So Jeff Rients of future man eating fame wrote a list of 20 useful and entirely reasonable questions for your campaign.
This is not that table.
This is an example of the other type of questions players will ask you and you should get some practise answering them now before all those bright keen faces are turned you with the first input they have ever done to a roleplaying game
1. Is there weaponized Squid?
(follow up questions are below) Can I start with one? How much are they? Can I have one as a pet/horse/best friend? Can I play one? Can I dual wield them?
2. Is there undead robots?
follow up questions involve the nature of consciousness and the existence of the soul in your campaign and can I play one? or have one as a pet or a gun that shoots them?
3. Do Icebergs walk across the land ?
can I be from one? Is godzilla frozen in one? Can I play a godzilla?
4. What do birds know?
(no further questions)
5. Does medicine work like it does here but no-one knows CPR or does it work like a cartoon so I cure amnesia with more head injurys or does it work like medieval euro people thought it did with demons in your teeth?
Do I start with demons in my teeth? Do I know CPR? Can I invent CPR? Can I give myself powers with additionally organs? What planet is in ascension in my spleen midmorning?
6. I want to play a hobbit but really I'm the fleas controlling the hobbit. Where is that in the book?
Could I take over a new guy with my fleas? Or another players guy?
7. How much could I rent my body out to spirits before I lost control of my character?
What are the names of the spirits? Are they cool?
8.What level do I have to get my character to before I am the g.m?
Can I half be the g.m at an early level? What about when you leave the room?
9. What is the dumbest thing I can spend my money on?
no dumber than that but cool. Like a pet with a pet with a weapon? Can pets dual wield?
10. How ugly can my guy be? Like Can I basically be a walking fish?
No wait I wanna be a walking fish. What is the reverse scuba technology like in this world?
11.The lamp oil? Is that like cooking oil, kerosene, white spirits or napalm?
How much can I buy of it?
12. How does physics work in this world?
What makes the planets stay up? Are there planets? Is it elves? Can I play an elf from another planet? Does everything work like how we though it did in the past? Can I discover stuff and pass it off as a magic? Is possible to use the scientific process to organise the concepts of magic?
13. Can I start with weapon hands?
What about crab claws? Can I play a crab with human hands? Can I have one as a pet? Do they live on a different planet? Can we go there?
14. What cultures approve of cannibalism?
What about if we are super rich? Aren't rich cannibals be default , I mean if you think about it? How is the class struggle here anyway? Is there a Karl Marx? How receptive are people to the ideas of anarcho-syndicalism here?
15. Can my character not be real , but a hallucination of another character?
But I still wanna be able to do stuff. What are the stats for that?
16. Which is the rome but with lava fire country in this world?
What about the ice circus country? Can I have a pet from there?
17. Can I invent an insect?
as a player like right now I tell you an insect and you put it in the game? Or as a character? Can my spells be insects that then exist in this world after I cast them? Can I play an insect who is actually a spell cast in this world? What about as a pet?
18. Is there reverse fire?
What about reverse water or earth? What do they wear there?
19. How much money can I make inventing siege engines?
Can I play a siege engine? In what ways are animals used in siege engines?
20.What is the most significant tree to the economy of the starting place?
Is it really a tree or maidens stitched together? If I play a maiden do I get spells or do people that worship me get spells but only if I'm mad at them?
This is awesome. Can I have this list as a pet?
ReplyDeleteFor the Old HMS APOLLYON:
ReplyDelete1. Oh yes, both in the form of fleshcrafted sting flails and floating short tentacled void beasts that spray the stuff of pure primal chaos instead of ink. Everyone is weaponizing squid.
2.Yes, both of the lich in a suit of power armor and the ancient robot bits animated by ghosts variety.
3. There is little natural ice in the dulls seas of Pandemonium and no land, so no.
4. Depends on the bird, the giant mutant pigeons that roost in the deck towers know only how to kill, rut and despoil.
5. Medicine is an X in 6 skill mostly useful for stabilizing the dying and slowing poisons. It's mostly like today's medicine - there's even mad kelp and red lotus anesthesia (highly addictive of course).
