okay i think thats enough for the moment unless someone wants me to keep dumping pics. otherwise ill post some more later if the thread is still up.
Ethan Cruz
If it's science-fantasy then "engineer" and "drone" are not good words; try "mekanist" and "meks". He could be a kind of Beastmaster, except his beasts are as often electro-mechano-tronic as living, or maybe partially cyberized. Regardless, "metallon creatures" would be his friends and loyal pets, doing his bidding as long as he signals on the right frequencies.
Julian Smith
the name for the class is actually Artisan but i see you point. partially cyberized doesnt really work setting wise but i havent thought of the beastmaster angle, could be cool. how would you go about limiting or creating skill progression? i need help with crunch, although it can be vague and ill adapt it to my system.
im gonna post some more stuff, if anyone has pics they wanna share feel free.
Joshua Scott
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Jayden Moore
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Lucas Cook
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Sebastian Walker
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Aaron Edwards
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Gabriel Nguyen
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Tyler Williams
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Sebastian Nelson
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Brody Carter
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Oliver Taylor
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Andrew Baker
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Aiden Stewart
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Alexander Mitchell
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Charles Wood
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Henry Howard
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Mason Wilson
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Joseph Mitchell
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Robert Peterson
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John Torres
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Isaiah Johnson
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Caleb Wright
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Jacob Williams
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Landon Harris
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Jaxson Rivera
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Cameron Morales
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Aiden Garcia
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Levi Baker
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Easton Morgan
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Jacob Adams
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Ayden Hughes
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Aaron Moore
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Owen Sanders
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Robert Reed
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Wyatt Murphy
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Nolan Ross
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Brayden Torres
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Adam Roberts
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Christopher Mitchell
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Matthew Roberts
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Eli Cruz
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Joshua Reed
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Brody Garcia
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Dominic Diaz
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Blake Scott
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Brody Moore
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Carter Johnson
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Austin Thompson
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Ryder Thomas
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David Peterson
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Jaxson Rodriguez
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Evan Gutierrez
Is that supposed to be a xenomorph version of one of the bugs from Starship Troopers?
Leo Lee
it sure is
Jonathan Scott
Is this from Immortal?
Noah Hernandez
i dont know
Ayden Powell
>anyway im kinda stumped in regard to one of my classes who is like an engineer crossed with a historian. >im thinking of making them able to use drones That's pretty cool. I like the thought of some rad archeologist dude who's able to commandeer the ancient drone-soldiers and magitech power armor he finds in the ruins he visits >a swarm of smaller ones, a human sized customizable one, a piloted mech or a combination of the above? Why not make each of them a seperate class, or specializations of a more basic class?
Ryan Clark
>Why not make each of them a seperate class, or specializations of a more basic class?
my system does allow for a fair amount of class specialization, through spending skill points on various abilities or upgrades, so i am leaning towards doing that. with one or several small ones and/or one medium sized being a direct function of class abilities. limiting the amount through a specific skill that determines how many drones you can have active.
for larger and/or piloted mechs im considering having them hid behind a massive paywall and in-universe rarity. along with requiring a roll to see if they respond to commands since they are not derived from the class directly.
i can tell a little more about the other classes if youre interested.
Colton Hughes
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Andrew Phillips
>i can tell a little more about the other classes if youre interested. Please
Jackson Clark
okay so far i have 4 classes which i feel are good.
first up is Knights: theyre like a heavily armored soldier with a doctorate in medecin. theyre meant to function as the games' tank and dps with a little noncombat healing. so besides having the toughest armor and biggest guns, they are also capable of diagnosing sick teammates, more effectively apply medical supplies and knows a little basic surgery.
next is Entropists: the settings mages, wizards, sorceres, etc. they are one of two classes able to wield powerful magical forces and bend them to their will. one of the stats is spirits which ties to a sort of manapool they use, should it run out they can choose to spend HP instead to power their spells. they are also the primary healer because they can channel elysian energy wich heals biological creatures, however they cannot heal themselves so they have to rely on band aids or, ideally, a Knight companion. outside of combat they have an enormus knowledge of magic and the way it works, along with being able to enchant weapons and gear.
then theres the Artisans: these are the engineers crossed with historians. they are also architects, mechanics, programmers and scholars. with them they have their trusty drones along with their varied skillset. if a bot needs to be hacked, some equipment needs repair or what this weird ancient piece of prefall tech might have been used for, they are the ones to do it. when not out in the field they can craft pretty much anything, be it weapons, armor, gear, bots or vehicles.
