Innistrad as a Campaign Setting

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Innistrad as a Campaign Setting

Post by Prak »

I've been wanting to make Innistrad as a setting, because it scratches my "monsters as pcs" and psuedo-1700s horror fantasy itches. Dunno if I'm going to do much with it, at least any time soon, given that I'm running a PF AP, but whatever. It's another project. Because I totally don't have enough of those.

Started by making a zombie race, since I guess Skaabs can actually be sapient-

Skaab
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Skaabs are creatures made from various corpse parts stitched together by mad necromancers known as skabaren. As creatures made from corpses, their primary strength comes from not actually being alive, but they also benefit from being composite creatures. Most skaabs are actually mindless, but some, made by particularly powerful necromancers, do have minds and sapience.
Skaab Racial Traits
  • +2 Str or Dex, No Con, -2 Int: Skaabs are constructed creatures, often made for a purpose, while many are musclebound brutes, there are those made with more corded, wiry muscle and nervous systems chosen for their speed. All skaabs are undead creatures which lack a metabolism, and their reanimated brains are poor tools for logic.
  • Medium Undead (Dark Minded)
  • Skaabs have a base speed of 25'
  • +1/3 character level Natural Armor: Skaabs reanimated flesh is thick and rubbery, making it more resilient than living flesh.
  • Composite Creature: All skaabs are stitched together from multiple corpses. The primary benefit of this is that it allows them to be healed with a needle and thread, without any need for magic. With an hour of downtime, a needle, and thread, a character can make a Craft (Tailor) check at DC 15. A successful check heals the skaab 5 hp, plus 1 per point their check exceeds the DC. The skaab can heal themselves in this way, but the DC for doing so is 20.
    In addition, a skaab can temporarily augment themselves with spare body parts. Given fresh corpses at hand, a skaab can effectively create a magic item which confers an enhancement bonus. This magic item is temporary in nature, lasting a number of hours equal to the skaab's character level, but it does not require gold or xp, merely time and the aforementioned spare parts. Rules for creating Skaab grafts follows.
  • Automatic Language: Skaab speak Common and a single language chosen by their creator at the time of their making.
  • Bonus Languages: Any
  • Favored Class: Fighter and Rogue
Skaab Grafts
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Given time and access to fresh body parts, Skaabs and characters with access to Blue magic and ranks in Craft (Tailor) skill can create temporary grafts for Skaabs. These grafts are magic items which are limited to conferring either a single enhancement bonus or a natural attack, but do not cost money or XP.
The enhancement bonus granted by a Skaab graft works slightly differently from normal magic items. First- in order to confer a bonus, the creature the part is from must have a bonus that is higher than 0 in the given stat. For example- a skaab could replace their arms with the arms of an ape to gain an enhancement bonus to Strength, or graft ape skin to their body to gain an enhancement bonus to Natural Armor, but they could not gain an enhancement bonus to Intelligence or Charisma from ape body parts. Second- the bonus granted by the item is static and calculated based on the HD of the donor creature. The ape arm graft from the previous example would grant a +2 enhancement bonus to strength, while the ape skin graft would grant a +1 enhancement bonus to the skaab's natural armor.
If the donor body has a natural attack, a Skaab Graft made from that creature can integrate the natural attack. It deals appropriate damage for the skaab's size, however, if the donor creature is smaller than the skaab, treat the skaab as being one size smaller, if the donor creature is larger than the skaab, treat the skaab as one size larger.
If the donor is at least the same size as the skaab and has alternative movement modes, these can be granted as an graft which takes an amount of time based on the mode- 30 minutes for swim or climb, 1 hour for burrow, and 2 hours for flight. The graft grants the chosen movement form at a speed of 10 ft per crafter character level.
Creating a Skaab Graft requires 10 minutes per HD of the donor creature, plus 10 minutes per natural attack integrated. A Skaab Graft lasts a number of hours equal to the character level of the creating character.


What do people think of the Skaab Graft thing? I know that in general magic items with creature part prereqs are considered too complicated, and too much to track, but I think it's an acceptable level of "wait, what does this thing have?" Certainly less than you'll care about as a necrolord. Are the time requirements worth the bonuses?
Last edited by Prak on Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Skaabs are very specifically made by wizards, and those wizards are player characters. Skaabs are equipment.