6. No Hobbits, how about a flying monkey?
7. Depends on the spirits - forever if you are a Houngan of the Ship Spirits or a Adherent of the Leviathan. Otherwise not long.
8. 10, that's the max level.
9. Carousing and/or mad kelp.
10. As ugly as you wanna be, and you can play an icthyomorph thrall (a fish based mongrelman).
11. Whale oil and alcohol, and highly flammable.
12. That's a secret, but time runs at different speed in different parts of the ship.
13. You can, but it's hard to climb with weaponhands.
14. Cannibalism is taboo as it is associated with feral humans living in the hull and demon cults.
15. No
16. No one really - The Black Gang are the descendents of the Ship's Engineers, grown pale and tall in their furnace fortresses - they are very militant and worship a gunpowder eating fire god.
17. Sure, I might not use it though
18. I don't think so.
19. A lot. You can play an engineer and work towards owning boilermail - then you'll be a siege engine of sorts.
20. Any of the fruit trees in the upper deck's greenhouses and gardens are significant and very valuable.
This might be the list GMs fill out in that ice circus country... or maybe not the GMs themselves, but the magic fleas controlling them.
ReplyDelete1. Probably somewhere in the Gnoll Ruins under the Hollow Mountain Sea. If you feel like braving a high-level aquatic dungeon at level 3, sure you can start with one
ReplyDelete2. Only if you count the War Machines. Consciousness is defined by sentience + intelligence
3. Caramir, the Weeping Fortress might interest you. You can worship them, but you can't be them, unfortunately.
4. More than you would imagine, but don't listen to them. They only speak mangled, mocking mimicry.
5. Medicine's medicine.
6. That resolves as a halfling.
7. On a case-by-case basis, sure. Refer to the Possession corruptuion in Horror Adventures.
8. As long as it takes, dude.
9. You can spend your hard earned gold however you like.
10. Refer to the Deep One Hybrid, and remember, "Bokrug Want Coin".
11. Kerosene in Aydee and Samenaya, whale oil in northern Lilit, Urfin, and the Toran Archipelago, and it's yours, my friend, as long as you have enough rupies.
12. Four forces + force of magic. Everything was created by the raw primordial chaos mixing with Sephirot energy, aside from the Sephirot and Primordials themselves.
13. That's called a hook hand, and yes you can!
14. The Pashtar, the ancient Ishibians, a few of the tribes of Samenaya, and Lilitian nobility (shhh, that one's a secret!).
15. That's called a thoughtform!
16. None, but there is a frozen nightmare rome!
17. That's the GM's job!
18. The concept of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air being elements is fake (also yes to the water).
19. Not enough to offset the return on your investment.
20. The one keeping the giant murdercrow from going on a rampage.
1/2/3. No weaponized squid, no undead robots - robots exist but lack a soul (they cannot leave vestiges and do not have a transitional existence into the afterlife). No icebergs walk across land.
ReplyDelete4. Casting speak with animals or similar spells confers a sort of human sapience to the creature you are talking to, in order to make the spell more useful. So it isn't so much that all birds are filled with wisdom, but more that they are conferred sudden wisdom to be helpful when such spells are cast upon them. Very rarely you will see magical theorists (primarily armchair magic-users funnily enough, not druids) who say that the sudden conferring of sapience upon a wild animal is cruel and unusual and the spells should be banned. Nobody really listens to these people.
5. Medicine is primarily abstracted - if one of my players starts applying medical concepts to the game, we probably need to retool expectations. Mostly if you have a "medicine kit" then you can do "medicinal stuff" to someone. This is an area where I'm fine learning from video games.
6. You could make the Relic for your character the Fleas, and play Fleas controlling a character using that mechanic. The rest of the group would need to agree, and you would necessarily need to answer what you do as a player if the fleas die and the character survives. Hobbits don't exist in the Dawn State though, so you couldn't play a Hobbit.
