The Fog
I’ve got to say, I’m really digging this whole “coast guard knight” theme that Cavalier has going on. Plying the treacherous waters in some 10,000 island archipelago… Fighting pirates… Investigating rumors of mysterious creatures… Might this be the first Handbook character to actually see play at the gaming table?
Eh. Probably not. Sad forever DM noises.
For serious though, I doubt such a PC would survive too long with that kind of job description. If Scylla and Charybdis didn’t get me, the fog would. Like underwater combat, magical darkness, and semi-professional wrestling matches, mucking about in The Mist is a sure way to catch a case of death.
From a tactical / mechanical side, it’s the perfect ambush. That’s because the ambushing creatures are always the type to have blind sense, echo location, or samurai super senses. And since we’re talking mist rather than darkvision, your character’s natural senses never seem to even the playing field. All of this combines to mean that when you’re fighting in fog, you’re fighting at a dramatic disadvantage. Your ranged characters can’t target the enemy properly, your melee characters suffer to-hit penalties, and the enemy gets to reposition with relative impunity.
Foggy conditions are also tough from a GM’s perspective, especially if we’re talking about a physical tabletop. A VTT like Roll20 is great for moving enemy tokens to a hidden layer, allowing you to hide positioning info from players. That’s impractical with a physical setup though. In fact, I’ve only made the effort once. It was a set piece encounter, and I wound up using a Battleship-style grid so that I could note where the monster had gone while the players struggled and guessed and searched around blindly. You’d better believe that they invested in some fogcutting lenses after that one.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we trade our finest tales of foggy moors and misty mountains? Was it werewolf fog? Cloud elemental miasma? Jack the Ripper hiding down a hazy alleyway? Or was there perhaps an island fish slowly drifting toward you out of a soupy sea? Was it a fair and fun combat, or did you want to hurl your dice at your GM’s fog machine? Tell us all about your (least) favorite foggy encounters down in the comments!
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Goz masks make for a better alternative to the Fogcutter lenses if you plan on pulling SWAT team stunts on enemies by fogging/smoking them and then rushing in to attack. Just make sure everyone has one. Red-scale Kobolds have a racial that lets them do this trick with smoke as well
My experience with fog had been one of the three:
It exists in a dungeon as trap outright, like cloudkill or to blind you whilst some other threat exists/lurks, or to function as a Dark Souls boss gate of sorts between rooms.
It’s cast by creatures that ignore it with their senses or want to buff up safely. In my case, the final BBEG of an AP just chilled in a fog cloud to get some free turns of casting out.
A PC casts it once and then never again when everyone else is hampered by it / unable to function (even if it hampers the enemies more.
Worked well in Starfinder thanks to this combo:
https://www.starjammersrd.com/magic-and-spells/spells/l/life-bubble/
http://thehiddentruth.info/player/equipment/weapons/grenade?page=Smokegrenade
All this talk of fog and no mention of the smoke machine from the extras? Curious of how that worked out for your game – or other ‘mood’ special effects and props.
Alternatively, simply using fog in-game not as a hazard/visual impairment, but as mood lighting of sorts. The foggy town is more distinct than a sunny village.
It was cool. I liked it.
Also I should probably update the “extras” section at some point.
I am the monster in the fog. One level of Oracle for Water Sight and Obscuring Mist. Rest of my levels in Rogue. Rapid Shot full attacks with sneak attack to follow.
I can’t use it all the time, because if we’re in close quarters it shuts down all allied ranged characters as well. I actually had to spend 8000 gp for Fogcutting Lenses to lend out (Pathfinder Society). And of course a lot of enemies have blindsight or something like it.
Love it when it works through. Especially when we were fighting the team of drow rangers. Half of them had to fight with their daggers, and all of them couldn’t use their favoured enemy (me).
That was my experience with Devil Sight over in 5e as well. Great in theory, but usually impractical in a team game.
