The Black Dragonkin

Okay, so here is the first of five posts on the five types of dragonkin which I outlined in a recent post.  Each write-up will include a couple small additions to the original basic dragonkin race build and then some cultural-political notes.

Black Dragonkin (Water)
Typical Alignment: ChaoticNeutral
Energy Resistance 5 (cold)


Their scales are black but their world is white.  The water dragonkin live amidst the ice and snow of the far north, separated from the rest of the world by a cold,  bottomless ocean wherein lies the elemental pole of water.  They share their homeland with many scattered tribes of tusk-people, isbjorn, wooly tauren, and frostwolfen.  The north is currently a united kingdom but with many powerful dukes eager for a chance to be next on the throne.

Black dragonkin live in cites of ice near the coast.  They even make ships of carved ice which they use to fish and to raid to the south in winter.  The raiding ships are made anew each raiding season with a ritual where a captive enemy is entombed alive in the ice to give the ship a soul.  In war the black dragonkin favor spears and glaives for melee and javelins and longbows of whale-bone for killing at range.  Most armor and shields are of hide or leather, but they also have some made from the huge scales of giant fish from the deep. The scales come in many colors and have beautiful iridescent qualities.  The ice-ships are also used for the sport of hunting the mighty orca-kraken.  The great black-and-white tentacled beasts provide not only glory for the hunters but ambergris, musk oils, kraken ivory, and other items of great value.

Trade with other lands includes mostly exports of the products of fishing, whaling, and trapping.  Exotic furs, ambergris, oils, musks, ivories, scales, rare meats, fermented liquors, and other items go south.  Sales of those products are used to buy imports of wood, metals, gems, grains, medicines, wines, and textiles.

The realm of the north is currently ruled by King Muran Wave-Rage, a mighty water dragon.  But the kingdom of the water dragons is in crisis.  The three sons of the king have fled the kingdom, accused of trying to overthrow their father and divide the kingdom between them.  The king is said to be on the edge of death from the failure of the high priests to revive him following an assassination attempt.  The sons are also accused of trying to destroy the recent egg-spawn of their father and his new queen, because those spawn would outrank them for the succession.  Queen Aleria Tide-Wing has disappeared, taking the last of her eggs into hiding.  There are  rumors that the sons have one egg which they hold hostage.  The sons and their small fleet of follwers are said to be somewhere on the north coast of the dvarr lands, the Isfold.  They bargain with dvarr pirate kings and mercenary generals to raise forces to take the kingdom.  With the king rumored near death the dukes of the kingdom are already maneuvering for advantage.  Three who have holdings on the north coast of the human lands are negotiating alliances and recruiting monsters for an invasion bid of their own.

Hulks & Horrors: My Way

So I threw out some ideas to my gaming group for a longer term game than we've been playing.  One of the options was a Hulks & Horrors (which I reviewed a while back) type game.  I'd use the overall concept from H&H and a lot of the world-building rules from it but the main rules of play would be something else, probably one of: d20 Modern/d20 Future, Albedo: Platinum Catalyst, or classic Traveler.

For my H&H style game I decided to use a hex map with the starting world in the middle.  There would be a couple of semi-explored star systems next to it, and then many others beyond.  Very basic information on the other system would be available, such as type of star, number of planets, and its name from the old days.  The players might be working for a corporation or perhaps with a ship of their own.  The idea is that the homeworld has only rediscovered interstellar travel fairly recently.  Their space navy is almost entirely an intra-system one, built by the allied nations of the planet to battle some aliens who were discovered in the system.  From the alien ships they reverse engineered the jump technology and began exploring.  Several of the first jumps went wrong somehow and ships disappeared.  Eventually they got the hang of it, but then missions to nearby systems ran into serious trouble.  Clearly this wasn't going to be easy.  But the technologies found on the alien ships after the war were amazing and there were more finds on the nearby planets.  The nations of the planet had allied themselves in a common front to face the alien invaders, but that only papered over their on-going differences.  And the technological spoils of war were not shared entirely equally as had been agreed upon.

Thus the race is on to explore the other planets and bring back loot, technological, physical or otherwise.  But building spaceships is expensive and the only ones with the money were national governments, international megacorporations, and a handful of super-rich individuals.  So currently there are national exploration efforts, corporate salvage efforts, individual efforts to salvage, explore, colonize, and more.  There is also a small effort by the Space Navy which most see as window dressing to keep alive the illusion (or hope) of unity.

I'm using a combination of the Traveler and Hulks & Horrors rules to generate the systems and planets.  I looked the world generation rules in Stars Without Number but it didn't have the sort of vibe I was looking for.  I'm still deciding on what exactly caused the fall of civilization earlier.   I figure that once an advance civilization weakens then issues which once were manageable or ignorable become relatively stronger.  So I need a core factor which brought about the tipping point and then several other factors which either then either attacked opportunistically or broke loose and ran amok.  Some ideas are:
- Nano-technology gone wrong (either as a self-replicating virus or evil artificial intelligence)
- Robot rebellion (and almost every device has AI embedded in it)
- Mutagenic bio-virus (but who created it?)
- Alien invasion
- Cthulhoid infiltration (leading to weird powers, cultists, demonic critters, etc.)
- Zombie-pocalypse (possibly as a result of one of the above)
- Sudden scarcity of a critical element used in all the old technologies (the star of the only source planet goes nova and destroys it)

And actually, while putting that list together I just thought that you could even make the home world be sort of like the Earth in CthulhuTech--yes, let's see how many games we can cram into one campaign!  You've got Cthulhu factions on the planet (but we'll file off the serial numbers and call it something besides Cthulhu), an alien space fleet still lurking and maybe with bases on the homeworld, zombie/mutant creatures still infesting certain areas, military-oriented nanotech getting loose and turning on.  I'm trying to decide if that would be a bit too much going on in one game or great extra depth and detail.

