New Edition: Iconic Characters

[Username17]

1199116537[/unixtime]]Fire should be Blue. Since the passion-pole is getting water and weather as symbols of passion as powerful and shifting, the rationality pole should get fire as a symbol of inspiration and technology and progress and stuff.

Humans should also be Blue-associated, since Blue does illusions and the human Realm is traditionally supposed to be full of illusion. Also, it works with the fire-stealing thing.

That's extremely reasonable. Indeed when it's done, Blue and Red will probably just switch places on the wheel. Where "Red" gets to keep its giants, its temperment, its dragons, and its destructiveness, but is in fact colored Blue and comes from the sea. While
"Blue" keeps its flight, its cerebralism, its artifice, but is colored Red and sets things on fire in the mountains.

Much more cogent at that point.

---

I'm all for 10 races, and do we want to cap the addition of sentient races that aren't lone tribes from a mana node?

I think the universe can sustain a lot of "Legendary Races" and such. I mean honestly if you have power beings who cleave to mana nodes like Ilithid and Tatanka, what's the harm?

But I think the sapient races should probably be capped. The whole D&D model where cities full of people were "always there but we never bothered to tell you" chaps me tremendously. Illumians man, what the hell?

What are you assuming to be the difference between a gnome and a gremlin and a hobgoblin?

Excellent question. The overlap between Vanara, Hobgoblins, Gremlins, and Gnomes is potentially vast. Like seriously I could write up any two adjacent ones to be completely indistinguishable from each other.

Gnomes I see as halflings but without Kender or Bilbo baggage. Like smaller, more anime humans (bigger heads, bigger eyes, smaller mouths).

Gremlins I see a lot like WoW goblins. Toothy, green skinned, all pebbly like in the movie Gremlins, and classically mischievious. Differentiated from Gnomes based on their needle-sharp teeth, giant bat-like ears, and warty, almost frog-like skin. Where a Gnome is an SD human, a Gremlin is a death muppet.

Hobgoblins I want to take something from everything. The distinction from Gremlins is that they have an extra meter of height for starts, but I also want them to have more human-like appearance - I think that you should want to sex up Hobgoblins (I don't want to hear about you sexing up gremlins). The Games Workshop orange skin works for me, but they should probably go hairless rather than shaggy to differentiate from Vanara. Basically I guess I'm saying that hobgoblins should look kind of like The Hobgoblin:


But probably with rows of sharp teeth rather than with vampire fangs. But you know, either way.

-Username17

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Has this ever really worked well? Your entire shtick revolving around healing and buffing other people is boring. Even if you are extremely strong by the ability to buff yourself too to the point where you're better than other classes at, say, fighting, people are still going to see you as just the healbot (see: 3rd edition cleric) and people aren't going to want to play it for that reason.

It has worked well, but it has to MATTER. The F+K Cleric Archer (With the Zen Archery feat) is a version of a class that works with this mechanic (you can be a good archer, with interative attacks, delivering touch spells). You can be a good buffer, but your buffs have to be interesting, and there has to be a reason why you aren't buffing yourself (other than that when you buff people, then they get all of the buff advantages right now).

I would like to have this character be what the Conjurering buff-mage that no one played in 3.5 was, except without the suck. Something like a character that gets a d4 hit die, and can only give other people (or the whole party) the ability to do the following:
have 4 arms (that don't end in shitty claws, stacks, and can quick-draw weapons or make free Sleight of Hand checks to steal things or something)
have tentacles that entangle people (while you still beat them silly with a sword)
super-strength (that is noticable somehow, free knockback? free bullrush? free sundering? free tripping? I dunno, just make cool things happen that aren't +8 to damage in melee combat)
be polymorphed into a Hydra
be on fire (all attacks that hit Touch AC set opponent on fire with no save)
give the party a telekinetic shield that blocks all ranged attacks
All characters are invulnerable for 1 round
All melee attacks miss characters this round
Everybody can make a 15 foot step instead of a 5 foot step
Make a free move action every round (you can full attack and move)
It rains luck potions (+<large number> to everyone doing anything)
give the party an extra attack/round
Heal/Mass heal/mass cure status conditions
Be really big (without the huge negatives)
Be really small (with huge negatives)
Target opponent is now a sheep (there is a save)

As a backup, it would be nice if this character could also:
have a basic breath-weapon or ink cloud or something as a defense mechanism (invisible most of the time? You have to make a Will save to attack? Whatever.)
Throw a grenade (fireball, stun-blast, whatever).
Shoot someone in the eye (be able to deliver buffs/debuffs with arrows/darts/whatever?)

