dungeon-apprentice

[dungeon-apprentice]

Boss Fight Idea - Battle Of Dimensions

Tired of your Big Bad getting overwhelmed by player characters and their shenanigans? Do you want to encourage tactics beyond "surround and bash the greatest threat"? Idea: The villain fights a few heroes at a time!

Deep in the cyberpyramid of Acrosticon the Puzzling, our bold adventurers have entered the central datacrypt. Acrosticon's soul downloads into one of his mechanical bodies and prepares for combat... On the villain's turn, he flickers sideways and vanishes into a semi-virtual state, and only some of the party can see him. Bernice the witch and Champion the gunslinger are the lucky (or unlucky) ones, while Dover the alchemist and Edwin the summoner have to deal with the mummified crocodile and digital sphynx minions.

The dimensions shift each subsequent round, and all the heroes get their turn to face the villain - just not all at once. Perhaps other features of this fight are also phasing in and out of existence, like the minions, terrain, control panels that can affect the fight?

[dungeon-apprentice]

there's one post that was going around during the shutdown that was something like "all zombie/pandemic doomsday media from here on out is going to have to have a scene where a bunch of people are running towards the infected while claiming the disease is a hoax"

and atm i'm really feeling like. well, now we have a really clear answer to the question of "why would anyone in a fantasy world worship a god of evil and torture and murder who backstabs everyone who allies with them?" and the answer is one of: 'because they think they're too special to be backstabbed,' or 'because they think their evil god will just torture and murder The Nonbelievers,' or 'because they think they can reap the rewards of worship before the torture sets in'

or, finally, 'they were raised to believe evil and torture was a good thing and they didn't see any problem with it until the evil and torture inconvenienced them personally'

[dungeon-apprentice]

I know I'm going to have to see it played more , but really the only reason I'm skeptical of daggerheart is that it doesn't have as many opportunities for character customization as I've liked in my 3.5-pathfinder-5e games. Oh sure, there are PLENTY of moving pieces during character creation, but until they start roping in 3rd party developers in fill out those domain cards It's going to feel like I'm stuck deckbuilding with the base set of a midbudget TCG.

[dungeon-apprentice]

Hiii, I was just wandering if you wouldn’t mind blabbing about the symbolism and stuff behind some of your design choices with the horse men that you might not have mentioned. Like with pestilence and death specifically I feel like there’s a lot of symbolism I’m picking up on without fully understanding. Like with Death’s sickle, both a homage to the classic scythe and a nod to the “reaping/harvesting” of souls. And with pestilence I feel like there’s something that I’m skirting around without grasping. The multiple legs strike me as a deliberate similarity to insects, and if I’m right I think that the rider is bound in a body bag type deal, similar to how disease and pestilence is so often both spread through the improper disposal of body’s, and how wide spread pestilence leads to mass graves filled with disease and the horrible anonymity that comes with being just one face in a pit of hundreds etc? All of this is, ofc, to say that I’ve adored your series of the horsemen so far and would go absolutely rabid for some insight on some of your design choices<3

My horsemen of the apocalypse! I will add the original commentary and some extras, less about the symbolism and more about what brought me to design them the way I did.

The symbolism is for you to chose, there is no wrong answer.

WAR

I can't bring myself to represent war with a cool knight. It's horror. War is a bound child crowned with shrapnel, tied to a wounded horse that is being pulled forward by unseen people.

I've read a handful of books regarding war. A lost quote said that it should be shown as horror, it should make generals vomit, it should make you sick. I haven't seen war but my family has.

It was the first horseman I've designed, and it was in my sketchbook for months (maybe over a year, maybe even more) before I had the courage to draw it. I was really scared about how people would react to a mutilated child.

Recommended reading: The Red Crown - Mikhail Bulgakov, a short story about a man coping with the loss of his brother in the war

FAMINE

Someone who lived thro a famine shared that their head was only occupied with thoughts of food. Famine consumes your mind. All animals were eaten. Neighbors gave their pets away cuz they couldn't do it themselves. People walked around town as if in a dazed dream, slowly

Recommended reading: The Last Witnesses - Svetlana Alexievitch, a collection of testimonials of people who were children when WW2 began. Some quotes below;

'''A cat! A cat!' Other children saw it and started chasing it. The educators were local habitants, looked at us as if we were insane. In Leningrad there were no living cats left...A living cat was a dream. Food for one month...We talked about it, but they didn't believe us.''

''During the first year of evacuation, we didn't notice nature, everything that was nature provoked in us only one desire - taste to see if it's edible. Only a year later I noticed the beauty of the Urals''

''I dreamt of catching a sparrow and eating it...''

''A candle burns and the shopgirl cuts the bread pieces. People follow her with their gaze. Her every movement...with burning eyes...crazed...and all that in silence.''

