Ruination of Bran version 2 Up!

The module I've been doing development diaries over is submitted onto the Dungeon Master's Guild site. It is a free 75 page pdf. Hopefully the adventure is engaging after all the time I put into it. I want plenty of comments made on it so that I know what to fix in the next 6-12 months whenever I start making Version 3. Version 3 I intend to be paid rather than free as it should be better tested and refined than the old.

Where to get it.

Musique Magnifique

Music may not be for every table, but it can be used to help set atmosphere. I'm gonna sit down with this post and go over what I have found that could be of use for helping immerse players through audio.

People can only know about the world around them through sensing it: sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound. With our digital age a myriad of sounds can be found and compiled to help with immersion. Adding more immersive elements is helpful to role-playing whether it is the historical reenactor, Society of Creative Anachronism (S.C.A.) member, Live Action Role Players (L.A.R.P.), or Dungeons & Dragons player wearing a blanket like a cloak. Sound is a cheap means of immersing people.

Atmosphere and Ambience

Now one can buy audio clips from site such as Amazon. In fact here is one for Medieval Battle Camps. If you want to create your own mix of sounds I suggest sites like Ambient-Mixer or Tabletop Audio where one can customize the audio files to their liking before buying them. Or.  . . have a couple tabs open where the sounds are playing, and unmute the specific mixer boards when appropriate for mood setting in the session.

Another cheap way is to look for the sounds on YouTube, such as the medieval siege collection by Ject Production below. Another idea is to look up A.S.M.R. videos either on YouTube or Vidme. A.S.M.R. by its nature places an intense value on ambient sounds. YouTube is an older site, so it will have a greater number of videos to choose from. Vidme though has a more intuitive layout and a specific tag for A.S.M.R. videos that would make searching easier.

Other actions one can take are to ignore ambient sounds and simply use music. My preference is instrumental music for it doesn't have your words and the musical lyrics mixing. Instrumental music's general lack of lyrics makes it require more emphasis on pitch, tone, speed, and other mechanics to create the mood. Also, not all music you find will be unusable for ambience. Imagine the below video from one YouTube channel, 15 Decades, being used either inside a church or in a social interaction before/ after a battle.

That isn't to say more general scene setting music can't be provided. Consider your players walking into a graveyard to the sound of "Ghost of Brandenburg," a piece meant to evoke an eeriness. One can simply have the song play in full, only its beginning, or start it at any other part in the video; it is an orchestral piece so there are several tempo [speed], volume, and key [collection of pitches] changes throughout.

On a final note there are some tips for not just the above videos but also for the below. Have several windows/ tabs open ahead of time. Nothing will break immersion like an advertisement starting up. Make sure the videos are running at their lowest quality, no one will be watching the video screens so take advantage of the increased buffer speed from lower image pixilation. The sound quality will remain the same throughout. Finally do what suits your group, have a metal guitar solo if that will get your players invested; it's your game.

COMBAT

One of the best places to use music is in combat. Songs here need not be directly related to the encounter; they need to build tension and evoke agitation. When I say agitation I mean movement, so a fast paced song with loud bombastic sounds would be a good fit. It grabs the players' attention and makes them be drawn into the fight. You should consider music as a tool in those situation because without music players are waiting and waiting for someone to finish their rolls.

"This is the Nylands och Tavastehus Calavlry March from Caliguoa or Hollowfaith's Drum and Fife mod for Empire: Total War!" (SpecialOST). I had to track this song down a fair bit, but it is a very eerie and threatening tune. It's hard for me to not imagine something dangerous approaching at the sound of those raspy pipes.

As can be heard in the above video, the battle music doesn't strictly need to be this tension building thing throughout. Music can simply be a means of filling the silence between drumming dice across a table. I personally like the Basil Poledouris piece that was used in "Conan the Barbarian "[1982], for its sound track gives this mystical and epic scope. Being used for a movie based off a sword and sorcery book series just gives an extra degree of appropriateness in my mind. Feel free to use any particularly powerful piece from a favorite movie.

Or perhaps you know a band with a particularly useful song, like the above Nightwish song I found by happenstance. It has a decent tempo and would work for my table with keeping the players somewhat immersed with what is going on at the table. Not in a manner of being strictly lined with the combat, but something to signify that they should keep paying attention. My players often have side conversations, which derail all of us---I'm still working on my G.M. skills to wrangle them all in again.