Yeah, in theory, spells like Darkness and Hunger of Hadar are of great value to a warlock with Devil Sight… in practice, they’re pretty hard to take advantage of.
Though I did have a grand moment last year where we’d prepared an ambush in a narrow canyon. We waited for the enemy force to charge into the killbox, at which point my warlock dropped Hunger of Hadar onto the crowd — ten rounds worth of cold damage at the start of their turn, necrotic damage at the end, and the satisfying combo of blindness and difficulty terrain just to make it hard for them to get out of it.
Meanwhile, my allies were rolling boulders down the cliff, or shooting blindly into the darkness (disadvantage negated by enemy blindness), with me joining in with eldritch blast (with Devil Sight advantage).
It was a massacre on a scale I’ve not seen often — but equally, it’s just about the only time I managed to use that spell without it impeding the party more than it was worth. It’s just too crippling for the melee types… an instantaneous-damage fireball is so much easier to work with.
The best I ever managed was hunger of hadaar + ordering my imp to use his helm of brilliance for wall of fire in a circle. The drow were screwed if they stayed, screwed if they tried to escape.
Of course, that kind of “teamwork casting” is pretty rare when you’re dealing with actual PCs. The rest of my team had all kinds of fun throwing AoEs into the darkness though.
Usually I’m the one inflicting weird visibility conditions on the poor DM. Fog Cloud is a very useful spell in settings where dedicated ranged attackers are more common outside the party than in it. Once used a wall of them to mask the escape of the party’s airship from a fortress’s cannons, in a part of the most “Pirates of the Caribbean”-esque sequence I’ve ever played.
Yeah, variations on Fog Cloud can be very useful when dealing with ranged attackers… cuts their accuracy down enough that your tanks don’t get killed before they close into melee. Though annoying to my character, since he’s the archer trying to provide supporting fire.
I guess that’s the real skill of a controller mage. Can you control the battlefield without catching your allies in the debuff?
lol. Fog cloud hiding from cannons in a clear sky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VokGd5zhGJ4&t=74s
Aahh. Here’s one.
In my first campaign of 5E, we were travelling when we ran into Priscilla, the empathetic fog cloud. It was a fog cloud that spoke to us in a very calm and friendly manner.
~I~ wanted desperately to have a nice conversation with this very nice patch of sentient haze, but the rest of the party NOPED out of that situation and dragged me with them, forever damning me to the knowledge that I could have had a conversation with a low-flying cloud, but didn’t.
It is a great, great shame.
That indecision though:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/areyousure
Your buddies were not sure.
About two thirds of the way through the last adventure i ran, the party was tasked to resolve the issue of a giant fog bank that had basically permanently settled over the largest elven colony island in their archipelago about 500 years ago. Conceivably, the elves could still be alive, but mostly the elves wanted it gone on principle at this point, since they were almost certain it was the work of the Drow.
Uniquely, up until that point, the elves only had conventional ships to get there, but because of an off-hand comment i made about a month before the campaign started, one of the players had become fascinated with -and obtained- a Spelljammer flying ship, which the elves tricked out for this mission. So unlike past attempts, these guys were certain to not crash in the mist or anything, and could safely make it onto the island.
Nice to have an actual reason for a sky ship. In my experience, they’re usually just there because they’re cool.
I mean, its totally there because it was cool, but it was at least specifically sought after in character, and there was a whole arc about getting the ship built and stealing the magic from the Illithids to make it work. So they earned it.
Until now Cavalier had more of a PVP theme than a coast-guard theme, but both are good.
Here’s a mindfuck for you: Which of the Handbook’s characters are PCs?
All of them, it’s become a truly unmanageable west marches style game
Well, okay, all of them except Quest Giver and maybe Bar Maid and Tavern Wench
Anyone with a PC class probably, and definitely if they’re in a party. (Main party, anti-party bounty hunters, team evil, dragon party.)
Hmm, my read would be The Main Party (Thief, Wizard, Fighter, Cleric ) obviously is. I don’t know about Lumberjack explosion or Horsepower, it’s a toss up really. Their other companions are definitely npcs though.
