Life Needs Games To Live

Queer, nb, ace, crafty. D&D vault blog. They/them.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monsterhunt: Caeldestiir, and her bloodless legions

A titan of ice and sorrow dwells amid the peaks of the far northern mountains, its pained cries summoning storms and avalanches. Most know to keep their distance and leave well enough alone, but the entity's bloody tears bring forth swarms of violent undead that every few years boil off the mountainside like ants from a kicked nest. Something must be done, but how will the party ever hope to challenge such a foe?

The name Caeldestiir originates with the local goliath tribe, meaning "The cold and broken god" in their tongue. In their lore, the creature is the unwanted get of some distant divinity that left it on the mountainside to die of exposure, as is sometimes done with unwanted infants in the harshest of times. Though this legend (and the creature that inspired it) has persisted for generations, the tribe's current jarl Zautho feels somehow responsible for Caeldestiir's recent disquiet, as when she was young she was forced by her family to give up a child deemed too sickly to live. Fear over the gods' judgment and the titan's building wrath has the jarl dispatching runners across the breadth of the tribe's territory, seeking signs, solutions, and allies.

Adventure Hooks:

The party encounters the first of the goliath runners in a bordertown marketplace, being hurried along by the authorities for "causing a ruckous", as they think the emmisarry is some barbarian radical preacher come to lecture them about the sins of civilization. They'll meet another in a noble's court, being given the cold shoulder after being promised a meeting.

After repeated undead incursions across their borders, those of the "civilized" lands will finally be forced to take notice, having ignored the signs for too long and losing their chance at containign the threat. ( Yes, we're doing a game of thrones reference, but unlike GRRM we're not going to take 30 years to resolve it).

Zautho might be the party's greatest ally in facing the frigid threat, but she's become distracted: convinced the rise of the icy titan is somehow the gods' punishment against her specifically. Guilt is not so easy a thing to shake off, so the aparty will have to go questing for knowledge and divine truth to shake the jarl from her despair.

Background:

Few songs are still sung about the dreadmage Feriya , of her plot to force eternal winter on any realm that did not bow to her, of the coalition of unlikely allies that marched north to challenge her army, of the heroes who gave everything to secure her defeat and bring her icy fortress crashing down upon her head.

Centuries since her defeat Feriya's wrathful spirit has yet to fade, trapped as it was in the glacial wreckage that was once the sign of her great authority. Time beyond death has distorted her, diminishing the person she was and leaving behind only her wrath, her power, and the memory of a body being crushed alive. As the distinction between tomb and entombed faded what began as a ghostly stirring has transformed into an elemental colossus, howling with the pain and fury of the north wind as it drags itself across the jagged mountain peaks, phantom bones breaking with each movement.

Mercy would be enough of a reason to put the thing out of its misery, whatever Feriya's ambitions and cruelties she did not deserve such a pained afterlife.

Artsource

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon: Castle Gelidraf

Artsource

Once belonging to a plunderhungry northern thane by the name of Geyrild Grimstalker, the fate of this forlorn fortress was sealed when Geyrild set himself to stealing one of the sea god's daughters.

Bards tell different versions of the tale: love or ransom, rescue or ravishment. Whatever the truth of the matter, the sea god's wrath fell upon Geyrild's home, striking it with a great wave and then freezing it solid.

Near to a century since this act of wrath, rumours have begun to circulate that the once glacial ice around the castle has begun to crack and thaw, opening the possibility to reclaim a portion of the thane's stolen riches.

Challenges:

As the party race across frigid seas they'll have to contend with other treasure hunters, some reasonable, some bloodthirsty.

The wise forewarn that the sea god's wrath may yet linger over castle Gelidraf, but those with the pillager's lust for riches are unlikely to heed them. Odd weather and icy elementals are likely to bedevil any who make the journey, and may even follow them home after the adventure is done.

Denied his prize, Geyrild's spirit has refused to fade. Fuelled by an ire that not even the wrath of winter could quell, the thane's specter now stalks the halls of his keep looking for a body to replace the one entombed in ice. The first he's found is a fearsome winterwolf ( darksouls style sword-wielding-beast bossfight anyone?), but after that one is slain he'll gladly move onto the party or one of the other treasure hunters.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Encounter: Tossup on the Tollroad

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Setup: The party are travelling either by themselves or as guards for some caravan, making their way along an old road widely known to have fallen into disrepair thanks to the local lord's mismanagement.

What a surprise then when the party approach an old fortified toll house and discover it garrisoned with troops in the lord's livery, who are now expecting them to pay exorbitant fees for the privilege of crossing into the lord's domain.