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Post by Mechalich »

Looking at Innistrad's actual cards, I'd say your races are limited to humans, spirits, vampires, and werewolves. And spirits might be pushing it. The setting is low on monster diversity too: angels, demons, undead, and a few spare beasts. Those monsters that there are tend to be divided by region.

Aside from the angels, running it in 3.X is basically a Ravenloft mod with a lot of Ravenloft's peculiarities simply stripped out.
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Post by Antariuk »

I thought about Innistrad as a setting a while ago when I fiddled with a fantasy hack of the Thirty Years' War, to be played in or around the Black Forest, and basically got nowhere (Innistrad looked promising at the time because it comes with a lot less complicated politics than a Thirty Years' War setting, and because you can run vampires vs. werewolves if you so desire).

But, aside from having lots of cool art and ideas for new monsters, is there any real benefit in running Innistrad instead of Ravenloft? I've only browsed the player's guide PDF and some articles on Innistrad on the WotC website, so I'm probably missing a lot of details, but in the end I just couldn't find a reason to put real effort in it.
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Post by Prak »

Skaabs are zombies, zombies made by sufficiently powerful necromancers can be sapient. Grimgrin is an example of a zombie in Innistrad that seems to be sapient, and there are zombies with classes. In fact, skaabs are specifically meant to evoke Frankenstein's monster. Saying they're equipment, not at least potentially player characters is like saying warforged are equipment.

I sorted out all the creatures printed in the original Innistrad block and the new one, and made a list of sapient races-
Zombie (some can be sapient, and there are Inn. examples)
Human
Werewolf
Shapeshifter
Angel (possible power issue here)
Spirit
Vampire
Demon (see Angel)
Devil
Homunculus
Shade
Scarecrow (maybe. It's the Artifact tribe for Innistrad, but I'd have to research whether they're supposed to be sapient)

That's a reasonable number of races, I think. As far as monsters go, you're missing Gargoyles, Golems, various animals (frequently of unusual size), dragons, dryads, elementals, fungi, gryphons, monstrous insects, hydras, oozes, plants, skeletons, treefolk, wurms and drakes, not to mention the entire list of races can pull double duty as protagonist and antagonist, and the Horror creature type, which seems to be a sort of magical corruption that can affect monsters and playable races.

That said, even without scouring and saying "if there's at least one card, it counts," there's nothing really wrong with a campaign setting being somewhat limited in scope if you're looking at just using it for your own games, which I think is what I'm looking at in making Innistrad a campaign setting. I mean, hell, if you look at the actual fluff, Innistrad isn't a plane so much as it is a continent, and kind of a small one at that. So I'd possibly stick it into a larger setting, or stitch it onto a few other thematically appropriate settings.

Given that one description I've heard of Innistrad, on here, even, is "Ravenloft done right," I think the fact that it's basically Ravenloft minus peculiarities isn't a bad thing.
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Prak »

RE benefits-

Well, Ravenloft has a ton of baggage, part of which is that it was done pretty badly in 2e. Magic has people who are pretty skilled, if medium-focused, in setting creation, so I think Innistrad has some definite appeal that Ravenloft doesn't necessarily.

And I'm a magic nerd who is really into Dungeon/Magepunk, which wasn't a thing when Ravenloft was written, so while Ravenloft was always appealing, Innistrad is something that I'm just personally really interested in.
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Prak »

