Huff

I feel like I really need to pour my creative effort into making these instead of actually writing and prepping campaign stuff

 

speaking of, me and the boys entering a liminal space when we hear snow halation start playing

 

me make funny traceover again

forgot i have my creative works thread with all the other ones here but fuck it

39 minutes ago, alexgndl said:

So what systems have people been playing/reading lately? I've been slightly obsessed with both Shadow of the Demon Lord and Mothership lately, they're both absolutely fantastic RPGs.  SotDL is this super grimdark fantasy game that has by far the best character creation system I have ever seen, and Mothership is a sci-fi horror game.  I highly recommend both.

Silent ran an Uncharted World sesh a few weeks back that was a lot of fun, hoping to do more sometime. Pretty much that and DnD atm for me.

our other group has Fellowship on the docket sometime in the future, looking forward to that.

6 hours ago, Rynjin said:

That's a nice pic. The clothes remind me of one of the NPC Clerics from Reign of Winter, with a splash of Korra; I always liked that outfit.

Thanks; I’ve been kicking around ideas for her in general for around a year now so it’s really nice to get something like this done and I’m happy the artist I worked with did so well.

And yeah the clothing of female Water Tribe members was one of the major references I used for her clothing, actually! It’s a mix of that and a real

life native Alaskan parka I scoped out at a museum in Anchorage this past June on vacation.

Got a commish of a character I'm playing in Silent's campaign sometime down the line. She's a human Grave domain Cleric. I'm aware it's a little sad that I'm getting one of a character I haven't played yet but I'm just really excited :3c

 

 

I think I have Find a Wep lying around somewhere

3 hours ago, Spectre said:

I personally still pay respects for Huff and his tragic love story involving a Pyro's default Fire Axe and a handful of Axtinguishers being held hostage on his inventory.

Such a tale still inspires me to this day every single time I go tryhard mode on Warframe/Destiny using nothing but off meta loadouts for my own personal satisfaction.

Funny man build personality around weapon in videogame

 

No Relaxe was good tho yeah

Not too shabby tbh

This is actually the funniest thing holy fuck

:(

I still think that one of the only strength of the Bioshock games are the setpieces myself. Columbia and Rapture are neat.

 

I’m there with you on the whole uselessness of some plasmids. I hate when games give you a platter of tools to use and no tough enemies or tough situations to apply them to.

4 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Man that all sounds pretty awesome. But I can't overlook a name like "polygnomials," what all happened in that arm of the dungeon?

I think that was one of the first arms of the dungeon we visited? I think we fucked about in the first three rooms and the middle bit before heading over there. The lost woods had three paths possible to follow. One was following a Will-o-Whisp that beckoned us down a misty path, which led us to Kevelda Ricci, a Half-Orc opera singer who had already been killed and was transformed into a Banshee, given the screaming ability they have and the whole opera singer cracking glass with their voices thing. Alex is a fucking psychopath and sicked her and a few Will-o-Whisps on us. If you're not familiar, Banshees' scream can reduce any creature that hears it to 0 HP on a failed save. And Will-o-Whisps, while being a low CR, have an action they can take against a creature at 0 HP that instantly kills them on a failed CON save. I'm proud of myself for thinking of using the spell Blindness/Deafness on my allies to make sure at least a few of us stayed up long enough to revive the others. 

The other path in the lost woods was one that we didn't find. In our travels we came across a poem about a boy losing his dog in the woods that hid a riddle describing a path one could take through the woods. Had we figured it out, we would have been rewarded with a handsome weapon:

 

But that's not what you asked about! The Polygnomials, yeah. Basically they were a bunch of band nerds crossed with mathematicians from Kalkus itself. I'll just paste the profile we got for 'em.

Quote

Instruction: Professor Paulie Nackle

 

Sounds: A whole lotta credit-hungry students.

 

Hailing from Kalkus itself, this mathemagician and his students are perfecting music to a science, in efficient and scary ways. They're very flashy and avant-garde, using weird 'instruments'. Alchemy, prototype magitech, and spells galore. The fact that they are technically neither makes them kind of outcasts to both wizards and bards, but they don't really care about that, nor do they care about the music of bards prior, just the innovation that research into Jinnen's magical energy, and its manipulation through music, can bring.

You have a feeling that they might have a home team advantage considering the lineups and top placers at the last few years of Soliloquy. More people from Kalkus will be there to show support...

