500 word challenge

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 10:22 pm

Darth Rabbitt wrote:Almost any humanoid monster from the 1e Fiend Folio you and AH reviewed, although I'd be most interested to see Xvart, Jermlaine, or Meazels.

Meazels are hard mode. First of all, the core "look" of the Meazel was defined by a couple of pictures that completely contradicted like every single thing in the original writeup. Secondly, they don't actually have a society as written because they are solitary and rarely leave their lairs. About the only interesting thing about the text is that apparently they go out of their way to murder Orcs and Kobolds. We can probably work with that...

Meazel

The Meazels are the last remnants of a people brought to the brink of extinction in a war between two fledgling empires of darkness. The armies of one empire were largely composed of Orcs, the other of Kobolds. Every Meazel village was near the border, and different villages sided with different empires to disastrous result: as the armies of the two empires pushed forwards and back, no Meazel village escaped the torch.

It was thought by many that the entire race of Meazels, never terribly numerous to begin with, had been wiped out by the tides of war. However, a scant few Meazels from a mercenary assassin cult escaped detection and survived the destruction of their homes as they were at the time away at war. Every remaining Meazel in the world is a descendant of one of those murder cultist mercenary soldiers. They had hired on to both sides, and with the destruction of their homeland vowed to continue their battle even in the absence of payment. And so, the Meazels hand down their never ending war from father to son and from mother to daughter, with the specifics of their war plan and their targets becoming increasingly garbled with each generation.

Meazels are shorter than Elves and comparably thin. Their skin is green or gray with irregular patches of red. They have brown, black, or red hair. The relationship between Meazels and Trolls is obvious from their appearance, but Meazels heal merely modestly quickly and lack the Troll's signature regenerative ability. Meazels are incredibly resistant to disease, and regularly wallow in filth that makes other races shudder.

Meazels do not really value anything regarded as “treasure” by other races, because they do not engage in trade, but many keep trophies from the equipment of their victims. They live as hunters and bandits in foul swamps and dark cave complexes, and truly want for nothing but food and weaponry. When Meazels have children, they teach them from birth the arts of trapping, murder, and guerrilla warfare as well as telling them of the centrality of the great war against the Kobolds or Orcs or possibly both and likely any other people who seem to be affiliated with the Kobolds or Orcs. When Meazels reach adulthood around the age of 12, their parents split up and each travels to make a new nest and hunt for themselves. Once away from their parents, Meazels rarely interact with each other as they spend almost all of their time in deep hiding, and their language skills atrophy.

Meazels usually try to pick off targets one at a time, using strangulation and sneak attacks to keep victims from alerting allies. Meazels will move bodies long distances to confound investigators. Attempts to convince Meazels that the war they are fighting is long over have met with failure.

-473 words

-Username17

schpeelah · Post by **schpeelah** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 10:27 pm

Chamomile wrote:I find that reorganizing all the Demon and Devil labels is too difficult, so I just make them a nationality. Baatezu are fiends from Baator, Tanar'ri are fiends from the Abyss. They have their places in their respective societies even if they do not especially exemplify its virtues at all. Demodands and Yugoloths are fine from this perspective, and in fact the lack of any natives for Acheron or Pandemonium is something of a nuisance.

That's what I was doing, because I find 'devils' being a group, and distinct from demons, both of which being subcategories of Outsiders from Evil Afterlife to be more stupid than calling the ones from Baator Baatezu.

Although the making a distinction between civilized and wild demons from any plane using the terms 'devils' and 'demons' respectively does sound rather intriguing.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 10:39 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:However, a scant few Meazels from a mercenary assassin cult escaped detection and survived the destruction of their homes as they were at the time away at war. Every remaining Meazel in the world is a descendant of one of those murder cultist mercenary soldiers. They had hired on to both sides, and with the destruction of their homeland vowed to continue their battle even in the absence of payment. And so, the Meazels hand down their never ending war from father to son and from mother to daughter, with the specifics of their war plan and their targets becoming increasingly garbled with each generation.

...so, the Last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, then?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 11:21 pm

What do you envision mechanically for "Meazels heal merely modestly quickly and lack the Troll's signature regenerative ability"?

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 2:00 am

Illumians. A friend reminded me of them when I was discussing this thread. There's also some kind of musically inclined race from some planes book I can't remember that he'd mentioned.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 2:15 am

fectin wrote:What do you envision mechanically for "Meazels heal merely modestly quickly and lack the Troll's signature regenerative ability"?

