Asteria Rising: Update 5

Player Characters die, simple as that. I've not had time to pour into Asteria Rising lately with my Summer course, yet I can introduce my three modes of dealing with death in this science-fiction rendition of D&D.

Injury types are still up for review, yet they are shown below anyway. They might be removed but the premise is that having come close to death a character will still be in bad shape afterwards despite having lived.

Hardcore

This is a mode of play where the players have no saving death throws. Once they receive damage that takes them below 0 hit points, the character dies.

Normcore
This is a mode of play where each player character has three saving death throws. It means whenever their character takes damage which puts them below 0 hit points, they roll a 1d20 with a Difficulty Class of 1. The above means that the character can only die if they roll a one for their saving throw; however, the difficulty class is bumped up for the next saving throw. So, the second throw the character will need to roll above a 2. Saving death throws are one of the few times a roll that ties with the difficulty class do not favor the player. A player character has a maximum of 3 Saving Death Throws they can make. By the fourth one, they will die. With normcore mode, every successful saving death throw will leave the player severely injured. Any failed saving death throw leaves them dead. Thus, they will need to create a new character.

Softcore
This is a mode of play where each player character does a Death Throw that gets increasingly harder until they can no longer succeed. Anytime their character takes damage that takes them below 0 hit points they must roll a saving death throw with their 1d20. Each saving death throw difficulty class is bumped up by one per use. A character doing their first saving death throw must roll above a one with their 1d20, a two for their second, three for their third, and so on until a twenty which cannot be beat. Upon a successful saving Death Throw the character will suffer no injury penalties. Upon a failure the character will be dead and the player must make a new one.

Injury
Minor Injury
Disadvantage [-5] on all physical rolls [acrobatics, athletics, riding, combat, et cetera] until a rest is taken and a Medicine Skill check of Difficulty Class 10 is used to treat the injury.

Moderate Injury
Disadvantage [-5] on every roll that isn’t a Saving Throw until a rest is taken and a Medicine Skill check of Difficulty Class 10 is used to treat the injury.

Severe Injury
Disadvantage [-5] on all rolls and your Constitution Saving Throw until a rest is taken and a Medicine Skill check of Difficulty Class 14 is used to treat the injury.

Three Fears of Man

"Three fears of man: the uncanny, the unknown, and the self. This creature is without a doubt a putrid chimera of these traits. When one plays god a devil is born."—Toma Koshiro, Leader of the Ark Project

The above is flavor text about a new type of aberration monster I created for Asteria Rising. That last monster I showed was the Vile-Horn, but here is a more disturbed creature. The below will give a picture of the monster, background, and statistics. Next week will be a new page on monster creation.

Three Fears of Man

There isn't much on the flavor text for this monster; however, I will give what little I have. First is that the monster is meant to be the ultimate example of the Ark Project's malfunction. The creature is meant to be barely held together because of this background.

It has very slow movement, despite the many legs, because it was crafted not evolved. A lot of mental function from the various brains of the three heads need to go into moving its many limbs. The Head of the Uncanny [distorted man] is where all the pain receptors go, meaning it is in perpetual agony. That is why the woman's head [the Head of Self] appears so tranquil. The Head of Unknown [hooded skull] is meant to be the dominant head where most cognitive processes are kept.

The Ark Project was prepared to recreate humans in an emergency; it had a plethora of imprinted memories and ideas to place within the heads of the new humans to avoid the race starting completely from scratch. This allows the monster to have a very high intelligence, a be a huge source of knowledge on Earth history. It also gives reasons for players to track down the monster beyond killing it.

The reaction system for the monster is the main way to make it dangerous. It is understandable that for the more native race of the world that this creature would be something worth fearing, while for the players they could try to keep a distance from the large and slow moving beast. I also imagine there being a finite amount of these creatures and they simply have an abnormally long life. If the chances of meeting one are low, than a fight against it must be memorable.