Vampire (Innistrad)
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Vampires on Innistrad are an unusual breed, not undead like most. Instead, they are humans who have undergone a special alchemical procedure that makes them hunger for blood.
The alchemist Edgar Markov sought a solution to the crop famine that faced his people. Unable to do anything to increase supply, he turned to decreasing demand. Through a ritual that involved ingesting angelic blood, he turned some of his fellow humans into vampires. They now needed blood, not crops to survive, and only human blood would do. This worked, after a fashion, but being told you were changed to save your former fellows tends to inflate the ego. Vampires now see themselves as the saviors of humanity, and treat humans as chattel.
The alchemical ritual involved drinking blood taken from angels, and changed the new vampires inside and out. Vampires have black scleras with bright, usually gold, irises, and hair that ranges from nearly black blue to nearly black crimson. Lighter colors are occasionally seen, but any vampire with hair that is lighter than crimson or burgandy is likely wearing a wig. Their own blood carries the same effect as the blood the original vampires drank to become vampires.
There are four clans of vampires, divided primarily by geography. Traditions within the clans do lead to certain inclinations, but all vampires use the same base stats, and have access to the same powers.
Vampire Racial Traits
  • +4 Str, Vampires are said to have immense strength, but on average they're only about twice as strong as a human
  • Medium Monstrous Humanoid, Vampires on Innistrad are alive, but no longer human, the ritual of ablution or the process of siring changes them sufficiently that they are no longer entirely humanoid.
  • 40 foot base speed
  • 2 Claws and Bite which deal standard damage for a medium creature
  • Blood-drinking: Vampires are sustained by blood, typically drank straight from a person. If the vampire has a helpless human, or has won a grapple, they may elect to drink the person's blood. To do so, they must succeed at a touch attack with their bite, which deals 1 point of Con damage in addition to standard bite damage.
  • Silent Aura (Su): At will, a vampire can create an aura of supernatural silence. This aura acts exactly like the spell silence, save that it radiates only 5' from the vampire. The caster level of this effect is equal to the vampire's character level, and the save is based on the vampire's charisma.
  • Ageless Body: Once turned into a vampire, a person ceases to age. Physical penalties do not accrue, and a vampire will not die of old age. Mental bonuses for aging are bad, and should be replaced by some kind of study mechanic, which they're supposed to actually represent.
  • Vampiric Vulnerabilities: For all their strength, vampires do have several notable weaknesses-
    • Living Wood: While all weapons are effective against vampires, living wood is more so. Whenever a vampire is subject to an attack from live wood (wood that has been separated from its source no more than three days), they suffer damage as if a critical hit had been made. If the die roll would indicate a critical hit, the critical is automatically confirmed, and the multiplier is treated as one point higher.
    • Moon Water: Water in which the moon is reflected is an un-passable barrier to vampires, as it links the food source of humans with the source of power for the angel Avacyn, created to strike a balance between humans and vampires. If the water no longer reflects the moon for any reason, the vampire may cross it. Avacyn can create specially blessed water which will burn vampires like acid.
    • Silver Truth: Vampires are not appreciably weak to silver, but they have a connection to the silver moon of Innistrad due to the use of angelic blood in the ritual that created them. When a vampire is reflected in silver, they see what they would be as a mortal. This is a source of great stress for the vampire, who can sense the presence of silver, and just being around silver weapons can stress them enough to put them at a disadvantage in combat. If a vampire is within 100' of silver weapons, they suffer the shaken condition.
    • Avacyn's Power: As Avacyn was created to strike a balance between humans and vampires (by preventing vampires from completely subjugating humanity), her symbols hold power over vampires. In the presence of a holy symbol of Avacyn, a vampire must make a Will Save (DC 15) or be panicked. If the symbol is held by a creature and brandished, the DC is (10+half creature's HD+creature's Wisdom Mod) or 15, whichever is higher.
    • Bloodthirst: Vampires are living creatures, and as such require sustenance. However, being alchemically changed, they can only derive nourishment from living human blood. A vampire must consume at least 10 pints of blood (roughly the contents of the average human) each month, or waste away. If a vampire does not consume enough blood in a 30 day period, they will wither and desiccate, suffering 1d4 Con drain each day until they reach 0 Con or until day 4, when they crumble into dust. If they make up for the deficit in this period, they can reverse this damage, recovering all drained Con the next day. Blood drank to make up for the deficit does not sustain them for the next 30 day period.
      Blood must be human, and must be living (separated from human no more than 3 days, or magically preserved) to give the vampire any nourishment.
      In a single round, a vampire can drink about 1 pint of blood from an open artery. Thus, it takes about a minute to completely drain a person (however, keep in mind that is roughly equivalent to chugging more than gallon of thick milk in a minute, and most vampires pace themselves). A vampire who has drank this quickly is staggered for an hour while their body deals with the large influx of food.
  • Siring: A human drained by a vampire will not automatically turn into a vampire. To create a new vampire, one must first drain a human, and then put their own blood into the human. Usually the easiest way to do this is for the vampire to cut their tongue or the inside of their cheek before feeding, allowing the backwash to mingle their blood with their prey's. Within 1d3 days, the human will begin to feel bloodthirst, but in this early period, only their sire's blood will quench their thirst. If they do not drink their sire's blood before the next new moon, the human will die. If they do drink their sire's blood in that period, they become a full vampire, losing all human racial traits and gaining the traits described here.
  • Automatic Language: Common, or what was known in their mortal life.
  • Favored Classes: Fighter and Wizard
I feel like this isn't a base character. Seems like vampires should get a hit die or two and just start at that level.