You could do something like having them heal 2x or 3x times faster than normal from rest. If you did, it'd essentially be a flavor ability because no one would really care in an actual campaign. A crunchier version would be to them stabilize better (automatically, 50% chance instead of 10%, whatever) and heal completely from a full rest.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 11:19 am

That's a couple requests for Illumians. Urgh. Illumians have a different problem than a lot of these races. Quite simply, the Illumians are not short of flavor text. The initial Illumian writeup is forty pages long. That's not a joke, it's seriously 40 pages. That's longer than the entire book that introduced the Aranea we were discussing earlier. And they get additional page space for character options elsewhere in the book. It's an enormous amount of text for a D&D race, likely more than 2nd tier races like Bullywugs have gotten in all editions combined.

As I see it, the issues are two: the first is that the core concept of Illumians is obviously game mechanical in nature, and the section is that the writeup is so boring that it makes me want to kill myself. Seriously, there's a chart to list examples of Illumian art that you might find in a treasure hoard and subsequently sell. Oil paintings and jade jewelry for the win! In a sense there is also a third problem, which is that the mechanics that the Illumians were introduced to pitch are fiddly and stupid. In essence then, the Illumians are a bad mechanical idea followed by dozens of pages of procedurally generated shovelware.

Moving forward, the core Illumian concept has to pretty much get binned. The concept, after all, is to have a race that gives out different racial benefits depending on what class you are and extra hotfix abilities for multiclass characters to try to patch failings of the 3e multiclass system. Any system which didn't have exactly the same multiclassing pitfalls as 3rd edition D&D (which means any new edition of this or any other game) would by definition need to structure the Illumians differently. And let's be honest: the Illumian compound words actually did a terrible job of patching what problems actually existed.

Illumians as concepted were pretty much doomed to support only a few "real" options and a lot of "fake" options with the additional caveat of probably having some seriously broken shit hidden in there somewhere. And that's pretty much what we ended up with. Most of the Illumian bonuses are rather worse than just taking a race with a more class-appropriate stat mod, and if you take the fighter-mage bonus as a high level Wu Jen you can convert castings of giant size into absolutely ricockulous save DCs on your spells. None of that is good for the game, and it's difficult to see how a new set of word writeups could produce anything other than basically that.

Anyway, if I was going to redo a "word centric" race of Humans, I think I'd do it like this:

Illumians

The Illumians are the creation of a powerful Human illusionist. She had been banished to an empty demiplane by the Demilich Acerak in the hopes that she would perish a slow and agonizing death, but with her abilities of reality manipulation she was able to sustain herself in mind and body until her eventual escape into the Mirror Realm several decades later.

The Illumians themselves were created after the Illusionist had been imprisoned for many years, and many of her earlier creations were in that strange world before the first Illumian opened their eyes. Creations of mirror-stuff simple and complex had been placed across the gray void, and several earlier attempts to create life were there. Most importantly to the Illumians, the Illusionist created a marvelous book whose pages show different things when special words are spoken in its presence. Some pages are simple diaries, others philosophical ruminations in several languages, others are spellbook pages. Illumian religion, such as it is, revolves around discovering all the words that change the properties of their sacred book and discovering all the secrets left for them by their creator.

Illumians appear physically Human, but are made out of mirror-stuff and magic words. Most Illumians are left handed and their hearts are on the right. Whenever any part of their skin gets pressed, words from somewhere in the Great Book appear in red on their skin. Illumians come in every skin color the Illusionist was familiar with and a couple that she appears to have made up, such as light green and blue. They can and do have children of their own, and can breed with Humans. When they do so, they always have twins: one regular Human and one regular Illumian. The other creatures the Illusionist made are often quite fanciful in appearance and cannot breed, but the Illumians consider them to be Illumians as well.

When the Illusionist escaped into the Mirror Realm, the demiplane Acerak had created was destroyed, moving all of its remaining contents into the prime material plane. The Illumians discovered that the Illusionist's compatriots had long ago defeated Acerak, and they attempted to integrate into Human society as best they could. The Illusionist herself vanished and has not been heard from since.

Magic words are important to the Illumians. They appear on their skin after physical contact, they appear in their dreams when they sleep, and when they die words are recited into the void as their body unravels into mirror-stuff. Every Illumian has an arcane mark, and it appears glowing on their foreheads when they feel strong emotions. The Illumians do not know what the importance of the words are, some of them seem to be situationally poignant while others seem to be complete gibberish. Many Illumian poets and philosophers spend long hours poking themselves and trying to puzzle meaning from the words that appear.