I cannot reinforce enough that one must use what they and their players would like. My advice is still to have a preference on instrumental pieces. Also, if you are having difficulty in finding music our sounds to use, simply type into YouTube (or some other streaming service) "battle music" or "battle sounds." There are actually a number of videos out there that already have a series of pieces and excerpts combined into a whole. Longer videos for audio purposes can be useful as combat in Dungeons and Dragons can take a long time. A shorter video is still useful for being easier to navigate to certain points if you have to micromanage the music to an extent.

That's all for this week.

Works Cited


15 Decades. Roman Catholic Chant - Crusades. YouTube: 15 Decades. May 29, 2013. Web Video. Accessed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY2KzjVNoKY>

Janoy Cresva. Nightwish - Last of the Wilds. YouTube: Janoy Cresva. August 15, 2010. Web Video. Accessed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oLqP6AsI7o>

JECT PRODUCTION+. MEDIEVAL BRUTAL SIEGE BATTLE SOUND EFFECT HD. YouTube: JECT PRODUCTION+. August 2, 2015. Web Video. Accessed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIKxZ2ZsH70>

Paganini Jovi. Basil Poledouris - Riddle Of Steel / Riders Of Doom. YouTube: Paganini Jovi. January 25, 2008. Web Video. Accessed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onGWF8mz1Zw>

Richard Meyer. Ghost of Brandeburg - Richard Meyer. YouTube: Classical HD. July 30, 2016. Web Video. Accessed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeenHWxcEFQ>

SpecialOST. Empire: Total War D&F OST (2009) Nylands och Tavastehus [SWE]. Youtube: SpecialOST. January 2, 2015. Web Video. Accessed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEQcXRnzxVI>

Atypical Characters: Piradin

Ahoy! Imagine a paladin, the typical gothic white knight of romances. Now throw that image out to let this jerk enter the stage. The character below is a Chaotic Evil paladin meant to act as an oathbreaker. This character is actually a provided one in my Ruination of Bran v2 module I've been working on.

I rolled for this character's stats and got some rather mediocre results. Rather than mitigating those 8 and 9 ability score results, I put the highest result [17] into charisma and added the +2 charisma that high-elves get to charisma. The high charisma makes the character's spells more effective and their ability to do rolls in social interactions far better. With a -1 in dexterity and strength, the previous idea of this paladin focusing on using spells or charisma is reinforced.

The pirate backstory came about on a whim. For Ruination of Bran I wanted each provided character to be its own race, backstory, and class. I found that pirate is a modified form of the sailor background. For an oathbreaker paladin, being a blood thirsty pirate seemed appropriate.

As side trivia Qualen Bata comes from my, yet to be accepted by a publisher, fantasy novel. Qualen is a war god for the elves who is the bastard son of the Goddess of Knowledge and the God of Death. Bata is also what I have the Elves say when cussing, it just means bastard. Digression over, back to the usual.

This character is meant to be played as a intimidating fellow. While they aren't particularly strong in combat, their proclivity toward violence makes the character more intimidating. Now the character isn't stupid, e.g. walking into a tavern and killing everyone. The character simply has no qualms about killing other beings [evil] and prefers to do things on their own terms [chaotic]. The character can work well with a party and follow a quest objective.

Actually working with a party not built up of evil characters might work best for this paladin pirate. After all, if the party had neutral, good, and lawful characters, then the oathbreaker can trust them not to betray him. A party filled with chaotic evil characters probably wouldn't have a lot of trust amongst the members.



*Disclaimer. I came up with this idea on my own, four days later I found Dawnforgedcast's video on making a Pirate Paladin. You're welcome to watch his video as it's interesting as well.

Asteria Rising Update 7

Been a while hasn't it? A large part is due to equal parts focusing on Ruination of Bran and my own laziness. Firday August 11, 2017 I did some more work on Asteria Rising though. Specifically the work began with passing time by improving the character sheet. I also began to work on determining a better progression system for skill proficiencies.

Drawing slightly off of videos for Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon role-playing-game, I removed saving throws and base proficiency. Players will now progress their skills by rolling critical rolls [rolling 20 without modifiers]. Personally, it makes more sense as both I and my players have been confused by the proficiency level up tables in the D&D Player's Hand Book before and generally forgotten to increase proficiency before.

The idea is basic, get the critical roll and check the box next to the skill. Once the session is over, increase that skill by one and remove the check. That way players aren't stacking their skill increases during the session, they remember to increase the skill as the spot is marked, and they feel they made progress. I do expect people doing house rules to curb these level ups, but for now that's the current system.

