Swash + Buckle
The people have spoken, and our latest Patreon Poll has come to a close. And in something of first for Handbook-World, there’s more than one of the same class! Please welcome Swash (the Triton with the eye patch) and Buckle (the Dhampir with the tattoos) to the comic! (Better luck next time, Assassin, Artificer, and Psychic!)
Now here’s the thing about Swash, Buckle, and swashbucklers in general. When your character concept is based on boldness and panache, you’re not about smart decisions and careful play. There’s a certain aesthetic of audacity when it comes to derring-do, and players will look for every opportunity to find those moments. That’s why, when I ran my musketeer-inspired dragon riders game not so long ago, I adopted the phrase “Qui Ose Gagne” as the motto of the Corps. I wanted to drive that message home as early as possible in the campaign, so I used the following opening for Session 1. Ahem:
You all stand at attention. A human paces before you, mustaches bristling. He may be small, but it seems a captain’s voice carries regardless of species: “Your officers have watched you these past weeks, and the Corps has paired you according to ability. To temperament. To chemistry. There are no humans in the Dragoneers. No dragons. There are only partners. It is your honor to serve together, fight together, and if the Corps requires it of you, die together. But you are not Dragoneers yet. If you wish to remove those cadet’s rings upon your forefingers, you must first learn to fly together.”
He tilts his chin towards a crumbling arch of stone; a doorway at the edge of the gaping Faille de Tourbillon.
“This is the Arc de Vol. Your path to the Corps lies through here. Right then. Humans first. Dragons will wait for the count of three.”
It was a flying islands sort of setting, so suffice it to say that the pit in question was fairly deep. But there’s more than a gee-whiz factor in starting a campaign by asking my players to literally jump off a cliff. Everyone in the room knew that we were doing that Dumas thing. Swashbuckling characters positively crave bombast, and it was my goal to give the players what they wanted. But more than that, if you don’t give your resident daredevil opportunities for glory, they will go and make opportunities for themselves. And if that happens, I hope you have plenty of extra sails, chandeliers, and banisters lying around the campaign. Speaking as the GM of a swashbuckling game, trust me when I say that you’re going to need extra.
Questions of the day then! What is the most pointlessly risky stunt you’ve ever performed? I’m talking dueling an entire army over a petty insult. Swimming through kraken-infested waters to win a bet. Maybe you leaped from a tall building rather than take the stairs just because it looked cool. Whatever it was, give in to your swashbuckler impulses and brag about it a little down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
My favorite dumb risky stunt was probably from a d20modern game. The game system is kinda broken, which meant there weren’t alot of rules for alot of stuff, or ateast not good rules, and while that definitely hurt the experience overall, it made it so that there were a few really big high moments. At one time, me and the party were trying to escape from a heavily patrolled area after stealing of files. I don’t remember how the rest of the party did it, but i know that i did it by flying up with my jetpack, aiming myself in fromt of the glass of a relatively slow moving jet while going max speed away from it, and letting the still very high speed of it hitting me break the glass and kill the pilot, sure it almost did enough damage to kill me, but i just hijacked a jet in midair, and that was awesome, and also netted us a really high quality jet. There were so many things and checks that could have gone wrong and lead to my death, but it was worth it.
Are you Brock Samson!?
https://i.imgur.com/1F4YzC6.gif
That was basically what happened, though the character was more a junkyard scavenger/engineer, leaning hard into a dex build, unlike brock who is a mountain of meat.
Probably during a one-shot, in which we broke out of a fantasy Truman show, in order to chase down the final villain. Turns out he was just a well-trained actor, but with a 7 wisdom, my muscle wizard didn’t really understand that. He also didn’t understand what kind of giant, metal bird the “villain” had jumped into, but the evil wouldn’t get away that easily! So, myself and my compatriot both grabbed onto the wing of the plane as it was taking off, and found ourselves clinging on for dear life as it ascended. My memory gets a bit fuzzy there, but I recall smashing a window and killing the villain, only for us to get knocked off the plane moments later. As the two of us we falling, my fellow adventurer wasn’t too worried, as I always took feather fall as one of my known spells. He asked to confirm, and my reply was, “Yes! I do have that spell in my spell book!”. “Well, do you want to cast it?”. “Nope! Didn’t prepare it today!”.
