In reply to A Malign Presence (msg # 286):

I hope you are good and it sorts it's self out.

Thanks guys. Things are... a little better now but I need to focus on RL. Will update you in October.

Glad to hear there is positive progress.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:28, Tue 27 Aug 2019.

In reply to Hanse Von Danzig (msg # 290):

+1

Hi Hanse! Sorry for not updating you in October like I said I would. RL continues to run me through the proverbial wringer, but Oliver and I have been exchanging PMs and are talking about reviving this game in 2020. Let me know if you're interested. If not, no worries!

I'm still interested.

Sweet! I also randomly think I got an RMail from a potential third player...

I will be updating a few rules over the next few weeks, but we will look at resuming mid to late January. More to come soon.

I've (accidentally?) recruited a third player. Oliver might know them from Arcana Americana, where they played Miss Sunshine.

Also, I have made what I hope is a final edit to the way Relationships work. First, I've 86'd the concept of Traditions. They were just too complicated. I've also removed the idea of Relationships providing a static +1 to particular rolls or actions. It was impossible to balance, and I honestly much prefer the idea of players suggesting when they think their relationships apply than giving a specific list of possible +1s.

Additionally, I've decided that invoking those +1s is a finite resource. Specifically, you can invoke a Relationship for a +1 only once before that Relationship is "exhausted." Once your take an 8-hour rest, your Relationships are "refreshed".

Using your Relationship to make something bad happen to you or your party doesn't exhaust the Relationship... you can farm Relationships as much as you want for Valor, but your party members might get pissed off if your complicated past keeps interfering with their payday! So beware.

Instead of choosing if you want a Relationship to grant you a situational +1 or "special training," you can just choose to forgo selecting a new Relationship to instead receive "special training" from one of your pre-existing Relationships. Since Traditions have been removed, one of the "special training" benefits is +1 to your caster level. This is clearly one of the better benefits of special training, but keep in mind you're giving up a +1 per day every time you elect to not select a new Relationship.

Anyway, just wanted to update you guys on what's happening behind the scenes. Happy holidays!
This message was last edited by the GM at 04:57, Wed 25 Dec 2019.

Same to you, hope you have a great Christmas season.

Just got off a grueling flight. Had a good Christmas but happy to be back home and looking forward to the new year. Hope you all are too.

I'm going to try and double-check character sheets this week and get everyone ready for the game. Also, a few details I forgot to mention about the Relationships changes:

For Oliver, the old moratorium on Relationship +1s applying to attack rolls is now gone. The power of Relationships is their flexibility; as long as you can convince me of a narrative reason why your association with that group would give you a +1 it's fair game. Keep in mind you need to invoke a Relationship before you roll, so no retroactively using the +1 to turn a miss into a hit.

To Hanse and Rachel who may not have had time to peruse the "example uses" before I deleted them: the +1 relationship bonus can also be applied to many, many other things, as long as you're only changing a single number by one. The old examples including things like reducing the upkeep costs of certain hirelings by 1 SP a day (though we're not using hirelings yet in this particular playtest), reducing the cost of certain goods by 1 SP or 1 GP (though you always pay a minimum of 1). I would probably even allow something like reducing incoming damage of appropriate type by 1 (like reducing a Fireball's damage by 1, since you claim your old Anointed Armada uniform provides a little protection). So feel free to get creative with suggestions on how to use your relationships. I'll shoot you down if you get too crazy, but the idea is relationships help define your character and give you as players a bit of narrative control.

With Traditions gone, you now gain 50 reagents per caster level when foraging for or creating reagents as an 8-hour "task" action. I will set thresholds for this and may also assign penalties. Foraging for reagents will also be straight up impossible in some places, and they usually can't be obtained for free in places like cities, or in a place already picked over by reagent mongers. Magic-afflicted areas (like the Golish interior) will have more forgiving thresholds. Heading off into Golinlund on a reagent-grubbing missions is can totally be an adventure in itself.

One other minor rules change: Int is now an acceptable candidate for linking to your Dodge saves. So you have three possible attributes to assign per save now, just for symmetry's sake. I'm intending for characters to always feel a little MAD (to dust off a 3.X D&D chestnut for those familiar). I basically want you to feel like you want high values in all attributes, so nothing really feels like a dump stat.

Looking forward to resuscitating this game. Happy new year, guys!
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:28, Sun 29 Dec 2019.

Speaking of Rachel: Hello, everybody! I'm Rachel! Rachel is a girl genius. Really, she's a published doctor and everything. Even with a university tenure. In daemonology. Because it's fine, people. It's fine.

Looking forward to it. Just getting the final mechanics laid out now.

Guten Tag Rachel. I am Hanse, soldier of fortune and bounty hunter.

Important note from earlier in the OOC thread I wanted to repost:



Encumbrance is boring but is important to balance plate armor versus leather, so we will run with it. Before anyone asks it: ammunition has a huge weight because the idea is you're supplying enough for you and the entire party to have infinite reloads. So it's not one quiver of arrows, it's like twenty, or at least enough that we don't have to track it. Having an ammo mule is a very real thing in dungeons for a reason.

