start is actual folklore. Your elves aren't elves: They are the Sidhe, or the Tylwyth Teg, or huldra-folk, or youkai, or celestial maidens, or, um, whatever Filipino elves are called. Pick a culture, or cultures, read up on the folklore, and decide what parts are true, what's false, and what's a mortal misinterpretation.

 

Dean Shomshak

I should probably share what I know about the campaign so far:

Urban Fantasy, set in the 1980s.

Characters are going to be starting as Highly Trained Normals-ish. I'm thinking 75 points, 50 points in disads, & 5 points in quirks (a la GURPS.) I say normals-ish as there's no requirement that anyone be human, or indeed, normal. If it can be built on 130 points it can be played. 

I want to set it in the UK but I'll have to see what everyone else thinks.

The one (vague) character concept I've heard so far is: power ranger/ronin.  

And that's it. The rest is to be worked out in our brainstorming session this weekend. I don't know if the supernatural elements are out loud and proud in the world or if there's a masquerade. I don't know if the PCs will be working for some supernatural policing agency (like the Watcher's from Buffy) or will be a bunch of misfit "monsters" as in Being Human. Or both. Or something else entirely. Will the campaign be a grey coloured, gothic, mope-fest or will it be brightly coloured pop-anime? 

I don't know but I'm excited to find out.

I admit I have asked my question somewhat prematurely. But I'm excited and the thread was right here. 😁

I'm about to embark on an Urban Fantasy game. I have in fact been wondering about what the elves will be like for this game. Assuming there are any. There may not be. My players and I are having a brain storming session this weekend. Ideas will be thrown out and voted on. I'm going to throw fae into the mix, they may not get the votes to be included.

But if they are I want my elves to be classic fae; weird, otherworldly, and very dangerous. Some of them will look like Tolkien elves but they won't be behaving like them.

Aaaaannnnnd here is where I'm running out of ideas on exactly what they should be like. Anyone got any suggestions?

38 minutes ago, Cygnia said:

Do you really want your campaign going to the dogs?

I'd be okay with it. Them doggos look like good bois.

10 hours ago, archer said:

 

"You can fly over the jungle if you like. But if you want to find treasure, you'll need to walk through the jungle."

 

Is there treasure in the jungle? Probably not. But it does give them incentive to walk.  

Well the Macguffin was in the jungle, but thanks to the nature of the adventure the PCs could sense where it was. They flew right there. My monster was all about hit and run tactics, it was never gonna stand up to the PCs in a fair fight. Ce le Guerre.

I've committed many over the years.

The most recent one was a couple of years ago, running a Pathfinder game, a Paizo AP. It's pretty high level by this point in the game. I modified one of the scenarios from whatever it was to a "hell in the jungle" type situation where the PCs would be hunted through a jungle by a high level, hit and run monster. I was going for a Predator vibe. Being high level Pathfinder it takes a lot of work: going over abilities to make sure I understand them, and then creating scenarios the monster could leverage for greater effect.

The PCs take one look at the dense, hot, sweaty jungle and say "We'll fly over that." Because, being high level Pathfinder, everyone had access to flight. Wings, brooms, spells, Baba Yaga's magic mortar. My face must have fallen because the players were all "Oh. Well, we can walk through it, if you like." I said "No, no. This is on me. I'm an idiot."

I appreciate the convenience of the auto dice roller, but I love the idea of rolling buckets full of dice. Glad everyone is having such a blast.

Looking forward to the future exciting installments. 👍

Thrilling stuff!

Two questions. The first about the story: is Silvercloud trying to copy Malvan tech? I hope not, the Malvans have very few laws but no one using their tech is one they enforce ruthlessly.

And second: Your team is throwing around some huge damage, are you using a dice rolling app? Just taking the average? Or throwing actual bucket loads of dice?

Adding numbers and "higher numbers are better" are two things that are much easier to sell to potential new players. Anything that does away with charts is better as well.

The next campaign I run is going to be Hero. And I have worried about this very issue. So thanks for the thread and replies. Very timely.

Just watched Season 2 of The Great; a not even slightly historically accurate telling of the early years of Catherine the Great in Russia. Lots of silly fun and very pretty costumes.

 And Deep Space Nine. Never actually watched it before (bar the odd bit here and there.) It strikes me as a less good Babylon 5.