''People walked slowly through the city like shadows. Like in a dream...a deep dream...As in, you see it, but you think you're seeing a dream. Those sluggish movements...floating...As if a person walked on water and not on land.''

''In Leningrad there are a lot of monuments, but one is missing that should exist. They forgot about it. The monument to the dogs of the seige. Dear doggy, forgive me...''

I don't like talking about it. It made no sense to draw Famine with a horse.

PESTILENCE

Based on the notes of a doctor who said the most frightening thing about viral disease was how it didn’t frighten. People didn’t know or didn't care. They lived and spread until it was too late and they became another name on the record

The clothing being made out of shredding plastic is no coincidence; pollution is a form of pestilence too

Recommended reading: Notes from a Countryside Doctor - Mikhail Bulgakov. Roughly translated quote below;

''Ah, I verified that here syphilis was frightening precisely because it did not frighten. That was why I evoked that women.* I remembered her with a kind of affectionate respect: because she had been afraid. But she was the only one!''

*Early in the chapter, doctor mentions a woman that appeared in the clinic with a letter from her soldier husband, where he wrote that he had syphilis and told her she should go to the doctor too.

DEATH

Recommended reading: Voices of Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievitch. The Death of Ivan Ilitch - Lev Tolstoi

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”

Death is the only horseman that doesn’t need to mount their horse; they will reach everyone eventually. Who is the saddle for then? Open ended question because this one you have to figure out personally

Many people pointed out how the horse is a Clydesdale. Good eyes! I purposefully asked a friend to guide me towards what type of horses are the sturdiest and most-friendly looking. I drew the horse grazing. It's not injured, it doesn't gallop. It's grazing peacefully because life moves on.

This is the only design that had a painting serve as a base - The Reaper, by Alexey Venetsianov. Not much or nothing at all is written about, I saw it in a book. It is a literal reaper but it haunted me, as if it's portraying more than a person.

The choice to make it a woman was due to a book about a crematory (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty) that connected women to death because everyone born is bound to die.

Ahhh, I don't want to give it all away. It's fun to figure things out. About them all. From the enviroment, to the movement, to the horses themselves. Many people even mentioned details that I did not notice and didn't add purposefully that were so inspired and amazing. I truly mean that the interpretations of the public enrich the works even more than my own words. And it's an honor to share that work with everyone.

Thank you anon!

[dungeon-apprentice]

hey, what, absolutely WILD news

the linked article is a piece from the LA Times:

[dungeon-apprentice]

Heart of the Forest 🍂 - ig | bsky | commissions | prints

[dungeon-apprentice]

An Exquisite Antique Aquamarine, Ruby and Diamond Cameo Brooch/Pendant, Circa 1860

[dungeon-apprentice]

HELLWHALERS: Book of Leviathan is dropping into BackerKit on June 10th.

The original HELLWHALERS, back in print. A 40 page expansion of new content.

Grisly whale hunting by damned souls in the afterlife. Hell's promise for bringing down a cursed sea monster is salvation.

How will you fare?

Whether you're a grizzled veteran sailor of hell's waters, or still getting your sea legs, we've got eternal damnation in abundance.

This game of nautical and Christian-religious horror is churning with maritime terrors and biblical traumas.

Between both books, we've got nearly 100 pages of torments.

In HELLWHALERS and its expansion, take the role of damned whalers, sinners in life and afterlife, hunting a demonic whale for the promise of salvation.

Collect enough souls, through roleplay, challenges, or gambling, and use them to call the hellwhale by the beats of its own disembodied heart.

Follow along with the BackerKit and get ready for a nautical journey through hell with some powerful themes. It's gonna be a hell of a time.

Book of Leviathan crashes into BackerKit on June 10th.

See you in hell.

[dungeon-apprentice]

Have you played GOBLIN QUEST ?

By Grant Howitt

Goblin Quest is a tabletop roleplaying game about slapstick violence, fatal ineptitude, and the greatest adventure of your life.. Play five goblins each (in sequence, not parallel) and watch them meet hilarious ends while failing to achieve the most basic tasks. Will they survive the dangerous world of the Great Battle Camp and avoid the attentions of brutal orcs, murderous bugbears, mean-spirited hobgoblins and scary wizards? Probably not. But you'll have fun finding out!

[dungeon-apprentice]

Art Nouveau Japanese 24K; Silver Inlaid Damascene Bat and Crescent Moon Necklace

[dungeon-apprentice]

Strays

It's the 1950s and you're a runaway. The court blood in your veins calls to realms beyond your own. The fae want you to choose---your powers or your humanity.

Strays is my 246 page stab at a faerie story. It's a ttrpg. It's got urban fantasy and horror muddled in. All of the courts are toxic in their own ways. The world made by adults sucks.

