Monday, April 24, 2017

What is Magic?

Draven Lyndholm
4:AA:289
On the Misrepresentation of Magic

If you travel around Requiem, asking various people what magic is, they will give you vastly different answers. 

A mud farmer in Styssios, wiping his brow with a blackreed hat while balancing on his dirtpoles, will tell you very seriously that magic is the way that souls reproduce: the mental ejaculate of a wizard or cleric, floating through the ethereal until it bumps up against a clot of ephemeral matter and infuses it with energy, creating yet another soul that is sucked into the biological vacuum of a baby as it is born, giving the child a personality. Druidic souls will instill a connection with nature, or perhaps eel-like tendencies. Clerical souls might infuse a natural skill with healing, or maybe a really good eye for detailed symbol carving.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

What a beholder told a terrified group of adventurers shortly before killing them

"You want to know why I'm going to kill you? Why I'm going to murder you knowingly, in cold blood, and watch you die? Why I and others like me despise you all relentlessly?

"I'm going to kill you because you humans never think. Never watch, never observe, never reason. Instead of attempting to find a plausible answer, you jump to the most immediate and self-serving one. 

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

D&D Abbreviations: A Guide

I'm new to D&D or other roleplaying systems, what do all these abbreviations/words mean?

Hi there, and welcome to my little corner of the interwebs. Despite the look of things, D&D isn't that complicated, just wordy. We use abbreviations so we don't have to type/write/say the same long words over and over again. Here's a basic list that will probably get longer and longer as time goes on. I apologize for my instinctive 5e bias. And I'll alphabetize this eventually. Just hit ctrl + f for now and search for your term.

AC: Armor Class. Measures how hard a creature is to hit. 
Con: Short for Constitution. Determines general endurance, grit, and hit points.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

The Cygnate Principalities, Part 1

So my current campaign world is called Requiem. (Please ignore the first posts I made about my world, I'm currently treating those like an inchoate, undeveloping fetus). It features the Tritonius Ingenium, which is an empire of coastal barbarians, tempest magic, Mongolian savagery, Greek creativity, and Romanesque military might that was fighting a very successful war against Ruhrum Aqklas, a loose confederation of tribes encompassing a huge inland desert. Unsurprisingly, the further away the Ingenium got from water, the weaker they became. So they tried to conquer up the top half of the continent, which was close to an ice sea, and got mired in tundra for their troubles trying to circle back down towards the caravan-capital of the Aqklas, Quorrummeklas. One front is cold, inhospitable ice with ebony dragons, two others biting sand with dustwyrms and sandstorms and no water along with the Ruhrum Antlions, and yet another route is cursed savanna between the tundra and the desert that swallowed up the first army that was sent into it and all other small expeditionary forces/adventurers sent into it so far. There are rumors of a massive citadel, constructed out of a volcano's peak, deep in the savanna. For now, propaganda abounds about the successful advance of the armies, while the war slowly loses its momentum as the Poseidon, Amphitrite, and generals watch. Logistics has become a mindfuck of colossal proportions, and the Aqklas are adapting. 

Friday, April 7, 2017

The Great Rave of Synthexia, Part 1

So Synthexia is an 80's neonwarpworld style hexcrawl filled with glowing sinuous animate lazers that snake miles underground through forgotten miles wide decaying fiberoptics and occasionally push a loop of themselves up into a humble hamlet that used to be a nexus of fiberops and fry/drive insane/convert the inhabitants into lazermen who are as fast as light and have no sense of how to control their new bodies and great apocalypse tigers with 3 eyes on each of their pawpads and infinite fuzzy green tentacle tails that can turn your soul into a black screaming tortured crystal that burrows its way out of you in 1 round with one look (save vs. death). Shit like that. Crystals and lazers and incredibly powerful technologic cities long since degraded into cults of broken AI's and dimly pulsing wires with frothing cyborg-zombie as the world tumbles towards its sun. Postapoc futuristic disco world slowly dying. Corrupted versions of this song glitch over degrading organoplastic speakers as crysgolems slowly shuffle over a holofloor, ignoring fallen golems that spastically twich, painting erratic patterns in the fresh blood from adventurers who weren't good enough dancers.

Et cetera.

Here is my humble contribution.