The idea for this 'iconic' character is somewhere between a cleric and a wizard. I don't want all of the wizard battlefield control, or divination, or illusions, and I don't want the clerics 'you have +3 to hit fighting evil creatures within this circle' crap. I want the fighter to be transformed into a hydra, and I want that to be a good tactical decision (instead of, say, Evards Black Tentacles). As it is, when I played a mage, there were too many better options than transforming the fighter into a hydra.

I want this character to be the Magic: The Gathering card equivalent of "Draw an extra card, untap 2 mana, untap target monster" around level 7, but I don't want it to be "the fighter has extra health now", "the rogue gets 2 turns and I don't get any", or "everyone gets +1 because I'm a singing bard". It is the classic support mage that always has the weird magical solution to any problem, makes the party fly at the beginnning of the day, and makes squards of little goblins a fairly large threat (you know, when one of them is a flaming four-armed gorilla and another is knocking the opposition into next week).

[Crissa]

Well, you know what races I want: Races that are...
[*]Tiny and magical
[*]Different number of legs and animal
[*]Breaths water
[*]Breaths fire

[*]Lives at night
[*]Lives in sand
[*]Magical humans
[*]Plain humans
[*]Strong humans
[*]Little hordish things
[*]Strong hordish things
[*]etc

So I want faeries, centaurs, merfolk, salamanders, etc; then you can have your elves that live in night, at sea, in the forest and get along with 'magical' IE, non-race things like dryads and satyrs and elemental nymphs; humans live everywhere; something lives in the sands - but how? I don't care if they don't eat or don't drink; Something big and brutish - half orc is lame, but whatever.

The list of races should be specific to the settings. And we should make it clear there are things in the world which aren't 'races' but merely a band of people/elementals who look/live differently because of a node. And that each setting should have it's own races!

That lets us have Greyhawk or that place with the Grey Mouser that have boring human races; settings where there's no difference between races but they are all some anthropomorphic animal instead of having different eye/skin color; and the world in which every race has mechanical differences and look wildly different but don't have stat differences.

-Crissa

[Username17]

The list of races should be specific to the settings.

That is an intractible math problem. Making a game balanced and interesting in a setting is really hard. Making it balanced and interesting in multiple settings is exponentially more difficult. Doing a conversion on a rules set to a different setting is possible, but difficult and full of failure points.

From the simplistic model where handing out functionally massless weapons makes tinkerbelles more powerful to the complex model where the ability to walk long distances is much more powerful the less camels you have - the relative worth of racial features is setting dependent and you can't make a reasonably functional system and say "just plug in whatever world and races you want" because that doesn't work at all.

Breaths fire

I don't think you can seriously have fire dwelling creatures as a race that is supposed to adventure with other races. Their mere presence invalidates paper which is not cool.

Different number of legs

A simple requirement is that everyone has to be able to sit down in the same bar, quaff ale together and formulate a plan to go adventuring. The game doesn't have to start that way, but it has to be able to start that way. So creatures with different numbers of legs are on problematic ground. A snake tailed humanoid (like a Marilith) is actually fine, as is something relatively horizontally compact like a Starflight Velox.

But something which is substantially outside that realm just won't work. A milipede or a centaur, for example, can't fit into most bars, and won't work as an adventurer therefore.

It's not that they couldn't be adventurers, it's that they can't participate in the frankly human centered adventures that a cooperative role playing game exhibits. I mean, if we were doing solo stuff you could be crazy things like a sapient swarm of bats or a a tiny insect or a giant turtle with an orcish village on your back. But because someone will want to play a pretty princess and someone will want to play a muscled and toothy warrior, you can't play anything which has substantial difficulty navigating the cities that those characters live in.

So any race which is smaller than a child, larger than a cow, on fire, or structurally impeded by a spiral staircase is basically off limits.

-Username17

[socrates999]

long time lurker. . .

A cool idea for a cursed race would be one that was on the wrong side of a god conflict. Their god lost, and the winner god decided to punish them . . . for all time!

[CatharzGodfoot]

1199192404[/unixtime]]
So any race which is smaller than a child, larger than a cow, on fire, or structurally impeded by a spiral staircase is basically off limits.