The idea of this monster is simply that it is hard to kill and dangerous if you get too close to it. This makes it more dangerous for close range characters [like the soldier class] due to its reactions, as well as classes that have very little mobility [Agent Sniper sub class]. The wail ability also ensures that the creature has a chance in a battle of attrition by slowly witling down the party's health 1d4 at a time.

Three Fears of Man

Large aberration

Armor Class 10 (natural armor)

Hit Points 939 [Each head has 313 hit points]

Speed 20 yards

STR    DEX    CON    INT   WIS   CHA

16(+3) 10(0) 18(+4) 19(+4) 10(0) 1(-5)

Skills perception +5, Lore [History] +9

Senses passive perception 15

Languages – All human languages

Challenge 

Three Heads. This monster has Advantage against all abilities or items that disorient, blind, deafen, and mute.

Reactive. Whenever a melee attack/ability is done to this target, it can use one of its actions against the attacker.

Actions

Bite. Melee Attack, one target, Attack Bonus +8. The tailed mouth of this creature bites a target causing 2d8 poison damage. An additional 1d6 poison damage is caused at the start of the target’s next turn.

Grapple. Target must roll a Dexterity Saving Throw of D.C. 14. On a successful save the target isn’t grabbed and allowed to move up to 5 yards in any direction. On a failed save the target is grabbed by one of the arms of the creature, is unable to move, and has disadvantage [-5] on all actions except Dexterity Saving Throws to escape the grapple on its turn.

Strike. Melee attack, one target, Attack Bonus +3. The creature attacks with its large clawed arm causing 1d20 physical damage on hit.

Swipe. Melee Attack. The many eyed tail of the monster swings in defense causing 1d12 damage to all in a 10-yard cone behind the creature. Targets make a Dexterity Saving Throw of D.C. 10. A successful save results in half damage, a failed save is full damage.

Wail. All creatures within hearing range of the monster must make a Constitution Saving Throw of D.C. 14. On a successful save nothing happens, on a failed save they take 1d4 physical damage. The action involves the monster letting out a blood curdling scream from the Head of Uncanny.

Asteria Rising: Update 4

More work on Asteria Rising has been done. I've fleshed out another of the three classes [Engineer] which is a class with two options. The idea behind it is that one path of abilities focuses on laying down traps and automated turrents to cause damage or hinder enemies. The other path focuses specifically on mitigating damage through the use of energy shields.

Something I need to work on is the health system. The Medicine skill is the major means of healing in the game. Mainly it is creating mechanics around diseases, exhaustion, and injuries. Asteria Rising is planned to make A) the medicine skill useful unlike with normal D&D and B) have the players fear the wilderness. Being on an alien world would mean all sorts of injuries and ailments would affect the players.

Speaking of making the wilderness dangerous, I'll need to arrange some sort of roll table in the document under the GM section to allow randomly generated environments, quests, and maybe even monsters. That will need to be some of the last things implemented, as everything else needs to be tested somewhat before randomization can occur effectively.

A friend of mine also gave an idea for a native alien species. She suggested that rather than having the species have one technology level, have it vary amongst groups. It's actually smart because even today humanity isn't caught up completely across the board in terms of technology either. We'll see how it works once weapons and armor are cemented into the mechanics but I'm thinking a range of Hunter-gather all the way to Pike and Shot era technologies.

Bha'ze Concept Art

To make it work I've noted that certain weapon and armor will come with their own bonus damages or resistances e.g. Kevlar would be resistant to ballistic weapons but not a great axe while chainmail would be resistant to a sword but not a sniper rifle. Some time this coming week I'll do some test runs on specific aspects of the game too.

I'll try to have more to show next week; thank you for reading.

Villians: Banshee

Here is a new edition of the Villains of D&D. This one is fairly brief compared to the last two, but offers a new direction for players to deal with monsters. Specifically taking advantage of how a banshee is created to encourage the party to investigate the creature before fighting or releasing it from its curse.