A creature covered in paste does not experience any change in mental state. Drinking the berries and being covered in there paste is two seperate ways to use the berry.
Frenzied as in highly excitable. Four year old with a double expresso and a fist full of lollipops.
Activated paste is only active while exposed to the frenzied mental state. If removed, it is only paste again. If the person losses thier mental state, it is only paste.
Roughly equal amounts is ideal. A drop of one paste on another will only cause a drop of the other paste to react. If the person can maintain thier mental state, they can keep the rest of the paste active. Go to Comment
Gaming teaches you to deal with whining, self centered idiots in a constructive way without just reaching out and striking them. So when your kid is too involved in his spontaneous after school game of tag to walk home (that was this morning), you don't just reach for the belt (and believe me, it was tempting, this isn't the first time we've been home wondering if someone has kidnapped and eaten our kid) instead you give him more chores (like throwing the party off the trail) and make him write down "I will come right home" a hundred times before he can play his new video games (like putting the twisting, mazelike dungeon in front of the treasure)
Every game can teach a lesson, it's just on how you want to learn it that's up to you. Go to Comment
Deadlands is a Wild West game put out by Pinnacle Entertainment Group http://www.peginc.com/
It uses cards rather than dice. I've only played it three times and thoroughly enjoyed it. The rules system seemed simple enough, the highest card got to go first, you used up your cards to perform actions. They've also made a parallel game that is set in the near future diverged from thier altered past.
The storylines were cool. California fell into the ocean and the indians had enough magic to push back the settlers, lincoln was still shot, but came back as an undead and fought off whatever was possesing him, there's this super coal that might hold the spirits of the dead... Neat stuff. Go to Comment
Excelent idea! Helps give an alien perspective to time so the players don't just feel like they're playing on a past earth. Wonderful!
The graphics are great and very useful, do you have plans to add the geometry to them? I kinda followed the explination, but a picture is worth a thousand wrods. Go to Comment
True fact:
Never squash a Yellowjacket wasp near the nest. A dying Yellowjacket releases an alarm pheromone that alerts its comrades. In less than 15 seconds, Yellowjackets within a 15-foot radius will rally to the victim's aid.
Phalanx Ants:
Never stop for lunch near a Phalanx Ant hill. If one of their scout ants finds more food than it can carry, it sends out a scent blast to alter other scouts to get the haul, and sends out another blast all the way back to the ant hill every time it can no longer smell the last one. The resulting scent trail leads the majority of the ant hill to your food.
This invasion can be solved if you can find their soldier ants, by looking for the slightly larger ants with two horns. If you can kill the soldier ant, it releases a retreat scent blast and the Phalanx ants will return to the ant hill untill the scents disapate. There is typically one soldier ant in five hundred. Go to Comment
True fact:
Air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit can be calculated by adding 40 to the number of calls a tree cricket makes in 13 seconds.
Sun Cricket
These small, bright yellow crickets sing to each other. Their mate song consists of short high and low chirps and long, high chirps. If you count the number of long chirps one cricket sings to the other and subtract 5, you will be able to tell what hour it is. These crickets mate for life, however, and if one dies, the other cricket will only sing it's lonely song, a collection of short and long low chirps. Go to Comment
It could be interesting if the long fingered theif had a poor digesteive process, and stole the food because it was more noutricious than the food it can normally digest. That means that when it attacks, it more often goes for the food that has already been chewed up some. Ewwwwww.
Mother always told you to eat with your mouth closed. Now you know why. Go to Comment
I am humbled by your depth of involvement and commitment to making a unique culture for your gamers to enjoy. If I ever get the cash together to put out a game system, I so want to hire you.
I'm not worthy! *bows and scrapes*
On that note, I would like to most humbly add a cheap bit of color. They players aren't always going to be dealing with high, or even polite, society. It might come in handy to have a few obscene gestures made up for just such an occation.
Nearly the entire world knows what "the bird" is. To clarify it for anyone who doesn't, make a fist, extend your middle finger, and thrust it towards the offending party with the finger pointing upwards and the back of your hand facing outward. This gesture is fairly obviously fallic in nature.
Persons in Austrailia may be more familiar with a different gesture, where both index and middle finger are raised and spread in a "V" shape and thrust at a person with the palm outward. In this case the fingers represent raised legs. To show "V for Victory" in Austrailia, I believe one is supposed to keep the palm facing inward.
