Why is true resurrection out of range but plane hopping isn't? This seems like a great opportunity to have them complete a quest for some high level NPC who does have access to true resurrection
There are a few reasons for this that I left out of the post because the context required would have bloated the post, the first is simply that I try to avoid high level spellcaster NPCs because players tend to see them as the solution to everything, the closest thing they have is a wizard friend who studies magic but doesn't like to use it aside from things like identify.
Secondly the deceased character is from our previous campaign, which soft-ended when that character died because around the same time one of the other players had to leave the group but we got a new player who had never played before who wanted to join, we didn't want to slap them with an 8th level character sheet though so we started a new campaign with the understanding that around 8th level the two campaigns would converge and the new players character would join the old party. The player with the dead character is fulfilling the role of character who can enable the plane shifting, giving me a convenient way to write the character out when the time comes. The other 2 players will get to choose if they want to continue as their new or old characters. (This was all discussed with the players before starting the new campaign in very big picture terms)
Thirdly, plane hopping just feels more fun to me than standard resurrection and it adds to the weight of the moment. That character died by sacrificing themself. If you've played the 5e spelljammer adventure you'd be able to guess exactly how it happened. A running gag of the previous campaign is that no matter what misfortune befell them they'd always weasel their way out of serious consequences (despite my best efforts) and this would be the ultimate no consequences moment.
The backup plan is always just to make it up, but I prefer to stick to established lore with the hopes that 50 years of ironing out (or retconning) has made it internally consistent enough to get by.
It's a fairly realistic medieval adventure rpg, sword fighting is stance based and very hard, you also suck at everything to begin with because you start off as an illiterate blacksmiths son. The sequel is a continuation of his story. It's pretty story focused but you can definitely have a ton of fun just wandering around stealing shit and fighting people if you want to, once you get good at stealing and fighting
An actually helpful answer is that there is a creator on tiktok called offlain who makes a series of videos called "try not to get scared scariest stories". The series has a rotating cast of characters such as Mr teeth, the meatworm, evil knife guy, the fuck you guy, Jeffs the killer, and The Creature. The creature is a cow that the narrator is scared of. Here's a popular The Creature story: I am so excited for the movie, I exclaims with excitement. But little did I know it would be a feature, a creature feature. Featuring... The Creature."
We were playing blades in the dark, they were sneaking into the back of a warehouse to steal some blood while the rest of the party made a distraction out front, the dog was right there and he didn't think he'd be able to sneak past it. He could have stabbed it but chose not to I guess. Maybe he thought that would be more cruel?
That was how it worked in the playtest. The sidebar saying "pick a race you really are and pretend to be half the other race" is gone from the 2024 PHB. Rules as written, you can only be fully one race, this of course doesn't actually matter as the whole thing is imaginary bullshit but in organised play it'll sometimes come up.
One time I was just trying to do my money laundering restocking in GTA:O (iirc it was money laundering, it was whatever business you got when the game went free on epic games) and a guy on the flying motorbike killed me for no reason and it wasted a ton of time, eventually I killed him back and he spawned in the desert in front of me so I spawn killed him until he apologized.
I'm not saying what I did was right, I did it in the heat of the moment. But man, that game is really good at making you mad at people.
On the off chance that happens I'd probably give them one of the beast traits, probably one of the ones that's less useful like keen smell or web sense
This is a really good idea, I might make their laws very simplistic. I might even steal the ones from Animal Farm.
In my mind the mongrelfolk definitely won't be inherently evil. Paranoid or scared of outsiders, definitely. But they should have near-human intelligence, but slightly diminished.
Professor Moreau to me is the evil one but purely because he doesn't hold much regard for the lives of the people he has experimented on, especially in a world with polymorph magic and Druidic wildshape. Though Moreau will be helpful to the players and give them no good reason to kill him, since they're his chance to regain control of his lab.
I've been going back and forth on if Moreau will want the mongrelfolk dead, since they'd hold more scientific value to him kept alive.
I've not seen either of those but a quick search shows me that's 51 episodes of one series, 64 of another and a movie. That might be a little bit too much for the amount of prep time I have
Is he stupid?