Fitz-Auk, Abaddon Escapee (tiefling ranger / horizon walker)

Once upon a time, there was a not terribly attractive human ranger named Fitz-Auk, who was part of a small group of infiltrators for the Molthune army. Shenanigans ensued during a mission, which ended up with almost everyone in the group either dead or sent off to other planes of existence. Fitz-Auk, being in possession of terrible luck, ended up in Abbadon, arguably one of the worst places in existence. A magic book he stole from his mission's target protected him in the three months he spent there, but couldn't wholly prevent him from being corrupted by the plane's malevolent influence.

Our friend Jonathan Harris made a comic, Adventures in the Fangwood, which is really good. You should buy it. It's pretty much the last session we did with our characters and details exactly what happened to them. It's very funny and well done and details the exact reaction I got when I rolled three natural 1s in a row (a 1/8000 chance!).

Fitz-Auk is a character I really wanted to bring back. Joe's Fangwood campaign was the first part in the trilogy of adventures, and since the final installment was going to take place on the non-material planes, I figured that'd be the perfect time to bring him back.

As a ranger, he had Morse as a raven animal companion (actually an eagle that we fluffed as a really buff raven), which he lost when he gave him to another PC, who took it with him when he got teleported to Heaven (read the comic, explanations are given). Since he's spent to much time in Abbadon, I imagined he'd been mutated into a more monstrous race. I spent a little while trying to choose between tiefling for hellishness or a tengu because I wanted him to look kinda birdy. I went for tiefling in the end because it fit better and had more stuff I wanted. Now Fitz-Auk is down from his human 7 Charisma to a delightful 4 Charisma! Yay!

Blanca’s Tumblr

Ahp, Undine Waterdancer

Flagella is no more. Driven into a blood frenzy by a cursed sword, Flagella was surrounded by endless waves of undead. Her companions were unable to break her from the sword's enchantment, and the necropolis' fail-safe engulfed everything outside the safety zone in cleansing flame. Flagella's corpse was left in such a crispy state that only potent divine magic would be able to ressurect her. Divine magic beyond the party's reach. After some traumatizing attempts to communicate with her soul, the party decides that the best thing would be to let her rest. They placed her remains on a pyre at dawn, and her ashes were scattered by the desert wind.

Meanwhile, Ahp has entered the city of Ninazu. She's been sent by her masters from Plane of Water to see into the deathly magic that's seeping through the portals that feed water into the desert city's aqueducts. If the source of contamination isn't stopped, the portals may be closed as a defense. Ahp was eager to volunteer to explore the other side, but she hadn't expected the Material Plane to so dry. So very, very dry.

Flagella is my first character to die in a very long time. Normally I'm the DM that kills other people's characters, so it's nice to be on the other side of things for a change. Flagella died a glorious, amazing death, so it ain't so bad. The cursed sword was a Berserking Sword, a sword that gives you rage and won't let you stop fighting until everything around you (enemy or ally) is dead. It wasn't that noticeable on Flagella, honestly, since she was already pretty keen to destroy all enemies and would often end up getting knocked out. After her death, the party kicked the sword down a bottomless pit. Randomly generated loot for the next unfortunate souls that explore the necropolis!

Ahp is actually the original character I wanted to play for this campaign (The Cerulean Throne) before deciding to go with Flagella. Going with fighter / bard for her. Originally she was inspired by Morphling of DOTA 2, and I wanted to make a water elemental character that whooshed about a lot. Her appearance is perhaps a bit too close to a certain Homeworld Gem from a certain cartoon a completely original design original character do not steal plz.

Flagella, Orcish Thug (Half-Orc Ranger)

Flagella is an orc ne'er do well, criminal, hired muscle, etc to be my next character in the campaign Joe is running. I struggled for a bit with coming up with a character. I originally wanted to do an undine fighter, basing her a bit off Morphling from DOTA 2, but it was eventually decided to stick to a more ordinary race. Technically I'm using the half-orc race, but for flavour purposes she's to be treated as a full-blooded orc that for some reason doesn't squint really hard in sunlight.

Also she's Tortella's mother. And should she die in this campaign, well then a Flagella in an alternate timeline goes on to join the circus as a lion tamer.