Fortunately for us fools, the DM’s world worked in a ‘million to one=sure thing’ kind of way, so we landed right on top of a pillow store. Took a lot of damage regardless, but we both fortunately succeeded our death saves.
I feel like your campaign is powered by the infinite improbability drive.
See, now, the above represents why swashbucklers need clerics on hand 24/7. Mending for everything that gets broken during dramatic entrances, cure wounds for when the pensioners take violent offence at your entrance being overly loud, and true resurrection for when you inevitably decide to fight the villain on a precariously swinging bridge above a volcano.
I have no doubt that Cleric is revising his insurance premiums structure as we speak.
A less dramatic, though no less dangerous, event occurred during the start of a new campaign, when while searching for some lost sheep, our minotaur cleric climbed 40 ft up a tree. He inevitably fell, so my heroic paladin leapt in to catch him!
Or, in other words: a level one paladin leapt into the path of 500 pounds of flesh and armour falling from 40 ft up. He then became known as, “the pancake paladin”, after he took 27 points of damage and was almost killed outright. Not the most dramatic, but definitely the most pointlessly risky.
It seems that every group has a good “fall off of stuff” story. Not many of them have such a snappy shorthand though. “Pancake paladin.” Snerk.
On behalf of a lady’s honor, I challenged a powerful noble to a duel when I was only level 1. Naturally, I did t actually know the woman and she didn’t even have a name, and hell the NPC in question was just a dick, not an important antagonist. But my DM says we were playing a fairly heroic game and that our characters were literally being watched by the gods so that they can grant us blessings for our deeds, so I figure it was just part of course that we are suppose to you know, stand up to bullies and such.
Now, keep in mind that while a noble is a fairly low CR, they still had around 12 HP, an ac of 16, and a rapier, while I was just this awkward rogue who only had a few daggers. It was a one-on-one duel so naturally I can’t get my sneak attacks off on this guy easily. The odds were not in my favor. But my DM allowed me this one caveat: the I have advantage against unarmed enemies unless they have natural weapons and/or unarmed strikes. So after getting stabbed because I lost initiative, my opening action was to disarm the opponent . An easy enough task thanks to my opponents lack of an acrobatics score, and now he lacks his rapier, which I was more than happy to take for myself as I stab em with my sneak attack dagger. It didn’t kill him, but without his weapon and now grievously wounded, he surrendered.
I didn’t really get anything from the woman as all she did was thank me, and unfortunately I had to give that noble his rapier back, but later my DM gave my rogue a boon from the gods where basically I can reroll an attack or saving throw as long as I’m being watched by someone who I’m is weaker than me. It was pretty cool, and really gave me an incentive to try and seek out people in trouble so I can make the most of that ability. Though yes, this also meant whenever I hear wind of some douche nozzle popping off at the mouth, you can bet your electrum that my rogueish white knight is going to be there to throw down the gauntlet.
Wow one of those sentences really got fucked up in my editing.
I can reroll an attack or saving throw as long as I’m being watched by someone who I am fighting for and is weaker than me.
Is that whole “advantage against unarmed” thing a house rule, or is it something I’ve overlooked somewhere?
It’s a house rule. My DM Figured that yes, while technically everyone is proficient with unarmed strikes, only those of certain mental dicipline I.e. monks are capable of calmly handling themselves completely unarmed against opponents armed with weapons. I don’t exactly agree, but it was to my advantage.
I think my favourite bit of throwing caution to the wind involved an actual (multiclassed) swashbuckler in a steampunk-themed 5E game: When my rogue/fighter Bright Eyes was face-to-face with the main villain and her automaton bodyguard, I decided her best course of action was to take out her spare powder horn, toss it in the air and slice it open with her flaming sword. The resulting explosion hurt her as much as it hurt the baddies, but it definitely sent a message, and it didn’t stop her from being the last one standing once that fight finished.