Though not an old race, the Illumians have a considerable amount of old knowledge passed down to them by their creator.

-500 words

Edit: Gender and Languages

-Username17

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 12:18 pm

That's at least 40x times better than the Illumians from Races of Destiny, and it's still not enough for me to like them.

The one thing that your write-up could have addressed is whether they have their own language or use an existing one (and if so, which one).

I guess, your write-up would be a place to start to make them a race that people care about (much more so than canon) but it might just be a 'bridge too far'.

But kudos for writing the first thing about Illumians that didn't make me want to punch someone.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 1:36 pm

I haven't been writing in languages for these races, since I assume that the player character section will tell you which languages they can choose from. Depending on the specifics of the edition, there would be lots of different languages to choose from. I would much rather that there was an Infernal language than that there was a Lawful Evil Alignment Tongue, and I would really rather that languages like Gnome and Roper didn't exist at all, to be replaced with regional tongues like Megyetian and Eocidese.

-Username17

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 2:14 pm

In all my years of gaming, I've never heard of the Aarakocra being treated as more than tribal bird people with omnipresent claustrophobia.

A few more suggestions include: Baldandar, Kna, Wallara, Snyad, Phanaton, Shark-kin, & N'djatwa

This last one should be a good challenge...leShay

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 3:07 pm

virgil wrote:In all my years of gaming, I've never heard of the Aarakocra being treated as more than tribal bird people with omnipresent claustrophobia.

A few more suggestions include: Baldandar, Kna, Wallara, Snyad, Phanaton, Shark-kin, & N'djatwa

This last one should be a good challenge...leShay

leShay are the 50HD ur-elves from the D&D joke book, right?. Those're so far into mary sue territory that I don't think they can be saved.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 3:41 pm

Well... D&D doesn't really have a sidhe monster, which is a pretty obvious niche to fill.

But you'd need to significantly rewrite their fluff and make the mechanics from scratch, so it's questionable how much you'd actually be "salvaging" the leShay as opposed to cribbing the name for something entirely different. And the name isn't even all that good.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 3:51 pm

But Frank has only been writing fluff. He doesn't need to fix the mechanics here.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 3:56 pm

My contention is that with five hundred words, you can make anything interesting. No matter how "kind of stupid" or "completely flavorless" the race was in its inception, with five hundred words of text you can make a race be something worth talking about. Any of them. Norkers? Giff? Vril? Dark Ones? Fucking any of it. And to prove it, I'm willing to take a 500 word challenge. If you don't think a D&D race could be given an interesting backstory, biology, and anthropology in 500 words, I'll take that bet.

This paragraph has been my guideline for suggestions for Frank's contention. I'll admit that he very likely can, but seeing him rise to the challenge for the harder ones is something I enjoy.

I stand by my original supplement to his bet: Frank can request any short-ish RPG-related writing piece out of me in exchange for the more difficult races I suggest (of which I can only hope I'm actually suggesting difficult ones).

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 4:19 pm

How about some of the Stormwrack races?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 4:57 pm

How about the Lords of Madness races?
Neogi, grell, and tsochar especially.

schpeelah · Post by **schpeelah** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 5:59 pm

One could argue either way on whether the llumians can be considered a failed challenge, since this writeup discards all but the vaguest concept of the race, on account of the essential concept being tied to bad mechanics.

TiaC wrote:How about some of the Stormwrack races?

Let's see... Aventi are aquatic humans who owe their current state to a sea god who transformed them when their island nation - then a sea empire - sank beneath the waves. They have good relations with merfolk, tritons and aquatic elves, and of those four races are most likely to engage in trade with land-dwellers. Weird approach to alignment as always, this time - Lawful society doesn't concern itself with having a lot of laws because all members are supposed to be individually honorable. Seems like an easy concept that only needs some cleaning up, involving tying them to a god anyone cares about and remembering that now that these assholes breathe water, they can jolly well continue living in their NotAtlantis.

The darfellans were once peaceful hunter-gatherers, but everything changed when the Sahuagin Nation attacked. Now they are on the edge of extinction, with surviving settlements well hidden in coastal caves all over the world, although some groups roam the seas in a guerrilla war. They have black skin with white chest and stomach, echolocation, a bite attack, and do not breathe water but instead hold breath... they are orcafolk is what I'm saying. The description is actually not bad as it stands. The main weakness is that despite being an aquatic race with a giant hook for campaigns about fighting the sahuagin (bonus - prophecy about the PC restoring the race to glory), they only hold breath for minutes at a time. Some missed opportunity for blowhole weirdness and the bite makes no sense - there's a picture and the dude is built like an ordinary human. Dumb ideas include a justification for the darfellan player not learning the names of other PCs and calling them by class (extensive caste system for tribal hunter-gatherers, wtf) and the example names having exclamation marks in them.

