#deadsands — Public Fediverse posts

My party isn't especially combat-focused, but for our second multi-year campaign, #deadsands, I described how the setting I was building would have areas that were more challenging than the first. But I'm always a little trepidatious when I design a challenging encounter and then everyone rolls like crap all night. It drags out the scenario and I worry it isn't fun.

I've had a reoccurring bad guy repeatedly show up and try to steal a wondrous item. They have fended him off twice but he has the ability to charm one of the PCs with no save -- which they do not know the reason for atm -- and every time be shows up he has bigger minions to boss around. The encounter isn't deadly -- he's not interested in killing the PCs, he just wants his book back. This time he succeeded in getting ahold of it and is now one round away from escape. He's at the bottom of initiative, so they have a full round to try and stop him. I hope they do! If they don't, they'll have to figure out how to go after him if they want it back. And I hope the stakes are fun?

I've asked the players, because that's what you do. I can make adjustments if necessary. But I still worry!

#dnd

As part of the #deadsands campaigin's theme of making mundane skill checks useful and interesting, I posted the homebrew rules for tinkering. This directly applies to the Artificer in the party, but it only really needs proficiency with artificer's tools.

#dnd #ttrpg #homebrew

https://deadsands.froghat.club/mechanics/tinkering/

My #deadsands dnd campaign has some light survivalist elements, such as foraging for high-value ingredients that can be sold for cash. This is one of several things players can do during overland travel when they're mapping the wilderness.

One of my design goals for the campaign was to make tools checks useful: there are plot-relevant things that can only be learned with artificer's tools, etc. So I also designed an entire alchemy system for creating potions from these ingredients tied to Alchemists Supplies. But nobody ever asked about using these ingredients for anything, so they never knew about it (despite taking jobs for a local alchemist)!

Anyway I was delighted when @epu rolled a replacement character who happened to be a potion master. Now these rules will see the light of day.

https://deadsands.froghat.club/mechanics/alchemy/

#dnd #ttrpg #homebrew

My #deadsands #dnd game takes place in a post-apocalyptic gold rush weird west. As my players have just begun discovering, a major inspiration is the concept of Eternalism; the apocalyptic events of the past are happening all around them now and the future is rotting, pouring into the present, they are moving backwards and forwards in time, and it's generally a Dr. Who acid trip of a setting.

I am having a lot of fun roleplaying a precocious teenaged scholar who is trying -- and mostly failing -- to explain what is happening. My players keep posting Pepe Silvia gifs in the chat while I'm talking.

My #dnd campaign, #deadsands, is a weird western and includes custom rules for survival in the desert wasteland. One rule requires them to drink so much water per day, or suffer penalties. Casting spells in the desert triggers wild magic explosions, so they have been somewhat gunshy at low level.

But they now have access to Tiny Hut, Shape Water, and Create Water, and they figured out that if they cast spells *inside* the hut, there is no wild magic explosion. So now they fill their water skins from inside the hut using create water to manifest it and shape water to distribute it into the empty skins, and I couldn't be prouder of them.

The game at low-level was supposed to be about survival, but at mid-level I wanted it to shift more into exploration: narratively the party is now beginning to master the desert as befits heroes. I'm thrilled that plans I hatched two years ago are coming to fruition through emergent gameplay.

My #deadsands #dnd campaign features homebrew survival rules for when they are exploring the desert, which is a kind of magical superfund site. Each region of the desert has unique magical weather, flora, and fauna. As they travel, they can map the area and unlock its secrets. Here's an example:

https://deadsands.froghat.club/locations/blooming-wastes/

Anyway tonight they entered a region called Bone City where one of the weather effects is a 25% chance of cursed wind that bestows madness for one day. At the end of the travel day, the party wizard cast Tiny Hut, but one party member was cursed by the wind to believe they were all out to get him, so he wouldn't go in. They debated leaving him outside until the weather shifted, but without shelter he couldn't take a long rest and risked an encounter.