Not gonna lie. That’s a pretty sick maneuver.
Also of note, your GM should have known better: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
I don’t go in for crazy stunts… Is what I like to tell people. I love throwing myself off tall things, but its usually for a reason. I haven’t done anything particularly crazy recently, but I do have a character who’s going to let me do some fun stuff. She’s a swashbuckler, appropriately enough, but not really of the pirate variety. She’s based (ripped off from) the Abyss Watchers, one of the key bosses from Dark Souls III, and is a Nirmathian monster hunter. I’m building her to be all about big flashy attacks to hack pieces off of monsters, so she’s going to be in a lot of ‘I leap out of the tree to dive on the giant monster sword-first situations.’
Smash intensifies: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/004/049/linkdownward.jpg
I apparently have some sort of spiritual connection to the Zelda games. I’ve been told several times that my puzzles remind people of them, and now this. The really funny part is that I’ve played… I think half an hour of one of them. Once. Like, eight months ago, so it’s not even like it could have been some big formative influence on me.
Our entire party jumped off an exceedingly high wall… one of those titanic barriers that appear from time to time in fantasy settings. Now, I don’t entirely recall why we jumped instead of taking a safer path — it may have just been to show off — but regardless, we were relying on Feather Fall spells to let us land safely at the bottom.
So it really wasn’t ideal that magic chose this moment to stop working in our vicinity…
My group once chased some villains getting away via mine elevator like that. I was also worried about anti-magic ruining the day, but we lucked out.
How did that fall work out for you guys?
Everyone survived, mostly through the GM being generous about allowing some creative attempts to slow our fall… the kind of thing that would normally be the exclusive domain of monks.
There was still a certain amount of “splat” at the bottom (particularly from the paladin), but you know D&D falling rules… and it’s very hard to kill high-level characters outright…
My characters tend not to do “pointlessly” risky stunts. The point isn’t always a good one but still. I mean, just last night I walked into an entire structure of warrior Minotaurs and Orcs with the intent to get our less language savy friend to the challenge ring so they could challenge the “God” of that place. My Level 10 but 58 HP and 14 AC illusionist went ham on the big dramatic wording, drew attention from every hostile and let everyone else sneak by to go and mess with the machinery that was controlling the “God” because you need bombastic. Apparently my pleas to the rogue AI to let me fix it came off as “smug” and “gloating” since the other designed for combat PC was kicking its butt.
But if there was ever pointless heroics, then my Exalted Eclipse Atoyo would take the cake (and give it to the poor). Guy was always walking around in full plate so you couldn’t see how sickly he was, generally was heroic to a fault, and did crazy things to try diplomacy. Literally every combat began with an attempt at diplomacy just in case.
The most memorable pointless heroics is probably when Atoyo had literally one health box left and fought the automated warstrider. I had been injured badly in a previous fight and was resting as we had no healers. I’d need hours of sleep to recover. Then we heard the warstrider equivalent rampaging through the civilians. The last time a fight had broken out, thousands had died when a missed attack broke the glass barrier keeping the ocean out (we were in Luthe). While everyone else ran around trying to figure out where it was, I flew into the air (artifact), ID’d the location and basically 1v1ed the damn thing until they arrived 3 rounds later. It wasn’t pointless because of the danger of another collapse and the civilians I saved, but the warstrider also wasn’t threatening that sort of area and I saved maybe 10 civilians all told. DM was pissed as his 18 dice of damage somehow rolled low enough successes that my armor and hardness kept me alive for the one attack I couldn’t parry.
My Lunar bonded friend was pissed and locked me in a room after that.
Nothing says “stick and move” quite like Transcendent Phoenix Pinions. Good show!
Orichalcum Wings of the Raptor in this case. My emaciated eclipse was appearance 8 when wearing that or something equally ridiculous.
Well hey, as long as you get those sweet Legend of Dragoon visuals, I’m all for it.