Unless you design the setting to include the race. Flamelings do just fine in the Grand Library of Sumer, which is made of stone and filled with clay tablets. If centaurs are common, there's no reason that a dungeon should be less accommodating to them in comparison to humans than a dungeon would, in comparison, be more accommodating to hobbits.

[Surgo]

A cool idea for a cursed race would be one that was on the wrong side of a god conflict. Their god lost, and the winner god decided to punish them . . . for all time!

I thought that we were finally moving away from the retarded idea of (active) gods and god conflicts.

[Username17]

There are basically two ways to run gods, and Hinduism eagerly accepts both models.

• Gods are Abstract and All Powerful The god of weather is just... weather. The god of Goodness is just good. They can't be destroyed, they can't be seen, they are just sources of power that you can draw upon in times of need or if you've been praying properly.
  
  
• The Gods are Over There The god Agni is a three armed dude who has a wheel of flame that flies around while he stands on it. The gods are really powerful, but they are also real and bleed. People don't channel divine power as their class features, they get given boons and training by gods and may some day surpass them.

Hinduism actually has both models. And it does so by having different gods and aspects and shit that do both. D&D also has both models, by dint of simply using both languages interchangeably, which makes no sense.

-Username17

[Crissa]

I know that multiple settings are difficult - but Joe's campaign world isn't Jane's campaign world. We need to make Greyhawk and Grey Mouser different, and say why. 'This list of character races is for this setting alone. This is why...'

Mostly, I'm sick of the D&D centaurs based off of a damned middle ages warhorse or modern draft. They're not depicted in prior art as being larger than humans.

Being able to breathe fire doesn't mean you're on fire (the fire-walkers in Warcraft, for instance, are merely naga who live in fiery caves instead of watery caves).

But really, how is being really small or really large different from being able to run really fast or swim? It just limits where you can go. A small character has a trouble that the world is really big to them - sure they could make it through a cave-in, or are less likely to trip a trap - but that leaves them taking longer to navigate such things, assuming they were navigable. That could be made into the system or with given suggestions on how to run them.

I want D&D to be more than humans of different colors play together.

I want fantasy.

-Crissa

[JonSetanta]

1199238837[/unixtime]]There are basically two ways to run gods, and Hinduism eagerly accepts both models.

• Gods are Abstract and All Powerful The god of weather is just... weather. The god of Goodness is just good. They can't be destroyed, they can't be seen, they are just sources of power that you can draw upon in times of need or if you've been praying properly.
  
  
• The Gods are Over There The god Agni is a three armed dude who has a wheel of flame that flies around while he stands on it. The gods are really powerful, but they are also real and bleed. People don't channel divine power as their class features, they get given boons and training by gods and may some day surpass them.

Hinduism actually has both models. And it does so by having different gods and aspects and shit that do both. D&D also has both models, by dint of simply using both languages interchangeably, which makes no sense.

-Username17

First option is largely impersonal but very close to how friends and I have played D&D for years, and I can attest that it works well.

Second option works well up until whichever mortal is granted enough boons by Brahma to a point at which they bitchslap, molest, and otherwise ruin entire pantheons at whim.
At this point in the game it's either an option to roll the world up like a scroll and shout "OK! Next kalpa!" or that the gods gangbang any upstart mortals seeking to displace their semi-eternal arrangement.

Also, good to read you here, so-crates. If there's any confusion from others about our IDs I'll change my name,

[Orion]

I definitely am in favor of both

Have "gods" refer to beings whose existence is not empirically demonstrable. Maybe the weather god just IS weather, maybe he's hiding, maybe he's just a story. Whatever. Philosophers scoff at him while commoners tell stories about him. There may be powerful creatures and magic items which are thematically associated with him, but either they were mad eby people or nobody knows where they're from. Under no circumstances does anybody have a class feature that depends on him.

Meanwhile, we still have powerful outsiders like angels, demons, and giant frog. If we must have "clerics" they are magic users who learned magic by discussing it with angels/spirits/your mom over tea intead of from books.

[Voss]

How is that both? Having minion class outsiders isn't even vaguely the same as being able to scale Mt Olympus and kick Zeus' ass for raping your mom.

What you're suggesting isn't even option 1. Its gods are abstract and it seriously doesn't matter if they even exist, because clerics are just wizards with a slightly different hat. Which isn't necessarily a bad option, but its completely different from the other two options. They aren't necessarily sources of power, let alone all-powerful.

