Oh in that case
I have a nice pole arm and a spiked gauntlet, and am basically a trapfinding skill monkey who happens to channel spells through said guisairme.

Human guy type

I am also a scout trying the feat
Quick Reconnoiter

( Complete Adventurer, p. 112)

[General]

You can learn a lot of information from just a quick scan of an area or object.
Prerequisite
Listen 5 ranks, Spot 5 ranks,
Benefit
You can make one Spot check and one Listen check each round as a free action. You also gain a +2 bonus on initiative checks.
Normal
Using Spot or Listen in a reactive fashion is a free action, but actively trying to make a Spot check or Listen check requires a move action.
This message was last edited by the player at 03:33, Thu 09 Mar 2023.

Getting closer to getting everything in place.  Will be ready soon.

Factotum 3 / Duskblade 3....

Decent melee character, tripper, scout trapfinder, etc......

Not sure who all is active in the game, but looking forward to adventuring...
This message was last edited by the player at 16:35, Fri 10 Mar 2023.

Aranea, you and I are active as far as I know

There is a chance you can steal the belongings of the fire giant. His corpse is considered critical to getting the glass you need, giantglass. The ultimate goal is to construct a house of glass using giantglass and obsidian, with which you'll need to travel through the wilderness and chances are you'll face shadowspawn. You don't know what they are, but they are the most primal of the beasts in the region. A random encounter will ensue after the gates drop, and you'll need to carry the fire giant's corpse to the church to fragment it and end up on the other side of the Sea of Pelluria. See map that I posted. The church also needs paint which you can bring over from the other city Highwall. It's huge, and as the water laps against the docks there is a notion that there are power nexuses that need to be harvested in the region, so you'll face them and have to fight their guardians.

Several giantglass, obsidian,, church icons and black fire can be traded with the city of Highwall, but there is reputed an underground crime network there. This is all once you finish the combat with the fire giant and you will face Drakthar under the city once you've traded the goods.

I am waiting for the proper intro time, it seems like it might be a minute.

Looking forward to meeting everyone.

Sorry, I've shifted schedule by about 7 hours which is a super weird interval. My body is not adjusting well. I will try to post again in character after I get some sleep.

No problem Aranea, hope you can rejoin us soon. The nature of things at the time is such that the docks of Baden's Bluff rap against the waves in an effort to bring trade into focus, especially with the necessary repairs after the riots took place. You never know if they might erupt again with the same intensity.

Hookface would probably be known by those who are of the red and black robes, and this is the nature of the church of Wee Jas. Their initiates would be good people to talk to to institute relations with the gods, who number in the thousands of hit points assuming they take on corporeal form. The objects of the city glow and lift in their presence, and you suspect they didn't have any other route to choose, meaning Cauldron is high-magic and low magic simultaneously, asserting its epic form. This means that ACs jump around the 30 to 40 level for most of the beings you will encounter near Cauldron but beneficial abilities such as Charge have less of an effect. The nature of high magic is that the city stands erect, made of glass-like appendages that are hard to destroy, and the very fabric of the city stands with creatures wavy that form a backbone structure, and repairing it requires the use of chitin from these AC 30-40 creatures who need to be taken down with magic, ie.. high magic. The travel time from Cauldron to Highwall is 3 days by horse and horses are relatively cheap but warrant some cultural affixations. If you find a horse, you're likely to be observing a particular astral constellation, and many in this world would argue that the quarries are a good place to harness the power of mother nature. Flux is the idea here, with creatures able to hide in plain sight, and the giants are able to literally contain space. The truth is unknown, but there is a forge in the city that supposedly makes giant-slaying gear.

Is anyone able to tell me what specific crunch they're most interested in so that I can stylize the game in this direction? The lore will be leaning toward Midnight and Shackled City and so the commentary and fluff will be drawn from that, but as I've said it's open milieu.

So the options for the upcoming path (ignoring some of the bullshit stream I posted that didn't catch and led nowhere) are thus:

Get the glass after traversing the regions around the city
Revisiting old friends in Highwall who are trade contacts and potential allies against the Shadow
Talking to Skye as she apparently has all the best magic items around
Finding a means to transport the corpse of the slain fire giant to another temple in Highwall, shoring up the purpose of travel there.

Those threads are loosely what I would suggest doing, without explicitly saying those are the only options. The city can be described more as you travel around, but now it's a bustling crowd that is calming down, so you never know if someone might spot you travelling around or re-entering the city. You see several people who make eyes at you, and you never know if you'll see them again, like in a modern metropolis.

So one of your goals for now is to figure out if the riots are tied to the Shadow's activities, but you don't know if anyone was disguised insurgent groups.

On that note,

"Someone says to you,, 'Are you able to help us bring glad tidings to the other city'"?

Hookface flies over the city, showing off his wings. Maybe he was responsible for the riot. How are you going to locate him?

Trade is the name of the game seeing as a Tithe is upcoming, and it's probably magic items being added to the coffers.

Does that help at all or is there a critique that would help me out?

