Claiming the Throne, Part 1/5: Active NPCs
Ever since we introduced Wicked Uncle and the Ivy Throne back in Drama!, a major showdown has been brewing. And ever since we introduced the Heroes’ minions back in The Help, they’ve waited patiently in the background. They’ve acquired backstories. Aristocrat has even done a bit of nefarious plotting. And now at long last, in the wake of Wizard’s adventures in gender bending, the ambitious NPC has seized her opportunity. None of this was planned.
When you’re telling a long-form story, it’s important to maintain some sense of continuity. You want the early episodes to pay off. You want your players to shake a fist and grit their teeth and cry, “I should have known!” In my experience, the way you do that doesn’t involve plotting out your adventure within an inch of its life. The trick is to be like Aristocrat, and to seize the opportunity when it arises.
This is one of the (many) ways that TRPGs differ from novels, screenplays, or any other medium with a fixed script. You don’t have the opportunity to go back and revise earlier scenes in a TRPG. You can’t retroactively seed a plotline, adding appropriate foreshadowing to your first act. Once something’s happened at the table, it’s happened. The unforeseen vicissitudes of dice and PC antics mean that planning is, at best, a narrative crapshoot. In the case of Handbook, the voting over on our Patreon has a similar randomizing function. (If it didn’t, Wizard would still be a dude).
My point in all this is to describe the sort of narrative flexibility that’s indispensable to GMs. It goes hand-in-hand with improvisation, and involves rethinking and reconfiguring storylines after each and every session. And because storylines rise naturally from a game world’s web of character interactions, the easiest way to do all of the above is to make like Aristocrat: to allow your NPCs to react to the heroes’ actions.
That leads us to the question of the day! When have you encountered an “active NPC” in one of your games? I’m talking about characters with their own agendas. Characters whose plans and plots adapt, interacting dynamically with the PCs. So what do you say? Let’s hear all about your opportunistic innkeepers, long-lost siblings, and squirrels returning favors down in the comments!
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There is something inherently amusing about “Wizard” saying ‘true facts’.
As for an active NPC goes, do former PCs count? Last session, we met our dead swashbuckler (the one that got ate by a prehistoric fish, if you might recall) as a vengeful moon wraith, played by his original PC (who has an enchantress in the party). This was all planned, of course.
What wasn’t planned was the fact that our kitusune’s cantrip, dancing lights, would force him to become ethereal, turning a potential epic redemption of a wrathful ghost (long story) into a rules-confusing bout of… Literal bullying. He cant hurt us, we can barely hurt him. This resulted in him fleeing instead of being beaten up ‘normally’ in his corporeal form (which he assumes in darkness). And now we have no idea when he’ll come back, presumably PO’d by our stuff, if not immunized vs cantrips, in an effort to get his soul put to rest the ‘regular’ way (beating him up to low HP until he surrenders). But hey, at least we got a cursed sword out of the deal!
Heh. Poor ghost needs to learn to cast darkness. Or at least make friends with a mage who can.
Neat bit of opportunism though! The random fish death became a plot point. That’s how you make “stupid deaths” meaningful right there.
Having looked them up Moon Wraiths look pretty interesting to me from a design perspective.
For the typical group they cannot be used in a classical dungeon scenario as just another monster since they go ethereal in light and therefore, basically doesn’t exist for almost all groups the exception being those where everyone has darkvision and the group therefore doesn’t carry light, or the very few that has a way to hurt ethereal creatures. The latter is after all a lot harder than doing it to the merely incorporeal.
So to use them you’ll need allies with darkness spells, or favorable terrain or some reason for the PC’s to want to destroy it.
As soon as a read the description, I got flashbacks to an old horror trailer. I couldn’t place the name until just now though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfvAF-UdS_o
Lots of good tropes in there!
Firstly, I wanna note that wizard is such a cutie in this panel oh my god!!!!
Secondly, I have the leader of a political faction, the Witch Hunters, who has a moderately complex plot that the PCs have been sticking their noses in recently. She’s been none too pleased with their efforts and is actively working to screw them over, lately by attempting to turn the nobility of the Cory against them.
*City, lol. Mobile phones are no friend to large fingers and quick typing.