Yeah, we had heard rumors that they may have had a home-field advantage, but it didn't help too much. When we got to the Lost Woods, we found a variety of signs and markers telling us to go different directions in the woods. Solving the hardest puzzle in the dungeon, we followed the directions and ended up in a room that looked like the set they film Family Feud on. We were at one table and the brightest members of the Polygnomials were at the other, held in suspended animation. The room lit up and a guy named Hans Duller (AKA the Headless Hostman) explained that we were the next contestants on his game show, and that the prizes were a Bag of Holding, a magical bell that would return its ringer to the first room of the dungeon, and one half of the ticket needed to open the door to the Rhythmancer's stage. Also with him was (and I'm sure you'll find some enjoyment in this guy, Corv) a monster called the Percrushinator to dissuade us from cheating or abandoning the game. I'm told this guy was statted out and that we would not have fared well.

 

And through that we basically played Jeopardy. We each made up a buzzer sound for our characters, the Gachimuchi "Fuck You" for Sylark, a goose honk for Goolaz, Noggin Clonthith's laugh for Easy Water, and a clown horn honk for Fool's-Game. If I remember correctly, there were five categories with about 5 questions each. I'm confident that there was History, for details on the lore that we had learned about the setting and our journey thus far, Arcana for questions about spells (one was what spell needed a bit of bat guano as its material component (the answer: Fireball)), and Music, where we were played clips of instruments through Roll20 and we had to guess which instrument it was. That one had a good gimmick. Roll20 displays the name of the track being played to all players, and the first one was a clarinet named "Clarinet.ogg" or something. Of course Alex did this to mess with us, and the rest were deliberately wrong matches or jokes about the clip. I can't seem to remember the other two categories... maybe @Silent can give us the director's cut?

Anyways, we fucking dominated the quiz because we're all a bunch of metagaming fucks and we were let go with our prizes and the Polygnomials were put back into stasis to await the next challengers. Turns out one of the Rhythmancer's band members, Mookie, was an ex-member of theirs who he killed and raised. She was in charge of percussion, lighting, pyrotechnics, and was cute!! We also got confirmation after everything that the Polygnomials were ok after the final battle... did they show up during it? I've forgotten...

23 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Do it, I could go for a fun story

Alrighty, I can give this a go, but it'll probably be a little rambley and meandering, but that kind of fits what our journey was just fine.

 

As I said, this was an all-bard adventure. I had previously run a two-session all-monk adventure inspired by this greentext and we all expressed interest in doing something like that again. Alex soon after called dibs on an all-bard adventure since he had some ideas. Come the end of our first campaign run by @Raze (still get nostalgic listening to that Fate song, thanks for getting me into ttrpgs, buddy), we took some time to do what Alex assured us would be about 4 sessions worth of content in his setting, Jinnen, before swapping back to the Sunset Heroes campaign run by @Insectan, which is what Orque and Rhea are in. It didn't last 4 sessions!

 

The campaign began with Alex starting the scene in a tavern. A lone bard strumming on a lute pulled up to fire and began speaking to a group of kids. He said he would tell them a tale of a music festival 150 years ago. A festival at which a quirky group of bards managed to save the realm from despair. And the scene flowed into a certain band's wagon travelling to a city.

 

Basically, every year in Jinnen, a large music festival called Soliloquy occurs to celebrate peace and the end of a great war decades ago. It inevitably turns into a full out battle of the bands every year, with the various groups slated to play duking it out to claim the top spot. This year's festival was held in the city of Kalkus, a gnomish city.

 

We played the band M.I.L.K., who were a bunch of has-beens who specialized in shitty boomer metal and was vaguely dairy themed. Raze (Josh) played Sylark the Songseeker, a silver Dragonborn who played the ocarina who was mostly interested in finding ancient texts and stories and weaving their lore into magical songs. Also he was gay. He ended up as a Swords Bard/Paladin multiclass. Insectan (Zach) played Goolaz Nod, an Aasimar who was a kinda slimy cross between Ozzy Osmond and Dr. Facilier who played the trumpet and was our vocalist. He somehow ended up as our leader and spokesperson despite causing the most trouble out of all of us. He teetered on the line of death often and literally never took his suit off. He just went straight Whispers Bard. @Primal Phoenix (Courtney) played Easy Water, a Kenku who was partly entering the competition to fuck up one our rival bands, the Kenku Noise Crew, a bunch of Kenku who mostly performed rips of other bands' hits. He ended up just going straight Swords Bard and was probably our strongest hitter. I played Vimak "Fool's-Game" Markakanau, a drummer Goliath who was all about fucking up people who tried to abuse their power. He outed his tribe's leader before falling off a mountain and then joining the circus to become a clown/acrobat. I tried to style him as some kind of unholy combination of a juggalo, a member of KISS, and a general troublemaker. He ended up as a Satire Bard/Giant Soul Sorcerer multiclass, mostly because I wanted to get the best feature in all of DnD 5e. We were brought to Kalkus and immediately started fucking everything up.

