First round of the evening and one meal per person are always free at the Cranky Cat inn ;)

My old group had the opposite problem sometimes. In one campaign, we ended up with an NPC perma-drunk street urchin who was too obnoxious for his own good, and just kinda tagged along with the actual party because it meant he could get a free meal as long as they tolerated him. He was meant to give the characters some hints for the campaign and then get chased off or locked up or otherwise removed, but the party basically instantly adopted him, tried to teach him some manners, got him out of trouble whenever he did some Really Dumb Shit™ like groping a city guard or telling a priestess to go f- herself or barfing on the druid’s familliar. I think our DM was a little frustrated for a while that the one-off character he pulled out of his ass just to deliver a message ended up becoming a full-time job for him to play, despite his efforts to get the character killed or left behind.

Fast forward a couple of (in-game) years and what was once an annoying little shit is now an resposnible adult running his own tavern, in which our party frequently resides. All is well that ends well, I guess ;)

(still, that DM never again brought orphans into the play, just in case.)

I always called it “clutter” tho I don’t know whether this is in any way official. De-cluttering an inventory means tossing the useless stuff out or packing it away.

Well, what can I say? Bird watching got boring eventually, so I upgraded my hobby … =P

We have a house rule about this: The real world of course has priority, so if something happens that is out of your control, it is not the end of the world if a session gets cancelled… but if it happens regularily or without a good excuse, then the character gets temporarily removed from the party with a matching in-game excuse so that the people who DID show up can play in peace.

So the party just defeated a big enemy and the next session they wanted to plan their next steps, but the player of the warrior didn’t show up for the third time…? His character is unconscious now while the others talk. Hit to the head during the fight, 5 hours or so knocked out, and the player and character alike can catch up with the rest the next time the player is present. Or maybe the guy had to escort injured villagers to the next healer and heads back to the party a few days later after completing his own little mission “offscreen”. Or he ate something bad and spent a week locked up in the outhouse, whatever. There is always some way to send the missing guy’s character away for a while so the rest of the party doesn’t go empty-handed for the umptheenth time in a row.

It’s basically that, minus the ability to talk (the “daemons” in HDM can talk like people, whereas the soul animals in DSA can only talk telepathically with their respective witch). The only other difference is that a witches’ companion is usually born elsewhere and has to find their witch in the real world later, which usually happens when the witch is around seven years old and her magic awakens. IIRC the daemons in HDM are somehow born alongside their respective humans and keep shapeshifting until they settle for a matching animal form eventually.

I fully agree with the name change tho. I mean, it should not have been that hard to just stick to Blackfurs and Redfurs for orcs & goblins when they’re “nicknamed” that way in the actual game anyway. Both races also have noticably different names for themselves in the game (goblins call themselves Suulak, for example) so that would have been yet another option for a unique name. No need to call these fictional races by a name that most people already associate with very specific traits and then go out of your way to make them “different”.

Sure, why not? ;) Sorry that most of the sources are in German, but I don’t know about relieable English sources.

• Orcs are big, bulky warriors with green skin and very little hair in almost all other franchises. DSA has a bad case of “our XYZ are different than yours!” for most of their species, so their orcs are covered from head to toe in thick, black fur (they’re condescendingly called “Schwarzpelze” / “blackfurs” by other races) and are noticably smaller than humans. Think of small, dark wookies with big teeth. Orcs generally don’t view women as people - not even their own! Female orcs are called by a name that allegedly translates to “animals that birth orcs” and they’re generally treated like livestock.

• Goblins got the same weird “ours are different” overhaul. In almost all other franchises they’re the smaller, big-eared, smooth-skinned green people, but in DSA they’re basically orange monkeys (some official art) who ride swine and are literally incapable of understanding where babies come from because the “goblin queen” (Kunga Suula) held a ritual to permanently erase specific traits of that species, these being: understanding what fatherhood means, understanding what personal property is, understanding any type of death rites (they just toss deceased relatives to their swines), understanding loyalty of any kind. A bit more info here: https://pnpforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=56697 … and the “best” part is that this ritual was held to protect the tribes from the Nameless (basically the main antagonist) because that entity often corrupts people by false promises appealing to their desires, like promising to liberate a folk from harsh conditions or protecting their loved ones and the like. A Goblin who doesn’t care for his offspring or friends won’t be tempted by that, right? Extremely weird way to protect your people IMHO, but canon.