Nice. Malicious rumor-mongering is always a good time. Now you’ve only got to introduce the Mud Slingers Guild and have a proper political campaign!
Also, I just wanna make sure… When you say ” wizard is such a cutie in this panel,” are you perhaps making Lumberjack Explosion’s mistake?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/who-dat
…?
Oh boy I did. :p my memory is like mush lately, and I didn’t read the bottom text throughly enough.
No worries. This comic isn’t exactly the poster child for continuity, so it’s always a bit bizarre (even to me) when it does show up.
I try my best to have active NPC’s, but today I’m gonna talk about one that ended up being almost entirely inactive instead.
So we where playing Exalted, and I had this mastermind style NPC that looked promising, the Players had met him and talked for a bit and then he faked his death when one of the players allies moved against him, largely due to extra resources said ally got from one of the players.
So far so good, the problem was that he never ended popping up on screen again because one of the players kept unknowingly sabotaging his plans in the early preparation phases.
First they stopped the civil war he had started, not with the violence and resulting instability and peasant unrest he had hoped for, but instead by pushing for a peaceful compromise solution.
OK, he thought, the solution had been a bit humiliating for the rebels he could work with that, so he would infiltrate their courts and try to push them towards either a rematch or at least towards not actively supporting the central government so that it would be weakened.
Said player then, without ever learning that the NPC was involved, started a social movement among his fellow ex-rebels towards taking pride in demonstrating their loyalty and how much more they did for the country than most people, so that ended up being a nonstarter.
What’s more his back-up back-up plan of triggering some slave revolts failed when the PC brought up and freed most of the slaves to found the groups new city and then took various steps to prevent the situations that would have given the slave takers the opportunity to replenish their stock (with all the misery that would follow.)
This just kept happening over the campaign, I’d decide on what the NPC’s next step would be, and said player would then as his next step do something completely calibrated towards stopping said step, crucially without doing something that would cause the two to actually meet again.
lol. Poor guy.
At some point, I like the idea of breaking immersion and going for “cut scenes.” If there’s no way to see what the baddies are up to, it’s sometimes fun to narrate a bit.
“Beneath the street of Paragon, in a darkened room, voices murmur. They speak of careful plans, of wheels within wheels, and of a need to foment unrest. The rebels can still be used. We can turn it all to our advantage. And one familiar voice whispers, ‘I would like to make a proposal….'”
You have to rely on players not to metagame too hard, but it’s a way to keep NPCs active when, like you say, there’s no way to actually reintroduce them to the plot.
Early on in the campaign (it may even have been session 1) the low level party was fleeing from some orcs. The wizard decided “hey, burning hands! Great spell, yeah?” and turned around to roast the orcs. However, what he didn’t account for is that wizards are squishy, and he died quite quickly after stopping to cast his spell. The party eventually beat the orcs, and they actually used the body of the dead wizard to distract some wolves at the orc camp later.
Naturally, I decided that misuse of bodily resources would have to come back to bite them, so I had the ultimate antagonists animate the body of the wizard and periodically had him attack the party as a sort of vengeful revenant. He quickly became the party nemesis, far more than the actual antagonists. Absolutely none of this was planned, I literally just threw him in whenever I needed a boss fight. Eventually, they made an entire quest of trying to figure out how to keep him dead this time. Until that time, I had absolutely no idea in my head of how he kept coming back or what kind of creature he was, other than just “undead wizard bad guy.”
It certainly made a test of my improv skills the day they decided they were sick of him.
Nice! I always love it when the murderhobos get a little taste of their own.
I mean, in a world of wraiths and ghouls and restless dead, why the crap would you desecrate the bodies? That’s just asking for a haunting!
“in a world of wraiths and ghouls and restless dead, why the crap would you desecrate the bodies” sounds almost like it would be a title text for one of your comics.
“Desecrate the bodies” is going in my list of script ideas.
This is why every fantasy monarch needs to immediately kill off all their advisers because they’re all treacherous.
Poor Wicked Uncle… Dude just wants to be a nefarious villain, but as an elf he can’t grow facial hair. I’d be evil too if I was deprived of my gods-given right to a twirling mustache.