The Anti-party I’d say NPC, at least originally (might vary from strip to strip). The point of an anti-party is after all to be a group like the PC’s in-universe but not actual PC’s since that makes the PC’s feel like a more integrated part of the world.
Team Bounty Hunter simultaneously feel very recurring NPC Mini-boss squad and very other PC group. I’m leaning towards mostly PC.
The Evil Party is definitely a set of PC’s in an evil campaign in a shared campaign setting (this also fits really well with the anti-party as NPC’s, since those are their primary opponents, though that would work with PVPing as well).
The Dragon Party, are definitely PC’s. Jeremy’s player is the brother of fighters player and everything, and their mom says you have to let him and his friends play. 100% PC.
Of the independents:
Bard feels like an NPC, as does Alchemist (he is even shown as a vendor relatively often), both showing up often to provide a service rather than on their own accord.
Summoner feels like an authentic creep PC, though I could see an NPC creep for the purposes of cathartic vengeance.
Gunslinger feels like a PC in potentia, if only his player could find a group.
At least one of Druid and Arcane Archer is a PC, probably both.
Pug feels like a proper PC to me.
Street samurai is the sort of concept only a PC would ask for (or the world would be more integrated with her at the very least)
I’m unsure about Monk and Kineticist
Quest Giver, Barmaid, Acolyte, Priest, Aristocrat and Elf Priestess are all very much NPC’s.
The Villains (BBEG, Demon Queen, and Miss Gestalt) are all obviously NPC’s.
Now for the characters not on the Cast Page
Occultist is a PC (NPC’s wouldn’t need to engage in attempts to guess AC, definitely not while fighting a Naga, and that’s half her appearances what with how new she is).
Warlock feels PC to me, particularly the scene where he acts liked he had a choice between all 3 5e core book patron options. That’s a very PC way to look at that.
Swash and Buckle, and cavalier all feels PC-ish to me, but could be just quirky NPC’s
Ninja could go either way. An npc assassin or a Pc that forgot to take proficiency in their own weapons.
Lady Duplicity and Lord Cragchin are both NPCs.
The Templated Thing, is an NPC (did anyone ever figure out what that was?)
The Hypertellurians are all PC’s, except for the unnamed greenish airship attendant who is an NPC (and the lobster automata who is a monster)
Beardy Goldaxeale McBeardminerson is definitely an NPC.
I think that’s everyone, at least everyone I happened to remember/come across.
Druid is the DMPC because she’s a precious and perfect bundle of sunshine.
What? Who ever said that? Sounds like something a jerk would say.
The details are a little foggy (pun intended ), but I remember running a Deadlands games. In the game, my players were outlaws who had cause to explore some abandoned house on the prairie. It was night time, but everything was fine and dandy for them. That was until the fog rolled in and they heard howling!
I don’t think I’ve ever run a game where I had my players so terrified.
You ever see “Dog Soldiers?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX9S3hdgZ5g
in War for the Crown we drove into the fog.
than we ran from some foggy creature through the fog
nearly got lost in the fog
and got the DM so annoyed arguing about the Survival dice roll to find the correct direction that he actually let us escape.
mind you, that was after the „you didn’t say so“ incident
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/same-page and I was not in the mood to run into that thing over bad logic.
also on the topic of „Sad Forever DM Noises“:
https://me.me/embed/i/c18232aeb83942eba0c85e941181bc7e
Well Cavalier has been known to stab other characters….
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unconventional
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/taking-10
The last time fog hardships happened they were self inflicted. Mostly because I was a bit unclear on the battle plan. Pun not intended.
We were on a quest to hunt down a basilisk, so obviously we needed to do something about its gaze attack. My druid volunteered to act as bait, readying an action to cast Obscuring Mist as soon as he sees the eight-legged bastard approaching, and then would light it up with Faerie Fire on his first turn proper in order to negate the concealment. After that it would be a simple task of fighting defensively with his eyes closed, while the rest of the party attacks it from range.