Making new friends and learning new things are on the top of my list....trade contact, allies and skye may have some interesting things.....

Expanding trade and territory we influence is probably best.

If someone PMed me, my apologies seeing as the prompt was red but shifted to blue, did anyone PM me besides Eorien Fellstave?

The cold winds of the plains of the Northlands whipped up by the Sea of Pelluria witness the attrition of the underground catacombs known as the Underdark. Then again there might be buried creatures on the way to Highwall or creatures erupting from the grassy earth, the grass being blood red.

I did not send any PM's

So, I guess I'm with the group now?

Given that all of us go before nay of them, does initiative order matter much?  Also, is there a combat map?

Hi people

Sorry I have been away for a couple of weeks: nasty cold/flu (third this winter...) + real life hassles.

I'll catch up tomorrow

I went ahead and posted (not my action for the round)....
I asked the same question re: initiative order..

We don't have to post in initiative order. Just 'monsters' and 'us'. It doesn't work if you have to wait for every player in the right order

Eoiren, I tend to do more freeform combat so the syntax dictates where people are, aside from spatial exceptions such as where the spells originate from and where they end up.　So ultimately movement is in 3D space but things like attacks of opportunity aren't playing a big role. So the combat map is fully internalized.

Which OOC are we actually supposed to use? Can you archive the old ones or something?

DM you said there were only a few players now?

It is tough to keep up with what is going on. I feel like past, present, and at least two possibile futures happens in nearly every post.

Not sure what is happening sometimes as well...

If we still have the old players (looks like a small degree anyway), then things are looking good. My style will be a bit off-the-wall, but I hope that doesn't determine people leaving the game and so forth. Thus I would like to field some criticism, as I largely write in a post-modern prose mode. Basically I was trying to set out a goal, with combats in between.

Some ideas:
Would you guys like descriptive combats or more number-crunching?
Which aspects of 3.5 appeal the most to you, and how would that affect which themes are used?
How do you guys want the prose style to lean, to the best of my ability?

The gods are there to maintain good vibes across the board, but any criticism would be well-received, especially when it comes to running the game with a balance of high and low-magic, basically because I really like the Midnight setting and like to see the bad guys win, good guys don't exist, but high-risk situations are couched in high-power magic items in the least, justified as the climb up the "level ladder."

Not sure if Lady Maevre is going to show up, along with anyone else who was a consistent poster.

As we left things, the bandits outside the town maintain a watchtower and the ultimate goal is to activate the power nexuses in order to create epic magic items, which are ulimately, priceless. But mundane items still cost gold pieces. The gods will be split on who they side with as per myth. But I tend to lean more toward player sovereignty being the main focus. Gods won't just automatically help you.

So the astirax are coming at you with their human masters. What about this is unclear, or what do you want changed? Is the location clear, and where you need to go? Largely you can travel anywhere in the city Cauldron or throughout the environs of Midnight, predicated on the idea that mechanics from 3.5 depend on multiple sources. Calderin is the next stop, where the bandits hail from. Are they your friends or your enemy? Only time spent in travel will tell, but most importantly, how should I change the game?

Quil, I like to play it simple with the interface but am willing to change the OOC, I just don't know how. If I can't figure it out, we can go with the biggest integer, so I'll try to re-name it.

Also, can I get a roll call so that I can edit the player list some time down the road? This can come along with more experience with rpol features but how Lady Maevre made a text-box that is too hard for me at the moment, but I'll try to make a decent organization of the rule-based elements.

Text box?



You can "Archive" threads away so players can't see them buy putting them in a group no one has access to.

While in the thread > Edit thread (top right) > Top most drop down is "New Thread" select Z

The actual archive button just gives everyone GM-vision for private and secret lines and closes the thread.

One neat feature of being the GM on here is that if you click to "edit" someone's post you will get to see their code. If you don't actually save the edit their post remains the same but you can copy neat tricks they may have done that you don't understand.

As to combat:
While I am used to turn by turn that does take a long time in this format. I expect turn by turn in games unless it is told otherwise. That said; while we are talking about it- I would be fine formalizing that it will not be the case if people want to do that to save time. We would need to devise tactics and such to suggest we are getting better at working together.

As to rewards:
We may be able to determine some resources we could gain from dealing with certain threats... Some may just be threats with no reasonable clue at rewards. We should probably never know that if they are combined certain ways they make certain things... some resources may not have observable threats associated with them. It would be reasonable for us to research uses of resources we have from time to time.

As to story:
I am feeling like the bad guys are winning I'm just not sure I have a feeling like I can even survive being a good guy. Maybe that is your point- if so... Bravo. I was mistaken thinking I was supposed to be playing a good guy though.

To Aranea and Jack Springhill, I'll post the next IC once we figure out the number of players. Right now it seems like you two older players plus Quil are posting. Once we have four, I can continue at a steady clip.

Once again, I will ask for roll call and if no one shows up we can move forward despite the low number of players. Are those of you who haven't responded waiting for an introduction to your characters? Or should we try to recruit some more players?