So the party spent nearly an hour initiative trying to get him into the damn hut where he would be protected from the wind. Any time they left the hut to try and get him in there they were cursed anew, so at one point we had a PC naked in the hut, another firing random thunder waves into the dark, and three others trying to grapple the paranoid PC and drag them back to the hut. He lit them on fire with a flamethrower. 😃

What I love about this is all the choices they were forced to make because the survival rules set up both mechanical and RP motivation for finding shelter and sticking together. Tiny Hut is a huge advantage for them and helps them feel like heroes mastering the desert, but the desert is still a dangerous place and the interaction of all these systems has led to some wild sessions that I didn't have to plan at all!

Spent an enjoyable morning modifying a CLI framework I built originally for Groove on Demand to handle hotkeys. Based on prompt_toolkit as it is this is not notable, but because I strongly believe in not repeating myself I wanted the hot keys to trigger the same handlers used by the autocompleter, and I wanted them to preserve the current prompt with user input, if any, *and* I wanted it to all work with my ANSI console theme engine. It involved making the whole thing async, building key binding wrappers for the handlers at run time, patching stdout and adding some clean up logic to ensure the terminal didn't get broken when the app quit. Anyway now I can hit CTRL-W and generate a custom wild magic table while I am DMing the #deadsands, CTRL-N to generate an NPC complete with stats, physical description, background, and goals., etc. Handy!

My #deadsands #dnd campaign takes place in a sort of Weird West setting on the edge of a vast desert. I designed an overland travel ruleset specific to the desert that gets the party rolling dice a lot and makes exploring actually interesting mechanically.

https://deadsands.froghat.club/mechanics/desert-travel-rules/

In each region of the desert players can travel, forage, track, evade, or survey. If they survey enough they gain knowledge of the region which grants them skill check bonuses for the other activities. They can track creatures native to the region to find water and shelter. The can evade those creatures if they themselves are being tracked. And they can travel the region to discover its secrets.

It's fairly crunchy, with multiple skill checks, bonuses, and penalties you have to resolve, and wouldn't work at every table. But my players? My players created a table matching their PC skill bonuses to overland travel activities so they know who is going to do what ❤️

Tonight they surveyed Gopher Gulch, an area some 80 miles from the closest settlement. But they've been in the desert for a couple of weeks now; they're starting to run low on water and were mauled by free-roaming cacti, so decided to turn back. But even in a region they had previously surveyed, with a total of +12 on the travel skill check, they managed to get lost. In an empty canyon. 😃

Tonight my #deadsands #dnd group played mostly in person for the first time in nearly six years. For reasons, the group is called the Frog Hat Club, so we called this FrogCon and I ran a frog-themed encounter. I got to use all my homemade terrain tiles and some tiny frog minis. The boss was CROAKTHULU, a giant demon frog with "tongtacles." I bought a plastic model frog, sliced its mouth open with a hand saw, then drilled holes up from the bottom through the aluminum strips and secured them with screws so they could swing freely. When CROAKTHULU grappled a PC, I wrapped their mini a tongtacle and began rolling it up. If it got back to the mouth, the PC would be swallowed. Good times!

#ttrpg #crafting

When the party visits a merchant in my campaign, I can automatically generate inventories using https://github.com/evilchili/dnd-rolltable

The merchant's stock is a randomly selected subset of possible inventory items I have previously defined with a weighted distribution. The General's Store, for example, is likely to carry most general supplies and typically has a limited selection of common items, but doesn't traffic in uncommon or rarer stocks.

Now I never have to GM a shopping episode, because the party can shop between sessions, I don't need to manually generate an inventory during the game, and regenerating the inventories simulates an economy where people besides the party are buying and selling. Better stock up on 10ft poles while they're in!

#dnd #homebrew #deadsands

https://deadsands.froghat.club/stores/generals-store/