Now, I ASSUMED the “from range” part was implied, but you know what they say about assuming… it makes an ass out of you and me. Being built for melee, three of the four remaining party members went up to the basilisk and started wailing on it. We remained unpetrified solely due to lucky rolls, good Fort saves, having enough brain cells to realize that looking away is smart, (I’m pretty sure) some fudged rolls on the GMs side and ruling that concealment works on gaze attacks.
We won somehow. Not sure we deserved that win, but there we were…
I get that I could have been a lot more detailed in my explanation, but I wasn’t the only idiot there, right? “Don’t get close enough to see its eyes” is the logical choice, right?
There’s a reason that all the best plans involve salt shakers and ketchup bottles and what not. That positioning info is critical!
Is that tortoise swimming?
He was introduced as “Brick the giant snapping turtle.”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/setting-up-the-charge
I can’t help it if Laurel doesn’t know her Chelonoidis from Chelydridae.
Certain members in my group (including me), may have been banned from casting Obscuring Mist at one point or another. Turns out both the party and the GM REALLY hate having to constantly roll miss chance for everything.
I know that feel, bro:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/frustration
Once to simulate how the party could only scream things at each other we stand up from the table and got to other parts out of the room and we just screamed things at each other while keeping a hazy map of the encounter on our head. It halted the encounter to a crawl but it was so funny having to loose turn relieving messages between us 😀
Lol. Do you play in a warehouse? Why not just use a normal speaking volume? Were you trying to simulate shouting over the sound of battle?
With different people on different rooms we needed to shout a lot 🙂
Not gonna’ lie, I am not a fan of the miss mechanics in D20. That’s a nice Natural 20 you rolled there. Be a shame if something… happened to it. Oh, you rolled a 19 on your minor concealment miss chance, WHOOPSIE DOODLE!
I use fog for dramatic effect. I try very hard to avoid concealment in fights after playing through Owlcat’s Kingmaker where concealment mechanics are as overused as a pokemon in the battle meta. They are so prevalent I’ve considered restarting the game and making sure everyone takes Blindfight.
Putting that aside, fog is great is to add some mystery to the table. In my R20 game, I use darkness in this fashion. The unspoken rule is if you can see it, you can target it. A handful of very specific enemies have concealment effects, and if someone casts a spell that grants concealment, we’re all going to deal with it. Overall… I find it’s the best solution.
Otherwise all your fighty and shooty types will be wholly well justified in cussing you out for fielding enemies that make certain specific builds and feat choices near mandatory.
I’d rather play off the very rare enemy that has that effect and just do what I can to separate them from the common encounters. Make a memorable warp stalking badguy.
One of Pathfinder Second Edition’s virtues is that it instructs you to roll the concealment check before the attack roll, so at least you never know that you would have rolled a 20.
Eww 2nd edition PF. ;p
More seriously, have not played. Did not get a real enthusiastic feeling as I flipped through it though. Irrelevant-I’m not sure that I like the core, central idea of double layered avoidance/resist mechanics. They slow the game down and have a tendency to make someone feel screwed, y’know? We can say that’s just how the game is… but I’ve long since decided to push my D20 games towards soak and regen models rather than extra double AC and Spell Resist. This way people get to do some damage and feel like they matter without extra janky RNG. Just my thoughts on it.
Like I said to the other guy, I know that feel bro:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/frustration
Not fog based, but reminds me of the “Cave of death” encounter I ran. it wasn’t supposed to be that dangerous, just looked over the monster manual for 3.5 and grabbed a random enemy from the Cave/Cavern section cause the session had gone off the rails a little. Got shadows. Cool, add enough Shadows to get a reasonable CR for the 10th level party…Cool, Shadows have a Greater variant, I’ll use that.
Several failed miss chance rolls later, and the Knight and the Wizard are now Greater Shadows, and the Swordsage was fleeing with his tail between his legs.
