In the next session, the player characters will enter the lair of a group of Nothics who have holed up in the old temple of a God of Magic.
And I need some ideas for absolutely unhinged magical items that should give even player characters second thoughts about using them. Any ideas?
I am running a fantasy campaign (using the Ptolus setting), and the PC just looted a "conspiracy board" from the hideout of a rather unhinged creature.
I've added a bunch of elements that might or might not be relevant for the campaign. And the element with the most strings to other elements was "beer price increases".
And I'd like to mess with the minds of the players some more. Thus, I could use some ideas for sinister reasons why the beer prices in a city might have increased.
Any suggestions?
I am running a fantasy campaign (using the Ptolus setting), and the PC just looted a "conspiracy board" from the hideout of a rather unhinged creature.
I've added a bunch of elements that might or might not be relevant for the campaign. And the element with the most strings to other elements was "beer price increases".
And I'd like to mess with the minds of the players some more. Thus, I could use some ideas for sinister reasons why the beer prices in a city might have increased.
Any suggestions?
I suspect that there is quite a lot of overlap with kobolds and household spirits in German folklore.
I suspect that there are quite a few of these in German folklore. I have collected more than a hundred German folk tales of saints and holy people over the last few years, but I haven't cross-referenced these with the list of canonical saints yet.
I do hope they use the ORC license for this, like they do for their other games.
I hope "Iron Gods" gets updated for 2E at some point, now that Starfinder 2E has been released and is cross-compatible.
Thanks, these are excellent and very helpful!
A good fit, thanks!
My players characters are currently exploring some truly ancient underground ruins of a sunken city (the setting is Ptolus, if it matters), and the PCs are trying to find the sites of some temples of various gods to explore.
Next up on the list are temples of ancient gods of knowledge and magic, and when I searched for thematically appropriate monsters to populate them, I came across Nothics. They have a pretty good base concept, but I need some more ideas to make exploring a ruin filled with them interesting. Things I am looking for in particular include:
But feel free to throw any ideas you have out here - I am still in an early brainstorming phase!
I mean, I realize that the margins in the TTRPG industry are razor-thin.
Still, this doesn't sound like something that should require a lot of effort.
What are your top three Pathfinder Adventure Paths, from either edition - and why?
As a reminder, here is the full list:
Pathfinder 1E:
Pathfinder 2E:
Yeah, but why should I be the one to do it, and not the company?
I buy a lot of digital RPG books - the shelf space in my apartment is ultimately limited, while the space on my hard drive is far less constrained (despite current storage prices). Furthermore, while the reading experience is still slightly better for physical books, I have a color e-ink reader which comes close enough for my purposes.
However, I do have a pet peeve with some RPG publishers: They refuse to give the files proper file names. Paizo is the worst offender among them, though not the only one.
I mean, I don't mind if the file name includes the product code. It's fine if a "PZO13008E" somewhere in there.
But please, for all that is unholy, make the file name "PZO13008E Hellfire Dispatches" instead of just leaving it at that! When I am making large purchases of multiple books - which I do frequently - I have to go on a renaming orgy:
If the file name included the actual product title, I could skip steps 1-3.
Occasionally, the Devil does show up as a fly in German folk tales.
Thanks for this information!
The way I see it, folk tales are basically a bundle of narrative tropes that can be switched out depending on the needs of the storyteller. So when the Wild Hunt narrative spread across Europe, people always tried to make it relevant to their local region. And in regions where there were still fragments of belief in Odin, it is not surprising that he appeared in one form or another - while in others, the Wild Hunt takes on rather stranger forms.
Ultimately, their main commonality is the strange noises you can hear in the countryside at night.
While fantasy is a many-varied genre, religion in fantasy RPGs is often some mix-up of polytheism with Christian notions - including of the afterlife. The common assumption seems to be that while there are a multitude of gods, if you dedicate your life and belief in that god in particular you will end up in the specific afterlife of that god.
In Christianity, the situation is of course a bit more complex than that. One major precondition for entering the "good afterlife" (i.e. Heaven) is that you need to get baptized. For a long time, this left a rather awkward question mark for what happens to the souls of infants who died during or soon after birth - before they could receive a baptism. Folklore sometimes comes up with its own answers for that, but this was certainly a thing that people worried about.
RPG fantasy religions tend to deemphasize baptism since it's such an iconic Christian rite - but this only further emphasizes the question of what happens to the souls of children who died before they could actually express faith in a particular deity. Does any particular deity claim these children then? Perhaps a deity worshiped by a parent - and if so, of which parent (are there "afterlife child custody" court cases)?
Of course, a fantasy setting does not need to have an afterlife people believe in. But if there are multiple afterlives maintained by different deities (or at least, if people believe that such afterlives exist), then people will worry about that.
In letzter Zeit gibt es ja diesen Drang von Politikern, Altersbeschränkungen für "Social Media" einzuführen, was dann bedeuten würde, daß man für Social Media-Plattformen seine Identität nachweisen müsste - eine hervorragende Gelegenheit für diese Plattformen, noch mehr Benutzerdaten zu sammeln.
Das Fediverse ist glücklicherweise nicht darauf ausgerichtet, solche Altersnachweise einzuziehen. Aber dennoch macht das die Situation für die Betreiber von Instanzen schwierig, da sie sich dann potentiell strafbar machen.
Jetzt würde mich interessieren: Gibt es in den deutschsprachigen Ländern irgendwelche juristisch klaren Definitionen von "Social Media", mit denen man klar identifizieren könnte, ob eine Fediverse-Anwendung als solche zählt oder nicht?
Z. B. betreibe ich einen WordPress-Blog mit dem ActivityPub-Plugin. Zählt das schon als "Social Media"?
Wer hier kennt sich mit dieser Thematik aus?
The practice of using fantasy counterpart cultures - cultures and societies that are very similar to real world cultures of specific times and places - has a long history in fantasy in general, and fantasy RPGs in particular.
And, in truth, there are good reasons for that. Fantasy worldbuilding is a major task, and fantasy worldbuilding for RPGs in particular requires that not only the GM understands any given culture, but the players as well - but understanding a culture requires a lot of effort, and there is only so much time everyone at the table has available for that.
Thus, using familiar elements is a great time saver. The main reason we see the same Tolkien ancestries over and over again (elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs...) is that most players of fantasy RPGs are already familiar with their basic concepts, and thus only have to learn what is different from the norm. But you create fantasy ancestries from scratch, you need to convey all that information to the players.
The same applies to fantasy counterpart cultures - if you have a vague familiarity with the real world culture, then familiarizing yourself with a fantasy culture will be a lot easier.
However, there's also a lot that can go wrong with using fantasy counterpart cultures. Misrepresentation is always a danger, especially with marginalized groups and if the developers did not consult with members of that culture. Likewise, if you are building a fantasy counterpart culture of a nation that has some ugly history, then you risk whitewashing that history.
So what are your thoughts? Do you like to have fantasy counterpart cultures in your settings, or do you prefer to avoid them? And what are some good examples of fantasy counterpart cultures done right?
I've covered a few tales of the Holle/Hulda/Perchta myth-complex in my translations.
(I see these three as fundamentally the same entity, even if there are major regional variations.)