[Orion]

Okay, two things:

The gods ARE power sources after a fashion. You can totally go find the "Skylord's Talon," a blue crystal rapier of dragonslaying. And there is totally an awesome story about how the skylord gave it to a butiful warrior queen to defend ehr kingdom with. And if you run into the Raptorans, tey wil totally either proclaim you the Skylord's prophet or beat you up and take it.

The question of whether the Skylord ACTUALLY made it is completely irrelevant.

Second, we take it for granted that D&D has all kinds of weird outsiders. This, by itself, already encompasses option 2. There's seriously a Marilith out there named "Shiva" and a Trumpet Archon named "Geruda." And probably a Celestial Storm Giant named "Zeus."

[Orion]

Garudas -- Because I laugh in the face of D&D law/chaos.

Originally, these guys were White extraplanar beings, like angels or something -- stern LG smite-the-evildoer types. Some of them got uppity, went bad cop, and through excessive pride and excessive dedication pissed off their superiors, geting cast out into the mortal world.
They were orignally incorporeal, but forced to create/possess mortal bodies.

When their bodies die, the mortal half of thier soul is whisked to the rebith place, demed incomplete, and used to make termites or something. The tortured outsider half can't reincarnate, so it's trapped in the corpse. It's so powerful it consumes the body in divine fire and eventually makes a new one from the ashes.

The new Garuda knows its name, why it was cursed, and what it is, but losing half your soul is sufficientyl traumatic that it is effectively a completely different character, and probably now an NPC...

Personality wise, these guys got cursed for not following rules, so now they're VERY strict about it. Each Garuda has a bizarre set of taboos related to his unique curse, and adds one more every lifetime. However, they are so passionate and impulsive that their behavior is extremely unpredictable EXCEPT when their specific taboos come into play.

[Username17]

So the Wheel of Dharma is looking something like this:

Naraka
Hellscape Land of the Dead
Naraka is where all the dead go when they are awaiting reincarnation, and sometimes creatures come to punish the spirits of the dead. It is populated by Rakshasa, who are shape-shifting Ogres with magic powers who do pact magic; and the Wraiths - spirits of the dead who have either voluntarily or involuntarily fallen through the cracks and are either fading away or accumulating power in the traditional spectral fashion. The Rakshasa keep around Imps, who are menial creatures who respond more to bullying than reason.

Naraka bleeds into the world of Sumeru in several ways. The first is through "hauntings" - places where Naraka is spiritually superimposed on the land. Wraiths just show up in such places, either because spirits of the dead were accidentally put in places where they fell back into Sumeru and now can't go on, or because a wraith voluntarily jumped through the crack and is trying to accumulate power in the non-Narakan world. The second is through direct physical portals, which tend to be dark and shadowy. And the final is through coterminus locations. These areas tend to be swampy and smell of death, and to have Rakshasa cities in them or worse.

Sources of Narakan power create monsters out of horror. They are things such as skin crawlers, lurkers, and doom bats. Those who are raised on Narakan power sites have a tendency to become ghouls - gluttonous for the flesh of the living.

The Tieflings - A group of imps rebelled against their cruel and often stupid masters. They used powerful magics to transform themselves and their seed into people, and thereby live in Sumeru as normal creatures with freedom of choice and the ability to become enlightened. But the Rakshasa were cruel, and were able to block the chances of their former slaves from reincarnating, and when they go to Naraka they stay there and suffer lest they can find some form of escape.

The Hobgoblins - Orange of Skin and sharp of tooth, the Hobgoblins hail from the deepest swamps where they taught themselves the nature of necromancy and the ways of pestilence. Angered at the insolence and head hunting practices of the Hobgoblins, a mighty Deva cursed their race and barred them from ever ascending to a higher form.

Asuraloka
The Titan Country Beneath the Waves

Asuraloka is where the giants were banished when they unsuccessfully attempted to conquer the world. Jealous and angry of temperment, the titanic Asura are now the source of the tides, as they alternately fume at their captivity and calm down long enough to feast or sleep. The undersea kingdom is also home to the Dragons, who actually live in the sea because it is their natural home. They get along with the Asura only occassionally and are no longer of temper than their Titan companions.

Asura Loka bleeds into the world of Sumeru in many ways. The most obvious is the physical overlap under the water which causes the sea itself to be calm one moment and then a raging torrent of destruction the next. But there are also portals to Asuraloka, which are usually (and fortunately) too small for most Asura to fit through. They are usually either in or surrounded by water and quite frighteningly tumultuous. Areas where Asura power flows into the world create things which are tremendous in size and in potential destructiveness. Eagles become rocs, boars become monstrous creatures which fight elephants.