 

After some general rabble-rousing and exploration of the city, we noticed some things were going haywire. The city relied on some sort of transmutation magic to transport people between its districts, and they were malfunctioning pretty hard when we got there. We even tried to sneak into the venue for Soliloquy but it had suffered some structural damage in addition to the magical entrance being broken down. So we got lost in some kind of noneuclidean liminal space trying to find our way back to our hotel when we were set upon by our first rival band, 9-Puri, a group of eastern princesses of various trade kings who were mean and had hordes of rabid fans. They threatened us with breaking our instruments if we didn't drop out. Goolaz ended up killing fucking 5 of them. We lost to their monk's fury in the end, but Goolaz had slain five celebrity members of royalty, so in the morning when we woke up groggy with our instruments shattered and destroyed, we were immediately arrested and brought to the mayor of Kalkus' office. We explained that the law called for our punishment, but he'd be willing to pardon us if we checked out New Kalkus, the new venue for Soliloquy after the last one broke down. He mentioned that something odd was happening in there, and that the rest of the bands had already gone in there beforehand to check it out. And with that we went to clear our names. When we entered, we were immediately locked in and greeted by a powerful bard who introduced himself as the Rhythmancer, a man who claimed he would take over Jinnen and use the power of song to conquer.

 

So yeah, we were trapped in a megadungeon for the rest of the campaign. A lot happened so I won't go into everything that happened. I'll put the map I gradually made for the party to smooth travel out. If you're interested in a section, ask and I can tell the story.

 

 

To sum it up, we traveled this dungeon and we did the following things:

• We clashed with other bands in combat, through puzzles, and various other challenges. Some of them were enthralled by the Rhythmancer, some were just assholes. In general it just cleared our path and earned us the tickets we needed to face the Rhythmancer himself.
• We found various notes and logs giving us the lore behind the places we visited and on the Rhythmancer's story. 
• We completed various puzzles to gain keys, which we later found opened rooms that granted us powerful musical artifacts.

The short story is that the Rhythmancer used to be a normal bard. He worked as a scribe and practiced performance and worked on his bardic magics on the side. One day his performance caught the eye of a princess being escorted through town. The King then hired the bard, Ragged Tom, on as a court jester to please his daughter. Tom soon discovered that the king was using his daughter for a nefarious purpose. In Jinnen, the goddess of dreams, music, and art, Gahari, used to have a pet. The Songbeast, an ancient creature of metal, creation, and music used to roam the skies of the material plane and Gahari's domain of the Feywild. It used to race, spreading inspiration where it went and filling the skies with color and beauty. The King managed to train his daughter in singing well enough to lure the beast in and capture it for his own collection. The beast soon grew crazed, and it rusted and lost its luster and song. Tom discovered this and arranged to use his bardic magic to free the beast and spirit the princess, who he had fallen in love with, away. He managed the latter at least, but the Songbeast was eventually killed and its body parts spread across the realm. The body was tracked and held secure by an order of metal-playing paladins called the Knights of Rock, but that becomes relevant later. Anyway, Tom was execute by the king, and was eventually sentenced to a few centuries of undeath in the castle's dungeons. He was put there and though the kingdom fell to a war during his sentence, Tom abandoned his humanity and eventually formed a lute with his own bone and sinew, before using it and his bardic arts to free himself and begin raising the dead in order to find the pieces of the Songbeast and use it for his own purposes, hoping to find the princess and exert his revenge on the world.

 

So turns out, the Knights of Rock failed their mission. We met their last member (actually our band's forgotten 5th member, an Aarakocra) in the labyrinth, who warned us of the Rhythmancer's plans before dying, and when we had prevailed and gained the tickets needed to enter the big guy's lair, we saw he had succeeded. The Rhythmancer was waiting for us on a stage built for his own band, RAGNAROK. He had pieced together the Songbeast part by part, and its rusted corpse stood over his band, a bunch of undead ex-members of the other bands we had faced. He said he was hoping we would perish so he could raise us as well and use our magical talents to power up the Songbeast further. We fought his band and VERY narrowly succeeded, mostly due to clutch uses of magical items and the fact that Polymorph is a VERY good spell. We watched as his form dissipated and the labyrinth dissociated, all of its parts aside from the stage we were on returning to the parts of the multiverse they were taken from.