Tried out Manga Studio / Clip Studio Paint for this drawing. Normally I use Photoshop, but there was a deal to get Manga Studio for crazy cheapsies, so I got it. Currently suffering from shortcut muscle memory, so I ended up selecting the wrong brush / pen a lot while drawing this. I've not used it enough to decide whether I like it better than Photoshop or not yet.

Also looked up a bunch of images of fighting injuries for Flagella because I wanted her to look like she gets into fights ofter. One thing learned in never punch a person in the mouth because that's a fast way to get an infection.

Flagella was also really fun to draw because muscles. I usually draw my characters "naked" so make it easier to figure out how the clothes, and end up doing a lot of quite nice muscle and anatomy that doesn't get seen in the end. Also there's a disappointing amount of sexy orc ladies out there, by which I mean there's way too many. Orcs are supposed to be horrible big muscly things, like shaved green gorillas, but the females are always just vaguely buff (if that) green ladies with maybe tusks and a battleaxe. No. Orc ladies should be as horrible to look at as orc fellas. You don't have enough sexy ladies in fantasy that you can't let any of them be musclebound juggernauts? And real musclebound juggernauts, not She-Hulk. The closest thing to an appropriate female orc I've seen is in the lineup of races in 3.5 D&D. Now that's an orc-y lady.

Now with art process!

Renata Dramatata, Human Sorceress

The current campaign we're playing is an evil campaign. Though we've played campaigns where some of the players have had evil-aligned characters, the goals were always your fairly usual save the world heroic business. This is the first campaign we've played where we're terrible characters doing terrible thing.

The campaign is that we're initiates into an assassins' guild. It's meant to be a mission-based episodic thing rather than an outright full-blown story (for now? Maybe the DMs have something planned for later). There's definitely some Assassin's Creed and Dishonored vibe to it, especially the latter, since it takes place more in a Renaissance-y setting rather than an outright Medieval one. Our missions are supposed to have an investigative, social and stealthy element to it as we scope out our targets rather than just charging in and killing. Which is fairly unusual for a fairly hack and slashy game.

Needless to say, we goofed up pretty bad on our first mission (we were trying to kill a mob moss). Not enough reconnaissance coupled with bad rolls (several 1s came up when making especially important sneak attacks and subsequent attempts to escape). Let's hope the next one goes better.

Renata is an actress fallen on hard times. Maybe back in the day in some other city she was well-known, but her haughty attitude and desire to live the high life have left her a bit desperate for cash.   Renata is designed to be an infiltrator rather than an outright killer (she's not going to get her hands and clothes bloody, ew), though still with a sociopathic bent. If assassins are going to kill someone, she may as well get in on the action. Sophisticated dinners and fancy clothes aren't just gonna buy themselves.

I also wanted to make a vaguely bardy character without actually making a bard. I wanted to focus on magically influencing others through enchantments and fooling others with illusions. I ended up going for the Rakshasa bloodline for Sorcerer, for bonuses to Bluff and bonus mind-reading.

Elessia, Changeling Wizard

So this weekend just gone we finished the Pathfinder campaign I've been DMing for the last few months. It went off with a bang! You can see my previous post on the whole business here.

In commemoration of this I decided to make a post featuring my redesign of the campaign setting's Big Bad, Elessia. Spoilers on the campaign progression/ending below!

Elessia, though barely 20, is a wizard of no small power. Orphaned by the Nirmathas-Molthune war, she was taken in by a guild of Nirmathan mages after showing surprising amounts of innate magical ability (perhaps owing to non-human ancestry - she was almost certain her mother had been at least an elf, possibly something worse). By the time she came of age, Elessia was certain she had pinpointed the fault for the destruction of her family: the belligerent and expansionistic nation of Molthune, whom everyone knew had instigated the war in the first place, and its star Captain, a brutal man named Pavo Vos. Elessia knew that she could never stand toe to toe with the full might of the Molthune army alone - but with her startling (almost inhuman) ability to dominate or destroy the minds of all those she met, she set out with a handful of stolen magical artifacts to install herself as a spy in the Molthune ranks, who would destroy the country from within.