This is why male Elves shouldn’t be Wizards. What kind of male Wizard doesn’t have a beard?
Dude, Harry Potter is 11. Give him a minute.
My favourite “Active” NPC honestly presented very little activity towards the party. He was a lich, and the party was following the trail of their own bad guy who’d come through the lich’s tower.
The lich was really focused on trying to divine where this other baddie had taken his phylactery. He noticed the PCs when they tripped a magical alarm, and commanded some golems to kill them, but otherwise spent most of his time with his attentions focused elsewhere.
The PCs spent that entire dungeon paranoid about the fact that the lich knew they were there, and was surely about to spring some sort of trap or wicked ambush. When they finally reached him, he sighed “You’re still here? I’d hoped one of my defenses would have dealt with you.”
They were aghast. They hadn’t even considered that he might not have been paying attention to them at all, and they were a bit insulted.
Nice move. That insulted feeling is PCs realizing that, every once in a while, they aren’t the center of the universe. It tough to do right, since most games want to make players feel like big damn heroes. But when used sparingly and well? Suddenly the world cracks wide open and comes alive.
I go out of my way to ensure almost all my NPCs have something they’re in the middle of trying to do. For this reason, the party comes across an awful lot of adventurers and the party has inadvertently dicked over. It’s a real issue of the party really mucking up some NPCs and then going on their merry way.
As in they’re both going for the same treasure…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/race-to-the-finish
That sort of thing?
A bold move from elf sis, but also an extremely daft one. I mean, sure, uncle is a reasonable elf – he’ll scoot off the throne… Right on over to check up on his stash of elf-slaying arrows, browse from his cabinet of exotic necrotoxins for the subsequent “welcome back!” honorary feast, and go get a scroll of sending to contact his favorite cousin W’inn’ie from that quirky Red Mantis cult.
There’s a reason this is Part 1/5. 😀
my homebrew sandbox campaign (based around Emerald Spire and Thornkeep of the Pathfinder Online Kickstarters) is still in development and delayed due to RL stuff…
But I have already put all named NPCs of those books on Excel based Character Sheets and got a paper filing system set up to track NPCs and also some Monsters.
I plan to hand out partial XP for running away. There will be litte „fights to the death“ crap from monsters: They will run away from fights they cant win and receive 10% XP of the CR equivalent encounter. And especially goblins and fey may just go total guerilla on the PCs till they leave their patch of the forest and promise to never return.
Wait… The monsters get XP for running away?
anything with Int > 3 at least, not so sure what I‘ll do with the XP yet.
That seems like a lot of work with all the tracking. Why not just make slap a template on when appropriate?
all non random encounters will be in a file box anyways, so it’s just a matter of writing it down during the encounter.
For random encounters I can just open another file box.
The sandbox consists of 35 hexes with 12 miles diameter. It’ll be fairly easy to have 35 files holding random encounters and moving some monsters between the files during sessions.
Interesting. I’m getting a kind of “Shadows of Mordor” vibe here.
“You can’t retroactively seed a plotline, adding appropriate foreshadowing to your first act.”
Actually you can, if you get a real life 20 in your bluff check.
Player: What? The Count Vlod von Blood is a vampire?
DM(gets 20): Oh, yes! don’t you remind me when i… em… didn’t told you… that him… em… doesn’t cast a shadow?
Players: You have never mentioned if his cast or not a shadow, and once we meet with him on the streets, on a sunny day.
DM: Well yes, i didn’t say anithing about his shadow because he… doesn’t have one. Also he was on the shade in that meeting.
Players: You are the best 🙂
DM (thinking): They believe that o_O¡
On the topic of active npc, yes, on our table have been a lot. It’s kinda like in Skyrim or Oblivion, npc have their own life, they move on the streets, meet people, wait for an adventurer to resolve all their problems in their lives. They don’t wait in a corner while the universe moves around them. The same in our games, whatever they are allies or enemies, because there is no other kind of npc, they do their things and live their lives, as short as their are after meeting the party 🙂
On a side question: Will be enjoy The tragedy of Wizard, Pince of the Elvenlands? Can we see Fighter dressed like Ophelia?
I’d rather see him die like Claudius.