I’m sorry but Buckle looks like she’s related to Mr. Fantastic with those arms.
Mr. Fantastic must have a large family then:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/philosophizing
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/rusty-and-co-crossover-part-1-5
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/krampuslauf
No idea why but the lack of sleeves/bracers seems to make the effect worse. Not criticizing. God knows I have zero artistic talent, and I do love the style of this comic, even having a commission done in this style.
No worries. 🙂
Besdies, I blame Pendleton Ward for the plague of noodle arms:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/ior5wbcfwl9ja2kagi8q.jpg
The lack of sleeves makes them more apparent, as you more easily notice that the characters lack any elbows and/or bones in their arms (with sleeves, the lack of elbows is hidden or not obvious, and the clothes themselves likely limit the pose that can be drawn.
I don’t mind them personally, as this is a comedic comic, after all! Overall, Laurel sure likes her noodle-arms!
With one notable exception, though! https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/fail-finale
No wonder he’s such a bad guy. Where everyone else is noodles, he’s stuck with the Rayman anatomy.
Who gave the demilich hands!?
Demilich? Aren’t those just personality-less (barring special circumstances) construct-like skulls full of soulgems and TPKs?
BBEG seems more like your run-of-the-mill lich (who apparently lost a few arm bones).
Mage hands?
ba dum tish
In a Greek Mythology sort of game, I was playing an “Odysseus” styled character – the shipwreck survivor, fish-out-of-water member of the party. The character was a freedom fighter, a tabaxi thief who robbed corrupt nobles for the good of the people, told bombastic stories about his exploits, and took the role of the ‘distraction’ more often than not.
In an early encounter, a large and powerful monster had abducted an important NPC that they intended to sacrifice to an evil god for personal gain. This did not sit right with my thief.
So with the speed only a tabaxi can achieve, my character sprinted over to the boss, Prince of Persia wall-running and such through the cave, leapt over the boss’ water elemental minion, grabbed the kidnapped NPC from the boss’ claws and sprinted back to the party with a theatrical “Yoink!”
Turns out a thief can steal more than objects.
This “steal person from death” trick would come up multiple times as party members fell or items needed to be taken, and became the character’s go-to move to support his party.
Il Capitano is a stock characters that I always wanted to see more of in RPGs. Haven’t ever had the chance though….
https://www.italymask.co.nz/About+Masks/Commedia+dellArte+Characters.html
Pointlessly risky stunt… Going to go with ‘threw myself off a moving train to stop the villain from laying hands on a staff of the Magi’
It was a one-shot ran by one of my players in their homebrew world. My character was a Grey Paladin, tasked with guarding an unknown relic on its transportation between two major cities. On the way, its attacked, and me (and a small group of passengers, the other players of the one-shot) fend off the villain. He escapes out the back of the train and flies OVER it to land in the front car to circumvent us. We get to the front, he tries to give us a ‘I’m really the good guy, trust me, just give me the artifact’ speech. Having taken the staff from its container, My grey paladin is on the roof of the train. We’re passing through snowy mountains, so I take the chance just before the train enters a tunnel and hurl myself over the side, landing in a snow drift with an incredibly powerful artifact that my level 4 ass has not even a whisper of a hope of identifying or figuring out how to use. I just barely survive the falling damage but the rest of the party and the villain are in the tunnel and too far away to come back for me.
And there ended the one-shot (since it was ending when the staff issue was resolved, the gm counted it as resolved when I leapt off a moving train)
I the TV series, that leads in to Episode 2 where the villain and your teammates are both racing to locate you in the wilderness.
So it was Beyond the Supernatural.
There’s a big gathering of cultist in the freshly added basement of a church! They are doing some sort of ritual. We’re looking over the whole thing from a balcony-this was one serious underground remodel, right.
And I sez to the GM “…eh. That’s like a stage, right? And we’re on the balcony next to it? Are there drapes?”