Elessia's name and role are taken pretty much as written from the Fangwood Keep module - a tricksy magic user who fights indirectly using enchantment and illusory magic. The character is written as an evil cleric - however, I changed her up in a few ways; mostly for the sake of it, but also because the villain in our previous big campaign (another Pathfinder series, The Price of Immortality) also happened to be an evil-god-worshipping lady, and I kind of wanted to do something different. I ended up writing Elessia more like a player character, with a traditional they-burned-down-my-village sobstory that had provoked her to just take the reins of life in order to ruin her perceived antagonists wholly and conclusively. She had a particular thing against the military, and given that the party were all from the Molthune army this gave her a good reason to specifically try and do them in.

The party itself was actually over-leveled (6 of them in a campaign meant for 4-5) and had been having a moderately easy time of killing hobgoblins, so i decided to make Elessia a lot more powerful. I gave her 8 levels in Wizard, giving her access to lots of fun mind-affecting spells but very little actual combat ability. She used mostly illusory/enchantment magic, so the idea was that the party would have to think their way around a lot of trickery to get to her but, once revealed, she was actually very weak. We had a fun fight involving lots of Naruto-style illusory clones (Major Image) and party members fighting party members (Dominate Person), all the while with Elessia running around under Greater Invisibility. But they got the better of her in the end! 

In the end, the death toll was pretty low - all but one of the party survived, although in order to escape they had to run through a busted planar portal which scattered most of the party across several different randomly-decided dimensions (I did a little epilogue for each). The one PC that died was the numerically-named "27"  - he got swallowed whole by a Gibbering Mouther summoned by Elessia just before the portal cut out and, having nowhere else to go, decided to go out with a bang and blew himself (and the mouther) to smithereens with a pellet grenade. RIP 27. 

I love cameos so I'm sure we'll see the other PCs again. Everyone did a drawing of their characters so I'll have to find them all and post them here so you can see what they looked like!

Anyway, I did some coloured versions of Vos' Vipers (now deceased), so I thought I'd post them too.

You can buy a pdf of the Fangwood Keep module straight from the Paizo website. I'd recommend it, the mix of sandbox-style exploration with classic dungeon crawling was really fun! Next campaign I run is going to be written completely from scratch - I'll let you know how it goes.

Tortella the Half-Orc Acrobat

It's been a while since we've posted, so I'm gonna post what the peoples wants: more PCs! (we'll get back to actual monsters soon i'm really sorry).

So we're currently playing the Fangwood Keep campaign as run by Joe. When we came to lieutenant #2, Daigo Longtooth, Joe spun it so that he would face us on 1v1 combat. It the member of our chosen party (it was Fitz-Auk) defeated him, he would surrender. I managed to win with the help of a lot of disarm maneuvers. However, the rest of the party felt like it would've been cool if they'd had a chance for the 1v1.

So alongside the actual campaing, we're gonna be running a little tournament. Each one of us (eight in total), will submit a 7th-level character for a series of 1v1 matches on some custom maps. We're going to be using the duelling and performce rules from Ultimate Combat. It's all going to be quite exciting.

So my submission for the tournament will be Tortella, acrobat-on-sabbatical, a half-orc discovering what it means to be an orc by beating up things and taking their teeth. She actually uses the flowing monk archetype, because I felt that fit the character the best for what I wanted her to be. The whole monks must be lawful thing feels a bit more like a guideline to me anyway.

Vos' Vipers

So, as I'm DMing a Pathfinder game right now I thought I'd make a little post of some of the material I made for the players. This is all based on the official Pathfinder campaign module Fangwood Keep, which I bought at the Orc's Nest in London a few weeks ago after reading a bunch of positive reviews for it online.

The campaign as written is a pretty simple affair designed to be a standalone, one or two session deal. I'm padding it out a bit, although we tend to go through stuff pretty slowly so I imagine it'll be around 3 or 4 sessions to finish. The story involves a pair of warring nations, Nirmathas and Molthune, and a disputed fort on their border, the eponymous Fangwood Keep. The way I'm fluffing it is that the two countries have achieved an uneasy peace, and as part of the treaty the tactically crucial Keep must be kept vacant by both sides.

