Champions of Tibault: Vol 9

 Something I adore is when a PC makes a connection or helps someone and it has a chance to come back around. I think it's good storytelling. This time, the people of Sweet Water got to deliver on the aid they had been given. The party ended up with some not quite magical but still unusual variations of the standard equipment. Leather armor that granted a claw attack, rawhide shields that granted more AC than a standard shield, a staff made from one of the massive bones, and other treasures from Sweet Water.

    Additionally, I LOVE patron stuff. I love to see it come back around. I love to see a player remember they have a patron. I love to see a player remember that the relationship with patrons is transactional. Talshu was always pretty good about that stuff. The player continues to be good about that kind of thing as they continue to play in other campaigns. 

 

Session 9:

The village of sweetwater delivered! They brought leather armors and a rawhide shield made of this “primal” leather, granting additional benefit. With their reward in hand the party decided to mess with wounded animal further, hoping to find something condemning on the featherfolk slaver and arena master. While Talshu broke into his home she released a demon from an iron cage who offered her a wish. She suspected that he would twist the wish and the demon shrugged and more or less confirmed that he was a bastard. She wished for a book detailing all the accounts and information of the old empire, everything possible, no matter how frivolous. The demon gave her a book which she quickly got out from under before it smashed through the floor of the wagon that wounded animal called home. Unable to move the book Talshu called out to her patron, the architect, offering him the book as part of her continued service and possible future reward. He immediately rewarded her with a patron spell, dimensional sundering while he took her to his pocket dimension, The House of Legacy, where she met a strange group of adventurers, Spingsinger, Brother Gavin, Saldru, and Squire, all of them seeming like larger than life heroic figures, he said they were visitors to the house of legacy from “another system” some distant place he called “five-e”. He briefly explains something called an Eternal Champion and says that sometimes he’s not addressing her but the eternal champion before returning Talshu home to scramble away from the wreckage of wounded animal’s wagon.

Talshu unfortunately didn’t get away with no witnesses and as a result Wounded animal demanded justice, Talshu had been summoned to the Arena to fight and prove her innocence. Witherbone and Egrat battle in her stead, against a 4 armed gorilla monster who almost kills Egrat. Fortunately Witherbone is able to put the beast down and a Mountainborn in the crowd with a talent for healing is able to bring Egrat back from the brink.

 

Magic Items: 5 potions

     You know what I love about DCC? Magic items. The rules give scarcely little information about them in the games. They encourage you to give them a story, to make each one unique in it's own way. No sword is "a +1 sword". You know the rest. I talked a little bit about Scrolls not too long ago and how those should also be unique, which the book gives us a great start for. The other "common" disposable magic item is a potion. I think those should be just as unique and storied! Maybe not as much as say, a sword or a wizard's staff, but certainly some kind of history. So in the spirit of that, I've been playing with potion tables and rolled up 5 potions with little stories, descriptions, and in some cases, side effects, to make them feel a little more special when someone finds them.

 

5 Potions 

Blog d100: Player Suprise

 Continuing the Blog d100 series using the d4 Caltrops table! The gauntlet was laid down by Buster over on 19 Sided Die and I will continue to go through it when I need a filler post!

Rolled 60: A time the players surprised you or ruined your plans.

 

This is a fun one for me, it means another story time post!

 

I played for years with a dude who was constantly throwing me off or catching me off guard. He did this thing where he could almost see the connection to the most distant pieces of the puzzle in his plans. The catch was that he could only do this with his own plans. He couldn't see through the plot or plans of the foes. 

 

Guy was usually playing an evil character but was somehow lovable about it. He would tell everyone long before the first session, "I'm going to betray all of you at some point". Then when it happened everyone always just kinda shrugged and laughed like "oh man, you really got us! we even knew it was coming! haha!". It was interesting, he had a unique ability to turn on the whole party and not even a single person would flinch when it happened. He telegraphed it, telling people not to trust his character and doing shady things in the open where other characters could see him and catch wind of his inevitable betrayal.

