alternative horror game locations to Abandoned American Mental Hospital
- underwater cave system full of crawling things
- the irish countryside in the middle of the night
- the forest of dean
- the middle of a desert. the heat shimmers in the distance are writhing in ways hot air shouldn’t
- a motorway full of dead cars. some have claw-marks the length of your arm on them and the bridge up ahead has been crushed
- an abandoned RAF base
- soft play spaces after hours. something keeps shuffling behind you and everything is sticky
- sewers
- a crashed aircraft carrier. there are skittering noises and the sound of something chewing
- multistory car-parks
- the moon
If we want to keep with the abandoned theme tho: Abandoned honeymoon hotels, like The Summit in the poconos (all the poconos 50’s honeymoon hotels are wild) shopping centers that have gone under (like K-Mart, sears, etc.), Dead Malls, and abandoned ghost towns.
abandoned ski lodges, abandoned farms, the chesapeake/eastern shore, literally anywhere in florida, hell there are several churches in the middle of the fucking woods near where i live that are several hundred years old
there are literally so many better options than that nasty ableist bullshit trope use ur fucking imagination
Dm: so you can take the princess back to the castle to marry a man and collect your reward or you can release her and let her run away with her girlfriend, but you won’t get any money
Player #1: I really like money but I also really like lesbians
Player #2: what do you value more, money or the gays
(They ended up escorting the princess and her gf to the country border bc our dragonborn barbarian scooped them up like babies and wouldn’t put them down until her ‘gay children’ were safe from ‘the evil heterosexuals’)
Space Criminal Dad™ + his surrogate child is possibly my favorite relationship dynamic ever
Sometimes around like 95 he said he didn’t need more money. He’s given away literally millions to his town (he had a little league field(?) build so his kid’s team could play) and to other notable charities for decades. He said, and has written in his books, that there’s only so much money a person needs and the rest is just vanity. He was taught that as a child and lived it as a multi-millionare (which he never truly was – bc he gave it away).
He and his family lived in the same modest suburban house in the same modest Maine town since the 70s.
And then there’s Jeff Bezos.
sometimes is heart-warming to see that indeed good people still exist
So if you’re new to Dungeons and Dragons, this new series from Critical Role (which admittedly atm only has one video) may be of use
Something that’s almost never covered in fantasy mediums is common names.
Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.
“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”
“Wait which Vicnae? You can’t just say Vicnae. There are ten Vicnae’s in my village alone.”
This has 100 notes yesterday and 300 this morning what the fuck happened.
People understand the truly important things.
DSA (a German fantasy P&P RPG) actually has the name Alrik, which is hugely popular in the universe. Everyone is Alrik.
This is also a great excuse to use “X the Y” or “X of Y” type names without being pretentious. Calling someone “Thognor The Stout” goes from pomposity to practicality if he lives down the road from Thognor The Small.
Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock.
~~*~surnames~*~~
my family is from a town in Ireland where everyone has the last name Ryan. literally like everyone. so they differentiated families by calling them by their professions, right?
anyway we’re the Horse Thief Ryans
When goblins come to start the fight
and dialogue is hard to write
Play them like this,
now there’s a lesson to ya
Behold your player’s rising fear
As the truth grows crystal clear
That every phrase they hear
Is Hallelujah
the princess bride is exactly what a dnd campaign would look like as a movie like? the delightfully weird cast of characters with their own quirks, the strange pacing and narrative that still Works, the absolute absurdity of it all, the jumping back and forth between wanting to be serious and it being really funny, hell its even Told like a dnd story through the use of the grandfather being the one telling the story
what a fantastic fucking movie
also like the character backstories are SUCH dnd backgrounds like? “im out for revenge for my father who was killed by a guy with six fingers on one of his hands” “i bumped into a band of pirates and their leader liked me so much he ended up having me take on his title to retire”
that is the Exact shit that people come up with for dnd characters
DM: having narrowly escaped Humperdinck, you find yourselves in the dangerous Fire Swamps
Westley: do I know anything about this area? Any danger?
DM: roll a history check
Westley: 15
DM: you know of rumors of giant rats in the swamps, as well as quick sand
Westley: what do I know about the giant rats?
DM: roll nature
Westley: [nat 1] …… rodents of unusual size? I don’t think they exist
DM: hey what’s your passive perception-
NPC Roleplaying Sheet
NPC Roleplaying Sheet (by luckpack)
“This is a non-combat character sheet meant to facilitate the process of creating and keeping track of NPCs.
I prefer giving each NPC it’s unique small sheet of paper instead of keeping them all crammed together in a notebook or something. Having a form with fillable blanks also makes it that much easier to create a large number of characters.
It’s about 10×15 cm, a quarter of the size of a regular A4 paper. Below are Google Drive download links. All PDFs have two pages; the first one is the front and the second one is the back. I used the player character sheet as reference to try to get it to be “official” looking.
[NPC Sheet, no lines & printer friendly]
Also:
- All races age differently. I recommend finding or creating an “age by race” table for quick reference. I also recommend writing how mature the character is as well in case you forget how that specific race works. So for a halfling, for example, I might write “80, middle aged” instead of just the number alone.
In the “Combat Statistics” field, the idea is to write the name of a creature in the MM or other book. The NPC will utilize these stats. So for example, if I have a Captain of the Guard character and I want him to be stronger than the average Guard (p. 347 MM) I might write down “Scout, p. 349 MM.” Humanoids don’t vary that much in strength, so for the majority of NPCs you could print out a couple of obvious stats (Commoner, Guard, Acolyte, Scout, etc) and refer to them as needed. This is much more practical than printing a combat sheet for every character, considering you have no idea who players might attempt to murder.”
Verliese Und Drachen 