At least we can get the tragedy of Wizard and Thief? Or Clericlanus? Macfighter? If you don’t like tragedies what about The Alchemist of Venice or The Merry Wives of Summoner? 🙂
I can assure you: none of Summoner’s wives are happy.
So he has more than one? 🙂
Nope. He’s only got waifus.
Could we get “the taming of the Summoner?”
I’d have to convince Laurel to draw him again. Apparently the dude creeps her out. Can’t imagine why.
I don’t see the problem. He use glasses, so does your avatar, he has a beard, so does your avatar, he is short, so is your avatar. Then what Laurel will not see you or your avatar…
RIP The Handbook of Heroes, Laurel can no longer see Colin 🙁
Let’s see. In my first game, Gunslinger hired an NPC as a Squire. Squire reloaded the guns and handed them to Gunslinger, taking the ones that needed to be loaded. Occasionally, he’d shoot something himself if needed. Sadly, that game ended at level 3 so we never saw Squire grow into his own. (Or see how robot-hating Barbarian find out that Gunslinger was an android all along.)
In my current game, major NPCs are the city’s god who’s name I don’t know how to spell. God’s two adopted daughters, one of whom is the queen. Benny, the construct created by God who is sarcastic and sometimes makes stuff for us. Crane, the Queen’s Spymaster. He doesn’t like us much. (He’s not evil, we just annoy him a lot.) And recently – Fighter Sr and his sentient sword.
Right on right on. But what are they all doing? Are any of them working to advance an agenda not directly tied to the PCs?
Well, I’m pretty sure the god has multiple things going on. He also has adopted grandkids, so I’m sure that’s taking up a lot of his time.
Right on. I guess that what I’m working around to is the need for the PCs to see these things. They’re undeniably cool setting details. But unless those grandkids are banding together into a spy network for hire or some such, those cool details become invisible.
Both of my DMs love having their own NPCs join the party for a long quest or even the majority of the campaign. I had always wondered if there was a term for it, like DMPC or something more clever and catchy.
In my very first campaign, a pirate campaign, our party NPC was a dwarf stowaway. His agenda was to stick around as long as he wanted and help himself to our rum. Since he was quickly revealed to be a high level drunken master that none of us could even lay a hand on, he was extremely successful.
Another memorable one was actually introduced as a plot device for my character. To make a very long story short, my DM accidentally broke my samurai’s story arc, and asked me what I thought of taking a paladin direction instead. I was on board, so he introduced another paladin, a cute and outgoing lady, who was out to recruit followers. They definitely had different agendas — she was a pious woman who wanted to act as a spiritual mentor to mine, while my dude found himself loyal to her, specifically, and ultimately only served her god by extension. Still, things worked out well, right up until she was cursed to become the servant of an evil god…
Meanwhile, in my current campaign, the DM’s party NPCs… they definitely have their own agendas, and I’m not entirely sure we’ve worked out the details. But for the most part, they all share the common goal of “Don’t let the PCs realize that I’m a mess and my life has gone horribly wrong,” and they have all failed this.
Love that paladin chick turning to evil. So often, NPC tag-alongs turn into extensions of the party. It’s always nice to see one that brings their own motivations and storylines to the game.
Definitely! In fact, I feel like tag-alongs can be far better plot motivators than even the biggest and baddest of villains if they’re played right. After all, they have a chance to carve out an emotional stake in your character’s story, which the DM can weaponize at will.
In a previous comic, you talked about the agonizing over alignment that drives a good paladin character. And after this NPC turned alignments, there was plenty of that waiting for my character, who didn’t know exactly what the curse had done. Like, she didn’t show up in spiked black bikini armor while laughing villainously — it was instead a slow burn as her actions grew more and more suspicious without explanation. And so, she turned the Lawful option of following her orders at odds with the Good option of living true to the ideals she had once preached.
It culminated in the usual high fantasy spectacle, with the dark god’s influence coming to light, and my character earning and then burning a Wish spell to free her. But as a player, I would love to play that campaign all over again just to sink my teeth into more of the rich, juicy drama this one NPC created.
(Also, did I mention they were both halflings? Because yeah, they were both halflings.)