• Elves, at least the “purebred” ones, never have unwanted pregnancies. They can f*ck all they want and won’t need protection or birth control, because elven babies have to be “called from the light” which is basically just a ritual to make a female elf pregnant. No idea what this ritual is supposed to look like, but sex isn’t necessarily involved. Elves having fun with other races, that’s a different topic tho, and might lead to an inconvenient surprise when the elf in question suddenly understands why other races don’t have / need such a ritual…

• Elves start out incapable of digesting fermented or highly processed stuff. The entire race is basically lactose intolerant and “spice-tolerant” like a Brit until they VERY slowly get used to eating human meals. The Elven language (isdira) is also basically unlearnable by other races, because elves speak with two voices at once, so a single elf sounds like two different people saying the same thing at the same time, and THAT in turn is a prequisite for the correct pronounciation of a lot of elvish words. Like I said earlier; I really wonder what TH the creators smoked … I also faintly remember reading somewhere that the second voice comes out of their nose when they say two different things at the same time, but I can’t for the life of me find the source for that so take it with a grain of salt. It might have been a fan theory. Some more info here: https://dsaforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=51042

• Every single person on the continent Aventurien has a “soul animal” that represents their character traits. They may not know about it, or may know that such a thing exists but don’t know WHICH soul animal they are associated with, but there are magic spells to “see” said soul animal in others to give the spellcaster an insight of the spell-targets soul. If for example a wizard casts that spell on a person claiming to be a war veteran and they see a battered, scarred, old lion then the wizard will know the other guy speaks true, whereas if their soul animal turns out to be a stressed-looking chicken or something like that, then that guy is probably a liar.

• Simlar to that, witches usually have an animal companion that is basically a separate part of their own soul, so it should be identical to the soul-animal of the witch in question. The rulebook suggests some “classics” like crows, black cats and frogs, but any regular (non-magical) animal between the size of a bunny and a cow is okay to use when creating the character. You want your witch to have a monkey, goat or tortoise as a companion? Go ahead. Witches also have some …unusual spells. They can make their saliva have healing or damaging properties, so they can heal wounds by licking them but also melt the face of an attacker by spitting at them. And they can reanimate and move “dead” wood. The witch of one of my regular players once was in a situation where she was tied to a chair, and she decided to make the chair run away with her still on top while their captors weren’t looking. We had to pause the session for a while because everyone was laughing so hard at the mental image of a tied-up 80-something wrinkled old lady galloping through the streets on an effing chair, yelling “so long, suckers!”

• There is a goddess named Rahja, who stands for lust and love and joy. One of her “Alveranians” (basically angels) carried her child to term in her stead, to spare the goddess the pain of having to birth the child herself. The thing is … that Alveranian was a man. I do NOT want to think about this any further.

So…yeah. There you go. One big serving of coversation starters ;)

Had a similar experience once at a convention. The DM was somehow obsessed with “winning” the scenario, as if it was a player party VS. the DM situation. He even was suprised when most of us flat out left the table after we managed to defeat the first major threat of the campaign and it then somehow suddenly turned into an undead version of itself, stood up again and managed to escape for no discernible reason other than the DM being unwilling to “lose” the fight.

On the flip side, we had a blast continuing the scenario in the partking lot on our own terms, without a DM.

Long story short; not a common problem, but IF it happens, it is frustrating and annoying and can ruin the fun of the entire party.

Random fun fact: there is a German roleplaying system (Das Schwarze Auge) which explicitly mentions that elves do not have belly buttons, because the “wound” gets magically healed right after the cut. There is a lot of similar weird official canon that occasionally makes me wonder what TH they smoked at the time of writing their rulebooks.

Amen. As a DM it is completely fine to generate challenging “food for thought” situations for their players, but when you start to play against your party and actively sabotage their characters, decisions or playstyle, it’s time to step down as a DM.

I lost it at “ELISHA YES!”

On a related note, I once read a nice DnD-esque summary of why Jesus was a Lich - that would fit right into this collection. (not my own pic or theory, just something I stole from imgur … still sorry for the missing pixels)

cast stuff like detect good and evil.

My long-term players have learned to not rely on that dumb spell anymore … because the way I handle this as a DM is purely about the intent of the characters in question, independendly from their actual actions. Examples:

• A witch-hunter who tortures and then burns women at the stake. A person who factually and personally brings suffering, pain, fear and death into the world as per his actions. What’s his intent? Well, if he just enjoys torturing women and takes the job of a witch-hunter as a convenient excuse then he’s certainly evil. But someone who is brainwashed into thinking that burning “witches” will save their souls from eternal hellfire and suffering, actually has “good” intentions and doesn’t think what he is doing could be evil. Sure it sucks that there is blood and fire involved, but what is a broken bone or two and a little bit of temporary pain compared to an eternity in hell? The spell would tell the caster that this is a “good” dude even tho he factually does the same as the other guy.

• An adventurer going to kill a dragon that has plagued nearby villages for ages … surely that’ll be a hero, right? Well, if he does this FOR the villagers, to save them and prevent future suffering, no matter whether it is dangerous for hmself, then he has good intentions. If someone does this purely out of spite because he happens to hate all things scaly, or purely out of greed because he wants the bounty / plunder the dragon’s hoard and he just doesn’t care for the villagers or his co-adventurers, then the spell would “detect” him as being evil, even tho both adventurers factually do the same in the end.

Of course this isn’t optimal either (the optimal solution would be to just not have that dumb spell in the first place IMHO) but it can make for nice little story twists if the obviously evil villain of the story has an ulterior motive and gets detected as “good” ;) The players might get an explanation AFTER the game, but while they’re still in the middle of an adventure, they have to figure it out on their own.

Headcanon forever accepted. This is aweseome!