The toll collectors are beligerant and one or two even appear drunk. Not paying their toll ads days, maybe weeks to the party's journey, and crossing overland will not only be slow going, but dangerous, as monsters have been known to be creeping back into the region from the wilderness (again, due to the lord's mismanagement).

Challenges & Complications:

Plenty of folks call tollgates "highway robbery" but in this instance it's far more literal. The garrison are infact a group of bandits who have laid their hands on some of his soldier's uniforms, or fashioned crude imitations. The ones interacting with the party have mostly legitimate looking outfits, but those standing back have increasingly flimsy disguises which a perceptive character might notice.

The bandits demand to inspect packs and cargo for "contraband" as a means of seeing whether the party is worth robbing beyond paying their hiked up crossing fee. If one of them finds something good, they make a quick signal to the ones on the battlements which tells them to drop the portcullis after the travellers are through, cutting off their escape before launching their attack.

More than a couple merchants have fallen victim to the ruse already, and the party may notice the their wagons and pack animals tucked away, some of the former showing signs of struggle. The contents of these wagons are sitting inside the fortress waiting to be fenced, meaning a party that defeats the bandits may have stumbled into a small fortune of trade goods, as well as mementos, messages in need of delivery. My advice is to cram this treasure-drop full of quest hooks.

Selling the goods may get the party accused of banditry themselves, turning a potential payday into a brush with the law.

[oathofwhimsy]

direction to perfection

Dorian fought his parents to be here.

He fought tooth and nail to be allowed to live in a dorm, so there is no way he can back down from this decision. It’s his first shot at freedom and being normal and doing something for himself instead of his family.

Dorian will not back down.

He will persevere.

“Harder, come on!”

Loud moaning and the creaking of an old mattress accompany the dull thudding that comes from inside of his room. The room he’s currently standing in front of.

“I’m so close, so close, so close—“

Dorian stares at the door. His face is hot and he stands frozen in place as he tries to decide what to do. He needs his lute for the next bard class. He also needs to be far away from this room.

Gods, most of all he needs a new roommate.

“Oh, fuck, just like that—ah—“

Dorian closes his eyes and hides his face in his hands.

He was so proud after he finally convinced his parents to let him stay here. When he first entered his room he wasn’t even concerned about how small it was, or how his roommate’s bed was so close to his that stretching both their arms out would result in them touching hands.

And then he met Dariax, the guy he’s supposed to be living with for a long time.

“Dorian, are you literally standing here listening to Dariax bang someone inside of your room?”, Opal’s voice reaches his ears and he turns his head to look at her. She must see the desperation on his face because the next moment she gives him a pointed look before hammering her fist on the door.

“What the fuck, guys! Rent a room! And hurry up, Dorian needs his stuff!”

Keep reading

[creativerogues]

1d6 Hag Deals & Curses...

Curse of Aging

“For your deeds you shall regress in age, return back to your child days.“ 

Over a period of 1d4 Hours, the Character will slowly regress back into a Young Child. Their Size becomes Small if it isn’t already, and they no longer remember their former life.

Curse of Whispers

"For trespassing in my lair, you will see what isn’t there!" 

The Character gets the following Personality Flaw: “I’m always being watched by dangerous entities, and everyone is secretly aiding them!”

Curse of Death’s Eyes

"To toy with me is to court death, but in tow from I steal a breath." 

The Character dies after two failed Death Saving Throws, rather than three.

Curse of the Trickster

"No worries to be made with threads so bare, I shall craft new beauties with this fine fresh hair." 

The Hag takes all of the Character’s hair, leaving them permanently bald. Over time, she uses the hair to create Doppelgangers of the Character. These Doppelgangers cause trouble and create a bad reputation for the Character. They also serve as defenders for the Hag if need be.

Curse of the Sea

"With these words, clean water turns, from sweet coolness to searing burns.”

If the Character ends their Turn wading through water, the Character takes 1d10 Acid Damage. If the Character ends their Turn submerged or immersed in water, the Character takes 3d10 Acid Damage.

Curse of Trading

“Spoken with mouths that are no longer free, I have a time to be you and you to be me." 

For one Day of the Year, the Character must come to live in the Hag’s home for 24 Hours. The Hag will get to live as the Character for that single Day. 

(Note: Time passes differently on other Planes, a single Day in the Feywild may be hundreds of Years on the Prime Material Plane…)

[bixbiboom]

Official character art for Exandria Unlimited, by Hannah Friederichs (@agarthanguide)!

[lostsometime]

I’m sorry, but I’m just thinking about how what Eodwulf’s experience of who Caduceus is is absolutely fucking wild.  Like, in the 3 times he has really interacted with this guy, can you imagine what Caduceus looks like to him? 

