Welcome To My Maze

he/him | writer, musician, and professional gm. I have been running a TTRPG session *at least* once a week since early 2016.

[the-orange-wizard]

The word came just after dawn; The Finishers were missing.

You see, many years ago, the queen and her court wizard sealed the land's heroes away beneath the old fortress.

Since that day, the crown has seen fit to awake them exactly twice - Only to prevent great threats to the kingdom, of course. They have never before failed to finish the job.

What the crown could not have known is that our heroes, or "The Finishers" as they've come to be known, faced a great evil deep within The Vastwood.

Defeating The Nightgarm cost them their lives.

Now enters our first protagonist; Eldred Rennet.

He doesn't know it yet, but this joyful noble's-son is about to become embroiled in danger beyond his wildest reckoning.

His heroes are gone, and when someone arrives at the gates with terrible news, they will not be there to save them.

But perhaps he and his compatriots have what it takes to become...

The Finishers.

______

This D&D campaign is a weird one. Our three heroes don't know it yet, but they're about to take up the mantle of the fallen heroes.

But there can indeed be more than three protagonists in our story - after all, the court wizard built 6 Stasis Chambers beneath the old fortress.

Can you save the kingdom? Perhaps.

But are you prepared to watch the world move on without you? To leave your family and friends behind as you sleep until you are needed again?

This D&D 5e campaign begins again with brand-new 5th-level characters this Thursday, February 27th, at 7pm EST.

Join us if you like.

Play Dungeons & Dragons 5e Online | The Finishers | Level 5 | Beginners & 🏳️‍🌈 Encouraged!

Over two-hundred years ago, a group known as "The Finishers" were interred within magical stasis chambers in their hidden tomb beneath the c

[cartooncoyote]

Okay you have ten seconds think of an rpg class thats never existed before

[dio-archive]

Ass devourer, they eat the asses right off of people

[guidancerune]

What the fuck

[dio-archive]

OP gave me ten seconds

[dat-soldier]

heard y'all talking rpg classes

[prokopetz]

This has been living in my brain for a decade and I literally just realised that it’s the same artist as “MISSION STATUS: SICK”.

[scramratz]

My vampires CAN walk into the sunlight but doing so would reveal what they would look like if they aged normally

Younger vampires don’t have much to worry about but older vamps have reason to avoid sunlight as they age. They are still immortal, but their aged, sunlit selves are significantly weaker than their non-sunlit forms. Vamps over 100 years old run the risk of crumpling over, fully immobile, but still conscious

[maniacaltoaster]

Yo wait that's fucking metal.

[homunculus-argument]

Add realism to your fantasy stories by having characters from different backgrounds struggle to pronounce each others' names.

"My name is [low guttural sound] but I don't want to hear you butcher it. So you may call me She Who Arises With The Cold Mountain Sun."

"...Is that what your name really means? All that in just one word?"

"Yes. If you stress the wrong syllable it comes out as 'She Who Coldly Wakes Up The Mountain Sun', or 'The Cold Woman Who Wakes The Mountain Sun', and you will not call me that."

"Oh, huh. Could we just call you Mountain Sun, for short?"

"Hmh. It's boastful, almost bordering on blasphemy, but it is flattering. I accept it."

[someemochick]

[fishingscam]

op didn’t add a link so here’s a link to his patreon where all of his minis are free to download please support him if you can

[marlynnofmany]

I would absolutely download a dragon, and I’ve already shared this with my D&D group. We’re gonna have some adventures! Thank you to everyone who made this possible!

[snacobie]

I usually only draw Jem in white sooooo I wanted to change it up a little

[appystruda]

design for my latest dnd character

[prokopetz]

There's an evil twin to "has only ever played Dungeons & Dragons and thinks all tabletop RPGs are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons" that lives somewhere in the vicinity of "went straight from Dungeons & Dragons to rules-light storygames and thinks Dungeons & Dragons represents the high end of tabletop RPG complexity". Like, buddy, you have no idea.

[prokopetz]

Every time I make a joke about some unreasonably baroque bit of tabletop RPG rules tech and some chucklefuck in the notes is like "OP, you can just say D&D", they should be legally required to conduct a cover-to-cover reading of Shadowrun 3rd Edition. There will be a test.

[prokopetz]

If we're being 100% honest with ourselves as game designers, we've gotta admit that this notion that "story focus" means making the GM do all the work is not a bugbear that's unique to the Dungeons & Dragons fandom. Think of how many self-identified "story focused" indie RPGs you've bumped into that have a great deal to say leading up to the point of rolling the dice, but once the dice have actually been rolled and the time has come to interpret what those results mean, those same rules that were so keen on procedural rigour just moments ago simply shrug and go "I dunno, have the GM make something up?"

[prokopetz]

so how did DnD get the race science bs in it? was that just a norm when it was made or was one of the devs racist or something?

A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.

In the "A" column, it's important to understand that Dungeons & Dragons isn't anything close to being a generic fantasy game: it's very specifically inspired by American literary sword and sorcery fantasy in the period roughly spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the late 1960s and early 1970s strand of the genre. Other inspirations have crept in over time, but that core has remained largely unchanged.

Like most Western pulp fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy frequently featured scenes of lantern-jawed heroes manfully slaughtering their way through nameless hordes of jabbering, spear-chucking, dark-skinned savages. Even at this early date, however, the explicitly racist dimension of this trope wasn't necessarily playing well with contemporary audiences, so over time, depictions of these groups tended to drift away from direct stand-ins for real-world "races" and toward fictional ethnic groups, eventually culminating in the tribes of swarthy hobgoblins and degenerate lizard-men and such populating the pages of the Monster Manual. Such literature freely invoked the assertions of race science to explain why these creatures were morally okay to kill, and that carried over into Dungeons & Dragons.

