tabletop gaming – Monsters and Stuff

probablyadrpgideas:

butterfly-crackers:

probablyadrpgideas:

probablytabaxirpgideas:

probablyadrpgideas:

probablyfunrpgideas:

Idea: Take a fairly common monster. Say the Rust Monster, or maybe a Chimera. Then imagine what it would be like at CR 20, or some point where it can be the big world-eating menace of a campaign. The Colossal rust monster might have the power to rapidly age any material into dust, or it could spray venom that gives characters Dire Tetanus. Or both! Maybe it even has the backing of an apocalyptic cult that worships it as a living embodiment of entropy.

I guess what I’m saying is your campaign needs more Kaiju, and you can find them anywhere.

Always have kaiju in your campaign.

CR 20 Gelatinous Cube……..

Yes. CR 30 owlbear.

CR 69 Goblin

You. I like the way you think.

The really great thing about this premise is that this is actually where a lot of classic D&D monsters like the rust monster and the owlbear came from.

Back in the early days of D&D, fantasy miniatures were tough to come by, so Gary Gygax and his crew used to buy dime-store bags of plastic dinosaurs to use as dragons. One day he found a pack of dinosaurs that had some Japanese kaiju figurines mixed in – claimed by some sources to have been Ultraman bootlegs, though there’s some dispute on the matter – and decided to stat them up and use them.

So really, making a CR 30 owlbear is just returning the monster to its roots!

Source: probablyadrpgideas

prokopetz:

If you’re trying to do an RPG classes prompt fill – like, maybe you’re fancasting your favourite show, or maybe it’s a costume design exercise – and you can’t seem to make up a satisfactory set of classes, remember: like 80% of all class-based tabletop RPGs are just heist capers in funny hats.

Ever seen Leverage? Ocean’s Eleven? Heck, even The Fast and the Furious?

There’s a very specific set of roles that pop up in basically any heist caper narrative – and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can probably list them off the top of your head even if you’ve never seen a formal breakdown.

Though the specifics of RPG class design vary from game to game, the foundation is figuring out what sort of crew Danny Ocean would put together in your setting and giving each of the standard roles a setting-appropriate hat. If you’re doing a prompt fill, that foundation is all you need, since you don’t have to worry about all those messy implementation details.

(There’s a reason games like Shadowrun are so successful in taking the tropes of the standard fantasy dungeon crawl and dropping them directly into, say, cyberpunk black ops: both types of stories have the same casting director.)