Apu: The Roar of the Earth (and some race design)

Born from the mountains of the southern continent of Thivola, the apu are a race of tall, earth humanoids said to have descended from the great mountain god, Etapu. Apu are very tall, averaging heights at 7', and have earthy colored skin tones. Grays, browns, dark greens, and blacks are very common among them. Their skin is rough, almost like touching shark skin, and their features are very angular and solid. They have straight hair that they wear at various lengths. Most apu keep their hair long and some tribes see this as a point of pride and prestige. Braiding is very common among the men and women. Basically, for looks, imagine goliaths from D&D with some Incan influences.

Source: D&D 5e Elemental Evil

Apu shamans tell of the birth of their race, as the progeny of their creator god, Etapu. In an era before time and people, the powerful mountain god slept beneath the waves. Aokah, the Celestial Caracara, saw the slumbering god under water and dove into the aether to pull him out and feast upon the god. Etapu was angered by this and went on a rampage, pulling out islands and rocks and even other sleeping gods. Each island and rock became a piece of the universe. When Etapu tired from his rage, he curled up and slept. His body became the world that we live on. As he slept, his dreams became reality. The birds, fish, plants... all creatures from his dream. The apu are the mightiest of his dreams, with the cunning and guile of the other mortal races as well as the brawn of their patron god Etapu.

Apu have a close relationship with the earth we walk upon. By simply touching the ground, an apu can gather rudimentary information about the area. What they see are simple echoes of who has gone by, and many times, the untrained apu doesn't have the focus to get more than a single piece of knowledge or two. Despite this, apus are often sought out to hunt down criminals and help with mysteries, as even the tiniest piece of knowledge can help with an investigation.

Apu are seen by other races as a bit emotionally reserved, but this is far from the truth, Apu experience emotions much like humans and elves and such, but extreme bouts of excitement, passion, or other emotional state causes the earth around them to erupt in a small earthquake. Given the destructive nature of this, many apu eschew the world and become aesthetics, trying desperately to seek discipline and calm to control their ability. For a strong race, a surprising amount of apu choose to become mages, clerics, or monks simply for the disciplined mind it creates. Despite any mental training, these earth shakes can still happen if the apu is hit with a powerful blow, though such a thing can backfire on the attacker if not careful.

Apu

Might of the Earth: Apu start with a +2 Strength.
Born Geomancer: The apu can make contact with the ground and roll a DC 15 Wisdom check to psychically see what has gone on in an area. These visions are muddled, but on a success can provide a single important piece of information about the area. A natural 20 adds another piece of information, painting the scene a bit more clear. This ability works on areas that touch the ground. Areas in the sky, on the sea, or a higher story of a building cannot be divined.
Earth Shaker: Whenever the apu suffers a significant emotional breakdown (failed moral roll, failed fear roll, GM discretion.) or is hit by a critical hit, the earth around them erupts. The apu and everyone adjacent to them roll a Paralysis roll. Failure means that you fail prone. For tactical maps, the apu's square and all adjacent squares are now difficult terrain.

On My Race Design Theory

I find that I prefer races as a beginning option, rather than as a class. I feel it allows more, cool options to play as, rather than restricting certain archetypes to a race (like a spellblade for elves) or restricting a race from a class (dwarven wizards are cool). Furthermore, I want to try and give races cool abilities that do more than just simple bonuses to rolls. This may not be completely balanced, which is fine by me, but I do try and have them at least somewhat comparable. I also don't want to put in something that will completely circumvent an obstacle. Darkvision is a good example of this. Level 1 adventures in the dark are completely negated by the ability to just see in the dark. Above, the apu's Born Geomancer doesn't circumvent investigation scenarios, but simply adds a new option for players to continue on with it. It's a nice little ability for what looks at first glance to be a more martial race. And Earth Shaker is a weird ability. I like weird abilities.