The pause. “…there…are…”
“Ok. So everyone pretty much has eyes on the guy in the middle doing the ritual, and the stage lights are on him, but the rest of the room is dark, right? I pull up the drapes.”
Everyone knew where this was going. They tried to stop them. My character pouted. “Fine.” They looked back down to the stage… And then I did my drape swing! It was a beautiful flying kick delivered from complete and total surprise! I rolled a crit too, so in Palladium’s system, this was a cataclysmic boot to the head!
…to which the guy stumbled forward a few steps, my character lost all of his momentum, falling flat on the floor, and the GM uttered those ancient arc words.
“Roll for initiative.”
After kicking the guy for the sort of damage that totals a small car in the setting, I was suddenly very concerned that my tactical calculus had been off.
A hero’s gotta do what a hero’s gotta do. When you can swing from the curtains, you damn well better swing from the curtains, consequences be damned!
Ohhh boy, do I have a story to tell!
So, there we were, frantically running away from a horde of thousands of ravenous rat-men (yes, Skaven) due to an infiltration mission gone horribly wrong. Due to the franticness of the situation the DM had us roll checks to successfully get on our mounts. Needless to say, I botched the roll quite badly and was now facing the very real possibility of getting devoured alive by our pursuers.
Fortunately, one of the other party members who had succeeded on the roll tossed me a rope; getting dragged through the dirt was hardly dignifying, especially for a Paladin (who had forgotten to cast Find Steed prior), but compared to the alternative of getting eaten it was no contest.
It rolled around to my turn again, and the DM quite rightfully said I would start taking damage from being dragged if I didn’t do something soon. And, all of a sudden, I had an idea.
“Hey, two questions. First, my shield is magic, right? So it should be magically reinforced against mundane wear-and-tear, right?”
DM: “Uhh… where are you going with this?”
“Second question… Who here has played Breath of the Wild?”
At this point, those of you reading this who have played said game should be able to guess what came next. After a tense Acrobatics roll that ended up being a natural 18, I described my paladin atop the shield, using it as an impromptu surfboard, while hanging onto the rope and being pulled 50 feet behind a dinosaur mount. And it was glorious.
You got theme music, bro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGB0ZvO8J5k&feature=youtu.be&t=75
Hah! That’s pretty much what happened.
Tritons need more love. I actually like them because if I’m stuck in the Realms they have almost no established lore aside from what’s in Volo’s so I can play around with them rather than being forced to say “I’m from this established location which is already pre-defined” On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being a blue/green human with fins/gills, and 10 being “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, I like my Tritons at about a 7. So many jokes about Trition reproduction.
The riskiest stunt my Paladin ever performed was suplexing a guy off an elevated platform into some lava. (He was under the influence of a Fly spell, so he caught himself before hitting the actual lava.) He also body-slammed someone off a balcony. Lots of wrestling abound.
Well then. Glad I missed that episode as a kid.
Oh boy, daring stories!
Let’s have three from my Ratfolk Wizard. You’ve probably heard of them before in previous comics. Return of the Runelords spoilers below.
After our Kitsune witch almost got charmed in an attempt to steal an artifact from her, she found herself in a desperate situation, flanked by a bard and a rogue, trapped in a locked room. The rest of her party, save for me, the wizard, were unable to help her, and it seemed like she wouldn’t laste longer than a few rounds before getting shanked to death. Unfortunately, my wizard was on the other side of the door, spying invisibly on the proceedings in case something like this happened (we had our suspicions before). Thus, desperation breeds creativity, and the Ratfolk proceeds to cast Lightning bolt within the deck of a ship, blasting a hole on the other side and alerting the rest of the party. This was all the witch needed to escape, using Fox Shape to scamper out. Artifact and life saved by a bit of hazardous magic in a place unsuited for casting it!
After encountering a demilich, my wizard had cast time stop and the session had to end. This game me enough time to plan out a truly daring set of actions that were equally rewarding as they were risky – casting antimagic field on myself and literally bagging up the then-helpless demilich, but also leaving myself at the mercy of a pair of fossil golems with nothing but the other PCs to aid me (none of my magic would be functional, including all and any of my defensive magic items, leaving me a commoner effectively). Luckily, he also had True Name, and could call on a Planetar to help him get out of trouble and kill off the demilich, without any magic involved.