Shadows are like salt: great for a little flavor, but too much makes everything (and everyone) salty.
One of the last bosses in my first campaign was a fog creature, though the fog didn’t appear until she did. A Sorcerer who was killed and then reanimated by magical salt, her whole thing was throwing down an Obscuring Mist she could see through (in-universe a blinding salt blizzard) and then fly around, blasting the party with AoE cold attacks that, if their saving throw was failed, also Slowed the target for one round. Given that the PCs had seen her at a distance months earlier and encountered a lot of references to her in documents and stuff, it worked well to be a memorable encounter.
And this was back in my early GMing days, where I underestimated the GM’s power to do whatever they want with a monster. As a result, the boss was (almost) fully legal to play as a PC. (Everything but her being undead.) Mostly an Elemental (water) Sorcerer with a level of Waves Oracle and I think one of Scaled Fist Monk for AC. I’m very proud of it.
That’s a powerful suite of abilities: low visibility, aoe, slowed PCs, and a flying antagonist are going to create a lot of frustration in players. I sometimes have these kinds of antagonists make an unforced error, just so the players can get a lick in and feel like they aren’t doomed to lose.
Conveniently, the ceiling was not high enough for her to fly out of their reach, and her AoEs were mostly coldified Burning Hands (so not that damaging and not that high of a save DC). The flight was mainly for her dramatic entrance of rising out of a pit of liquid salt, as well as giving her a high move speed. I don’t quite remember how the fight went, but the party did have an Alchemist whose breath weapon bombs would clear out part of the fog (and do +50% damage because of her fire vulnerability), so if they could figure out that the cold-themed creature dislikes fire, they’d probably be okay.
Sometimes you just gotta make the major boss a pain to deal with, especially if you’ve built them up beforehand.
Fair cop.
I’m mostly thinking of incorporeal creatures. They tend to drag combat to a crawl when you try to play up their hit and run capabilities. When they’re a boss fight rather than a typical encounter, however, that tends to work a lot better.
My most recent experience with concealment was in a Pathfinder 2e game, where I played a winter witch in a party fighting a horde of elementals, and we ended up both working around concealment and using it to our advantage. It turns out when you’re facing smoke monsters in a smokey room or mist elementals in a foggy one, having Gust of Wind prepared is a big help. I also made good use of the Personal Blizzard hex, using it to weaken down dangerous foes and let my party focus on taking out the weaker ones. Overall, it was fun, added interesting tactical depth to the game, and made being the only caster more satisfying.
Also, here’s a lesson I learned the hard way: In 5e or other systems where the mutual-concealment rules aren’t obvious, don’t learn Fog Cloud unless you’re sure you and your GM agree on its purpose and how it works. I had one GM think it was meant to blind and confuse foes, so when I tried to use it to cover the party’s approach into a kobold lair, I was told they’d have an easier time targeting us since they could narrow down our locations more easily than we could figure out theirs. Not a fun argument to have.
There are some spells that say “prestidigitation” on them, even though it’s in a font too small to actually see. Gust of Wind is one of those feel-free-to-get-creative spells, and I’m always happy to have it prepped. It also happens to have explicit uses like clearing fog and poison clouds and such, but it’s just straight up smart to have in your back pocket.
I find this is true of almost every rule in the game. I remember hearing a story of a first-timer quitting after the GM declared that he missed the “slow-moving slug creature,” even though he ambushed it.
“How the hell did I miss? This game is stupid!”
In other words, getting on the same page is friggin’ hard sometimes.
My go-to fog build is Sylph with Cloud Gaze feat and a Seaspray Ring (4~5k-ish item that’s a toggle-able Obscuring Mist that follows you). Go Ninja or Rogue and focus on ranged attacks. There’s definitely the stated issue of it not playing well with some parties, and the 30 ft range limit on Sneak Attack definitely hurts your ability to stay out of the way and rain down damage from afar.