Finally, I want to stay away from what I feel are abilities tied to a culture. An example of this is in Pathfinder, you have the dwarf's goblin hatred ability, where they gain a bonus against goblinoids. It feels weird to me that no matter what, all dwarves in the world are just really good at killing goblins. I'd rather have something more biological or magic for them.

I think once I flesh out my setting more on the blogs here, I will give out some more cultural information about this race and the others in my setting. And hopefully, I've provided an interesting creature for DMs to use in their game. I made this with ACKS in mind, but I could see it working in 5e (maybe with some more bells and whistles, like a bonus to Athletics or something?).

Onbu

In my setting of Anacaona, I try to keep things familiar yet different. You won't find elves or dwarves naturally (except in the colonial cities as immigrants) but I have similar creatures that are analogous to them. With this, I'll be talking about my goblin analogue, the onbu. I had made these guys up on the fly in the ACKS solo game I'm running for my girlfriend. Luckily, it was towards the end of the game, so I've had some time to make up some cool blurbs about them. Enjoy!

Onbu are grey, short creatures that live in the steamy jungles of Anacaona. These creatures are lithe and wiry, and are generally the size of halflings. Onbu have wider noses and black hair, usually worn long. Their bangs are kept short and trimmed. Tattoos and piercings are prominent among the onbu. The piercings denote authority. The higher the piercing, the more important the onbu is. The native tribes of humans, called Sulano, have long held that onbu are primitive and bad omens, and many don't take kindly to onbu making homes on their lands. Onbu are tribal and do conduct raiding parties, but it's not unusual or even unheard of to have good relations with a tribe of them. 

What makes onbu interesting is their natural connection to the Spirit World. Onbu can see and talk to spirits, demons, and ghosts like they were living people. This makes onbu guides very popular among the natives and colonists, as they can help grant safe passage or news from the spirits of the rain forests. Onbu shamans are fairly powerful spirit talkers, using their natural abilities of spirit speech to parley more magic from the spirits. Onbu shamans have a particular special ability to eat fever dreams and divine truths from them. This requires a special ritual where the subject takes powerful hallucinogenics to get them to dream vividly. The onbu shaman then devours the dream and for a period of time, is addled with madness. Once their period of madness is done, they can then deliver a proper augury to the subject. It's an intense ritual that is draining on the onbu shaman and can't be done often.

Onbu live in tribes in the rain forests of Anacaona. Many times you'll see them in borderlands and marches of a kingdom, acting as parasites on the area. Occasionally, tribes of onbu will gather together to create their own large commune. These onbu are enamoured by the trade and culture they see with the other base races and will eschew their tribal tendancies to create villages. It's not unusual for people to trade with these onbu hamlets. The native Sulano are less likely to, but many of the other native tribes and colonists are more willing. And several of the colonists will make alliances with onbu fiefdoms that they feel can be a thorn in the sides of the native kingdoms.

Onbu Stats

HD: 1

AC: 11 (Cotton Armor)

Attacks: 1d6 (macana), 1d6+poison (shortbow; save poison or take 1 ongoing until death or antidote)

Morale: -1

Spiritspeech: Can see and talk with spirits as if they were visible and normal people.

Onbu Shaman

As above. Give cleric or druid spells that are appropriate. If running ACKs, make them a shaman.

Dream Eater: The onbu shaman can eat fever dreams brought on by hallucinogens. After doing an hour long ritual, the onbu can cast divination once for the subject of the dream. The onbu shaman must rest for a night after doing this.

Stat Rolling Idea

I recently purchased the Black Hack after seeing a lot about it. While I'm not as enamored by it as everyone else seems to be, there are some points I like. I thought the way it does usage dice is cool and reminds me of my weapon degradation rules. The way they do rolling stats is interesting, as it takes into account if someone rolls a very high stat (15+). Reading it, I was inspired to do something similar, but for rolling low rolls. 

Sorry about your damn luck!