You can pay for it if you want, but all of my works have a free download---just hit the Claim Access button instead of Buy Now.

[dungeon-apprentice]

[dungeon-apprentice]

I firmly believe that the best character trait to give any rpg character is an excess of curiosity. Someone who always wants to just peep around the door, or open the box, or climb down the ladder, or follow the stranger, or see what’s in the creepy old house up the hill. You can season them with a level of prudence to suit your taste, of course, but letting them always have the urge to go that little further or poke this one more thing will definitely lead to them having a potentially very brief but almost certainly interesting career-slash-life.

Live vicariously a little, you know? Be curious and unwise. Open doors you definitely shouldn’t. That’s the fun of a game, isn’t it?

[dungeon-apprentice]

If we're being 100% honest with ourselves as game designers, we've gotta admit that this notion that "story focus" means making the GM do all the work is not a bugbear that's unique to the Dungeons & Dragons fandom. Think of how many self-identified "story focused" indie RPGs you've bumped into that have a great deal to say leading up to the point of rolling the dice, but once the dice have actually been rolled and the time has come to interpret what those results mean, those same rules that were so keen on procedural rigour just moments ago simply shrug and go "I dunno, have the GM make something up?"

[dungeon-apprentice]

inspired by the previous question, in writing about these things, how would one go about still having different races like orcs, elves, dwarves, without making them psychologically equivalent to any humans? at least if one doesnt want to just repeat poor ways of going about it.

a second on it, if one wants a faction of fairly intelligent monsters, who are a threat to the heroes, what could be a good approach?

(With reference to this post there.)

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? One of the central pillars of racial pseudoscience is the assertion that there are multiple, materially distinct "species" of humans (or, more broadly, of people). Most refutations of race science don't go any further than pointing out that this is false, because they don't need to go any further – losing that pillar kicks the legs out from under the whole affair. However, if you're designing a fantasy or science fiction setting with alien or non-human sapients that aren't just humans with funny foreheads, you're necessarily describing a world where the assertion that there are multiple, materially distinct species of people is, in fact, true.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you're inherently Doing Race Science, but you do have to face the fact that you're imagining a world where one of race science's central pillars is true. Some people adopt the zero tolerance stance that positing the truth of any part of race science is just as bad as positing the truth of all of it, which is where we end up with the argument that speculative fiction has a moral obligation to depict humanity as alone in the universe. Certainly, this is a hard-line position, but it doesn't come out of nowhere.

Ultimately, there's no magic bullet solution. You just have to think carefully about what you're doing, be conversant in the history of race science in speculative fiction in order to identify the less obvious pitfalls, and be prepared to accept that some people are never going to be satisfied with any solution other than the humans-are-alone-in-the-universe approach.

[dungeon-apprentice]

Emotional Walls Your Character Has Built (And What Might Finally Break Them)

(How your character defends their soft core and what could shatter it) Because protection becomes prison real fast.

✶ Sarcasm as armor. (Break it with someone who laughs gently, not mockingly.) ✶ Hyper-independence. (Break it with someone who shows up even when they’re told not to.) ✶ Stoicism. (Break it with a safe space to fall apart.) ✶ Flirting to avoid intimacy. (Break it with real vulnerability they didn’t see coming.) ✶ Ghosting everyone. (Break it with someone who won’t take silence as an answer.) ✶ Lying for convenience. (Break it with someone who sees through them but stays anyway.) ✶ Avoiding touch. (Break it with accidental, gentle contact that feels like home.) ✶ Oversharing meaningless things to hide real depth. (Break it with someone who asks the second question.) ✶ Overworking. (Break it with forced stillness and the terrifying sound of their own thoughts.) ✶ Pretending not to care. (Break it with a loss they can’t fake their way through.) ✶ Avoiding mirrors. (Break it with a quiet compliment that hits too hard.) ✶ Turning every conversation into a joke. (Break it with someone who doesn’t laugh.) ✶ Being everyone’s helper. (Break it when someone asks what they need, and waits for an answer.) ✶ Constantly saying “I’m fine.” (Break it when they finally scream that they’re not.) ✶ Running. Always running. (Break it with someone who doesn’t chase, but doesn’t leave, either.) ✶ Intellectualizing every feeling. (Break it with raw, messy emotion they can’t logic away.) ✶ Trying to be the strong one. (Break it when someone sees the weight they’re carrying, and offers to help.) ✶ Hiding behind success. (Break it when they succeed and still feel empty.) ✶ Avoiding conflict at all costs. (Break it when silence causes more pain than the truth.) ✶ Focusing on everyone else’s healing but their own. (Break it when they hit emotional burnout.)

[dungeon-apprentice]

Wanted to try something new. Unsure how I feel