For foggy encounters on the receiving end, my go-to trick would be toss out some sort of bait (a disposable summon, an illusion, what have you) and wander it into horrible fog monster reach. If it dies, time for AoE damage effects or a hasty retreat. I say ‘would be’ because my only encounters with fog so far have been red herrings; great way to build up tension, unless your party is the crazy meticulous types, in which case you may want to get up and grab a drink, some snacks, and a nice book- gonna be a while.
Another trick in this vein of one-sided fog and darkness concealment? Gnome Tattooed Sorcerer, pick up a Pig or other Small Familiar with the Elemental Familiar archetype (Air) for a flying familiar, then get Undersized Mount to ride them into battle. Then pick up Effortless Trickery (I think is the name?) which lets you maintain an Illusion spell with Concentration duration as a Swift Action; Illusions require interacting with them to get a save, so ride your pig into the air into some illusionary fog out of the foes’ reach and go to town from there (though when it comes to the flying pig-riding gnome, I prefer to optimize the heck out of my burning hands damage and obliterate stuff with cones over abusing illusions to hide, but my flying baconator build isn’t relevant here). Still waiting for a chance to use that one.
Does that saltspray ring combo ever hurt your ability to receive friendly buffs? I’d hate to have to burn a standard just to deactivate it if I need to get teleported out of a grapple or whatever.
I was lucky enough not to run into that scenario too often, but it was definitely a bit of a drag to not be able to receive a buff; I recommend having it down at the start of combat and putting it up the turn after you get a buff; if your initiative roll’s good, everything is flat-footed and you can get a good full attack in anyhow, and if not, you’ll get a quick buff and then turn it on. Given most other characters spend their first turn getting into position or buffing at the relevant levels, it’s usually not a huge loss to give up a turn this way.
Not being targetable by Liberating Command is a concern, but if something can grapple you reliably through the mist it’s likely not hindered by it (alternate senses) and you’re probably too close for the full benefit (in which case don’t bother turning it on until you’re safe).
Another idea I came up with was the Ring of Dark Blending. It rendered the wearer invisible to Darkvision but not regular vision or low light vision. It was great to mess with players who relied on their darkvision looking down a hallway and seeing nothing but the human walking behind them could swear they saw bright red eyes glaring at them from the darkness…
Well that’s awesome. Much more creative than my go-to “color-based puzzle in darkness” encounter.
In 3.5, this was the Ring of the Darkhidden, which we used once to make the Underdark well lit. As once the GM saw it, we never encountered an inhabited dark section, even in the middle of Menzoberrazan.
In Pathfinder, there is a first level spell called Shadowfade that will do something similar.
A homebrewed space game. I was playing Zeyoor, an old lionman diplomat, who was a rather classy fella. Carried a service saber and had his own cyber-monocle. He had decided to spend his retirement going on space adventures. I will admit that the fog is only loosely related to the story, and that I just really want to tell it.
For various reasons we ended up landing on a planet filled with acid mists, which not only made it impossible to see or track anything, but also required us to wear protective suits or get constantly damaged by it. Zeyoor was part of the 3 man team that left the ship to go explore the planet. We walked through the mist, following a weak signal we picked up. Finally we tracked down the signal down to an acid lake. When we gathered around it to see if we could see something, suddenly a giant psychic lazer lobster burst forth from it, knocking out the two other crewmembers with a burst of psychic energy. After which it fired its eyelazers at Zeyoor.
Zeyoor, now burning from the acid getting through his damaged suit, fought it saber to lobster claw, but the were at a stand still. Until the Lobster grabbed his saber and tossed it into the lake. This, as it turned out, was a big mistake on its part. Zeyoor was build for diplomacy, and only really carried his saber due to sentimental value (It was a sign of service and authority among his people). But I had build him to be decent in unarmed combat, due to being a boxer in his youth.