The Merfolk Dragons and Asura, jealous of Sumeru and the Devas in general, yet unable to travel there directly created a race of creatures which could be fish when in the water and men while on land. They sent their creations to Sumeru in order to effect their will upon the world of men. Unfortunately, their creations were as rebelious and tempermental as they were, and they showed no special loyalty to their creators. They were rejected and cast out, and now wander the world patronless and cut off from the divine.

...more later

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

Ah, Garudas. "Yes, we can have sex with them too."

[Orion]

Does anyone like my Garuda write-up?

They could be a White race if they're still do-gooders, maybe with extraordinarily orderly and well-policed towns none of them can stand to live in for more than a few months at a time.

The taboos would be a deliberately chosen penance.

Or, they could be a Red race that lives for new experiences and indulging passions.

The outsider nature might manifest mostly through nightmares and hallucinations. The taboos could be compulsions they resent, or chosen in hopes of re-ascending some day.

[Username17]

I'm thinking of using most of your Garuda write up. White all the way, because White is currently empty.

So we got:

• Asuraloka
  
• Merfolk (created and abandoned by dragons)
  
• Gremlins (Made weapons for the Asura, for which they are punished)
  Naraka
  
• Tieflings (Gave the finger to the Wheel of Life)
  
• Hobgoblins (Broke Taboos, still do)
  Yama
  
• Garudas (Pridefully overstepped their Dharma, lost divinity)
  
• Empty Slot
  Pretaloka
  
• Humans (Stole Fire from Djinn)
  
• Gnomes (Empty Crime)
  Tiryagyoni
  
• Vanara (Broke promises through apathy)
  
• Dryads (Share Soul)

So one traditionalist, altitude loving race missing. Yakfolk?
Also, I think Gnomes spend a lot of time digging for coal in Pretaloka, so maybe they are also thieves?

As for Garudas specifically.




???

-Username17

[Surgo]

If it "eventually makes a new body" on its own, I don't see why it should be forced into one specific look.

[Orion]

Well, if you want flight to be selectable ability rather than a racial feature, they could have translucent magical wings instead of physical ones, though thatd etracts a bit from the bird-man appearance. Giving them a hawk-head would still make them pretty avian though.

As for gnomes, maybe something to do with giving the caste system the finger? Maybe descendants of untouchables who decided to stand up for thier rights instead of hoping for a better rebirth. Since they don't see anything wrong (morally) with being Untouchable they keep getting reborn as gnomes...

[angelfromanotherpin]

When it comes to Garuda aesthetics, I think it comes down to two choices: pretty or weird. If you want pretty (and they are White), just winged humans with feathers for hair.

If you want weird, start with a human, replace their head with a bird's head, replace their arms with big feathered wings with bird claws at the primary juncture, and replace the legs with human arms. So they walk on their wings, and manipulate with their lower limbs.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I like the garuda as birds minimally modified to act as humans. Give them arms and an upright stance. Base them on big (flying) birds for a minimum of realism: buzzards, albatross, and eagles (no pigeons, falcons, or nuthatches).

Then, if you like, have all the bad karma garuda cursed with their wings cut off. That's not necessary mechanically (assuming you make flight more realistic), but it still makes things simpler.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

1199275107[/unixtime]]Ah, Garudas. "Yes, we can have sex with them too."

I'd hit it.

[Orion]

Well, first of all, I think Garudas would logically be the high-altitude race, with another white race for the lowlands.

Also, they should have extreme sexual dymorphism, since they are bird people.

I also think their physical appearance depends a bit on thier culture. As originally conceived, they needed to be scary-looking, with hawk-heads, rippling muscles, and feathery arms with talons. They were suppose to be seething alternately, they could humble and accepting rather than prideful and angry. In that case they need two to four white and/or brown feathered wings which fold around them like ornate robes.

[Orion]

The other White race is hippo-folk. They're basically a mesopotamian empire -- I was thinking faux-Egyptian, but if that doesn't fit, we could go faux-sumerian or whatever.

The point is that they live on the river beds, used water magic and irrigation to form the first large-scale argicultural society, and now use the rivers for transportation magic that makes them the leading commercial power.

They usd to have a militaristic empire (maybe related to their crime) but these days are extremely humble and conciliatory, to contrast with the Garudas' arrogance.

Or, if the Garudas are humble, they could be prideful and decadent. Whatever.