I'm Just About Level 100 In Elden Ring And My Favorite Quest Line BY FAR Has Been Ranni The Witch And

I'm just about level 100 in Elden Ring and my favorite quest line BY FAR has been Ranni the Witch and Starscourge Radhan.

My jaw dropped the first time I wandered down into Siofra River and saw the starry night beneath the earth. My jaw dropped twofold when I was told how those stars got there.

A lot of fantasy games should take notes on this kind of worldbuilding. Too often I find that settings (my own included) are unwilling to do things as outlandish as "arresting the stars and imprisoning them underground" because the writer is worried that such a concept won't be taken seriously by Players. Perhaps this is because said writer is concerned that it will ruin the suspension of disbelief for Players, as it directly contradicts the cosmology of our own world.

But brother this is FANTASY, let your cosmology go wild and let your Players get elbow deep in that cosmology in turn. Freeing the stars from Radhan's grasp and watching that crater to Nokron appear on the map has been one of the coolest things in the first 100 levels of Elden Ring.

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.

This thread helped me design my first game. Thanks guys!

I'm working on a Wild West/Horror fusion RPG that uses playing cards instead of dice. The main conflict resolution system has The Dealer (GM) lay out 2 or more cards face-up and the final card face-down to represent the difficulty of the action. This is a Challenge Hand!

The Player then must choose cards from their hand to beat the Challenge Hand. Only there are a few obstacles in their way:

1. How many cards the Player can choose is restricted by how they're handling the situation. Are they bashing down a door? That's Strength, aka Clubs. Say the Player's Character has a Clubs of 3. They can only play up to 3 cards to beat the Challenge Hand!

2. The suit of the highest card the Player chooses must match how they're handling thr Challenge Hand. In the aforementioned example, that would mean the highest card the Player chooses from their hand would have to be a Clubs card. Spades are wild-cards in this system so those can be used in place of the required suit if necessary.

3. Because the last card in the Challenge Hand is face-down, the Player only has partial information of the score they need to beat the Challenge Hand. It could be anywhere from +2 to +11 more than the face-up cards show!

4. Players don't get to refill their hand of cards back to 6 until their hand is empty! This means the Player will occasionally have to face a Challenge Hand with very few cards in hand. This creates intense situations where players really have to cross their fingers and pray that the face-down card in a Challenge Hand is low.

So Challenge Hands use both the partial information from face-up vs face-down cards, as well as the extra values a card can have instead of dice, namely the suit.

I've also got additional mechanics that tie into other points mentioned in this post, like using the cards in character creation to determine what personality traits a Character has through a large random table, but I've gone on long enough for one post.

Just wanted to say thanks to the people I'm rebloging and share what I've done with their ideas!

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)