Wednesday 1 January 2020

The Return of "Why did I click this, it's barely a sentence"

Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF d&d has a lot of underwater peoples.
"
there are the Kua-Toa, Mermaids ("""merfolk""") , Triton, Locathah and Sauhagin as fish with human bits or characteristics
Then there's aquatic reskins of surface monsters/races that get their own name:
(and are smart enough to hang out in loose society) Merrow, Scrag, Kapoacinths
Then there's magical creatures that you could talk to but having a city of them seems odd
:Selkie, Nixie, Nereid
Then there's other underwater animals but as a race:
Crabmen, Ixitxachitl, Tako
and while every other humanoid race has got an underwater version at some point , only aquatic elves have shown up on the semiregular"
 
What in gods uglest child is it possible to do with them? 
Ocean based fights are notoriously one sided , so players avoid them and having players go underwater with magic involves either ignoring they are underwater or reminding them constantly they are underwater and neither seems that grand.
 
The only idea I got is take as many as you can bothered doing , and render them extinct and existing as archeological strata  .
As archeological strata you would need to condense it down to a detail and a reason for the players to care (unless you have far more patience and patient players).
(also maybe a reason they died)

Note lands and seas rise and fall so this strata doesn't need to be underwater by any means and you can make the ruins make even less sense because they were 3d spaces and that's why this massive room only has one exit on the ground.
So
Kua-Toa : Build everything out of defeated ritual enemies turned into coral. 
 
Civilization was unable to adapt to advances in warfare due to obsession with getting captives.

Coral tends to release dangerous unpredictable spiritual energy when destroyed

Triton s: Painted murals celebrating  their very present and powerful gods.
 
Gods ate them and ascended to space.
 
Numerous god stomach and skin parasites still found in hibernating states around ruins  .

Locathah:
Made everything out of magic super-glass. Liked imprisoning people in invisible labyrinths .
 
Turns out they making the glass out of the Kua-Toa coral and storing the toxic psychic waste in vast chambers that eventually burst make everyone turn themselves inside out with whatever was at hand.
 
Numerous nigh invisible glass weaponry still around. Also those angry ghost shit storage dumps 

Sauhagin:
still around , trying to colonize the land to avoid the mess from the last 3 peoples/.

7 comments:

  1. Or, somebody needs to develop an RPG naval battle system built on battleships that can bolt on to OSR...

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  2. I've always wanted to run an entirely-underwater OSR campaign. Players are merfolk or tritons or sea elves or water genasi or the like, living in underwater villages, navigating underwater dungeons, everything's underwater. you can swim across any chasm. the world is completely 3-D now. There's no fire, no torches, so many of the basic assumptions we make about swords-n-sorcery fantasy go away. And the surface? man, that's some other shit entirely, if you can't breathe air (which I'd rule you probably can't lmao) then the whole surface world becomes a place to stick a juicy alien overworld and let the players figure out how to survive there.


    don't think high fantasy, think normal OSR, gritty, low-fantasy, but it's water peoples instead of air peoples. could be fun as shit.

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    Replies
    1. the tricky bit is getting players to hold in their head that sound and dimensions are all different all the time or it's just fish themed d&d. If anyone wants to do Veins Of The Earth but for underwater that's opportunity right there

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    2. There was a BECMI supplement that had a stab at it (one of the creature crucibles, iirc): the bulk was about playable aquatic races but some effort was made to... mechanise(?)... the alien environment, sound, light and 3d movement.

      Something with the depth and creativity of Veins would be cool as fuck.

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    3. I think there's room for a lot of "Veins but it's __" supplements out there. That "into the weird and wild" book that came out recently tried its best to be "Veins but it's forests," whether it succeed is up for debate...

      but I would just eat up a "Veins but it's the ocean depths" book, or a "Veins but it's Hell" book, or ESPECIALLY a "Veins but it's the Macroverse" sort of thing where players are planet-sized folks like Galactus moving through nebulas and star clusters and shit, that's been a dream of mine for ages. maybe I'll need to write it myself eventually lmao

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    4. F O L L O W Y O U R D R E A M S
      ...even if your dreams are to faithfully world-devourers at a tabletop level.

      *especially if

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