dmintraining

[dmintraining]

im about to just gush about my halfling family with no coherency so youve been warned

ok so my whole dnd experience began with one lightfoot halfling level one bard called eoifira maplefoot. i knew i wanted her to be Not A Good Person, but also didn't feel comfortable playing a bitch when i didn't know anything about the other players in the party, so i did what any normal person would do: i encorperated pretending to be nice to get what she wants into her back story.

eoifira's backstory time! (where we get introduced to the character i will play this summer, llwella, and a character i am desperate to play at some stage, erling) middle child of turpin and grace maplefoot (grace's maiden name was proudfoot), eoifira was taught to entertain by her grandmother on her mother's side. her mother's family ran the only inn and bar on a small island, but when her father married her mother, his parents moved in too. so, under one house, we have the proudfoot grandparents : otto and mary, and the maplefoot grandparents : hildegard and basso. turpin and grace had three children together, their eldest daughter, llwella, is two years older than eoifira, and their youngest is their son, erling.

like i said, mary taught eoifira how to entertain, through story telling, playing the lute, and playing the spoons. the two performed regularly in the bar. llwella was never a people person, but people liked her well enough and she was a wizard behind the bar from a young age. erling played a bigger role in the running of the inn than the bar, as he was far more gentle than his eldest sister and much less self-centered than eoifira.

running the only inn and bar meant that these three kids met a wide variety of folks, and for eoifira, that turned out to be a huge problem. a 16 year old eoifira met a 29 year old halfling wanderer with a chip on her shoulder, and became fast friends with her. by the time she was 18, eoifira had been indoctrinated into this other halfling's way of life : she would regularly travel to the mainland to aid in the slaughter the nobles who were partially responsible for the poverty of her island. the duo did not limit their targets based on age, if they were of noble descent, they were fair game. initially, eoifira was merely the distraction, flirting with guards and playing the damsel in distress while her girlfriend actually did the killing, but over time eoifira's hands became just as bloody.

no one could prove it was them, but popular opinion was that the girlfriend was the perpetrator, and when a 19 year old eoifira announced to her mother that she wanted to propose, grace maplefoot panicked and locked her daughter in her room. eventually, eoifira's would-be-fiancé stopped showing up at the island, and grace felt safe enough letting eoifira go about her chores on the island. one day, eoifira asks her mother for help out in the fields, where she'd offered to harvest the crops for an elderly neighbour. naturally, her mother agreed, thinking she'd be able to reconnect with her daughter, and explain why she did what she did, and to apologise.

she never got the chance. eoifira slit her throat in the field, disguised herself as a cabin boy using the uniform of a boy she'd murdered that morning, and escaped on a ship to the mainland before anyone even really noticed grace wasn't working the desk of the inn as usual.

on the mainland, eoifira searched for her lover. she found a grave. her lover had been trialed, convicted, and executed for the murders. she had never mentioned an accomplice.

unable to return to her homeland, and with the person she'd carefully curated her personality for dead, eoifira was at a loss.

unTIL she runs into a travelling group in the woods of rouges and college of whispers bards who live as they please, taking what they want. eoifira made a slight adaptation to her personality, so that instead of killing for a Cause, she would kill with Purpose: to get food/gold/possessions the group needed or wanted. unfortunately, eoifira fell in love with one of the bards, and thought it would be safe to come clean to him about her past in its entirety.

he was repulsed. she made a dramatic change to her personality, now advocating for sparing peoples lives; she was now a pacifist. eventually, the man she was in love with came around to her, and they got engaged, and lobbied for the party to become more merciful. the party got sick of their bullshit, and sprung an attack on the couple, killing her fiancé stone dead right in front of her. standing at a whopping three feet with an armor class of 13 and very little training as a bard, eoifira knew she didn't stand a chance, so she fell to her knees and started begging, claiming her lover her threatened to kill her if she hadn't done what she did. they believed her, the idiots.

that night, she went around to their individual tents and slit their throats as they slept.

once again alone in the world, and now in her 40's, eoifira began her life on the run, never really staying in one town for too long, preforming in taverns in return for lodgings and food. there's more on her, but im going to take us back to the island, the day of the murder.

llwella actually discovers the body. she and her sister were close (or so she thought), so initially llwella thought that whatever had slaughtered her mother had gotten to eoifira too, and went into mourning with the rest of the family. then, the murder of the cabin boy came to light. with very little digging, llwella followed the blood trail eoifira had left behind before and during her time with the party, and by the end of her investigation, became certain her sister had murdered her mother. she never felt as peaceful as the rest of her family- she had a horrible temper and a tendency to drag out grudges for longer than was healthy, but this discovery ignighted a rage in her that did not subside when she lashed out like she normally would. she knew she needed to be more proactive about this anger, and eventually joined a monkhood : the way of mercy. they were helping her work on her anger by channeling her energy into her job, which initially was to kill the patients who were beyond saving (think nurse ratched type), but as she progressed, she became responsible for reinforcing quarantines by any means necessary. eventually, she hit a block. she'd managed to work through most of the sources of her anger and use the energy productively, but try as they might, her fury towards her sister was too strong- it came to a point where it was affecting her work with the monks. they told her she needed to find and forgive eoifira if she ever wanted to progress.