Character sheets are coming along nicely for the new players. I think we will be ready to start/resume next weekend. Changes and tweaks to character sheets are fine up until that point.

As far as the narrative goes, the first adventure you guys will have together will start in Fiwood, a small and unremarkable town on the Aventaine side of the Aventinian/Golish border.

Here's my pitch: Hanse has been contracted to capture or kill a certain individual. I want Oliver and Rachel to get roped in as hired help. Oliver is in town already after the events of his first adventure, and could get roped in, either by the town asking for his help or Hanse recruiting him directly.

Rachel would need to come up for her own reasons for being there, but Hanse might have recruited her back in Rivai (both characters are based out of Krastavo, so that works). Or she could have been near the Golish border doing field research or pursuing her own mysterious ends, and could get hired on by Hanse as magical support or a daemonology specialist.

Let's try to hash this out at least a little before the weekend.

So, Rachel would probably need some incentive to leave the university. This could be the prospect of something interesting to study, or it could be something internal. She's immature and could have gotten into a fight and decided to, essentially, run away with some adventurer on the guise of 'research' when actually it was just her own bad mood.

Fiwood is aggressively boring, its defining features being A) it exists in close proximity to the Golish border and B) it somehow survived the fall despite this proximity. So I like the idea of Rachel leaving in a snit, since unless she's planning a solo expedition into Golinlund and stocking up on some last minute supplies, there isn't much reason for her to be there specifically.

As far as offending a professor... yeah. There's plenty of misogynistic, or classist, or just plain pompous professors hanging out in the Esteemed Alumni. Pretty much just pick a reason, and we can make an NPC to instigate it.

In reply to A Malign Presence (msg # 304):

If you like and with GM approval there could be a pre-excising friendship with Lira, perhaps they studied together ? This could be a draw to go adventuring or at the very least to meet up and share some news.


-

Lira:

If you like and with GM approval there could be a pre-excising friendship with Lira, perhaps they studied together ? This could be a draw to go adventuring or at the very least to meet up and share some news.

That could work, depending on Lira's age/when she studied at Rivai. Rachel is a girl genius, an appointed professor while still a teenager. She is also low-key insufferable.

I'm good with it.

Okay, I think this is the plan:

Hanse (whose mercenary company is being left in a "to be determined later" state) is on a leave of absence to pursue a bounty. Specifically, he is being asked to hunt down some deserters from a subsidiary mercenary group, the Zawek Volunteer Militia. Six men are accused of war crimes but escaped before their execution. One of the six "volunteers" Hanse is hunting was captured trying to steal food from a Fiwood homestead. The local magistrate is holding the man until Hanse can interrogate him.

The bounty is 800 gold for a man named "Godemir Wolenski" who leads the deserters, and an additional 50 gold each for the other five men in his squad. Rachel could have gotten involved because Wolenski is also a suspected warlock. Pact-breaking is frowned upon by the University, so they're always keeping tabs on that thing. It's mostly just rumors, but that could give her a veneer of plausibility to investigate, and strike out with Hanse from Rivai.

We know the real reason that Rachel is leaving Rivai, though, is to get away from Professor Edgar Kokoschka.  I'll leave up to Rachel and Oliver (Lira's player, I mean) what his specialty was exactly, but it should be something high-level and sort of unnerving. He could be in charge of the post mortem of the changeling fiasco, or doing research into cutting edge golems and constructs, or maybe one of the inventors of daemonlock firearms (making him basically an arms dealer).

Rachel can decide what exactly annoyed her about her mentor, but Oliver and I were talking over PM and agreed that Lira would have been a rival of Rachel's at Rivai, as the two have very similar backstories. Basically Lira is Masonite and lower class whereas Rachel is Makerite and middle class. Rachel was accepted into the fold post graduation, whereas Lira was less so. I think if it would be cool if Lira was up for the same position as Rachel, and didn't make the cut. This is a large part of why she's out adventuring instead of continuing her education at Rivai. So to see the woman who took her job suddenly appear in the same podunk town she happens to be in...

Rachel, for her part, can be a jerk but is smart enough to know Lira and know that she is likewise pretty smart. For a bumpkin.

Lira was Oliver's alt in the old game, but I'll be playing her as a DM NPC to give you guys a good strong four man party. Oliver will get roped in by the local magistrate, who has decided to meddle and ask Oliver to sit in on Hanse's interrogation, to make sure everything is above board. Oliver was a decorated dragoon who came out of retirement to deal with the crisis on the Golish border; also due to his knighthood he is seen as the closest thing to a representative of the king here, besides the magistrate himself.

Oliver agrees, brings Lira to the interrogation, Lira and Rachel recognize one another and can begrudgingly vouch for one another, everybody agrees to split the bounty and work together.

Does that all sound feasible? At least you don't all meet in tavern...

I dig it.

In reply to A Malign Presence (msg # 308):

Sounds very good.


-

Thumbs! Up!

IC thread to resume tomorrow!