The most cocky action came at level 20, where an encounter with a CR20+ construct was abruptly swung in our favor by a casting of Control Construct.
Unfortunately, we were being spied on by the BBEG, a mythic level superboss wizard, who proceeded to roll against me in spellcraft to regain control. My humble Ratfolk proved to not only beat her in three consecutive opposing rolls (his INT and spellcraft rolls were HIGHER than an overpowered mythic archmage’s!), but he also repeatedly and intentionally taunted her on her ineptitude along the way, mocking the fact she was losing a battle of arcane genius to a rat. This enraged her enough to ‘heat’ by using one of her mythic surges to win the final check by force – which would prove to be a massive advantage, as she wasted one of her strongest resources on a fight we were handily winning – the construct would be defeated a mere two rounds later, having dealt massive damage to its former monstrous allies.
Always makes me nervous when blasting holes in ships comes into play. If 10d6 electricity damage can scuttle my boat, I think Ima pass on the pirate game. I’ve known too many wizards to trust my allies’ aim.
Dang, you missed out on grabbing PF-original Merfolk as a race. Would be interesting to see how good one is at swashing and buckling with an effective 5ft. land speed and a lack of legs.
Meanwhile, my eternal wait for Ratfolk Handbook characters continues.
Hey now, we gotta give 5e some love every once in a while. Besides, tritons and gillmen and sahuagin and merforlk all blur together in my head into the composite “fish man.”
I mean you can always do what I do and just call things by their 5E name since there’s very little thematic difference between a Witch and Fiend Warlock.
You know how I feel about edition wars:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cessation-of-hostilities
Handbook-World is a pastiche of multiple games. Always has been. That’s why Thief is named Thief and not Rogue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_class_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#Classes_by_editions
Cool new pair! Are they a pre-existing romantic couple, band of merry combatants, unlikely (or hyper-likely, with how PC/bardic family trees work) brother and sister, or the like?
Meanwhile, in the other handbook: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/513/012/625.jpg
All shall be revealed in time.
All shall be revealed in time.
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
Gnome low-level wizard captured by bad guys, stripped of all equipment (including clothing and, more importantly, spell book and component pouch), low-level, managed to escape (did you know that the “speak with burrowing mammals” racial ability could be used to convince rats to gnaw on delicious, tasty rope? Just the thing for a discerning rodent to abrade its ever-growing teeth on!), then after opening the door, finding a room with an ogre and some dishes on the table.
The character jumped on the table, grabbed a steak knife, and charged the ogre. And well, turns out that a surprise round, a size bonus to AC and some racial bonuses against giants combined with a critical or two can be very useful when you’re reduced to commoner status. (It probably helped that the ogre was still a bit wounded from the battle where it and its buddies captured us, though.)
Daring Maneuvers? Gunslingers are made for those, and get rewarded in more grit for it!
My Kobold Gunslinger used one such in the fight with weird mimic-like creature, that was covered in glue and in the process of trying to kill our Oracle who was stuck to it. Due to its DR, our weapons were doing diddly squat to it, but we knew that it had a weakness to fire, melting its glue.
Thus, my gunslinger took one of his black powder horns and scattered its contents into the mimic (making all of the black powder stick to it). Then, he ignited it with a tindertwig. Result: One mimic (on fire), an oracle, scorched, but now freed from the glue, and an unharmed Kobold (red scales for the win!). Sadly, whilst it did help for a little, the monster proved to be too deadly, and our Oracle would end up dying a few rounds later, the monster dying a few rounds too later.
Not me, but one of my players wanted to get a better view of the city they were all in, and decided the best way to accomplish this was to climb the main government building. So he casts Spider Climb — in broad daylight and in full view of everyone present — then proceeds to walk calmly up the wall, startling not only the guards and the citizenry but also some bureaucratic types whose desks were by the windows.
