The Avenger Class in Miasma and Monsters

“Everything my god needs to say to you can be said with my weapon.”

I love this class from 4E D&D. It's unique as all get out, a zealot with a big weapon teleporting to and from, whacking mooks with the power of almighty Glob. What's not to love about that? 

In this post, I'll explain how the class can be recreated using the Miasma and Monsters system of mine, specifically with the Advanced rules (basic still in progress, get off my back). 

As a refresher, let's start with the character creation steps and work our way through each. Gotta play by the book! It would be embarrassing as the creator of the system to make an error(s).

 

• Buy Ability Scores or choose an Ability Score Array
• Choose a Bloodline
• Choose a Path for your first level
•     You receive an Archetype and a Passive Bonus from that Path
•         If your Bloodline is Human, you gain a bonus Minor Trait
• Roll for your starting HP
•     HD + BB + any modifiers from your Path
• Determine number of inventory slots
• Roll 3d6 for starting silver coins
• Roll d27 twice for your starting Adventuring Gear
• Roll d15 once for Other Items
• Choose a Starting Equipment Pack
• Spend any remaining coins
• Calculate AC
• Note down your attack and damage modifiers for your weapons

 

For our abilities, we care a lot about the Teleporting Striker Major Mind Trait, so we will make sure that Mind is our highest score, followed up with Skill. Brawn and Charm have some import, so our character will be more balanced than other classes.

Our beginning stats will be Brawn 13, Skill 9, Mind 15, Charm 10 for bonuses of BB 2, SB 0, MB 3, and CB 0. A balanced start, we don't care about our Skill stat for AC due to some key Traits we'll be taking later.

We will be a Human so we can start with an Extra Trait to give us a maximum of 7 at level 12.

We will pick the Mind Path at level 1, choosing +1 to all Mind Saves as our Passive Mind Bonus (PMB) and the Adept Archetype. The spell we will take is Haste, and it is a permanent part of our body (tattoo, brand, etc.).

 

Starting HP is D8 + 2.

We have 13 inventory slots.

We roll 3d6 for starting silver coins.

We roll for our Adventuring and Other Gear items.

 

We will pick the Mind Starting Weapon/Armor and choose a medium melee weapon to wield in two hands for D10 damage. We will also get a blank book and 1 random spell book.

With whatever money we have, we should prioritize 1 ration, a light source, and a sack.

The Trait we will take at level 1 from being a human is Bound Weapon. We will attune ourselves to our medium weapon. This will let us use your MB for attack and damage rolls, we can recall it to our hands, and we can expend a Quality to deal extra damage on a hit.

To maximize our damage output, we will use our high Mind to harvest materials to perform Field Repairs on our Bound Weapons, letting use the Quality expenditure to increase our damage potential. When we can, we will use the Haste spell we have etched onto ourselves to increase our Actions per Round and gain an AC bonus.

As for level ups, this is the general progression we'll want to follow:

• Level 2
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1. (14 Brawn 16 Mind)
  
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die PBB, Barbarian Trait. 
• Our AC is now 14 unarmored (16 w/Haste) and we have much more HP on average. Haste now lasts 2 Turns.
• Level 3
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (15 Brawn 17 Mind)
  
• Mind Path, +1 to all Mind Saves, Ocular Patdown Trait.
• Our AC is now 15 unarmored (17 w/Haste) and we can deal more damage with our extra Haste Action to add our MB a second time.
  
• Level 4
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (16 Brawn 18 Mind)
  
• Mind Path, +1 to all Mind Saves, Teleporting Striker Major Trait
• We can now use teleport before or after attacking, dealing an additional HL damage. We can also teleport for 30' at will!
• AC is now 16 (18 w/Haste)
• Level 5
• We don't care about the Mind Path anymore
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (17 Brawn 19 Mind)
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die, Weapon Master (choose Heavy), more consistent damage!
  
• You get the deal about AC already
• Level 6
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (18 B 20 M)
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die
  
• Reroll 3 HD
  
• Level 7
• Last Major Trait!
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (19 B 21 M)
  
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die, Meat Dabbler Major Trait
• Another consistent damage improvement AND we can get free attacks when we miss.

The remaining levels can be filled out as you wish. You could continue with Brawn to maximize damage, go to Skill to get some consistency and extra movement options, Mind for more out of combat utility, or even into Charm to get Turn Undead, Templar, or something else that fits your fancy.

Our character will be a Glass Cannon for the early levels, but once we can teleport we can strategically pick targets that we can kill quickly and won't put us into too much danger. Once we start increasing our HP to high levels, we can start titan slaying.

I hope this post was a good exploration into the options Miasma and Monsters gives you with creating your characters and how it allows you to recreate most of your favorite classes from other games.

Good hunting!