In another part of the world (I forget, I was watching an educational channel), an obsecene gesture it to raise the hands with the palms facing outward in front of one's face with all the fingers spread and thrust both hands at the offending party. Rather than being a sexual gesture, this represents throwing refuse or feces at the person.
There are a vast variety of gestures, obscene and otherwise, that players may come incontact with. Mix in demihumans and their various cultures, appendages, and anatomies, and a gesture may become quite confusing and may even be misunderstood. Go to Comment
That is a bunch of great advice. It's aslso a great deal of work. You have to keep a careful balance of effort to make the story worth the players investment of time and fun for yourself.
When I start planning, I tend to over plan and get bogged down in irrelevant details that will never come into play. Like the inventories of the three different bread shops in a town. The players are going to come into town, maybe ask for bread and just buy what they want. They don't care about the small things. So I finally had to bring myself to stop, and so I went to the other end of the extreme: No preparation.
If you're not having fun, or delaying the start of the campaign in planning that doesn't seem to stop, just stop planning. Crabby stressed out DM's are no fun to play with. Instead of planning, just take the first session on the fly. We've all played enough toe have a general idea of how campaigns start, throw a plot hook at the characters and see how they react. They're actions determine their adventures. After a few hours, everyone wraps it up, you ask them what they'd like to see and they leave. That's when you make your notes. What they did, who they meet or pissed off, and ideas for the next session.
It all works out into basically popping the clutch, but it gets the campaign started. I've done that far to often when the guy who was supposed to be the DM couldn't show and everyone was sitting around bored on a saturday night. Just quick adventures to pass the time, but they always turned into month long campaigns. Go to Comment
This is a cool idea. I also could imagine if the Dungeon Masters weren't immortal, new ones would be rising to power. Perhaps the players are approached by the newbie to ask as consultants. They just need to enter some of the dungeons already in place and get the feel for it, so they can tell the newbie what challenges work or don't work. That could be a very stragne situation. Go to Comment
I like that. The DM needs the players to go through the dungeon to survive. The players need to go through the dungeon to get all that cool loot. Nice tidy ecology there. Go to Comment
One thing I always wish I could do would be to write a short story set in the world. The players could read the story and get a general kind of feel for the setting and flip through the other information if they wanted to know a specific. Go to Comment
I was just wondering how this got switched. As moonhunter said, this is one of mine. A glitch of the switch I'm guessing. We'd appreciate it if this could be corrected at some point. :D Go to Comment
Perhaps instead of only one and they are unaging, you could steal a concept from Buffy and they are reincarnated in a sense. A new Dracoran is being born all the time, or only in times of need. A dragon styled birthmark or the outline of wings on their back from the scales there could be a good indication of thier destiny.
BTW, my rule number one of an experienced DM is: Don't give yourself anything you don't want the players to have.
Your main character here is going to be quite cool and the center of attention at serveral points, obviously. The player are going to be dying to find out how they can be one too.
Maybe you could make a Player version that is much less powerful and have them be servants/ assistants to the bad ass unaging leader. One man cannot be everywhere, after all. I can't think of any reason the player version should ever be able to turn into a dragon, though. Just, Yikes!
The side effects of changing into a dragon should be dramatically intense, like severe weakness or helplessness or maybe uncontrolable rage once they change back to being a person. So they pop into a dragon, go bust something up and fight the good fight and all, then are in desperate need of rest, help or restraint. And who should happen to be around for one of these needful moments? The PC's perhaps? Go to Comment
Longbows Articles (Resource)
(Gaming - In General)
Plate glass can be chipped like flint to make arrow heads or even spear heads or knives. A bad guy in Neal Stephenson's book Snow crash has an assortment of glass weapons and takes advantage of them being off radar, but that's a little off subject.
Glass breaks on a mono-molecular edge. The sharpness of a glass egde is purely how sharp an angle it is. The better a person is at flint chipping, the sharper an angle they could make on glass.
The fact the glass breaks on entering is very true and quite vicous. Sounds like a perfect item for an assassin. Perhaps with a small chamber in the shaft behind the arrowhead for posion or disease causing material. Go to Comment
Longbows Articles (Resource)
(Gaming - In General)
Lifeforms (Flora) (Forest/ Jungle)
Frenzied as in highly excitable. Four year old with a double expresso and a fist full of lollipops.
Activated paste is only active while exposed to the frenzied mental state. If removed, it is only paste again. If the person losses thier mental state, it is only paste.
Roughly equal amounts is ideal. A drop of one paste on another will only cause a drop of the other paste to react. If the person can maintain thier mental state, they can keep the rest of the paste active. Go to Comment