Rolling Stats

Roll 3d6 down the line as normal. Like in the Black Hack, if you get a 15 or higher, your next roll is made on a 2d6+2. If you roll a 6 or below, your next roll is made on a 2d6+5, then as normal afterwards.

This method helps to make it less likely that a player will have multiple stats below 6 and really helps to give them a chance to get a greater stat to make up for the low stat. So if you roll a bad STR, you at least have the chance of getting maybe a higher DEX.

Why 2d6+5?

Looking at the probability curves of 3d6 and 2d6+2, you'll see that the average of 2d6+2 is 1.5 lower than the average of 3d6. It allows for the average to come out lower to make up for the fact that you rolled really high before. Furthermore, 2d6+2 completely cuts out any result of 15+, since you already rolled that before. I decided to apply these same principles for rolling a higher amount. 2d6+5 has an average roll of 12, which is 1.5 over the average of 3d6. It also completely removes the results of 6 and below, making it easier to land something higher than a 10. Overall, I think this does what the original rule does. It helps to make an interesting character with some clear strengths and weaknesses and normalizes the rolls a little bit. Both of these help to make a character that's not a superhuman powerhouse nor a chump.

Survivor Series I: Weather Forecasting

Fun fact, before I decided to be a chef and go to culinary school, I went to college to be a meteorologist. I have always been enamored by the weather and decided I wanted to do that for a living. Sadly, I wasn't the best at it, mostly the math sections. You'd be surprised how much math we had to take. I think only the mathematicians beat us. But enough about that.

I've always loved tornadoes and got to chase them! (Source: Wikipedia)

When I started DMing 3.5 and later Pathfinder, I would incorporate a lot of OSR survival stuff into my games. I always focused a lot more on the Man vs. Nature battles as players would deal with wildlife, natural disasters, disease, and weather. Weather is awesome and a game changer, and most players don't expect to deal with the blistering heat or cold, let alone storms and tornadoes. One of the most memorable moments in a game was when a PC tied himself to a pole and survived a tornado going over them, all while screaming and shouting obscenities. This earned him a place of honor among the tribes of kobolds that saw what he accomplished and he became a hero to them.

Of course, when adding more survival stuff into your game, it helps to know a little bit about the rules as well as how it works in real life, especially in a world very different from our modern world. For today. it's weather forecasting. In Pathfinder, one can forecast the weather using the Survival skill. And I use this in my ACKS game too, with a 16+ roll to do it, but those with Survival gain a +4 to it. However, many of my players have wondered how, without modern equipment, did our ancestors divine the weather?

We have to remember that people didn't use the scientific methods that we use today. A lot of weather forecasting was pattern recognition, based on astronomy, observing animal behavior, and simply looking at patterns in the sky. This would be compiled into almanacs as weather lore. You can see a pretty good list of them on the Wikipedia article about it. You can use these or have them as inspiration to make up your own weather lore for your game. Remember, it's all based on observations, not rigorous testing. If a bunch of crows gather the night before a rainstorm, you can bet that people will assume that a murder of crows brings the rain. And with running a magical fantasy setting, maybe that is actually the case! There are more magic methods of forecasting the weather, Dowsing and haruspicy are some real world examples. The classical definitions of pyromancy and aeromancy are also good to use for divining the weather (among other things).

Forecasting the weather is an important tool if you make weather a decent obstacle. Players dealing with torrential rainstorms and the flash floods that come with them will value a survivalist's prediction in the future. Or, the players trap an enemy army in a terrible thunderstorm to weaken and gain an advantage on them. Anything is possible! The more you use weather, the more of an impact it will have. I generally use the Pathfinder rules for weather, since they are pretty robust, but use or make up whatever you like! For a generator, I like to use the Dodeca Generator here. I find it is a good weather generator that takes into account the previous day's weather as well as the climate.

Sunder and Rust

Last month, I made a post about Weapon Degradation here. I wanted to expand a little bit and talk about sundering items.