Oh, and I welcome input on how to make the Con damage from blood loss and the average blood quantity line up in a way that makes blood drain a meaningful ability.
Last edited by Prak on Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:30 am, edited 2 times in total.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by koz »

The 'mental bonuses still accrue' thing basically means that vampire stat modifications are Str + 4, Int +3, Wis +3, Cha +3 from starting out old. Probably not what you wanted.
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Post by Prak »

Not what I want, but I realized it and kind of just accepted it. Is it better to just say that ageless races don't get aging bonuses?
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Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by koz »

Prak wrote:Not what I want, but I realized it and kind of just accepted it. Is it better to just say that ageless races don't get aging bonuses?
Explicit is better than 'dumpster-divers and rules lawyers get more than you'. If you're OK with these sorts of stat adjustments, just make it Str +4, all mentals +2 and say that they get no bonuses or penalties from aging. Nice and direct.
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Post by Schleiermacher »

Even better to just throw out mental ability bonuses from aging completely, because they are bullshit. People don't get more keen or charismatic as they grow older, if anything it's exactly the opposite.
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Post by erik »

I don't know enough about Innistrad in specific to say for certain, but if this were anything like normal 3.x then I'd scrap almost the entire thing and make this a template that you pay off with, say, 5000 XP.

Stat the natural weapons
Blood Drain attack similar to Dire Weasel (but 1 Con dmg/round)
+4 Strength
+4 Move Silently racial bonus
+10' fast movement
DR 5/magic
Spawn ability
Ageless trait

(and I like Schleiermacher's suggestion of tossing out aging bonuses 100%, that has only ever been used for cheese, no game has benefited from it in the history of ever)

Learning a language from spawning is silly. Favored class changing... ehhhh, I don't like that either. *toss*

And you're pretty much there. Throw in some fluff about water-crossing, lack of reflection, and let people of faith (clerics/paladins) spend a turn undead to repel them. And some fluff/micro-crunch about needing to use Blood Drain to feed nightly, weekly or whatever.

The business of draining Con to zero and that not being fatal, ugh. Bad mechanics and bad fluff. And you don't need to be totally exsanguinated to die.

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The flavor text says they are products of an alchemical process, but then describes a spawning process. Bad flavor text, bad!

The blood drain process is way over-complicated. They can die and rise again as part of the spawning process. That's easy mechanically, and you don't have to worry about blood quantities.
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Post by Username17 »

Innistrad Vampires are pretty similar to World of Darkness Vampires except a lot more powerful. Which is honestly, exactly where Vampires should probably be. You have various bloodlines of vampires, and different vampires within the same bloodline have different powers. Very crucially, some vampires in Innistrad fly and some don't. And also crucially, not every vampire in the same bloodline at the same power level can fly.

So basically you're going to want to do the kind of World of Darkness to D&D hack that people have been wanting to do forever. You have bloodlines that have favored powers and as you go up in level you can make a number of selections off your Bloodline lists and a number of selections off the other lists.

The difficult thing is handling Vampire powers (and Werewolf powers, for that matter) in a level based system. Vampires clearly have classes, because you got Vampire Berserkers, Vampire Warriors, Vampire Knights, Vampire Assassins, Vampire Wizards, and so on and so forth. Making that work is obviously difficult, because asking people to multiclass levels of Vampire and levels of Wizard is not likely to work. My suggestion would be to have Vampire use up magic item slots. So if you're a Human you have an eight item limit, and if you're a Vampire you have a four item limit. And your vampire powers grow as you level in the same way that a suit of magic armor would grow as you leveled.

Now as for Spawning, it is very notable that some vampire spawning is better than others. Call the Bloodlines makes 1/1 Lifelink Vampire Knights, while the Bloodline Keeper makes 2/2 flying Vampires. My suggestion for that is that spawn creation powers have level minimums to convert characters, and that if you convert someone who isn't powerful enough you turn them into an X hit die monster (like the Incorrigible Youths). And your spawn powers have number limits similar to Leadership.