 

And so we returned to the mayor of Kalkus, who congratulated us on the reclamation of the venue and on our defeat of the Rhythmancer. He explained that the loss of the other bands (all missing since the labyrinth dissipated) and the disasters surrounding it had brought the population of Kalkus and the attendees of Soliloquy to despair, and that we needed to keep the festival on to celebrate peace as much as we could. So we chose the crumbling stage that still held the Songbeast's corpse as our venue, since the body of a monster of metal and song is a pretty fuckin METAL thing to play under. After we had set up the stage, we began playing and started making performance checks to try and get the crowd out of their funk. After a bit we managed, and Alex described how the crowd gradually began to regain its mirth. It reached a peak where Alex described how everyone, for one split second, felt as one, in harmony with each other in the inspiration of the music. And it was of course at that time that the incorporeal soul of the Rhythmancer decided to seep into the Songbeast's corpse, animating it and immediately raising every corpse in the surrounding few miles as undead.

 

The crowd immediately started to panic, of course, given the beast's roars and the zombies everywhere. We were level 9 at that point, and though we could hopefully take it on, so we began attacking, with Sylark and Easy Water taking the frontline and Goolaz and Fool's-Game slinging spells from the back. We were proven wrong because we were fighting the corpse of a dead GOD possessed by a powerful Bard. Wanna know this thing's rough stats? This shit had like 25 AC, over 1,000 HP, and could stun all of us with a roar, do like four multiattacks in a turn, and we were all fucking Bards with our puny d8 hitdice. Even though Sylark managed to hit it once or twice, we were having to like use all of our resources to even touch the thing. There was a moment where we and everyone else decided to kind of give up and hope to hold the beast long enough for a few civilians to escape.

 

But then we noticed our faithful roadie Eddie standing off to the side of the stage, tapping his toes and acting like everything was fine. Almost everyone else through the adventure had given us shit, but not dear, sweet precious Eddie. Now here's something I neglected to mention at the beginning. This campaign had a few special rules for Bardic Inspiration since everyone was playing a squishy support caster. You were able to give Bardic Inspiration as a reaction to another bard making a saving throw, an attack roll, or ability check. And they could stack. So for example if Goolaz were making a really important saving throw (even a death saving throw), Fool's-Game, Sylark, and Easy Water could all give him an extra die (we all had either d6es or d8s) to the result, almost guaranteeing a success. We had used it handily through the advenutre, but pretty sparingly since everyone wanted to use them for Swords Bards' flourishes and Whispers Bards' psychic blades. Eddie threw us a thumbs up and inspired us, returning each of us a use of Bardic Inspiration.

 

From Eddie's confidence we figured out what we had to do. Every time Sylark or Easy Water would attack the Songbeast, we exploited the rule, allowing them to feasibly hit the 25 AC mark with consistency. And when they were attacking and tanking, Goolaz and I had the bright idea to try and hype up the crowd and inspire them, so they would in turn inspire us. Goolaz started belting out Jumpin' Jack Flash and restarted the concert. Each time we succeeded on doing something like that, the crowd would become more confident in us, restoring our Bardic Inspiration. Their inspiration also seeped into our attacks. As we hyped them up, our weapon attacks would tap into their cheering, and we would start doing extra d6es of damage to the beast. It reached the point where attacks started looking like this:

And each time we did something to hype the crowd, we would find another gust making their way to cheer us on.

• Melbin, the magic item shop owner we bought scrolls from at the beginning and promised to sponsor jumped from the crowd and gave us all Shield scrolls, as well as calling our pre-show ad for him shit.
• Coobie, an albino Lizardfolk we met in the labryinth and asked us to perform plays for us jumped in and informed Sylark that the "Holy Avenger" that he had been thinking was a prop the entire adventure was actually a real Holy Avenger. Basically the sword had had a function where Sylark had needed to fail a Wisdom saving throw to believe that the sword was real at the start of his turns, Coobie confirmed that it was, and so it was.
• Hinton, a gnome we met in the maze who offered hints on how to progress in return for various things, showed up. Throughout the adventure, we had all given up the knowledge of one of our songs and a gold piece to figure out what to do, and Fool's-Game had given up his proficiency with bagpipe and the usage of the Fool's Insight feature I built him to get and that I was sad to have given up. He returned these to us. I promptly used it to do just what I had hoped to one day, and I immediately used it to make the BBEG pass gas in front of everyone.
• The ghost of one of the Knights of Rock, either our 5th member or their leader who was enthralled by the Rhythmancer, showed up and blessed the magical pair of gloves they had given Fool's-Game with a +5 bonus to hit. This was relevant a bit later.
• So-Matic, an urban dance group who we trounced in a rap-off and drinking contest showed up to say that if we could beat them, that this guy was a piece of cake.
• Neuroseptic Goreplague, an emo metal band who we had to leave behind to a vampire, showed up and strngethed our resolve, restoring a majority of our lost HP.
• Strange Tim Tuggapole, a halfling one-man band who turned out to be a silver dragon in disguise that was enthralled by the Rhythmancer, flew overhead and froze the Songbeast, paralyzing it for a round.