Sunder

To sunder a weapon or shield, you must roll an attack against the item. Small items like daggers or potions would be harder to hit (-4), medium items like swords and bucklers take a -2 to hit, and larger items like armor, staves and tower shields are much easier to hit and take no penalties.After the attack, roll a Strength check. On a success, the weapon is brought down a die level. On a natural 20, the die is brought down two levels. Depending on the item die below will depend on what you need to beat to bring it down a die level

Weapon Quality Die    Strength to Bring it Down

d4                                 6+

d6                                 10+

d8                                 14+

d10                               18+

d12                               22+

This makes high quality weapons harder to destroy. It also hopefully makes it a good tactic to weaken an enemy's weapon or armor, especially if they are hard to kill and do a lot of damage. Of course, this leads me to my next idea...

Rust Monster

DM's love him, the PC's worst nightmare is back, ready to oxidize your weapons until they crumble. When a rust monster uses it's feelers to destroy a metal item, roll a Blast/Breath saving throw. Failure means it drops a die step. A natural 1 means it drops two die steps. If your item is at a d4, it breaks.

I wanted to make the rust monster still dangerous, but a little more forgiving with its oxidation ability. That way it increases the tension that your weapon/armor is degrading, but you can still use it to fight it off while you think of something else to use on.

Killing PCs? Evil. Destroying their gear? Downright despicable! (3.5 Forgotten Realms)

Card Game Haul from FLGS

Went to the Adventure Gaming Store in Davie and boy, did my girlfriend and I get quite the haul

I've really enjoyed Sentinels of the Multiverse and I'm happy to have the latest expansion. Boss Monster was something new, but we've played a couple games of it and it is very fun.

For more RPG related news, Wednesday is the big tournament PPV for the World Wide Wrestling RPG I run on the VGCW boards. I'll definitely do a blog post about it in the coming days. Last week was a physically and mentally exhausting one at work, so I apologize for the sparse updates.

20 Man Royal Rumble Main Event? Oh Yeah!

So in addition to running an ACKS game, I also run a World Wide Wrestling game with seven people from a forum I frequent. The link to the RPG is here, while the link to the forum post about my game is here. Over all, it has been a very enjoyable experience, both as a fan of wrestling and a fan of RPGs. Many of the people have really enjoyed it as well, whether they are wrestling fans or first timers. I think that's one of the cool things about adding wrestling in an RPG format. Wrestling already supports the gonzo and beer & pretzel style of gaming. It's a natural fit. And while there's roleplaying and talking involved (as per any *World game), you can always just have a manager be your mouthpiece if you aren't so great at talking, just like in real wrestling. It's an amazing game and I think people really should give this a spin.

Anyways, a while back, I bought some funky dice and I've been wondering what I can use them for. Well, now that I have the go home show before our game's PPV event, I think I've figured it out. The PPV is called King of Kings, a bracket style tournament where seven people go in and the winner gets a title shot of their choice, when and where they want it, no matter the title. It's essentially like King of the Ring mixed with Money in the Bank for those that watch WWE.

Now I bet you are wondering why seven people instead of eight in a tournament? Well, that's where the main event of the show preceding our PPV comes in. It's going to be a 20 man Royal Rumble, where one person will be called in at a time to come into the ring and wrestle, until we exhaust the list of 20 entrants. To win, you have to eliminate another wrestle by throwing them over the top rope and having their two feet touch the ground outside. You do this until there is a last man standing. That winner will be getting a by in the tournament on the following game and go straight to the semi finals. The next six people will be put in the tournament and it'll go from there.

I plan on using the Funky Dice to do the random rolling for the Royal Rumble. I'll roll a d20 on the list of wrestlers and as I put more wrestlers out there in the ring, I'll step the die down. So if we have 11 people left to be called out, I'll roll a d11 to see who is next. I could use a deck of cards, but where is the fun in that?

I'll have to do a session recap for this come Wednesday. But, I am looking forward to it greatly.