7. You can't really rent your body out to spirits - possession is effectively a binary state, not a fractional one. You could do a timeshare of sorts by researching magic on how to allow for partial possession.
8. I run fairly collaboratively, so arguably players are always able to take on some GM duties. But there's no mechanism to actually becoming the GM, no.
9. There are no dumb expenditures, only disappointed players. If you want to buy something extravagant and potentially useless, tell your GM your intentions with the thing you're buying so they know what you hope to get out of it, and have a candid discussion about whether your intentions are likely to come to fruition.
10. The problem with players roleplaying ugliness is that very rapidly it can become abusive. If every other player is okay with it, then obviously it's okay. Being a walking fish is a different issue - you'd basically just play a sahagin. Reverse scuba technology isn't a big thing, but amphibian creatures cover that without the tech.
11. Lamp oil is mostly fish oil in my headcanon. It doesn't really come up, but if a player asked, that would be my answer.
12. Physics mostly works through common sense understandings - it occasionally breaks, usually when physics intersects with HP, but that's a game conceit people readily accept.
Delete13. You may have weapon hands as your Relic, if you wish to. The same goes for the more exotic things, like crabs for hands. Bear in mind that if you make a Relic, the primary purpose should be to provide a potential hook to the GM narratively, not as a "buff" to your character. The "crabs come from another planet" option is one I'm actually open to.
14. Political thought spans basically all of ancient and modern political thought that I as the GM am aware of, though it's emulated rather poorly as I was a physics major, not a political science person. Cannibalism exists but nobody really "approves" of it. It's a necessity to survive in some places, and it's a ritual of mourning in some places. Doing it "for the lulz" isn't approved of anywhere.
15. Being a hallucination actually cannot be a Relic. You can have a hallucination yourself as a Relic, but you must play someone who must face all the logistical challenges of being real.
16. I don't even understand what lava fire rome is as a concept, so no, it doesn't exist. If you want elemental cities go to elemental planes. There are elemental loci, places where the elements open into the prime material, but of those only one is large enough to fuel a whole civilization - the Windblown Dominion. Unfortunately they are fascists and extraordinarily racist.
17. Players can not only invent insects, they can invent wildlife and monsters if they so choose. The GM retains the right to veto or edit, but suggestions of that sort are totally fine if they're made in good faith. Starting with it is a Relic option.
18. No, elements don't have a pertinent-to-gameplay antimatter form.
19. Siege engine costs vary dependent on the thing you're trying to create. Most of them require a siege engineer to build - some specialized hireling. Costs are referenced from various domain game sourcebooks.
20. There IS an important tree in the holy land of Ishadia, actually. I wouldn't say it's important economically, but the holy tree is a pilgrimage site for many clerics and heralds, and the tree's branches make up the crown of the current emperor.
1. Not weaponized but deputized by gods.
ReplyDelete2. Kind of. You can play one.
3. not anywhere that you have heard of.
4. Ask them! You should learn the bird language
5. It works kind of like real life, but brains are different.
6. Not fleas, but you can play a parasite and infect new hosts.
7. A lot? Too much?
8. Eleven
9. Maybe Absinthe. There are less useful things but they're also less fun.
10. Very ugly.
11. Sesame oil, usually.
12.Big mystery. It's a combo of real physics, language, and magic.
13. Sure.
14. Various esoteric orders. Also, this drug requires cannibalism.
15. I've run that before, but could you also play the hallucinating character?
16. Nuf
17. Please do, ideally in the form of a d12 insect table
18. Sure
19. You could strike it rich if you overcame the logistical problems of constructing and transporting them.
20. Varies, but I can confirm that all of them are maidens stitched together.
I wanted to work on my fantasy setting, today, so I answered your 20 questions on my setting (crazy answers, which is fun to answer) on my blog:
ReplyDeletehttps://osrdread.blogspot.com/2021/02/dread-scrap-princess-10-questions-about.html