llwella left to find her sister alright, but with no intention of forgiving her. she was going to end her sister if it was the last thing she did.

she spent years trying to find her, staying in inns she knew eoifira had preformed in and following her faint yet distinct trail left from her performances and charisma.

unbeknownst to llwella, she actually caught up to eoifira.

one evening, eoifira was sitting in a dark corner of an inn she'd just finished preforming in, having a nightcap before turning in for the night, when her sister appears. she sees llwella check in for the night at the desk, before immediately heading up to bed. eoifira moves to the desk, and starts flirting non-stop with the receptionist, flustering them so much that she manages to see the bookings list without getting noticed. she knows what room her sister is in.

in the wee hours of the morning, eoifira sneaks into her sister's room and slits her throat, running away before making sure she'd bled out.

luckily for llwella, there was a cleric in the vicinity, who'd been up late with night terrors, and heard her helpless gargling as he made his way back to bed. he was young, and only half-trained, and while llwella survived, her wound tends to seep blood and pus when she exherts herself to expend a ki point, and her voice is low, gravely, and prone to breaking. she has not yet come that close to her sister again.

back to their hometown : after their mother passed and the family went into grieving, erling, while mourning just as much as the others, subtly kept both of the family businesses running. there was a brief period of time where his father and his grandparents began to take up the reins again, but the workload fell on him once again once it was discovered eoifira was not in fact, dead, but on the run after having killed many people, mary included. when llwella joined the way of mercy, erling became enamoured with the idea of healing people. he loved his sisters, despite now having severe mixed feelings about eoifira, but he wanted to heal, he wanted to help people plain and simple. he didn't want to kill for fun like eoifira, but he didn't want to kill for mercy like llwella, he wanted to heal. but he was stuck behind a till and a bar for several years, until the proudfoots, now well into the ends of their lives, decided to sell the bar. his father took full responsibility for the inn, and with all four grandparents helping out here and there, erling felt comfortable enough to go out and chase his dream. unable to afford medical school, he reluctantly reached out to the monks his eldest sister had joined. he was upfront about his hang-ups about their practices, but opened up about his quiet and private worship of one of the deities they worship, mishakal. they directed him to a local collection of life clerics who worshipped the same goddess, and he became very happy there with them, at ease.

im yet to decide what whips him out of his peaceful life with these clerics and into a life of adventuring, but im pretty sure it will have something to do with either llwella or eoifira dragging him out either directly or indirectly (i have a feeling llwella might go missing, and it might be up to her brother to find her (because while eoifira doesn't hate her sister, she has pretty much washed her hands of her family))

[dmintraining]

maps for the briarcliff asylum made with dungeon scrawl. none of these have furnishing, it's just the general layout.

this is the ground floor, you enter through the massive fuckin doors on the right of the large main room. in this room there will be tables + couches + sofas + that motherfucking jukebox + general common room stuff. the room on top of the map is the kitchen, with steps down to the pantry in the basement. the bottom of the map shows the three therapy rooms, and the room where non-patient guests stay (on the right).

this is the first floor (second if you're american, i think? idk how y'all work, this is the floor up one from the one level with the ground) with padlocked cells (red doors), the head nun's office/corporal punishment room in the same general area as the cells but with a door that may be locked normally or unlocked depending on the stage in the story (green), then you have the nun's quarters through the double doors (shown in green, indicating they may be locked normally or unlocked depending on where we are in the story). there are four for those which are inferior to sister jude (assuming i keep the names they used in the show (which i think i will)). sister jude (head nun) has her quarters in the bottom right room, with a side room kept padlocked. the steps in the nuns' quarters come up from the the steps on the therapies corridor. the main steps come from the main room. (these maps are all orientated the same way).

this is what the players will find if they go down the steps of the kitchen (as with all of these maps, the furniture and obstacles to perception are yet to be added). this is the pantry.

upon high perception checks/information gleaned from other patients/other means (yet to be decided), a secret door is found in the basement (same colour coding on these doors as those on the first floor), the key to which is kept in the secret room in sister jude's quarters. it will be impossible to enter either corridor (both padlocked) without entering dr thredson's office. those two rooms are cells for his experiments. there will probably be a lot of combat here. the corridor which does not end in stairs is going to be where the failed experiments are tossed to die, and they will try and consume the party members with a stronger vigor than those in the cells (those in the cells do not have to die, they can be befriended if the scenario is played right. these have gone feral and cannot be befriended.). the other corridor is the way out. the stairs at the end are actually a ladder which leads to a trapdoor in the forest from which it is possible to make it to town. there are more struggles in the woods which can result in recapture, but once out of the woods, the one shot will end (opportunity to expand into a campaign comes with the bloodyface arc and trying to shut down the asylum).

[dmintraining]

hey there! this is yet another goddamn sideblog for @scaredandbored, but this time, it's because i want to learn how to dm/homebrew stuff for dnd! i'll also post stuff about my own pcs here because i adore my children so much.

currently im trying to teach myself how to homebrew oneshots by formulating american horror story themed oneshots! im going to start with asylum (homebrew tagged 'welcome to briarcliff') and coven (homebrew tagged as 'witchhunt').

as of right now, i do not have any players, since im not 100% sure i would be comfortable actually dming for real people, i just want to create the stuff for now, y'feel?