This treaty is threatened when a rebellious Molthune captain named Pavo Vos disobeys orders and takes the keep by force, helped by the elite specialist infantry unit he once commanded in the army, known as "Vos' Vipers". The main thing I added here was Vos' three liutenants - pictured with him below - because when I read the description of his squad I was disappointed to learn that, despite the unit's description as a group of "specialist" soldiers excelling in espionage and covert military operations, there was remarkably little characterisation.

So, I added three underlings for Vos (replacing some other NPCs in the quest so the XP doesn't get knocked out too much), with the intention of fluffing them as a sort of rival NPC party for the players to duke it out with. They're highly specialised for different roles in combat, and each have a fair share of weird abilities and tricks that (hopefully, we haven't quite started the campaign yet) will keep the players guessing. I suppose a big influence of the flavour of this setup would be the Metal Gear Solid series of games - whose colourful cast of villains have always been favourites of mine.

I'll just post some quick descriptions for you guys, as it's possible the players might look at the blog and I don't want them to get spoiled! 

From left to right:

1. Wasily Grodz

A dwarvish marksman. Softly spoken, something of a perfectionist. Not keen on direct combat, prefers guerilla tactics and stealth. Fond of traps, be careful! 

2. Pavo Vos  

Unit captain and the leader of the insurrection. Highly charismatic and a master tactician, he orchestrated countless successful operations during the war. No slouch with a blade, either - particularly with two or three men at his back. His motives in the insurrection are unclear. Has been sighted accompanied by a robed, dark-haired woman of unknown identity. 

3. Daigo Longtooth  

Little is known of this mysterious half-orc (yep, he's a half-orc) swordsman. An unparalelled duelist. Has a kind-hearted reputation despite his skill in combat. 

4. Edouard Fleisch 

Fleisch is the unit's demolitions expert. Bloodthirsty and quick-tempered by all accounts, and apparently an enthusiastic pugilist to boot.

The gist of the game is that you have this fortified Keep, which the party has to infiltrate, with Vos inside. The PCs have to get in, neutralise him, and get out. The entire keep is mapped out with set things in every room - it's largely up to the PCs to decide how they want to approach the problem. Scale the walls? Find a secret passage? Stealth vs. kick-down-the-door-guns-blazing? It's an idea that appeals to me, kind of blending your standard dungeon crawler with something a bit more sandboxy. It's by no means all combat, either - there are definitely opportunities to talk your way in or out of things.

I'm also using a computer to keep track of everything - I'm making a gigantic, layered map in a program called Adobe Flash (which we use for animating all the time) and it's quite easy for me to set up a big document containing everything - rooms, items, enemy locations - it even has a day/night cycle! it looks cool, too.

I won't reveal any more now, but we're playing the first session next weekend. In subsequent posts I'll let you know how people are getting on, and hopefully post pictures! I kinda hope I kill at least one person :3

Let me know in the comments if you've played this campaign, too. Or if you have any funny DMing experiences - I'm completely new to this, and slightly nervous, so it all helps!

- Joe

Fitz-Auk and Morse the raven

Sometimes mistaken for an orc, hobgoblin or especially unfortunate half-elf, Fitz-Auk is actually a full-blooded human, but quite ugly.

This is my latest character for the next campaign I'm playing, this one being DM'd by Joe, the other contributor to the site. Unlike Spackle and Jammy, Fitz-Auk will be playing a more active role in combat, rather than just hovering in the background shouting encouragement or giving people special enlargement chocolate chip cookies. Not that he won't have his own out-of-combat role. I chose some rules that mean that, despite being a ranger,  Fitz-Auk will be able to take on the rogue role of finding and disarming traps we'll be coming across.

Also doing some fiddling with class options, I got myself a raven that's smarter than the average raven. Used my 4th HD ability point to give her 3 Intelligence. Officially sentient raven. Put a skill point in Linguistics because I don't care if she's got like -3 on her Linguistics check. That's just how I roll, babe.

Hoping that I'll be playing the raven a little like Alex the African Grey parrot, though he was probably 5 Int.

Slok, Frogwarden

Slok is a PC I created for a comedic-themed campaign some friends of ours are running and is a masterpiece of planning because, despite being a bit of a joke, he covertly manages to be a) sort of a cool idea (for me, anyway) as well as b) possibly overpowered (pending on my reading up on a couple of rules).