Eventually he decides to get down (which may have had something to do with how people had started yelling at him), and decides the best way to accomplish this is by jumping off the building. The fall was probably survivable (I hadn’t decided how tall the building was yet, but it probably wasn’t tall enough to kill outright a 5th-level ranger at full HP), but a round of “Are you sure?” at least convinced him to break his fall by casting Web between a couple of buttresses on his way down.
The only things this accomplished were getting a decent view of the city (which could have been accomplished just as easily and less disruptively by using the city walls or maybe asking the wizard who runs the lighthouse) and thoroughly annoying one of those bureaucrats, who has since put him on a watchlist. They haven’t had a chance to go back to the city, what with a sudden unplanned detour to a volcano followed by a Covid-induced hiatus, but our ranger will have significantly more difficulty moving around publicly for a while.
Perfect time to introduce these two characters. I’m not sure if you already knew this, but the Pathfinder 2E APG comes out this month and it’s introducing both Swashbucklers and playable Dhampirs.
The real risky or pointless stuff I do in rpg’s tend to not fit all that well with the swashbuckling aesthetics (as far as I remember), but I do have a few tales.
Once in an exalted game I started a fight with an elemental gangster boss and his demon bodyguards essentially because my character was too proud to handle money.
The conceit of the campaign was that we where these mercenary abyssal ninja’s (think naruto more than real historical ninja’s) working for a noncanonically defined deathlord. My characters gimmick was that I was the aloof high class type with a superiority complex, and that I used necrotech to make ninja gear and/or transhumanist-ninja-body-modifications.
The Gangster was the former boss of our groups face (gimmick the vaguely seductive infiltrator kind of ninja), who we met while travelling to another job. Turns out that he felt cheated by one of his workers quitting to be part of our group and wanted monetary “compensation” to allow it. Since he (wrongly) saw her as fundamentally a flunky and my character was acting as through he was important, he approached me to get the money.
Now my character wasn’t actually opposed to giving him some, I actually did have quite a bit of money for my necrotech, but he strongly felt that handling money was beneath him. He “had people for that sort of thing”, and since we where travelling light said people was the Face, so I told him to just go settle it with her and she’d give him the money.
Well the gangster insisted that he wanted money from the wealthy nobleman, not from the low-level ex-flunky he thought she was, and my character was too proud to actually engage with the gangster and explain the changed situation, so the conversation quickly devolved to him setting his demon guards on me and the rest of the circle and us killing them, the gangster and ultimately setting off a big bomb and booking it to “cover our tracks” (through not without taking some serious damage ourselves, 4 blood-apes flurrying a single PC at once can be quite nasty).
ghosting our Gripli Barbarian with the „glider“ alternate feat, which lets him treat falls as half distance and gives some maneuverability.
Cleric got pushed off a cliff and woke some wyvers up in a cave near the bottom, so fighty sounds broke out some 100ft down below.
I let the Gripli jump after her and used him as a projectile to hit a wyvern in the face. Next session the player was like, „yepp, sounds legit“.