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Post by Prak »

Erik, feel free to make your own Gothic horror d20 game.
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Post by erik »

I dunno if d20 handles horror well. I did start a d6 TN 5 age of reason horror game like 5+ years ago but shelved it when I saw I needed to scrap and redo significant portions. If I wanted to try again I would probably use tweaked Ubiquity system or my Nexus system.

In this particular instance I'm just helping by pointing out weak mechanics and inconsistencies, and offering solutions. Take all, none or any of my suggestions as you see fit.

There's errors in blood drain that I didn't specifically address since it is easier to scrap it and spend 1/10th the words on a simple blood drain mechanic. Like 5 min at 1 pint per 30 sec is 10 pints which is 1.25 gallons, not a half gallon. Little things. And if humans can live with only 1 pint of blood in this setting so be it. That's the fun of going all in with raelizm mechanics. My group has gone the silly route of using spell component pouches as sources of rations by eating tarts for Tasha's hideous laughter.
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Post by Prak »

Well, what I meant by my response is that I'm going by the Innistrad fluff. Sure, it may be odd that the effects of an alchemical ritual can be conferred by the embrace, but given that the ritual involved drinking angelic blood in the first place, it's not that odd, and it was alchemy, so obviously it changed the blood of the recipients such that it carries the condition. Works for me.

The Innistrad plane book says that their vamps need 5L of blood per month, which is about all the blood in a person. I converted it to imperial volume measures because I'm an American and I don't know why the hell WotC, an American company, used liters. Basically I figured "what's a comfortable mouthful of liquid in six seconds? *take a sip of coffee* Oh. Ok." So 4oz/round. 8 oz to the cup, so 1 cup in two rounds. 2 cups in a pint, so 1 pint in 4 rounds. 2 pints in a quart, so 1 quart in 8 rounds, and round up to a minute because fuck rounds at that point.

And I see where I made my mistake. It'd been a long day, I kept doubling. So, yeah, 5 quarts in 40 rounds, or 4 minutes, or 1.25 gals in 4 minutes. Ok. I'll fix that.

I recognize how bullshit the "I want this power to be meaningful, so it should have con drain. I can't do 1pt/Xrnds, that's bullshit. Ok 1 con per round. But then people are dying when they've lost, like, a bit more than a quart of blood. That seems wrong. Fuck. Eh, fuck it, they have blood left, so they don't die of con damage from this. It works." The alternatives are that blood drain does hp damage, or con damage over multiple rounds, or vampires are shotgunning blood from arteries in combat.

I mean, I might be ok with the last, but in order for the average human to die from blood loss over 10 rounds through a Con Drain mechanic, the vampire is seriously shotgunning a pint of blood in six seconds.

...on the other hand, I just looked up a video of someone actually shotgunning a beer and they drained 12 oz in like 4 seconds, so... fuck me, maybe that could be an ok rate of blood drain.
Last edited by Prak on Mon May 30, 2016 7:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Stupid question from someone who has been off the cardboard crack since Mercadian Masques, but what value does using Innistrad specificially bring to this project?

Is there a reason not to make it some other gothic horror d20 game that you can pitch as "It's like Innistrad, but with less stupid a unique IP so I can maybe sell this someday without fear of litigation." ?
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Re: Innistrad as a Campaign Setting

Post by Prak »

Prak wrote:I've been wanting to make Innistrad as a setting, because it scratches my "monsters as pcs" and psuedo-1700s horror fantasy itches. Dunno if I'm going to do much with it, at least any time soon, given that I'm running a PF AP, but whatever. It's another project. Because I totally don't have enough of those.
Prak wrote:RE benefits-

Well, Ravenloft has a ton of baggage, part of which is that it was done pretty badly in 2e. Magic has people who are pretty skilled, if medium-focused, in setting creation, so I think Innistrad has some definite appeal that Ravenloft doesn't necessarily.

And I'm a magic nerd who is really into Dungeon/Magepunk, which wasn't a thing when Ravenloft was written, so while Ravenloft was always appealing, Innistrad is something that I'm just personally really interested in.
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Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Prak »

Made the changes to calculations in the Vampire bloodthirst trait, changed the amount that can be drank in a round so that the average person dies from con loss and blood loss at the same point (and I'm totally cool with 8 con people having less blood and 14 con people having more blood). I made it more explicit that vampires carry the alchemical ritual effects in their blood.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Username17
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Post by Username17 »

Josh_Kablack wrote:Stupid question from someone who has been off the cardboard crack since Mercadian Masques, but what value does using Innistrad specificially bring to this project?