GM Tips: Avoiding "Dead Air"

There's a concept in live radio and TV broadcasts of "dead air": the event where nothing is being presented to the users, the live feed being paused as the actors wait for a cue, freeze up, or anything that interrupts the normal flow. This is to be avoided at all costs in these forms of media for fear of the a powerful "Ratings" dipping too low.

Dead Air can be a huge problem in our hobby when running games! It's perfectly normal to get lost in thought as a GM during a session. Your players are staring at you, waiting for your response to their burning questions. "Did I hit the beast?", "What do I find?", "What's in the room?", "What is the name of the tavern?" are all potential causes of Dead Air and new GMs may have a hard time dealing with the pressure. 

I have found in my years as a "Forever DM" that it is just as crucial to avoid Dead Air at the table as it is during a broadcast. When I run a game, I don't prep endless pages of notes, build encounters, write dialog, or anything that would cause me to stop the game to read it. That stuff feels good to do in the pregame phase of GM-ing but I deem it useless when the pavement hits the road, so to speak. You can still write all those, but you should merely do so to help keep it in your mind. Being a slave to your prepped info will result in your game constantly hitting red lights as you reabsorb the quotes, monster stats, and minutia. 

Enough faffing about on why it's bad. Here's how I avoid Dead Air in my games. 

- my notes are always in bulleted form, separated into logical groupings for very fast retrieval

- random encounters have a # of creatures and what they're doing at the moment, nothing more

- I never write quotes for NPCs, I instead get 2-3 quick sentence fragments about their personality, desire, and hit dice

- I make sure to have a solid grasp on the system I'm running so I can recall rules quickly for players 

- I use that understanding of the game system to make up rulings on the fly when I don't know the rule or it's not contained within the text

- I try to gently nudge off topic conversations back to the game by always keeping in active role in these "sidebars" so I can steer it back to the game

The last one is truly an art in and of itself. Staying in these conversations about a joke, what we ate yesterday, or whatever miscellany that's inevitably gonna come up during a session helps build your social links with your players AND gives you the ability to easily bring it back to the game. You can insert a quip or additional joke to relate with the others then refer to the sidebar starter's PC name and ask them what they're going to do next. 

I have other thoughts about running a table as a GM I will certainly share in future posts. I think for the next topic I will muse about engaging less proactive players into the game. 

Until next time, swear the blood upon your steel will never dry! 

More content! Also, mini review of FIE! I SAY!

Random rolling table time! Got a 3, Dungeon setpiece. 

1. Make a spell
2. Make a monster
3. Make a dungeon setpiece
4. Make a wilderness setpiece
5. Make a city setpiece
6. Make a magic item
7. Make a class, race, or race-as-class
8. Make a 4-10 room dungeon
9. Make a trap or dungeon hazard
10. Roll 2d10 and combine

This will be an idea I've had in my head for a while: within the depths of a dungeon home to a corrupted and malicious wizard lies a stone table, roughly 3 and a half feet (a bit over 1 meter) in height and it's length being 4'x6' (can't do that mental conversion to metric). Atop its flat surface lies a miniaturized replication of the dungeon it dwells in. It has been pain-stakingly recreated down to every loose flagstone and mouse hole: doors open, the same traps are present, and there are even clay figures of the dungeon denizens. Within the miniature version of this room stand X clay figures that mimic the appearance, equipment, and health of the party. They repeat the same actions as the party with a 1 Turn delay. Ex: If the party were to set up a camp in this room, the facsimiles would do so in 1 Turn. If the party has encountered the Mad Mage in their lair, they will notice that this set of rooms is missing from the magical diorama. Furthermore, anything that affects the replication from the "real world" will happen without a delay. Ex: if the party spills water into the mini room they're in, water will rain from the ceiling above them. 

A fun thing to throw at your players that could have some very interesting results. Some players may realize they can "scout" ahead to find loot, grab it in their world, and then grab it's double from the diorama before 1 Turn is up to have a duplicate! 

I would also allow the clay minis to be used as an extra life for each player. If they died, their party could pluck their double from the diorama, which would subsequently grow to their intended size once freed from the arcane device. 

If a double and original are near each other, however, both go into a murderous rage and will only stop once unconscious or their double is dead.

Mini Review of FIE! I SAY! 

I came upon this game when it was up for Kickstarter a few months ago and it looked really neat. It's written by Tim Snider, who has used this system more or less for many years so it's not something that was just spun up recently with no testing. It bills itself as a "comedy" game but I can very easily see it being used for a more story focused fantasy game. It's gimmick is that it uses D6 dice pools for rolling but one of those dice HAS to be a FIE! die, and if it rolls a skull/FIE!/bad thing, some complication occurs to the actor. On top of this, it also has the idea that characters don't die, they just get wounded and come back later. This allows for recurring, Saturday morning cartoon style villains and the players have less stress when it comes to making decisions. 