As the song says: “We do what we be must because we can” 😛
Stupid risks for petty reasons are something we do a lot. More in a Exalted way than Swashbuckle way, but still. In a game that was a ripoff of The Avengers/Exalted, we played as a group of god backed heroes. After getting their powers what id the very first thing we do? Get drunk and play truth or dare!!! Of course the dare part of the game is a good way to know the limits of our new powers. Steal the High Thaumathurge’s of your God miter. Go to get food the other side of the world and return in less than 5. Shoot lightning to a specific bottle i put among other on that other city over there. You know typical thing for god empowered teenagers. Another one thing we did was to fall from a plane. We opened the door and just jumped, together with a bunch of terrorist sucked by opening the door open. Our pc survived the fall they don’t. But that doesn’t count that much because our pc didn’t know if they were to survive, they did it just for fun and to accomplish their mission. And it was before knowing of the Garden of Heroes, after that the consensus was: “We were pretty stupid with that stunt”. But stupid unnecesary stunts are an important part of the Swashbuckling style, as Swash shows today. Style is another important part. Hope your dragon riders have got the opportunity of letting themselves fall by the side of their dragons like Hiccup with Toothless 😀
Side note: I like this new couple, they look so full of life and romance between each other, unlike Wizard and Rogue 😀
Another side note: i don’t want to sound repetitive, but one of the things that Warframe has is the needless usage of pointless over the top movement maneuvers. Stairs? Not for the Tenno. Bullet Jump your way between floors. Running towards an enemy? BBBOOORRRIIINNNGGG!!! Slide shooting followed by bullet jump into melee. Falling from a top floor among enemies? Really? Glide while you shoot at them. Needing to go across the Plains of Eidolon or the Orb Valleys? Who use a vehicle when you got a cool K-Drive? Elevators on a Corpus map? Well… actually the Tenno take them. They are a good place to play to chill before following the massacre 😛
My College of Swords bard grappled a wyvern one time… overboard a ship, plunging both into the sea. It worked out great in the end – he almost died, but the two other wyverns found themselves at a distinct disadvantage in numbers on the ship and were swiftly dealt with.
Other highlights with the same character were casting Heat Metal on his own armor to escape an overgrown Otyugh’s grasp and challenging the leader of a raiding party in single combat, alone, surrounded by the entirety of the raider host, just to delay them for a few moments so that the town they were about to raid could brace itself a little better. Somehow, he survived, too.
Challenging general Maxillar Pythareus to a verbal duel in front of his entire army so that we could completely discredit him was definitely risky as heck considering that we were in prime position to simply assassinate him.
If we’d screwed up, we were toast. Even if we survived it, our side would have been doomed if he’d won that argument. Fortunately, we were the victors.
I’ve done two I’m fairly proud of with the same character, Landslide. Picture the Boulfer from Avatar but not intentionally trying to be the Boulder.
Anyway, the first one was me deciding to do a massive AoE in the center of what was essentially a group of 30 enemies that explode on death. After 30 reflex saves later, he stood there without a scratch absolutely beeming. The second was when we were on a cloud Giant’s castle, and were leaving. Rather than take the safe way down with flight or what have you, I grabbed our dwarf and jumped off to rocket to the ground. My plan was to try and use Thunder Step (a spell in 5e) to soften my landing and create a sonic boom kind of landing for style points. That one… didn’t exactly work out and hurt a lot. Still survived though!
Lesson learned. Evasion is helpful. Recreating the falling tank scene from the A-Team movie less so, lol.
Curse of Strahd, my druid using polymorph for the first time ever to fight Strahd riding on a nightmare who was otherwise out of reach for our melee-centric party. Later on turning into a wooly mammoth to occupy an entire hallway in Strahd’s castle and bull rush several of his underlings out a stained glass window.
Waterdeep, Dragon Heist. We’d been dealing with a long series of events including a lethal use of fireball on the street outside our base, a rogue clockwork servant, breaking in to a noble family’s home, 3 different major underworld gangs and a corrupt noble house all vying for the macguffin, retrieving the macguffin by stopping a diabolic summoning ritual, meeting a gold dragon, and more.
It’s the climax scene, we’re being confronted by the corrupt noble house’s majordomo, some kind of fiend in a human guise. He’s giving his monologue about how we’re going to die and the thing will make the family (and the cult of asmodeus who they serve) rich and powerful beyond imagine. My paladin (who had been recruited by the city watch at this point) steps forward, pulls out his badge, and loudly declares “You’re under arrest for conspiracy, arson, murder, and jaywalking”. He got to eat a fireball to the face for that, but it was worth it.
mammoth rush
Defenestrate
Derrik Darkluster was a typical Swashbuckler, on the surface at least. He showboated in the public view but when it came down to dungeon territory, he was as careful as could be, after all the story can be as bombastic as he wants to make it, but he can only make it bombastic if he makes it back from the dungeon.