The Dragonkin Races (a fantasy race build for Pathfinder)

Okay, so for my new campaign world I am positing that when the world was created it was given five elemental poles (corresponding to the five Chinese elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) to hold it together amidst the natural elemental chaos around it. A divine guardian dragon was created to protect and defend each pole.  Over time several generations of dragon-kind were created, finally resulting in the dragonkin (like D&D's dragonborn).  Since Pathfinder doesn't have D&D's dragonborn race I went ahead and built the race using the Advanced Race Guide. Note that the colors of each elemental sub-races are drawn from the colors corresponding to the relevant element; they are not necessarily the same as the chromatic dragon types in D&D.

 Dragonkin (10 RP)
Type: Humanoid [0 RP]
Size: Medium [0 RP]
Base Speed: 30' (normal) [0 RP]
Ability Score Modifiers: [0 RP; standard]

• +2 Strength
• +2 Constitution
• -2 Intelligence

Languages: [0 RP; standard] Common plus the corresponding draconic
Racial Traits:

• Advanced Strength: +2 Strength [4 RP]
• Elemental Affinity [1 RP]
• Energy Resistance (5) [1 RP] (see below for specific energy type for each dragonkin sub-race)
• Natural Armor: +1 to AC [2 RP]
• Bite [1 RP]
• Low-Light Vision [1RP]

Green Dragonkin (Wood): Energy Resistance 5 (sonic)

Red Dragonkin (Fire): Energy Resistance 5 (fire)

Yellow Dragonkin (Earth): Energy Resistance 5 (acid)

White Dragonkin (Metal): Energy Resistance 5 (lightning)

Black Dragonkin (Water): Energy Resistance 5 (cold)

This is How to do a Mutant Mashup. Thanks Zak!

Okay, so I really love it when someone can take an existing idea and put a cool new spin on it.  When done right it's a real brain-expanding experience.  Too often it's just a tired rehash where they simply file off the serial number and give it a new coat of paint.  Not so with this superb effort by Zak S. over at Playing D&D With Porn Stars.  He's done a weird mashup of Warhammer 40K and Pirates of the Caribbean called "In The Wine Dark Sea of the 40,000 Isles, There Is Only Booty".  Each 40K space marine chapter becomes a pirate ship.  The name of each chapter is twisted into a cool new piratey ship name and the name of the chapter founder/leader is twisted into a cool new pirate queen (captain) name.  There are other references and cool bits in there as well.  Just fantastic.  I could easily use these ships as the basis for an entire campaign.

Almost Done: My Major Art Project

Okay, so this isn't really related to roleplay gaming, but it is medieval-ish.  Several years ago I went with the family on a trip to southern Germany for a Girl Scout conference.  While there we made a side trip to see the famous gothic revival Neuschwanstein castle.  The interior was a fabulous masterpiece of the decorative arts.  After I got back I decided that I was going to re-create a bit of that at my "castle".  While in the home supply store one day I noticed some moldings with the egg-and-dart motif.  The half-covered "eggs" looked just like shields--and I decided then and there that I was going to do a project of painting detailed heraldric coats of arms on the eggs and adding a lot of gold for extra effect.  I'm finally done with the main painting on the shields and the gold edging (and yes it took forever).  I still have the final fine detailing to do on a lot of the shields but here's a sample of what they all look like now:

Next up is a large Chinese-themed painting, but I need to finish this project to make room to work on it.

A Bit of Background (@ Dice Monkey)

My second post for Dice Monkey went live today.  It's entitled "A Bit of Background" and is about my approach as a DM to backgrounds for player characters.  I've generally considered backgrounds for PCs to be optional--except for the one bit discussed in this post.

Handy List of Skills for the Traveler RPG

Okay, so I'm doing some generic prep work for probably running another long-term roleplaying campaign.  One of the games I'm considering running would be based on the setting from Hulks & Horrors.  However, I don't like the RPG part of H&H and so I'm going back over the old Traveler rules.  I still have my original boxed set (great memories there) with the little black books but I also bought the nice big reprint of books 0 to 8 by Far Future Enterprises.

Traveler is pretty generic but as an inveterate tinkerer I naturally want to tweak the careers and skill lists.  So, being the methodical, systematic type that I am (can you say "Lawful Alignment"?) my first step was to dig through the books and compose a list of all skills.  And now that I have a list I figured I'd share it out as a handy aid. (If I've missed any, let me know and I'll add it in.)

Classic Traveler Skills List

Administration
Air/Raft
ATV
Battle Dress
Blade Combat
Brawling
Bribery
Broker
Carousing
Combat Engineering
Communications
Computer
Demolitions
Electronics
Engineering
Equestrian
FA Gunnery
Fleet Tactic
Forgery
Forward Observer
Gambling
Gravitics
Gun Combat
Gunnery
Heavy Weapons
Hunting
Instruction
Interrogation
Jack of all Trades
Liaison
Leader
Legal
Mechanical
Medical
Naval Architect
Navigation
Pilot
Recon
Recruiting
Ship Tactic
Ship's Boat
Steward
Streetwise
Survey
Survival
Tactics
Vacc Suit
Vehicle (Aircraft, Grav Vehicle, Tracked Vehicle,Watercraft, Wheeled Vehicle)
Xeno-Medicine
Zero-G Combat