 

I ran a game using a combination of Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Super Spies. The goal of this game was to break into this facility extract important information for a group of people who hired them. The party was playing a group of basically bottom of the barrel contractors for this kind of job. Two people played something called "dedicated martial artists" These are characters who are extremely skilled fighters with borderline mystic martial arts abilities but fresh off the boat and no ideas of the modern world. One person played a Hardware character who was both a weapons expert and an electrical genius. This guy... He played something called a worldly martial artist.  He was meant to be the guide to the dedicated martial artists in the world... he roped them into this contract and was paying them pennies on the dollar for the job. It was discussed and everyone found it to be funny and fine. 

 

During their raid of this building they fought against some cyborgs and some strangely skilled martial artists for being on corporate payroll. Along the way they defeated a man with a sword that contained a demon. This guy took the sword and made minor deals along the way to the goal in order to gain some power. 

 

After a battle with an honest to god supervillain who was way above the pay grade of the party, and somehow coming up with a way to defeat him but not put him down, This guy has his character die. The sword offered him a second chance, a new life, at a cost. Dude didn't even hear it's deal and said, "nah, death is fine" before throwing the sword away and letting go of life. It really shocked me, I thought for sure he would take the deal and become a new villain in the setting. He was always playing such evil characters who were so quick to turn against the party.

 

Goes to show, you can play with someone for decades and they will still surprise you on occasion. 

 

 

As always with the blog d100 series, if you follow along and make your own entries please comment below and I'll link you at the end of the article. It seems this time there are no new places to send you but I'll keep an eye out! 

Super Vehicle Rules

 Mentioned briefly in the Vigilante Class for Comic Crawl Classics or Evolved I now present the super vehicle rules. I didn't really care for the rules presented in Evolved and wanted them to be a little more granular and potentially tied to progression and player choices. I wanted something that felt a little bit like it could allow choices for unique vehicles as players built them differently. I also wanted to tie it to the prosperity die, which this project will be using, when getting points for upgrading because we always see the most wealthy of heroes with these insane vehicles and super suits. I wanted something that gave players options and wasn't just loaded with bonuses to X or Y all over the place. I wanted it to feel like comic book craziness where a vehicle could be built quickly and we could lean into the "rulings not rules" style that DCC lives and breathes.

    The rules I present below assume using the same vehicle rules as Evolved which originally got them from The Umerican Survival Guide. 

     As with the other posts in this series, this is just the draft of these and a fully corrected, edited, formatted, and fleshed out set of rules will be presented when the book comes out.

 

Super Vehicles

Blog Graveyard Vol 3: Balthazar's Bloviations

     Balthazar's Bloviations, last seen February of 2020, was a more general RPG blog that covered content across multiple games, 5E, DCC, FASERIP, and a few others. He covered something near and dear to my heart, Superhero RPGs. Recent posts should tell you that I love superhero games. You don't see a lot of overlap in this sphere with superhero games. He also talks a bit about "cloud campaigns" which I'll share below and might be good for you. Overall I have gone back to this blog many times over the years for inspiration and just fun things to read. He loved tinkering with tables and many other things that feel near and dear to my heart. So here are some treasures from Balthazar's Bloviations to get you started!

 

Alignment Based Disapproval Tables: I really love these. Prior to stumbling on his post for this, I found myself thinking that this would be a good thing to have, splitting out disapproval based on alignment, if not the gods. If you don't want to write out a custom disapproval table but want it to feel more tailored to alignment, Balthazar has what you need.

Cloud Games: I think this is such a good take on the west marches style of game which I'm sure more than a few of you are familiar with. At its heart it is just a west marches style but it's meant to be episodic and have an indeterminate group of players. He has 4 posts about this and I suggest reading them. It feels a little like how I've treated every campaign as the same setting for years and years. I think I'm going to make the superhero game I end up running soon with each session being episodic.