For balance, the Aquatic Elf description doesn't say anything you didn't already deduce from the words "aquatic elf". Similarly, the authors did not come up with a culture for the Hadozee - in a Stormwrack campaign, some of your ship's crew are black orangutans with skin flaps like flying squirrels, and that's that.

Edit: Oh hey, the attributed quotes work again.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 6:03 pm

I've always liked the aventi and darfellan. They're aquatic but can function on land, and just, yeah. Have a soft spot for them for being relatively sane and simple as splat races go.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 6:41 pm

Hadozee, that was the race I was thinking of! They seem to have a lot of wasted potential. Darfallen really just need a picture that actually fits the crunch.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 01, 2014 6:48 pm

schpeelah wrote:One could argue either way on whether the llumians can be considered a failed challenge, since this writeup discards all but the vaguest concept of the race, on account of the essential concept being tied to bad mechanics.

I could certainly accept such an argument. I didn't take it all that seriously, basing their backstory on the Tomb of Horrors comic, and most of their culture on the intricacies of secret page.

Looking back on it, I forgot that the Illusionist in that comic was specifically female, and I probably should have mentioned that their words were in more than one language.

Edit: One thing I really should point out is that Illumians have been essentially retconned out of existence since their failed unveiling. 4th edition talks of the Illumians as a long dead people who had special magic words that people could learn to do something or other.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 6:30 am

It occurs to me after that Pandemonium discussion that places as well as races can get the same treatment. For example, Pandesmos:

Pandesmos

Pandesmos is a world whose day is almost exactly the same length as its year, causing the sun to stay almost perfectly stationary in the sky. One side of the world is baked by the blistering heat of an unblinking day star, and the other is frozen by the bleak expanse of a never ending night. The resulting convection currents create continuous howling windstorms that make unprotected places on the surface virtually uninhabitable.

The hot side of Pandesmos is called Muspelheim and the cold side is called Niflheim. Within the lava filled canyons of Muspelheim are the fortresses of the Fire Giants and the Surtur that they serve. Protected from the windstorms by glaciers of Niflheim are the fortresses of the Frost Giants and the Rimtursar that they serve. Most races are able to live only in mountain steadings along the perpetual twilight rim of the planet, protected from the fire, ice, and wind that devastate much of the surface – or in underground tunnel complexes of a proper depth to reach their temperature needs. The deepest tunnels are claimed by the Unseelie Court, where the Queen of Air and Darkness rules over a nation of Gremlins.

The largest city on Pandesmos is called The Mad House, and it is named after an inn that served a portal nexus in a twilit valley. With good access to several portals off-world and situated over some deep running tunnels, a city naturally grew up around the inn and now the entire city bears the name of a raucous drink house for travelers. The original building has been expanded several times, and now serves as the city's house of government – though it still serves ale in the main hall for the sake of tradition.

The off-world population is mainly composed of Goblins, Dwarves, and Elves, many with some degree of Fiendish ancestry. The continuous roar of windstorms far and near marks a stark contrast to the near silence of most Goblin settlements in the known universe, but Pandemonian Goblins seem to get used to it quickly.

While most of Pandesmos is inimical to life, it is no stranger to death. Many undead creatures prowl the wastes of Pandesmos. Muspelheim is rumored to include the haunt of the Shape of Fire, while Niflheim is said to have the resting place of the Shadow of the Void somewhere within it.

-397 words

-Username17

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 7:38 am

So what about, say, one of the upper planes? Like the Beastlands or Elysium or Mount Celestia? Or, as a side issue, Mechanus?

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 8:24 am

Can I just say, half the maps in the Manual of the planes are useless.

Carceri needs work. It just fails.

Ghenna is similarly fucked, probably should be trashed.

Archeron doesn't fit its alignment.

Mechanus is cooler if you make every gear a micro-climate like the 3.5 picture shows.

Looking at the upper planes:

Ysgard: Is hurt by the alignment aspect of the Great Wheel and the decision to put all the Norse regions together even though they are all distinct. The daily rez is kinda cool.

Arcadia's shtick is that there are no plot hooks because everything works fine by itself. Although the description actually sounds like it would fit Equestria, so that's cool.