Is there a reason not to make it some other gothic horror d20 game that you can pitch as "It's like Innistrad, but with less stupid a unique IP so I can maybe sell this someday without fear of litigation." ?
Innistrad specifically has a couple of key advantages. The first is that the Magic background ensures that even in a game where people are expected to play investigators wearing tricorn hats, that no one is going to call bullshit if a martial character gets powerful enough to pull his weight alongside a high level wizard. If you're going to do a D20ish game, that's pretty sweet, because normally the thing where player won't accept Fighter abilities that are good enough to keep those same players from feeling useless at high level is a pretty big deal.

The second is that it comes with a lot of concept art. This is invaluable because it means that everyone at the table can picture the same things in their mind. I mean sure, everyone can imagine a foppish vampire or a cackling necromancer, but if you all have some concept art to look at you can all picture something that's basically the same. That means that players can agree on story elements like whether hats can be used to carry water and whether you could plausibly hide a hatchet in a dress.

And perhaps most importantly of all: Magic settings are made out of tiny pieces of flash fiction. And I mean tiny. Ashmouth is mentioned on a grand total of six cards, and there is not a lot of information on any of them. What this means is that there's a lot of stuff to riff on when you want to do cooperative storytelling, but there isn't a lot of detailed obscurica for people to shout "Objection!" at you if you want to take the story in some direction or another.

You could certainly do worse. Way worse. It's probably the best setting for doing Ravenloft style D&D type adventures in.

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Prak
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Post by Prak »

So, the vampire race I wrote up. Assume that vamps get a second +4 stat boost based on bloodline.

Would that be equivalent to a major magical item, or could it squeak by as a medium?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by OgreBattle »

a class level based system feels like an uphill struggle for an Innistrad game, maybe consider going down the Mutants & Masterminds route so you don't have to worry so much about vampire wizards balanced against human wizards in terms of racial abilities vs getting higher level spells faster.

Then you can do stuff like "oh no the good thraben monster hunter was mauled by a werewolf" without agonizing over werewolves being a template vs class vs race or feat or something.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Mon Oct 17, 2016 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Rawbeard »

When Frank said Innistrad vampires are like WoD vampires just better I have to wonder... why aren't they undead? WoD vampires are most certainly walking corpses with (limited/shitty/totally broken. pick one) superpowers. I generally dislike any non-undead vampires, SR being the only one so far that kinda didn't make me roll my eyes (until 4E hit the shelves and they suddenly actually fed on blood for sustenance).
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

OgreBattle wrote:a class level based system feels like an uphill struggle for an Innistrad game, maybe consider going down the Mutants & Masterminds route so you don't have to worry so much about vampire wizards balanced against human wizards in terms of racial abilities vs getting higher level spells faster.

Then you can do stuff like "oh no the good thraben monster hunter was mauled by a werewolf" without agonizing over werewolves being a template vs class vs race or feat or something.
I'm just going the "transformation takes one of your magic item slots" route Frank keeps advocating.
Rawbeard wrote:When Frank said Innistrad vampires are like WoD vampires just better I have to wonder... why aren't they undead? WoD vampires are most certainly walking corpses with (limited/shitty/totally broken. pick one) superpowers. I generally dislike any non-undead vampires, SR being the only one so far that kinda didn't make me roll my eyes (until 4E hit the shelves and they suddenly actually fed on blood for sustenance).
I would imagine it's the same reason Innistrad werewolves have gorilla-esque proportions and aren't contagious, to create a thing that WotC can lay claim to as their product identity. In world, Innistrad vampires aren't undead because they're transformed by an alchemical process which can be administered to others via their transformed blood.

The funny thing to me is that Innistrad Werewolves are explicitly humans possessed by nature spirits and so are pretty similar to World of Darkness werewolves, except better executed.

So, basically, Innistrad is Ravenloft done right with World of Darkness monsters done right.

Which is fucking hilarious to me.
Last edited by Prak on Mon Oct 17, 2016 7:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Rawbeard »

that sounds interesting so far. from a D&D point of view wouldn't the abberation type fit better? that seems to be the go to type for "transformed from natural into... not". stupid game has way too many types for living things, crams too much into outsider at the same time... I digress
To a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail.
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