Asteria Rising: Update 6

This post will be a tad rushed as I was quite busy this weekend. In all honesty not much progress has been made with Asteria Rising due to my focus on the new Ruination of Bran. I will take time to state some ideas fluctuating in my head, and maybe by next weekend have a preview of more work on Asteria Rising done or Ruination of Bran version 2.

I had a sit down with my sibling whose head is less in the clouds. Bouncing ideas off, I found that my initial concept for a super complex disease system wouldn't work. Namely because this is supposed to be me making the game I and my core D&D group would want to play. Half of us have A.D.D. and four-fifths have their children begging for a butt whooping at every session—complex rules don't work with us because we can never stay focused on them.

To sum up an hour-and-a-half conversation, I went and reconsidered why I was making this game. The first reason was to have a Science-Fiction environment for playing D&D. Looking back through monster ideas in my memo App. I saw that all monsters were meant to be semi-realistic. That is a key factor of Science-Fiction—time is taken to make things believable—just hoping for suspension of disbelief alone would be Space-Fantasy.

My second reason was to make the wilderness dangerous. Looking through videos, mainly by the Web DM and Mathew Colville YouTube channels, there are references to old school D&D where just making it back to town was an achievement in itself. More importantly during my first campaign that I ever ran for D&D we skipped the wilderness 95% of the time.

My core D&D rarely got to meet, so whenever we had a quest the players wanted to just skip random encounters and keep any story telling to set the seen to a minimum. However, two of our better sessions dealt with random encounters. The first was for a one session quest where the party needed to investigate a new disease that was hitting very precise economic and military areas in town.

The party went to the first town on the road, did some investigating, murdered all the survivors, then kept traveling to the Night Owl's Inn. When they set out, I rolled for some hostile creatures I wrote down the week before. First day they [the party] were just told they felt like they were being watched in this open expansive grassland. That night I just mentioned there was a hawk in a tree looking at them. Second day, the hawk was circling them. They would scare it off, then it would come back from a different direction and hour later. Second night of what was a three day trip they set a whole field on fire in the direction the hawk went. Next the party marched down and got ambushed by a Deranged Ranger [hawk's owner]. Their main tank/healer the cleric in plate armor almost died. They all felt like they earned that victory as it was harder than the premade questcentric fight that came after.

The other time I did random encounters was more them being allowed to choose where they went in a region known as the Deadlands in my campaign world. They choose a random town on the map; I rolled for the number and types of minions. Then they fought a 12 shadows and some ghouls. After that they fought wraiths on their way up a tower to battle a Lich who used Death Ward—instantly killing one of them. The party had gained really powerful magical artifacts from a previous dungeon. Nothing had ever been able to hurt them afterwards until that moment. The wilderness was suddenly scary for the first time.

In both cases the looks on my players' faces was far more engaging and satisfying than most of the boss fights we ever experienced. They weren't expecting the fights, they didn't know what they were going in for, and they sure as heck felt accomplished/relieved when it was done. I disliked skipping these random encounters so often, but the players wanted to progress in the story and I obliged them. Making a game where the focus on exploration and what you find during was and is again a primary reason for Asteria Rising to be made.

So, I'm going to cut a lot more out of the game mechanics. Specifically things like that disease set up, the challenge rating system for monsters that D&D had because the players need to figure out something is dangerous on their own. Removing it will actually reinforce them being characters on an alien world who don't know what they are facing. In retrospect, I will need to make a section in the game document full of tables to randomly roll a monster to just patch together. I will keep having 3 classes with 2 sub-branches each. I will also need to find a way to create a very robust weapon and armor system, since there won't be a textbook of spells like in normal D&D.

I'm also considering reworking the Bonds, Ideals, Flaws, Personality Trait, and Backgrounds that D&D had. My players don't really role-play much. I like role-play as a plyer myself, but I don't stay strict to it. Making just a background option that changes starting equipment and having an overall alignment might be better. In other words, keep Alignment, Background, and player made Backstory, cut the rest. We'll see though as this is barely even an alpha stage I'm in on Asteria Rising.

Thanks for reading, hopefully I have something neat for you next week.

Template

I'm back and ready for action. I'm still progressing slowly on Ruination of Bran and Asteria Rising as I had far less time during my summer teaching assistant job than first estimated. During my work on the Ruination of Bran module, I did create a quest board in Paint.Net for some added flavor.

Admittedly part of making the template was to procrastinate on creating a floor plan of a palace however I am proud of my template and the quests I placed on it. Hopefully, it will add that extra bit of flavor to the game when people play it.

I'll keep working on the module and see if I can gather enough research and experience to make a page about module creation afterwards.

Salutations

Salutations Dear Reader,

I've run into quite a pleasant predicament. From June 12-23 I will have double my usual workload in my life outside this blog. That means you won't notice any new pages or posts for a spell. I am still gradually expanding on Ateria Rising, I am also revamping Ruination of Bran into a much cleaner and more comprehensive work. Any days I don't have enough time to get into those two projects I will simply go through older pages and posts to correct information and editing mistakes.

My main goal will be that by the week of June 26 the new and improved Ruination of Bran module will be uploaded for you all to enjoy.

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.