The first time you see him, he’s accompanying your ex-boyfriend to the Sanitarium, a location that is severely fraught for both of you.  You notice that he’s surrounded by new friends - very colorful, and apparently largely foreigners.  The big pink one openly wears the symbol of a forbidden goddess.  He either does not know or does not care that doing this could get him arrested.

Also, your ex is still hot and you don’t know what to do with this.

The next time you see him is when you are actually spending a significant amount of time with your ex for the first time in almost 20 years.  All his new friends are coming, and so is your mutual abuser, so you can’t really talk to him, but oh well.  His friends are needlessly petty about the seating arrangements.  The pink one, however, is polite.

For some reason you decide to react to this by making a snarky and somewhat racist comment about him, and he returns with so smooth and confident a burn you almost can’t be sure if he meant it as one or not.  Maybe he’s just genuinely guileless and good-natured?  You have literally not talked to someone guileless and good-natured since you were fifteen.

It is a deeply tense evening, and you spend most of it stuffing food in your mouth so you have an excuse not to talk or answer any questions.  At the end of it you realize that, no, the pink one was definitely throwing shade at you earlier.  You know this because he decides to openly insult Trent Ikithon, the person you fear and hate most in the world and potentially the most powerful man in the country.  He throws this shade very eloquently and politely and it is the closest to speechless you have ever seen Trent.

You decide to get drunk.

(You see him again, briefly, in Nicodranas while trying to circumvent your orders to arrest your ex.  You thought you were doing pretty well being subtle with your charm spells, but apparently he noticed anyway.  Is there anything he doesn’t notice?)

Finally, you are brought as backup when Trent actually goes to confront your ex.  This, it turns out, is happening at Pink One’s family home.  You can tell it’s his family home because his entire family is there, and they are also Large and Pink.  You set the house on fire.

The house is also a temple.

You are a fairly religious man, and you would probably feel bad about this, if you weren’t so good at thoroughly repressing all your bad feelings about everything you’ve been asked to do for the past twenty years.  It’s been very helpful to think of everything you’ve done as being in some way the will of your goddess.  It is very difficult to categorize “burning down a temple” under the heading of “things my goddess is cool with,” but hey, you’ve been ignoring your cognitive dissonance since you were 17 and you’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.

This is the first time you’ve really seen Pink One get angry.  You don’t see it for very long, because you get your ass kicked by some of Bren’s other friends very quickly and fall unconscious.

You later learn that Pink One stopped you from dying.

He lives in a graveyard, and you worship a death goddess, and he saved your life.  It feels like there’s something wrong with this but you don’t actually know enough about the gods to figure out what.  

…you help put out the fire.  

[chevs-and-spiders]

Farewell.

[phantomganon]

scripted shows could never

[vethbrenatto]

A blood feud it is then.

[wildmelora]

The Gentleman when he realizes Marion will be arriving at his sketchy crime boss headquarters in less than five minutes

[jinxknight]

Happy 6 Years Critical Role!! 

This show has changed my life and there aren’t enough words to express how grateful I am for the show and the cast. I just love them so much, you guys <3

[fjorester-and-forever-deactivat]

With all this talk of the precious Fjord x Jester moment at the end of last weeks episode, the Han Solo/Princess Leia vibes made me think back to this little gem. You know? How Travis basically named his D&D character after his wife’s celebrity crush. It’s literally written in the stars. 💙💚

[sparring-spirals]

Oh god the potential angst of Veth accidentally hypnotising Caleb with a misplaced spell, in the bowels of the sanitorium that trapped him for years while he's in the throes of his Murder Headspace

[thedarklordsnicklefritz]

Not to mention that iirc she dropped her concentration on Mind Fortress (the spell she was trying to mentally protect him with) to cast it

[grogblogging]

something incredibly fascinating about this episode are the parallels between this heist and the one in zadash, the one where caleb and fjord nearly came to blows over caleb trying to steal a scroll case, the one where caleb was fireballed into unconsciousness, and the one where veth went back into the house to steal the scroll case for him

bc like. compare to this heist, where it is again fireball (among other things) that breaks their stealth, where again veth stops to steal something, where fjord isn’t inside to keep things moving, where they are once again interrupted by the owner appearing unexpectedly, and where this time the delay, instead of working out in the end, has directly cost them their escape

& so many people are blaming veth. which, yes, matt directly implied that it was the theft of the blue crystals that meant ikithon got there in time to counterspell jester’s word of recall. but veth had no way of knowing ikithon was even on his way, & she’s always been sticky fingered. in many ways, if she hadn’t wanted to stick around and steal more, it would’ve felt like metagaming to me

but on the other hand, while yes she has always been sticky fingered, the lesson of ‘hey don’t steal stuff while we’re on a heist bc it puts us all in danger’ was imparted in episode thirteen. and, if the other heists the party’s been on are any indication, that lesson was learned

i love all the thoughts about caleb, & why he’s acting the way he is. and i think much as it’s funny to look at veth’s hypocrisy when she says ‘i’m travelling with a murderer’, i think it’s fascinating to realise that she’s genuinely shaken by caleb’s brutality – and to realise that it seems her response to this uncertainty is to regress all the way back ten levels and 113 episodes ago

she’s never been bothered by her own acts of brutality, but there’s something about seeing caleb perpetrate them that directly affected her in this episode, & my god i cannot wait for the fallout of that

[theregoesmylurkerstatus]

Beau, traumatised and distrusting: Yo wait regular people aren’t cool with kidnapping for pay?