Carousing Tables: I try to collect these left and right. I love a good carousing table. It is such a good little generator for interesting little moments, developments, and sinking money. There are quite a few over on Balthazar's Bloviations, including one if you are boring and want to lay low. Take a look, filter for carousing tables and have a good time looking at tables for the core classes. Keep in mind these are made for Skull Mountain but there is no reason you cant change things just a little and use these tables anyways. I know I have.

Shrunken PCs: This entry includes a table, a scenario, and tips for running that scenario. It is part of his "Steal This" series and honestly every entry in this series has something interesting to inspire or one to one rip and run at your own table. Give this series a look. Personally, I fantasize about running a game about a group of Tiny PCs once a month. Fighting insects, navigating the forest of someone's front garden, scaling massive structures of furniture, going on dungeon crawls in the walls of a house. 

 

    This one was fun to run back through. Balthazar's Bloviations ran for about 5ish years, give or take. I'll consider myself lucky if i can run that long. He hosts a second blog for a game called "The Dragonreach Campaign" which is mostly a chronicle of the game. By my best estimates it seems like it went on as recently as 2023, the only evidence I have for that is the house rule packet being updated in 2023. This isn't strictly a DCC blog but you can feel the years of experience coming through the posts with this one. I encourage you to go check him out, there is always something to take away from any source.

Class: Vigilante

     Another class made for compatibility with Evolved and Comic Crawl Classics. This time I wanted to emulate a street level Batman. Batman the animated series was the guiding light of writing this one. I wanted the character to feel like a detective and a bit of a scrappy fighter. The Utility belt also felt important to the identity of the class. I really started to lean into the comic terminology here, calling sessions "issues" or things that happen off screen "between the panels". I think as I write these and my own superhero rules I'm going to lean into this more.

    You might notice that The Vigilante starts with a super vehicle but there are no rules presented for them. I promise those are forthcoming, I'm still tweaking them and will probably release them some time before I release the rules for the Armored Hero class. 

 

The Vigilante 

Champions of Tibault: Vol 8

     This session brought the most wealth I think the party has ever held at a single time. The players sold a tube fed shotgun to the Gunsmith's guild who were all too eager to pay for this strange new design that didn't at all follow the rules of firearms in the setting. Eskel has yet to see any royalties from this yet, behind the scenes the Gunsmith's Guild is suppressing the technology, worried that it might change the balance of power if guns are no longer difficult to produce works of art. As time passes in the setting a new type of firearm will be released eventually but for now, the tube fed system remains a secret.

    This was also the first time someone use the DCC multiclassing rules. I gotta say it was pretty cool. This person saw a chance to make their character a better fighter and took it, letting her support herself in the arena, in a pinch.

 

Session 8:

Eskel courted with featherfolk gunsmiths about selling his newly acquired weapon. They asked him to come back when they could have more experienced look at the strange new weapon. He hired Quill, a featherfolk lawyer to represent him to this gunsmith and the gunsmiths guild. Wanting to help her friend, Talshu hired the Black Eye kobold gang to watch the featherfolk overnight. The expert gunsmith who came to represent the guild was an emperor penguin who seemed very eager to get his hands on this weapon. Ultimately the deal was that Eskel would receive 1000gp in advance, a favor worth 400gp, and a 5% royalty on any weapons made based on this design. Interested in becoming a better hand to hand combatant, Talshu started to study under the gladiator Arin. 

The party then decided they needed closure on Eskel’s death and returned to the Macphadin clanhold, finding his spirit residing there in the hero’s tomb. In his final moment he was elevated to the clan’s new Hero spirit. Here, in this place of heroes, The Architect arrived to make a formal patron bond with the party, making them truly bonded as patron and petitioner. To celebrate, on the way home they killed the petulant tree on the road, damaging it until it could no longer talk or move.