He's the first druid I've ever rolled - for some reason I've never been much attracted to the class - and also my first half-orc. Druids are popularly considered overpowered through sheer versatility - their Wild Shape class ability allows them to transform into a host of different creatures which can be useful in many situations.

Slok's gimmick is that I'm using the Pack Lord archetype (actually for the Pathfinder series of games, which we've taken to playing lately) with him, which means rather than just choosing one animal companion (as is the druid's usual allocation) Slok gets to instead have a selection of lower-levelled animal companions (divided up between his druid levels, so at level 4 he can have 4 lvl 1 companions, 2 lvl 2 companions etc). I've accordingly given him four giant frogs as companions (he also has to forgo a domain). Archetypes are fun! You should check out pathfinder if you don't already know it.

The art was fun. Wanted to get it done quicker so went for a more flat, graphic style.

Jammy Dodger and the Marmelooze

Sorry about the lack of updates. See the previous post for our excuses.

Also sorry about cheating, because this is my new character, rather than a creature. I just finished DMing Paizo's Path of Immortality set of adventures, which ended up with everyone dying (except for one who went mad with power and another person who got trapped in the Astral Plane). Some of the players enjoyed it to the point of wanting to DM there own campaign, which they said would be silly.

Well.

So my new character is Jammy Dodger, gnome alchemist/summoner. The Marmelooze is what happens when you make preserves from magical oranges. It would seem I like playing gnomes that probably shouldn't be adventuring.

Dis gonn be good though.

Metharel Velenaedasr, elven conjurer

With Cincinnatus in tow, we went to visit the home of our initial contact, Kendra Lorrimer, who wanted to introduce us to somebody new. He was Metharel, an elven wizard from the university of Lepidstatd, who was interested in finding out who'd broken into the university and stolen the artifact (a plot hook for this particular adventure).

He proved his worth in our investigations of a burned asylum, and later at the raid that cost Edge his life. During this raid, he suffered nary a scratch from what we assumed was the protection of his robe of deflection (which are, in reality, completely mundane robes and he was just suffering from chronic luck). More luck for him as we later found a scrimshawed tusk among the loot in the place we were raiding, containing some quite powerful spells.

He's played by the same guy who made Tark, and has an absurd INT score of 23 (21 plus a headband of intellect).

NNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD


Special hello-hello to the folks at Paizo that may be looking at this blog and a special thank you-thank you for the Carrion Crown campaign. We're currently in the tail end of Trial of the Beast and enjoying it immensely. Here's to hoping that our DM runs the next part too.

Cincinnatus Tiberio, Oracle of Battle

When Tark died, we buried him at Lepidstadt's temple of Pharasma. Spackle was especially broken up about this, since it was partially her fault that he died (the wraith wouldn't have returned to attack if she hadn't taunted it with an illusion).

So one of our main front liners died and we went around looking for somebody who could fill his slot, and this one weird gravedigger seemed about strong enough. Enter Cincinnatus, whose charming black war-mask makes an appropriate addition to our for-real-we're-not-evil party.

Cincinnatus is unusual in that while he's technically a caster, many of his abilities are geared towards battle. He liked to big himself up and throw swords and axes at people (yes, I'm quite disappointed that his shovel isn't a weapon, but whatever). As a worshipper of one of the war gods, he's all about dealing as much damage as he can whenever possible in order to please his god. Even if what he's fighting is a misguided yet weak angry town mob. Needless to say his Chaotic Bloodthirsty lethal tactics against people who don't stand a chance against him grate with Spackle's Neutral Nice nature.

I can't even use any bardic abilities properly against him since he's deaf. However, if that means that he can't get the benefit of my inspire courage to whale on some mostly-harmless villagers well then that's not really my fault, is it Mr Deaf.

Also, Edge is dead. He got eaten by a frankenstein dog when we were going on a raid. So now it's just me and Cassimara left as members of the party who have been there since Day 1. We're getting a little paranoid about that.