It's worth checking out and is available on drivethrurpg! 

Another random 'OSR Content' creation!

Similar to my latest, substantive post, this one will be dedicated to rolling on a table widespread through our community and writing up some new content for people to use.

That table again is 

1. Make a spell
2. Make a monster
3. Make a dungeon setpiece
4. Make a wilderness setpiece
5. Make a city setpiece
6. Make a magic item
7. Make a class, race, or race-as-class
8. Make a 4-10 room dungeon
9. Make a trap or dungeon hazard
10. Roll 2d10 and combine

I rolled a 9! "Make a trap or dungeon hazard." Fun! I'm going to use an idea I created on the spot while my players were going through The Caves of Chaos using Miasma and Monsters. They were wandering through the hallways that lead to the locked crypt and the Medusa's jail when the "fighter" stepped upon a pressure plate when reaching the bottom of a staircase. The pressure plate was against the western wall of this E<-->W hallway, which was a bit over 60' long. I said that in an alcove on the east side, just slightly visible outside of his light source, stood a statue of a knight holding a lance. The lance appeared to be of an old metal, the statue was vibrating, and he noticed a small track in the floor of the hallway that goes from the statue to the pressure plate. Behind him, his party noticed holes in the rock wall and dark bloodstains.The statue did not seem like it was going to launch at the unlucky adventurer until he left the pressure plate, so the mechanically-minded priestess of Lunaqqua (we're playing in the Hyperborea setting by Jeffrey Talanian) did some inspection of the rails to see if there was a mechanism she could disarm. No obvious mechanisms could be found but at this point, Baron decided it was time to put his Brawn to the test. He shouldered his Roman tower shield with both arms and confidently stepped off the pressure plate to face off against this hallway trap. It promptly rose to life and charged at him! I gave him a chance to roll a Brawn Challenge against the statue, which was given a +3 to its roll. He succeeded the Challenge and I ruled that the rusted lance snapped causing the statue to crash into him. He used his high strength to push the statue back into its alcove and held it fast as his party (avoiding the pressure plate!) carefully made their way down the hallway.

This trap was improvised entirely on the spot and I feel it demonstrates that traps don't have to be extremely complex to be fun for the players to work around. Baron could have easily jumped off of the plate back onto the staircase and the statue would have crashed into the wall without hurting him, but this gave him an opportunity to test his mettle. I gave him an XP bonus for safely bypassing and disarming the trap.

Spring Cleaning

It's been too long since I posted here...

I plan on adding more posts shortly. Been pouring over DCC and its fun modules. Also looking to start a Hyperborea group with the astonishing module, The Anthrophagi of Xambala, hopefully later this month!

Stay tuned. 

OSR Content Challenge

After seeing this post, https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/o5o8o, I rolled a D8 and got cracking! I rolled a 4, which is wilderness set piece.

Here's my submission:

A Cloud Giant's floating castle that has been overrun by 5D12 goblins. Their leader is a 4 HD goblin named Skreek Von Fizzle that saves as a Magic-User and knows random spells. The goblins have no idea how to control the castle so it has been floating aimlessly for weeks. The goblins have subsisted on migratory birds but they are starting to get bored and 25% are plotting a mutiny. 1-4 chance that the first goblin(s) the party encounters are rebellious and may ask for help overthrowing Skreek. Loyalists will try to bring the party to their leader who may want to negotiate with the party to learn how to pilot the castle. Or imprison them as ransom. Or just eat them.

The original owner of the castle died and its remains make up Skreek's throne. 

Generate a random set of maps with donjon.bin.sh to represent the castle, which is 2d3 floors tall.

I want to try and do something like this regularly, so look forward to more! 

Miasma and Monsters 1.4 Released

 

Version 1.4

Added

• Coleman H added as Playtester
• Added PB (Passive Bonus) to the Abbreviations section
• Added a note to the Passive Brawn Bonus that affects HD regarding Magus
• Rules for Surprise and Surprised added to the list of Conditions
  

Changed 

• Updated many Traits to use Reactions instead of not being a part of the action economy
  
• Save Difficulties are gone (except for certain cases up to the Referee) and replaced with Opposed Saves
• This affects Traits, Spells, Potions/Poisons, 
• Updated grammar 
• Bound Weapon clarified to take a Turn to bind a weapon
• "Strike Fear into their Hearts!" now Frightens affected creatures rather than making them perform a Morale check
• Harvesting Difficulties lowered
• # of Actions per Round updated
• Energy Blast updated to Energy Dart to not confuse with the Magus's Blast ability and given a range of 60'
• Minimum AoEs added to the Magus's abilities
• Gate spell updated to specify settlement or hex the caster has been to before
• Raise Dead updated to target the ground at your feet and skeletons appear as close as possible to the caster