Damanor’s Lair: a Gaming Blog

 I really like the idea of playing a shape-changer in Dungeons and Dragons, but I’ve sometimes wondered if I could pull it off and make it fun for myself and the others at the table. Doppelgängers, changelings, mimics, trappers, lurkers above, piercers, rugs of smothering - I like the concepts but have often wondered if I could pull it off. I finally broke down and am giving it a try. https://damanor.blogspot.com/2022/10/rime-of-frostmaiden-keth-hand.html?m=1 Obviously I’m not keeping it a secret. Here are some of my thoughts. I’ve read two big bits of advice for secrets in social-focused RPGs like Houses of the Blooded or Vampire LARPs: 1. Keep all your secrets to yourself and nobody can betray you. 2. Play with open secrets and let any player who wants to know about it in on the secret so it’s more fun for everyone. Obviously, these two pieces of advice are in conflict. In my mind, each piece of advice comes from a completely different goal in playing the game. People who follow ...

[I thought about it and decided that having someone with all the benefits of a half-elf PLUS all the benefits of casting Detect Thoughts and shape changing from the Doppelgänger Secret is OP, especially since no other characters have Secrets. Edited with some modifications. The character is still able to do all the things he did previously.] AKA Robert Swan, Kellen Ambrose, Lady Margus [Deleted: Half-Elf (doppelgänger) criminal clockwork soul sorcerer/order cleric] Changeling (doppelgänger) criminal Shadow Sorcerer/Hexblade Warlock Keth’s mother Elspeth and his grandfather Aleric Hand are free carters, traveling the same sales route every year and trying to make ends meet with a one sack share. (They are hired to drive a cart full of other people’s goods from town to town and are allowed to carry one sack of their own goods as a “one-sack share” to sell on the side.) Keth learned to value and sell anything, but his favorite times were when he wintered with Ambrose, a wandering friend o...

Chaotic neutral* outlander lizardfolk druid A lot of this is inspired by a great post on Goblin Punch. https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/7-myths-everyone-believes-about-druids.html?m=1 As a reptile in cold weather, Hangul is out of its** element. Hangul comes from a naturally forested area, where they learned from the druid Nataalsha. Nataalsha’s views on non-druids were very extreme, and she often opposed local lords and elf leaders about the right way to live with nature. After a time, Nataalsha sent Hangul away to a desert, where they learned about plants and animals that survived with minimal resources and how to live independently+. After nearly two years, Hangul returned to the forest, only to see that local human lords and elven leaders had driven the dangerous forest animals away, cut back the more invasive plants, and generally turned the wild forest into a tended game preserve where the nobles and rulers could hunt at their leisure¥. Hangul found Nataalsha in one of th...

 I recently joined a new D&D 5e campaign. It looks like it’s going to be a ton of fun. I made a druid that set a polar bear loose on a group of goblins. Good times. The MeetUp.com announcement https://www.meetup.com/wasatch-rpgamers/events/289237936/ The campaign Facebook page https://m.facebook.com/groups/1561088737668003/ I’m going to post a few things on this blog just for fun. This is not official content, it’s just character backstory I’ve come up with.

 Sarna.net has their Bad Mechs feature for the Charger. Go check it out.

 For the Americans out there, Happy Thanksgiving! Of course, holidays by this name are celebrated on different dates in other countries (states in political science terms). In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated the second Monday in October. Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia celebrate Thanksgiving on various days this time of year. There are festival holidays with similar names in Germany and Japan. There is a harvest festival in the United Kingdom during Autumn, and I understand that some people in the United Kingdom celebrate what they call Thanksgiving on July 4 . Other places throughout the world celebrate it differently. Regardless of where you are and what you celebrate, I hope you have many reasons to give thanks.

 A less complicated and more straightforward way to model pilot inexperience is to just say that the less experienced pilot just doesn’t have the ability to use all the systems or avoid enemy fire as well as an experienced pilot. Just remove a system to model that. For example, let’s say that a green pilot is supposedly piloting a frame with a Soldier loadout (2RD/1B/1Y/1G/2W). However, since they’re inexperienced, they don’t have a spotting (Yellow) system. The reason the inexperienced frame pilot doesn’t have a spotting system is that he or she doesn’t know how to use a system to spot enemy frames as effectively while doing too many other things such as attacking an enemy frame and moving their own frame. On top of that, the less experienced pilot isn’t as good at keeping the frame out of trouble under fire, so they can’t take as many hits. Basically, I’m using my existing house rules for inner Sphere pilots against advanced or Clan tech to instead model pilot inexperience. A les...