I may or may not be any number of unfathomable beings.

Account migration from @skulblaka@startrek.website after learning the admins of that instance are wankers.

  • 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 8th, 2023
  • skulblaka@sh.itjust.workstoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Those poor fools
    4·
    12 days ago

    Fae don’t play by the same rules as mortals. Just because they possess your name doesn’t make it their name. It just makes it not yours. And Fae magic doesn’t necessarily rely on truenames, it relies more on expression and emotion. If you think that your name is your name, and now a Fae has taken it from you, it gives them power over you. And most especially Fae power is held in deals, contracts, favors, tit-for-tat. They asked you for your name and you gave it freely. That’s a contract. If you want it back, you’re going to need to draft a new contract.

    Besides, most fae won’t exert such complete control. Some will, definitely. But most of them prefer to trap you inside dealings of your own design. You’ll make an initial deal, which you know is a bad idea but you don’t have much of a choice - it always starts like this, with an offer you can’t refuse, such as recovering your name after giving it. Then you make another deal to escape the consequences of the first one. Then another. Then another. Before you know it you’re bound by multiple conflicting deals and can’t possibly keep your word on all of them - and then that’s when they really get you. Broken promises hold terrifying power with the Fae.

  • skulblaka@sh.itjust.workstoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Players be like
    6·
    1 month ago

    One of my favorite bits about Shadowrun in particular is that directly alongside this futuristic world of cyberdecks and prosthetics and automatic weapons, are fully fledged hauntings by things like bug ghosts and big fuck-off actual dragons (one of which owns a corporation) and other mystical crazy shit.

    I’ve played a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 but I haven’t gotten my hands on RED, so I don’t know if it has something comparable. But it sounds like you’re describing an Invae nest. Notably, bug totems are the only sort of spirit in Shadowrun that requires a sacrificial host to manifest, and bug shamans will capture people in order to infest them with bug ghosts which will gestate like xenomorph babies.

    The hivemind behind these Invae are pretty much a perfect slot-in for your gestalt locust swarm if you wanted, and they’re only interested in one thing: breeding grounds. Would be an interesting moral choice for your party. It’s a powerful entity and it can do or offer many things but its price is always going to be several corpses. Not necessarily your own, or corpses of innocents, it doesn’t care about that, but it wants live bodies that will then suffer greatly and then die. And then after they die they will release many little bug ghosts, which are a nuisance at best and highly deadly at worst. The bugs ate Chicago back in 2055.

  • skulblaka@sh.itjust.workstoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Weekend
    25·
    2 months ago

    I mean credit to the cleric here, when stumbling on a bodak by surprise, Pillar of Fire is a pretty good reflex. That’s one of those monsters where you open the fight with your secret weapon, we do NOT want to turn this into an extended battle.

    Shame about the location though.

  • skulblaka@sh.itjust.workstoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•There's truly only one choice
    4·
    2 months ago

    A player having access to counterspell is need-to-know DM information just like a player having access to flight is. It can and should be planned around.

    Also, if the player and DM are into it, escalate the arms race, start having enemies prepare counterspells. Lots of interesting casters have it on their lists but DMs are afraid to use it to its full potential. Players would do it to enemies all day long but when the tables are turned, nobody ever forgets what it’s like to have the enemy lich counterspell their heal.