I see that you are a disciple of Wizard. I think you and Laurel would get on well in-game. 😀
I definitely sympathize with him a lot more than Fighter, despite the fact that I’m almost always playing a melee class. Maybe I should take it as a sign, and roll a squishy spellcaster next.
And by him I mean her! It’s still going to be a while yet before fem!Wizard is the first version of Wizard I think of.
MASSIVE POST INCOMING.
In the last few days, my first true campaign as a GM ended, in an epic (if somewhat rushed) finale. Many random, contextless anecdotes (including some previously mentioned here) are noted in this reddit post: ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/ble1ni/my_first_campaign_as_gm_has_ended_in_triumph/ ). Also, art.
More importantly, boy did this campaign have an active NPC.
Madrian Acheros was a Cleric and one of the three leaders of a secret drow creature and magical items factory. Though not well-liked, she was feared and respected, and that worked well enough until one of the factory’s creations started messing with her head, she ended up killing and eating several of her subordinates and the rest chased her away because even drow minions will only put up with so much. Madrian, though still alive, joined up with a pack of ghouls that had been menacing the factory, controlling them with her leadership skills and Command Undead, and this ghoul group would be a thorn in the factory’s side until the factory’s products rose up and killed most of the drow still working there.
The food supply drops off, which makes the ghouls unhappy, but fortunately the PCs’ boat crashes near the island and so now there is fresh meat available. The first two ghoul squads sent out to menace the PCs are defeated, but as one ghoul flees shouting to “Get back to the ship!” (referring to the ghouls’ hideout in a wrecked ship, but a deliberate move by me to lure the PCs in that direction), the PCs decide to pursue, lasso and interrogate the ghoul. They learn about “Mother” (as the ghouls call her) and release the ghoul with instructions to tell Mother to meet with the PCs at a certain location and time. Not exactly in my original plan.
So I have Madrian follow the terms and arrive at the scheduled time, flanked by her most elite minions and with several more ghouls in hiding some distance away. The PCs ask Madrian if they can use her ship to leave the island, and she says something to the effect of “Uh… sure. Come back to my lair with all of my minions and I’ll let you have the ship. For free.”
…And the PCs buy it.
As the party and ghouls walk off towards the ship, Madrian sees an approaching storm cloud and, realizing that it is a sign that one of her other enemies is approaching, attacks the party early with her minions all right next to the PCs (as they were traveling in a big group). The PCs fight back pretty well before the additional enemy arrives, bringing a hailstorm on the group and scattering everyone. Madrian retreats back to her wrecked ship base.
The party eventually works their way down there, still looking for the ship and also for some missing PCs. Madrian and her ghouls attack (Madrian turning invisible, using Enlarge Person and a bite/grab combo to try to eat whoever looked tastiest at the moment). Then the PCs take her down and… WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY KNOCKED HER OUT AND TIED HER UP!?!?
The PCs interrogate Madrian for a while, and while she is still cryptic, I use this to drop hints about other things, backstory and to alert the players to the names of various things. The PCs haul the hog-tied Madrian back to their camp. She also starts to bond a little bit with the Oracle with the Ghoul curse, but it’s mostly her manipulating him.
That night, Madrian attempts to escape using her drow noble spell-like abilities, which she can use while tied up. The Suggestion on the low-INT Druid doesn’t work out because his stupidity protects him from many magics in the form of a high Will save. Madrian then uses Bluffs and Dancing Lights to send the Druid running off into the woods, followed by the Druid’s dinosaur animal companion, on top of which Madrian is lying. She is able to use this distraction to try and slip away, but merely falls ten feet onto her face, as she is still tied up. The Druid (who hasn’t figured out she was behind this) then drags her through the dirt back to camp.
Later, the party fights some skeletons, and Madrian covertly uses Command Undead to control one of the skeletons (which attacks its fellows but does little damage). With the rest of the skeletons defeated, Madrian has her skeleton bop the Druid for good measure. Later still, a drow poison arrow knocks out the Druid’s dinosaur, which causes the tied-up Madrian to fall off as it falls over. Landing next to an enemy saltling (basically reskinned kobold) caster, she proceeds to bite attack/grab the caster and kill it while still hog-tied. As she continues to eat what she can of the corpse, the PCs had to have a debate over whether to pull her off or let her have it, before deciding “better that dead guy than any of us.”
