And the voices. “Billy…”

“You fucked the whole thing up.”

“Billy, your time is up.”

“Your time… is up.”

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • Eh. I dislike the “dungeon only works the way I want it to” solution, like the mirrors are unbreakable because that’s not what I wanted you to do with them.

    In the other hand, having the players suddenly finding themselves in a boss fight with what was imprisoned in the mirror prison as soon as there’s an existing mirror isn’t facing another intact mirror? And then if they start winning or run away and get back to town, they get a surprise as soon as they go near a mirror? Until they figure out what was the special property that kept the beast in place in the chamber, how it was tricked into it in the first place and how to repeat the process? Fuckin a man. I had planned that you have to have one party member watching in the mirror guiding someone else to find the alcove in the opposite wall that can only be seen through one of the mirrors, but I like this way better; let’s rock.







  • "They do not fully understand what death is and this makes them dangerous to be around. In the culture of the Heralds, each being is made of many kinds of interacting life. They live and die in a cacophony of birth and death, fading and renewing all the time. They are a colony of things. They assume that everybody is.

    "If someone dies around a Herald, they will keep speaking, addressing the microfauna consuming the corpse from within. If not prevented or advised otherwise, the Herald will ‘garden’ all the forms of life upon the corpse into a coherent whole, inhabiting the old form. It is the polite thing to do. Like helping someone who falls sick at your home, or offering new clothes to someone who has spilt their soup. They will educate this colony of things in how to consume the remaining chemical memories of its former host, how to walk in its body, then politely let it go. This may take time…

    “Though the Heralds are by no means evil things, they are so alien and strange that to most people they may as well be. They prefer to deal with intelligent undead, or other very long-lived and indifferent individuals. Unprejudiced. The surface as a whole is strange to them. They value calm, politeness, and a discreet hand. You can never be sure how someone will react…”

    -Trench Heralds, from “Fire on the Velvet Horizon”






  • “Dude this gun is awesome, I liked fighting that boss, I can’t wait for the turbo version”

    You can make it so the length of time until they come back drops by half with every use, while they still get stronger… until it’s a boss sort of appearing in strobe light fashion while growing interminably up towards the sky, until one massive strobing hand slams down and squashes the whole party like a bunch of bugs. Fitting cap + end to the campaign


  • Not all at once, have them start coming back one at a time as time goes on

    (A) with items and powers they gained in the meantime wherever they got sent to
    (B) and team up to fuck up the party, in squads of increasing power level since the party has been meeting increasingly powerful enemies of course
    © the same, but changed a little bit in unsettling subtle ways that get less and less subtle and more and more wild and empowering as the story continues, like Pet Semetary

    Pick one. Start the first little challenge they run into right after they disintegrate some massively powerful BBEG, so the realization of what they are in for now and the anticipation of what horror is in store at the end of the arc can build and build and build

    Caution, they may say “fuck it” and still keep disintegrating stuff, or experiment with disintegrating each other once they know there are strengthening effects, things like that, so be prepared for that


  • As I interpret it, the purpose of a hook is a big signpost to your players that says “hey the prepared adventure content is over thataway”

    If they are down for the social contract they will presumably not be dickholes and interact with it. Of course, it is your job to make it engaging and give them a reason or shut all the alternate pathways off or however you want to do it. But likewise it is kind of their job to interact with the clearly marked “adventure is here” signpost as opposed to implicitly saying “naw fuck what you had prepared I think we would prefer you had to wing it, it’s what my character would do.” Ttrpg environments carry a significant implied social contract on all sides.



  • Yeah. Not everything has to be a movie. If you want the little dudes to do exactly what you had laid out for them, get some action figures man. If you want your players to play on the playground just give them some toys, a rough objective, and let 'em run around.

    If you want your players to interact with something, make it either related to something they already care about and actively want to achieve, or else thrust them into the middle of it without any choice about it. If instead of that you turn them loose in the dungeon and they just run around having fun killing monsters and having hijinx then there is nothing in the world wrong with that and it is the expected result