Celestia is shiny? That's about all I got.

Bytopia is the Plane of Gnomes. It's about as interesting as it sounds.

Elysium is heaven, whatever. Lot of furries.

The Beastlands, like most of these planes, is really nothing new. Really, its claim to fame is that it has a lot of animals.

Arborea is the plane of elf-wank. It also has two useless layers.

And that's it.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 9:58 am

Carceri is a prison plane. You send enemies there to be imprisoned and your enemies send you there to imprison you. Also, the Gods imprisoned their ancient enemies there, the Titans. Any or all of these things might try to escape, prompting you to aid or thwart the attempt.

Acheron is a plane full of armies of little men fighting. The top layer is made of giant iron cubes where everyone you meet wants to draft you into their army on pain of death. The lower layers are a series of magical store-rooms, wizard towers and labyrinths out of which loosing armies fight guerrilla wars.

Arcadia is a plane slowly being invaded by Formians and other Lawful creatures. The population of the city of Menausus was absorbed entirely by the cosmic factory of Neumannus and all of its citizens converted into Inevitables.

Celestia is a giant mountain full of layers where you get challenged by Archons and Angels as you try to ascend. If you don't prove yourself to be Lawful Good enough, they try to prevent you from going higher up. It's basically an excuse to fight angels without feeling like a terrible person.

Bytopia has the nice and friendly Dothion, full of gnomes, and the wild and crazy Shurrock, full of horrible monsters. Periodically, monsters will wander down the mountain from Shurrock into Dothion, (or just fly down directly if they have wings) and start eating people.

Elysium, like Hades, has an entrapping effect. Unlike Hades, it has geography that isn't a boring grey desert. It's also the source of the River Oceanus, which is like the River Styx, except that all the places it goes to are pleasant.

Arborea is also the plane of the Greek and Egyptian pantheons. If you like chopping the heads off of Medusas or kicking in sarcophagi, you've come to the right plane.

I have nothing good to say about the Beastlands.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:24 am

Grek wrote:Carceri is a prison plane. You send enemies there to be imprisoned and your enemies send you there to imprison you. Also, the Gods imprisoned their ancient enemies there, the Titans. Any or all of these things might try to escape, prompting you to aid or thwart the attempt.

But when anything worth imprisioning can planeshift, why? There aren't any wardens, and nothing makes planar travel any harder. Also, what's wrong with just imprisoning them in actual prisons?

Grek wrote:Acheron is a plane full of armies of little men fighting. The top layer is made of giant iron cubes where everyone you meet wants to draft you into their army on pain of death. The lower layers are a series of magical store-rooms, wizard towers and labyrinths out of which loosing armies fight guerrilla wars.

My only complaint here is that a bunch of armies fighting a many-sided way isn't very lawful.

Grek wrote:Arcadia is a plane slowly being invaded by Formians and other Lawful creatures. The population of the city of Menausus was absorbed entirely by the cosmic factory of Neumannus and all of its citizens converted into Inevitables.

And then they walk that shit back by saying that even the Formians, the most voracious of the Law races have their "Expansionist ethic" "muted" because it would spoil the harmony.

Grek wrote:Celestia is a giant mountain full of layers where you get challenged by Archons and Angels as you try to ascend. If you don't prove yourself to be Lawful Good enough, they try to prevent you from going higher up. It's basically an excuse to fight angels without feeling like a terrible person.

It's not bad, but it still says that you can't get higher without discovering truths of Law and Good. Also, there isn't really much of a reason to want to climb. (Unless you're evil, in which case you just die.)

Grek wrote:Bytopia has the nice and friendly Dothion, full of gnomes, and the wild and crazy Shurrock, full of horrible monsters. Periodically, monsters will wander down the mountain from Shurrock into Dothion, (or just fly down directly if they have wings) and start eating people.

Still, gnomes... It's pretty much the Material plane but with shorter people.

Grek wrote:Elysium, like Hades, has an entrapping effect. Unlike Hades, it has geography that isn't a boring grey desert. It's also the source of the River Oceanus, which is like the River Styx, except that all the places it goes to are pleasant.

It's fine I guess. Not much in the way of conflict.

Grek wrote:Arborea is also the plane of the Greek and Egyptian pantheons. If you like chopping the heads off of Medusas or kicking in sarcophagi, you've come to the right plane.

Most games don't use them.

Grek wrote:I have nothing good to say about the Beastlands.

Yeah, the Beastlands and Ghenna both kinda suck.