What followed was an epic claw to claw battle, as Zeyoor battled the lazer lobster, and he was not just winning, but utterly dominating the battle. Finally the Lobster grabbed him in its claws and dragged him beneath the surface of the acid lake, where he promptly choked it out, grabbed his saber from the bottom and swam back to the surface, only being alive to some downright miraculously low damage rolls from the lake. He then grabbed his two crewmates, and dragged them back to the ship, burning from the acid rain the entire way. Finally falling to the ground, with only one hit point left, when they entered the ship.
That is when we, and by we I mean Zeyoor, discovered that half the remaining crew (ie, two people) had been taken over by mind slugs. The Doctor had locked herself in the medbay, with the other two survivors who had had the misfortune of running into the pilot, an adventurer of note and a master swordsman, and were thus out of the fight. So Zeyoor, after fighting off a couple of mind slugs and punching out the mechanic, finally got to the medbay, and got some quick first aid, after which he set out to fight off the swashbuckling pirate, before the slugs got to the part of his memories that would allow them to fly the ship.
The two of them, pilot and diplomat ended up in a dramatic saber fight, that quickly resulted in Zeyoor getting impaled. It was looking grim for me, until the pilot made the classic mistake of disarming him, resulting in Zeyoor once again having to resolve to his claws. Suffice to say, the pilot was quickly dealt with. The session ended with Zeyoor dragging the unconscious pilot back to the medbay, after which he shut himself in a medical pod and refused to leave for the next week.
Getting some major “box cover art from Twilight Imperium” vibes from Zeyoor:
https://cf.geekdo-images.com/_Ppn5lssO5OaildSE-FgFA__opengraph/img/hPRQeo0p5SEQs5Yg-5fHC2rqa64=/fit-in/1200×630/filters:strip_icc()/pic3727516.jpg
Man I hate those things:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/hypertellurians-part-2-3-technobabble
Love it when the dice do cinematic things though. Hell of a moment when you stagger back to the ship with 1 hp only to discover dramatic danger music waiting for you.
I would be lying if I said the aesthetic of Twilight Imperium didn´t play a role in his design.
It was quite a day for Zeyoor, yes. Through the journey to the medbay wasn´t too bad, seeing that the main threat between him and it was the mechanic who was not just not build for combat at all, but also came from a race that resembled a rather immobile moomintroll.
Learning that the pilot got taken over was, however, pretty terrible, as he was the second best fighter in the group (The best being one of the two knocked out people). It was quite frankly a miracle that I won that fight, seeing that Zeyoor was only tertiary build for combat and was terribly wounded.
One of the main things I loved about the moment was how the dice rolls firmly established Zeyoor as someone who was terrible with a saber, yet still kept trying to use it, until people finally made the mistake of disarming it. That and the fact that he somehow ended up being basically immune to mind attacks.
I’m currently building a character that does this in reverse, actually
Kern, Hobgoblin Battlemedic. He’s an alchemist with a racial passive to be able to see through smoke and similar obscureness without penalty- so he carries a bunch of smokesticks and feated to be able to toss them quickly (1 action instead of 2 out of 3 per turn) so that he can quickly create a wide area of smoke that he can see in but his enemies can’t- whether to use the cover to heal allies, pick off enemies, or both.
The important part is that he doens’t need conditions to already be foggy- he brings the cloud with him in his back pocket.
We were talking about this a little further up the thread, but how co you keep from inconveniencing your allies as much as your enemies?
Smokesticks only fill a 5 foot burst, a + shape. As long as I’m smart about where I throw them, I can exclude enemies from benefitting- A downed ally isn’t going to care about whether or not they have a 20% miss chance, they’re going to care that enemies trying to finish them off have a 20% miss chance, and that I have cover while I heal them.