Finally, the party reaches an area with magic wards on it. Madrian, who made the wards back before she went crazy, talks the party into untying her so she can disable the wards. Though the PCs keep her at close swordpoint, a minotaur picks that moment to attack (legitimately a coincidence and not a scheme on my part). Madrian, having been the only one whose Perception noticed the minotaur, flees to a nearby ladder, using her Darkness spell-like ability at the last second to make the PCs fight the minotaur in the dark as a farewell “F You”.
When the PCs reach the abandoned factory, they find Madrian digging through her old room for equipment and supplies. Hearing them coming, Madrian swears loud enough for them to hear her and goes invisible, but the PCs enter the room and trap her. There is a series of wacky events as the invisible Madrian tries and fails to slip out of the room, but she is eventually able to lure the party to one side with Faerie Fire and use Cause Fear on the one guarding the door. Even then, one of the PCs continues to chase her down a hallway until another character hears the commotion, opens a door and hits him in the face, allowing Madrian to escape.
The party doesn’t run into Madrian for a few sessions, as they deal with other threats and Madrian hides off in a corner, struggling with her really bad ghoul fever infection. Previously she had suppressed it with the spell Delay Disease, but her time in captivity kept her from doing that, and now the hunger is close to killing her. Eventually, she finds the party’s camp, uses Invisibility to sneak in and tries one last time to eat the Druid. The PCs fight back, however, and beat her to death before tossing her body off of a cliff (though it rolls more than falls, being the side of a mountain rather than a sea cliff).
…Then Madrian’s ghoul fever reanimates her, something I had planned to do if the PCs hadn’t properly destroyed her body back at her ship hideout, where she was SUPPOSED to die. As the PCs pile onto a 3-by-6 square elevator to descend to the lowest part of the factory, Madrian, now a powerful corpulent ghoul and also completely animalistic, comes shrieking down the elevator shaft, faceplants in the middle of the party and begins a frenzied slash-and-paralyze streak until the party hits her so hard that she literally explodes in a burst of gore… which infects three characters with ghoul fever. (They got better.)
So, yeah. That NPC ended up doing a LOT more than I had initially planned. But it worked out, and the PCs got a fun nemesis that several of them had a personal connection to.
(For the record, we counted at the end and Madrian had consumed, at the very least, drow, human, ghoul, elf, saltling, bear and halfling flesh by the time she died. Only the bear was properly cooked.)
I still don’t get why they didn’t kill her way earlier. Was it some kind of misplaced code of honor?
The Alchemist (who she had chomped on during her boss battle) was all in favor of finishing her off, which was ironic since he was about the only Good in the party. For one thing, the Oracle felt a bit of kinship towards her, since he had the Ghoul curse and a minor cannibalism problem of his own. (Never ate anyone who wasn’t dead anyways, though). The bigger and more practical reason was that the PCs had no idea what was going on on the island they were shipwrecked on, and Madrian did. And her information did turn out to be useful a lot of the time, though more for context and backstory than avoiding immediate dangers. Plus, after about 24 hours or so, killing a prisoner starts to feel more murder-y, especially if they’ve been fairly cooperative.
The party of my recently ended campaign ended up turning a partial sandbox into a full sandbox campaign and going on a “road trip” of sorts, moving all over the campaign world. As a consequence of this, the only NPCs that they learnt the agendas of were one of two types: mercenaries following the party for money, and NPCs with teleport.
I only had one NPC with teleport, but I think she worked quite well with respect to having her own agenda, as she was able to work with the PCs in a manner that both served their agenda and her own, and she often modified her agenda slightly and compromised with the PCs to reach a quest-goal that served all people involved.
What was the teleporter’s agenda?
It’s not quite the same thing, but I’ve just gotten a really good setup for some future ‘just as planned’ moments. In a game of that random transformation system I mentioned a while ago, one of my players has just befriended an enemy who was supposed to be one of the mini-bosses of the dungeon he’s currently delving in. She’s a powerful wisp-like undead, and he’s agreed to help smuggle her out of the dungeon. So at some point down the line when the time seems right, she’s going to make another appearance, though as help or a hinderance I haven’t decided yet.