Wraith (formerly Tark Skulltaker, human barbarian)

Tark Skulltaker was our party's barbarian. Due to an unfotunate set of attacks involving wraiths, he died. Also unfotunately, when you're killed by a wraith, you rise as one seconds later, so that meant we had to double kill his evil spirit.

Wraiths are one of your standard D&D monsters for horror campaigns, when you want things to get a bit dangerous. We found one that had been killing kids and slew it dead, but not before withering away Tark and my pony Butterbutt. These monsters are extra dangerous because they not only hurt you when they attack you, they also drain the life from you (in D&D language, Constitution drain, the deadliest of drains). They have an aura around them that spooks animals, making it difficult for rangers, druid or just anyone who fights from horseback to engage in combat. Third, they're not solid, making them super difficult to hit. Spackle was pretty useless in that particular combat until I remembered I'm the one with the wand of holy magic and started whacking the wraith with it.

RIP Tark.

At least this means that the guy that played him is gonna get a second character portrait now. But not for a while, so that means I get to go back to doing regular monsters!

Valenmar (human cleric) and Edge (tiefling rogue)

Like most parties, we have a rogue and a cleric. Our rogue is a tiefling (supposedly, since he doesn't actually show any quasi-demonic abilities or traits) who specialized in knife-throwing, and the cleric is a human optimized for destroying the undead. Like, literally, we'd walk into a room filled with skeletons, he'd flash his holy symbol and boom. Everything's dead. The guy playing the cleric recently left the group due to the amount of stuff he's been doing, so that's gonna make things a little more deadly. We use my pony to detect when there are undead stalking us.

One more character to go now!

Cassimara Raventhorn, Dhampir

Cassimara is the archer of our team, with an unusual combination of classes (ranger/rogue/inquisitor, I think). She hunts for undead with our team. What makes her unusual is that she's a dhampir, i.e. her dad was a vampire. Our team cleric is an "expert" undead killer who didn't notice this until she revealed it to us like three sessions into the game. It makes for an unusual team member since our cleric is pretty prone to accidentally hurting her with her energy channels, and always has to give her a heads up before he starts blasting things.

For healing, the first part of our adventure was pretty useful. We got these things called haunt siphons that are used to trap ghosts (think the traps for Ghostbusters). So we've got these bottles filled with unfortunate souls that she sometimes uncorks when she needs a little pick-me-up. She's never shown the whole "bloodlust" thing that dhampir are occasionally supposed to have, but I guess eating souls balances it out.

The closest thing to a dhampir in D&D is the Half-Vampire template, which is still a little bit annoying because of level adjustment things. D&D is rife with templates. I think Dragon magazine had a special issue dedicated to various templates for the offspring of the living and dead. Paizo did the Dhampir race, a much less powerful version of the Half-Vampire, so that you can play them from the get-go.

Spackle Thrush, Gnome

Spackle Thrush is a travelling juggler/joker in Ustalav, and friend of the now deceased Professor Lorrimer. She's still a young gnome, but her race is naturally inclined to travelling and seeking thrills the second they reach adulthood. She's not a combatant and is a firm believer that if you're nice to people, they'll be nice to you.

Spackle Thrush is my gnome bard for the current game I'm playing. Technically this is cheating for the Dungeons and Drawings blog, since it's a Pathfinder game. But Pathfinder is also known as D&D 3.75 on the internet, so I'm gonna let it count. I normally play super serious characters, so I decided to play a really comical, super friendly character. Maybe not such a good choice, since we're playing the Carrion Crown adventure path, which is supposed to be horror.

I really like the gnomes in Pathfinder. The problem I found with gnomes in classic D&D was that they weren't much different from halflings. They were both quirky short races, with halflings being a little more sneaky and gnomes being a little more magical. In Pathfinder, they definitely made gnomes their own thing; they're former fairies that got stuck in the mortal world. I'm not sure if Wizards did a similar thing to gnomes in 4th edition, but I know they removed them from the core player races (they've since been added again).

My favourite things about Pathfinder gnomes is that they're essentially immortal. They don't die of old age, but of boredom. Literally. They have something called The Bleaching, which means that if they don't regularly experience fantastic and exciting stuff, they begin to lose their colour and perky personalities until they fade away. Boredom is to gnomes what heart disease is to humans.