Oh, and one of the other party members is ALSO a smokesight hobgoblin, so half the party is fine anyway lmao
On the topic of 10000 island archipelago; the Shattered Islands (name?) in PF tries to be that, but still retains the problem of simply being way too far away from any trade routes to be reliable for a “pirate hideout” (and IRL most pirate hideouts were actually set up for buccaneers; ie had implicit approval of state, the Shattered Isles is more like a literal country of pirates which is weird). A bit like how the Land of the Linnorm Kings is clearly meant to be fantasy Vikings as written by someone who thinks Conan is representative of all Vikings, but you get into things like that area being too far away from any place worth raiding to be a raider culture, sonce no one apparently wanted a country themed around “we get raided and it sucks.”
Anyways, that’s just my little worldbuilding moment.
On the actual topic, in my homebrew sci fantasy game, we also make heavy use of life bubble to negate bad environmental effects, and we have armor upgrades that grant various alternative senses as well, like blindsight and tremorsense.
I’m a big fan of fog, which isn’t super hard to pull off since I’m permanently on virtual tabletops. However, I’ve got to do some extra planning because one of the most active players in my game is a Fire Dancer bard who has a performance that lets allies see through fog and smoke. However, that led to a very fun situation where there was a combat encounter against a bunch of Warhammer-style beastmen in the fog, including a small group of drummers who were trying to drown out Malih’s performance, forcing opposed performance rolls each round he used his performance.
That’s how it’s supposed to be done. Fold the players’ shtick into your encounter design. Well played!
I was inspired, so, to the tune of the Mariner’s Revenge Song…
We are adventurers,
Campaign survivors,
Let us tell you our tale,
There were disturbing things,
Spilled guts, enchanted rings,
And two near total party kills,
You don’t know the half of it,
We were so full of shit,
And so our GM made some plans,
And I remember them,
So I will fill you in,
On how we escaped death’s cruel hands,
At the time we were so confident in killing hordes,
Spending all our money on enchanted swords,
Oh, oh,
The cleric had wizened eyes,
The fighter’s strength was high,
Even the rogue had unchained feats,
And wiz knew fireball,
We thought we could kill them all,
So of course we never did RP,
As the game went on we proved a hobo-ridden mess,
Leaving our GM to pull his hair out while he wept,
Oh, oh,
And then that faithful night,
He took the rogue aside,
And never told us what was said,
He started rolling dice,
But told us with smiling eyes,
“No, it’s okay there’s nothing bad…”
Then next session the city guard broke down the door,
They stormed into the tavern and said something about the lore,
Oh, oh,
Listen, listen,
The GM gave a plot point and we,
Missed it, missed it,
Now we’re being hunted and he,
Loves it, we’re so dead,
I don’t know how to get out of this mess,
It took two sessions more,
Before we found the core,
Of what great havoc we had wrought,
Turns out that guy we killed,
Was high up in the guild,
And now the kingdom wants us caught,
And so we ran onto a wharf in the dead of night,
We thought maybe we could sail away from our self-brought plight,
Oh, oh,
But we were overheard,
An urchin girl observed,
And we then had a choice to make,
Should we kill the kid?
Or bribe her with some dish?
For once we didn’t care of XP,
The party argued and the GM’s heart filled with joy,
Because the rogue just mentioned she was orphaned in her backstory,
Oh, oh,
Listen, listen,
The player gave a plot point and,
The GM, took it,
Now we’ve got dilemmas and we,
Love it, who knew,
That RP could be so fun in this game,
The party decided on a compromise,
We’d take the urchin girl with,
The GM smiled as we asked her name,
For once we liked an NPC,
And then that faithful night,
The ship we stole capsized,
We lost our armor to the sea,
We washed up on the shore,
The GM explained some lore,
And everyone made their own note sheet,
The GM smiled as he once more rolled a few dice,
We all looked nervous as he told us to all save or die…
Oh, oh,
Don’t know how we survived,
The wizard’s spells ran dry,
But the rogue flanked with the NPC,
The GM thanked us all,
And we couldn’t believe at all,
When we all asked for the urchin to share the XP,
It gave his heart such great joy when we said those words,
And now we’ve been playing for three years more and it works,
Oh, oh,
Well shit. You win the thread.
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