The Cobalt Soul: …No? Are you okay?

Beau: Huh. Hey guys some dude’s been arrested for my kidnapping!

The Mighty Nein, equally traumatised and distrusting: Wait, that was illegal???

Beau: RIGHT?!

[paintedwarpony]

And while we're on the subject of choice...

POST EPISODE ANALYSIS, EXHAUSTION AND PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS SUGGEST

That the Nein have a few glaring choices to go on now that they squeaked out an escape from the Tomb Takers. I would like to hope that the Tomb Takers would not actually give chase but they are literally hours from their goal and to go hunting off for another crest over hunting down the Nein is high risk, low reward. Plus lets be honest, its personal now and the Tomb Takers aren't going to take kindly to being dodged like that.

Barring player choice and shenanigans, of which there are endless, I see three pretty solid possible routes for the Nein to go.

1. B O L T : Both Jester and Caduceus have set up sanctuaries and Caleb has teleport. Its risky to try big magic like that in Eiselcross as we've seen, but it might be worth the risk and consequences to get a half a world of distance and time. That doesn't stop Lucien or the Tomb Takers but it does put a wrench in it and give the Nein time to regroup and plan. But they have to get far enough ahead or find someplace to hole up long enough to sleep and gain the spells to use in the first place.

2. J U K E M O V E : They make a mad dash to the Aeor ruins and cut the Tomb Takers off at the pass. Either to collapse the entrance they plan to use or work their way into the depths of Aeor to sabotage or set up an ambush for Lucien and the others. Super dangerous move. Its just asking to get trapped or cornered.

AND the one I really hope and feel like is most likely at this point...

3. GET THE CALVARY : Haul ass to the Vurmas Outpost. Alot has changed in the last 48HRS for the Nein, the trepidation that Beau and Caleb felt about pulling Essek into the whole situation is gone or the rest of the Nein have deemed themselves in dire enough straights that they don't have any choice now but to involve or summon Essek. The message sent with Dagen was meant to try and spur Essek into action to meet them at the ruins. Now they're on the run and most of them are wounded or severely depleted. There's no other place of promised safety they can reach and they are going to have to DASH to get there before the Tomb Takers catch up to them. But there's really no promise that once they get there they will actually be safe.

BUT THEY WILL GET HELP. Not tenuous, threatening, hostage holding mutual company.

H E L P

The desperation the Nein are starting to feel in their situation is suggested by the fact that Beau, previously against involving Essek, was the one that asked Caduceus to use one of his Commune questions to confirm if Essek would help them. Most of us could tell from Essek's rush to respond to messages, reaching out the Nein from his end, his repeated plead for them to come to him, his relief on hearing them send messages to him, was evidence that he would help them. It was all confirmed and backed up by the Wildmother in the Commune. Essek will help them. There's no question about that.

What that help entails is hoping that Lucien is COMPLETELY unprepared to face what we all hope is a high level Dunamantic Wizard in his prime. One that is not only familiar with the Nein but helped train their wizard. He's going to be able to fight and mesh with them in a way that Lucien never could hope to have done. From what we know about the Kryn Dynasty was that it rose after the Calamity and Divergence. Its hinted there was some knowledge of Dunamantic magic during the Age of Arcanum but the Kryn perfected the use of Echo magic and Dunamantic magic after the fact, so other than possible scrapes with Kryn here and there, considering how secret and isolationist the Kryn have been, Lucien himself and the Somnovum might have never encountered a full bore Dunamantic magic user. Even Caleb was conservative about using it around the Tomb Takers. Its a very real possibility that the powers granted by the Eyes of Nine will not hold up against Echoes, Graviturgy and Dunamancy. Essek really could be a true wildcard.

And hopefully, gods I really REALLY hope...

That Essek will have his own reserve of calvary there to help. Led by one Lawful Good Echo Knight Babey Brother Verin...

Gimme that baby brother. Please.

And now I am fully exhausted and have to go into work at 3am so I better call it a night honestly even though its only 4pm...

LET MANIFEST WEEK BEGIN.