In the "B" column, Gary Gygax was the kind of person you might invent as a cartoon parody of a racist game designer if he didn't already exist. Like, this is a guy who was quoting John Chivington's infamous "nits make lice" remarks in order to explain why it was okay for paladins to kill orc babies in forum threads as recently as 2005; one might think "not citing the Sand Creek Massacre as an example of morally praiseworthy conduct" would be a very low bar to clear, but he managed to tunnel right under it. Certainly, he didn't originate the race science that's present in D&D's worldbuilding, which is also amply present in its core inspirational media, but he also had no interest in pushing back against it!

[prokopetz]

"Okay, but it's not a dragon, a dragon has" if putting it in the sky would be sick as fuck, it's a dragon. Whales are dragons.

[mstrickster]

Honestly love this OP, 100% on board. However this does feel like it would incite another "featherless biped=behold man" situation.

[prokopetz]

Concept: fantasy setting where "human" is a political category whose boundaries are pseudoscientifically justified by defining humans as featherless bipeds.

[roselilyg]

Isn't that just the politics of personhood in Dungeon Meshi?

[prokopetz]

"Human" as a political category goes all the way back to old-school Dungeons & Dragons; Dungeon Meshi is merely one of numerous pieces of modern fantasy media that's critically responding to that idea.

(In brief, older versions of D&D had a soft rule that only "civilised races" were permitted to be player characters. The term for such races was "demihuman"; this was an umbrella which encompassed both characters of part-human ancestry, and non-human races deemed sufficiently civilised to be valid player characters, such as elves, halflings, etc. Species which were human-like but insufficiently civilised to be permitted as player characters were separately lumped together under "goblinoid races". Did you ever wonder why half-orcs were a standard player character option, but full-blooded orcs weren't? It wasn't a game balance thing – it's because a full-blooded orc is a goblinoid, but a half-orc is, by virtue of part-human ancestry, a demihuman, and thus a valid player character.

If this is all sounding uncomfortably like straight up race science, well, here's the thing.)

[lyadrielle]

Another commission from April :D I will do that cheat 3D file for horns one day!

[hellothisisangle]

[the-orange-wizard]

There is a door here.

-=-🚪-=-

If you’d be so kind, allow me to ask you a couple of leading questions.

Do you like D&D? Playing when it’s convenient? Gay people?

These questions, are, of course, relatively simple for many of us on this website to answer.

Let’s get more specific.

Do you like video games like Monster Hunter and Breath of The Wild? Have you ever wanted to play an MMO where your story is *actually* unique to you?

Well, allow me to present my latest hyperfixation project:

Through The White Door.

It’s a West Marches campaign!

Initial timeslots are up now:

1️⃣ [https://startplaying.games/adventure/cmahaolwk0007mbe18nrnq3ip]

2️⃣ [https://startplaying.games/adventure/cmahauaqa00212tvelf5ik9hf]

3️⃣ [https://startplaying.games/adventure/cmahaxw3t000311954p1tyrgj]

There is a door here.

What lies beyond? A West Marches game with roleplaying, drama, open-world exploration, and survival horror elements.

1-3 timeslots are posted weekly; I expect times to usually be Monday, Wednesday or Friday nights (EST), with occasional weekends.

The level 1-4 areas already incorporate over 40 published modules into the open world (adapted for the setting, of course) plus lots of my own creations.

I’m looking for 4-8 more players to start with.

Each session is 20$. You can play as often or as little as you like!

If you can’t make the initial times but are still interested, shoot me a message!

There’s so much more I could go into, but you wouldn’t read it if I did.

Check out one of the StartPlaying listings if you want more information or shoot me a message; I am very excited to chat about this game and will gladly answer any questions you might have.

[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]

[prokopetz]

One of the bigger reasons I think "trad RPGs versus storygames" is a false dichotomy is that this sort of categorisation – whether external or self-applied – tells you nothing in particular about how much a game actually cares about narrative-as-such.

The trick is that games in the former category which care about the game's story are usually coming at it from the angle that interpreting the outputs of the game's rules is what produces its story, while the latter often think of the game's story as this pre-existing thing, toward which the rules' primary obligation is to refrain from interfering (hence all those awkward disclaimers about how "story comes first").

The upshot of this difference in opinion regarding where a game's story comes from is that many self-labelled trad RPGs end up thinking deeply about what player-facing behavioural incentives their rules expose, and if the players respond to these incentives, what narrative this produces, while many self-labelled storygames have never moved beyond 1990s "roleplaying XP" style incentive frameworks which attempt to bypass the game's own mechanical procedures of play and directly bribe players into playing the game "correctly".

This is not, of course, to say that there aren't self-identified storygames which think deeply about the narrative structures implied by their rules' player-facing incentives, or that there aren't self-identified trad RPGs which try to simply bludgeon players into the "correct" narrative with extrinsic rewards and punishments, but which of those labels has been applied reveals nothing at all about which of these approaches a given game actually adopts.

[the-orange-wizard]

Tomb of the Crescent Moon

Within the prosperous village of Langeldar, the guild's experiments have disrupted the chrono-stasis on an ancient tomb containing a cadre of time raiders. Freed from their temporal prison, these visitors from the Sea of Stars now gather to plan their revenge—defeat them before they regain their strength!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Do you like D&D? I love D&D. It's been a big part of my life for the last decade. However, while I can't speak for anyone else, once Draw Steel releases, it will take D&D's place as my favorite heroic TTRPG.

Heart of Arcana has been working on a lovely adventure for this upcoming game called Tomb of the Crescent Moon and I've offered to give it a whirl!

If you'd like to try it out, check out the details here.

[the-orange-wizard]

We’ll be having our Session 0 and building characters together this Wednesday!