Do your wacky transformations affect NPCs as well? Seems like that would be a good spot to allow wacky happenings to impact NPC agendas.
Oh yeah. They’re affected in the exact same way as PCs if they’re travelling with them, or if are separated then I sort of abstract the process. …I may also have sometimes fudged the numbers so previous enemies come back as more power-level appropriate species.
NPCs who don’t travel aren’t affected because of lore reasons though. The wild magic that causes this nonsense doesn’t gather in settled areas.
It’s certainly a novel premise! I can picture character identity getting a bit hard to track though….
Any especially interesting transformations thus far?
The most interesting would probably be when, in an act of desperation, a player threw his bag of transformative potions at an enemy who was proving too powerful to beat by conventional means. The enemy, a female mindflayer ( https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/monstergirlencyclopedia/images/9/97/280_mindflayer_L.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150614142749 ), had been mostly winning the fight with magic and psychic powers, so it was actually a pretty good strategy, as it was very likely to take both those things away. The bag contained three transformative potions, plus a few transformatives that I ruled were unlikely to affect her due to being solid, food, pieces of jewelry, stuff like that. So I rolled a d4 to see which one would take effect, and rolled a 1, which I had decided was ‘all of them.’ So the enemy ended up as a three-way mix between a slime, a lamia, and a harpy. While she was still quite powerful, she was confused enough that it was pretty easy to escape from her. Of course, I kept her stats around, unfortunately, the character retired before she could catch up with him.
I’m imagining that one scene from Babylon 5 where someone asks the Vorlons “How will this end…?”
I don’t see what Sorcerer has to do with anything:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/damage-type
Oh boy, let me tell you about Grigori.
Grigori is a footnote antagonist NPC in the Paizo adventure path Kingmaker. His whole purpose is to be a stoogy little twat to smear the names of the party when they’re trying to establish their nascent kingdom. Me, being the ruler, got the brunt of this. We even unfortunately got publically humiliated by the man and I ended up running him out of town, trying him in absentia when we failed to capture him, and sentencing him to death.
I expected that would be the last I would hear of Grigori. Until a LONG time later, he popped back up again! He joined the court of another kingdom and tried to defeat me in a tournament being hosted by said kingdom. Naturally I walloped him in the joust because I’m a Cavalier. And he swore he’d beat me!
Next session we learn the Tourney is all a ruse to distract us while said kingdom was invading ours. After defeating that invasion, we took the fight to the tyrant’s capital and snuck in during the siege to confront him. We got to the throne room but the king was nowhere in sight. Grigori suddenly leads and ambush against us, saying he would finally have his revenge!
Turn 1. I critical hit with my lance, doing x5 damage and kill him instantly.
A fitting end for my so called rival. The best part was learning we were never suppose to hear from him after act 2. The DM just decided it would be cool if he showed up for act 5. And it provided the most hilarious miniboss fight of my dnd career.
Gotta love the love-to-hate dudes.
Aristocrat is just too cute :3
I had forgotten the last page of the handbook I had read, and so I decided to read backwards from the most recent. Was surprised to see a green clothed female elf, thinking there was a timeskip, Aristocrat had grown up and successfully took over Wizard’s place…. I’m glad to know Wizard just got genderswapped. Maybe this means there’s going to be some bonding time between the sisters in the future?
Friday’s comic may have a little something to do with Aristocrat arc.
Storylines move slowly in Handbook-World, but they do move!
In the last game I ran there was an inkeep who was also secretly the priestess of a nearly forgotten deity. Early on when she first appeared, the players discovered her secret, and they learned that she meant to make pilgrimage northward to serve her deity’s purpose. When she learned that the party learned she actually asked if they’d escort her, but it didn’t suit their own direction at the time.
Yet when, near two years later playing time, said woman suddenly showed up elsewhere in the world (in the company of a bunch of other people who were similarly aligned to presumed-dead deities), they were shocked. How had she got all the way here? They’d thought it was “just a quest hook”, not something integral to the background story!
Well, the Cursed Belt of Giant Strength again. Remove Curse removes the Girdle of Sex Change, but not the curse.