I didn't want characters to start as a completely blank slate though as that removes an aspect of fun in usually tedious character creation process. Ability scores remain, and their modifiers go into the related skills to act as their starting base. Background will also give a +1–2 in some skills. That way backgrounds aren't quite as minmaxable as they are in D&D, as I've found in my Atypical character series. Yet, the backgrounds still give some mechanical weight to choosing them.

There will also be additional skills that go with backgrounds too: vehicle types, languages, hobbies, and so on. I just haven't come up with them all nor added to the character sheet template. One thing I do anticipate are players having unorthodox skills based off their backstory or the type of game the GM runs, so I want one or two columns in the Extra Skills block empty to be filled in as necessary.

I also still need to come up with a better name because having Attribute Skills and Extra Skills may be confuse people or it may not. The names are self-explanatory yet are all Extra skills going to be skills, or perhaps personality traits should be added in? I'm not sure but it is a question that will keep me up at night until fixed.

Left: Soldier Levels Alpha0.08                                 Right: Soldier Levels Alpha0.09

With the change in the character sheet I also modified the leveling system. My greatest trepidation at completing the engineer and creating the leveling process of the agent class was how much needed to be filled in. D&D has a massive chunk of page space devoted to spells and abilities, yet even it falls back on just increasing number of actions, ability scores, or ability damage. My half-hearted research of leveling in D&D shows that most players don't reach level 15+. If that's the case then why bother with struggling to make 20 levels of content, when I can pack it down into 10.

It might seem like the player will have less, but their leveling will be more potent than its current iteration. Getting an ability score upgrade for leveling is nice, but getting a score increase and another ability is better. I also don't think I'll double the xp gain needed, perhaps increase xp per level by 30% at most.

Ruination of Bran v2 Update 2

We're coming to a head with the update. I've recently begun work on a section devoted to the sewers underneath the town where players run into a few chaotic evil creatures. The dungeon map I made for it is rather basic, though it should convey to the Game Master (GM) where the players are.

The Depths, as the sewers all called in the module, shouldn't require much work. It was actually the second thing I worked on for the original Ruination of Bran. The premise is that the players can enter either for a quest, or be teleported there by a Halfling mage the encounter. I've added other reasons to enter but I won't spoil. The entire idea is that there are two factions vying for power within the sewers, making a mini dungeon. There aren't traps but there are secrets; I anticipate that my usual players would avoid checking for traps after not finding any for a while, thus not finding hidden rooms to rest or treasures.

I've also completed an assortment of level 3 adventurers to start the module with; Ruination of Bran was intended to be an adventure people could just pick up at any point and play. I've not made an assortment of custom drawings as I had hoped; moreover, that polish will be left for version 3 next year.

Once the Depths section has been completed, work on the Climax section will begin. That section is easily going to be the most complex as it takes account for the actions the players take in the previous sections. When completed, I will both post the module on the blog and release it as a free pdf on Dungeon Master's Guild, and provide the links to both on a D&D Facebook group I'm in. The main goal will be to garner more interested parties to critique, so I have direction for what to focus on in version 3.

Your audienceship is appreciated.

Atypical Character: Techno Druid

Though I'm not particularly knowledgeable on druids and their rolls in D&D, I feel this character is unique enough for this series. This post will be rather short due to my more simplistic quirks about the character.

This character plays in contradiction to how druids aren't supposed to use metal armor or shields [aren't proficient in them], yet can use metal weapons. If that is loophole to the rules, then are there other ones? What if there is a druid who communes with nature in more urban environments, attempting to compromise the artificial and natural worlds.

Rock gnomes start with the ability to make mechanical clockwork critters, along with being proficient with tinker tools. They aren't going to find the components for these tools out in the wilderness, which encourages them to at least visit urban environments more.

In my mind the character puts their skills in tinkering to use for a guild to both gain money for components and form allies for more druidic needs. An urban environment would be starved for a lot of nature, yet it would be present to some extent. Maybe the druid travels to orchard farms or even tree farms to heal the crops for the locals. Working for a guild could allow the druid to always have a place to rest when visiting settlements, and give the druid an information network to tap into.

That is generally the Techno Druid, one that plays around with the rules of their Druid Circle. Possibly focusing on helping nature within and around settlements, while using a guild membership as a means of always having money and a place to rest when traveling. Someone with simple goals, a drive to better themselves and compromise two seemingly opposing forces [nature and mechanical].

Have a great day.