After Tim paralyzed it, we knew we were getting close. We were all running low on spell slots, smites, and health. I was fortunate enough for the rest of the group to set Fool's-Game up for the finishing blow. Those magical gloves could basically perform a Falcon Punch. You could sacrifice your movement and take a penalty to the attack roll ranging from -5 to -15 to add additional fire damage to the punch. I decided to go for the big one, the -15. Here was my attack roll with advantage:

But thankfully, everyone gave me a smattering of Bardic Inspirations and I had the +5 from the blessing, resulting in:

 

An attack roll of 36, totaling for a crit damage roll of:

 

Time seemed to stop for a moment as the Songbeast's rusted exterior exploded. In an instant it was returned to its previous luster. It roared and its flesh shone chrome, it spouted color, and raced into the sky. We watched as it tore open a pastel, dreamy wormhole to the Feywild and raced through, to spread inspiration and music to the world again.

 

And the Rhythmancer, reduced to his former crumbling self, sat in a pile. He mumbled that he was doing it for love, and that he only wanted to see his beloved again. As if on queue, she showed up, brought down by the Songbeast's magic and gently told him that though his intentions were pure, they had been tainted by hate and wrath. (Turns out we could have inspired him or boosted some Charisma checks he was making and could have had the two reconcile, but since all the members of M.I.L.K. are kind of assholes, we were mostly intent on him just fucking perishing.) And he died having known that he absolutely freaked it.

 

And there the scene froze, M.I.L.K. victorious. The lone bard in the tavern ended his story of the legendary bards to the kids. In something really special, Alex included a few cameos. Josh and I already have characters planned for Alex's long form campaign whenever it's his turn, so Alex narrated that a gruff silver Dragonborn Paladin listening into the story returned to his drink and that a fussy woman, a Cleric, ushered the kids off to bed. I'm really hyped to play her so that moment really sticks in my mind. Really makes it feel like our accomplishments as M.I.L.K. had lasting effects on the setting and I can't wait for us to visit that tavern. And with that the bard adventure ended after about four and a half months, about three months longer than planned.

 

Again, if anyone's interested about any parts of this adventure or any of our other campaigns, I'd love to share our stories. 

4 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Y'all are making me jealous of how much fun you have with tabletop. 

If that’s the case when I’m gonna tell the story of the Bard adventure Alex ran for us earlier in the year to make you even greener because the finale especially was something else. If anyone’s interested I’ll type it out later tonight

On 6/11/2019 at 4:51 AM, Silent said:

So less of a distraction and more along the lines of, summon a statue that instantly directs the fortresses' inhabitants toward our party. So they did, dragged us inside, and after a terrifying duel between the bad guy leader and Huff's barbarian, we are now taking advantage of some Rogue-induced hysteria to get the fuck outta there, and ended the session mid-escape.

This moment was so good that we decided to make this the pose for the group comm we actually had planned even before Alex got his single one up there. Rhea triggered the "you can only breathe out bubbles when you try to speak for the next minute" result on the Wild Magic table, so she had to hitch a ride on the only guy with an actual STR score. It's a lot of fun to get back to these guys and I'm so happy with how this turned out. Orque is tied for my favorite character I've played with the Goliath bard I just played (I mean I've played fuckin 3 characters and I've liked each a whole lot so it doesn't mean much that he's one of my faves...) and I'm happy to see him in action. Funny epic chef orc is on his way to becoming the level 20 bartender every DM thinks to plant in the adventure and I couldn't be happier.

 

 

Not sure yet, I’ll be going to school for a few years before getting an actual duty station

I swore in on Thursday, I’m owned for a good six years starting January at the latest.

Going to Alaska and other states on the west coast for about a month

Really happy Cadence of Hyrule is coming out before my 16 hour day of flying

Aparrently it’s comoletely accurate and the epilogue will have each and every one of those

FUCK CALLIOPE

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh fuckin Sakura?

Penguindrum weird...

Kaguya-Sama good