Easton Roberts
last there is the Stalkers: the scouts, spies and assassins of the world. quick, deadly and quiet, they combine the skills of a proffesional hitman with that of a survivalist. they know pretty all there is to know about flora, fauna and, of course, whatever enemies they might encounter, and what their weaknesses are. besides that, they are very often individuals who were considered to be Entropists but their spirits was too weak. instead they are trained to use what little spirit they do have in very specialized ways, such becoming invisible, summoning deadly electrical spears to throw at enemies or creating illusions.
so those are the classes. let me know what you think or if you got any other idea for a class or something that could be cool.
Xavier Gomez
Looks pretty cool, do you have any more info on the setting itself?
Adrian Evans
yeah but not in any great detail. i do want to flesh it more out with a few exceptions, because a part of the setting is exploration and mystery.
anyway humanity lives on mars now, which has become heavily forested and having a atmosphere. humanity either live in enormus cities or small communities. its pretty much a paradise since its been terraformed from the ground up to be ideal for humans, so no dangerous megafauna or mosquitoes.
earth is for the most part either overgrown ruins or wastelands. there are very few small colonies, but life is far more spartan here than on mars. some places are damn near medieval. other humans living here in a more nomadic lifestyle are tough as nails wastelanders. also found here are aggresive territorial megafauna, killer robots, zombie robots and homicidal aliens bent on murder and conquest. low orbit is filled with wrecks from ships and sattelites, scavengers sometimes scour them for useful tech or materials.
the moon is littered with abandoned stations all across its surface and reaching far underground. lack of an atmosphere and ghosts/demons that wants nothing more than to see you dead, its not a nice place to be, but the ancient computer systems found there are often too valuable to leave alone.
the poles of venus are insanely hot and humid jungles with strange acidproof ruins. its pretty much under the control of the aforementioned killer aliens whose dreadnought sized shipe lies in orbit around it.
Gonna save most of the pictures in this thread for inspiration!
Working on a space opera campaign myself, still unsure what system to use but I might just take the D&D setting and apply it to the setting since thats what my players are used to. Primarily the setting will be a mixup of Destiny & Stargate, with some high opera looks like that of fifth element. Right now I've got 2 players but one really likes magic stuff and the other is a sci-fi fact-checker so its going to be fun to balance the things out. Still deciding on how to get the players started and what era it'll take place in (humans first steps into space or perhaps we've already expanded to several systems
Adrian Green
Not user but I might be interested. Haven't played on Roll20 in particular tho so Im not sure if that applies to "new players" as in new to RPGs or "new players" as in new to roll20. looking through the applications, how furry will your campaign be?
Landon Peterson
Love them fighter jets.
I'm working on a similar setting. Post-Apocalypse (really it's the fall of the wider interstellar civilization the world depended on the resources of, combined with a finger of interstellar warfare brushing the planet), and the majority of survivors exist in a strange sort of Swords & Sorcery world left behind.
Some of the old infrastructure still exists, such as a monthly drone delivery of foodstuffs and medicine or the military warehouse A.I. which has been severely braindamaged (not the best term, but you get it) which rules a group of tribes.
I'm probably going to use Classic Traveller with a few modifications and house rules. Works pretty well for space opera or other sci fi stuff. Pretty lethal though, so that might deter you.
Xavier Thomas
OP here and pretty stoked to see the thread is up :)
looks pretty interesting although i have zero experience with roll20. definitively gonna give it a look.
given that you have fact checker present i would suggest placing the era fairly well into their colonization stage to justify planets being sufficiently terraformed to allow for human presence. and to scratch the other players magic itch just say a wizard use magic to kickstart the trerraforming. hope you guys have fun.
Asher Bell
neat. its funny, my setting also has an AI thats, as you say, kinda "braindamaged", although its pretty much focused on killing anything that isnt itself, like a superaggressive Skynet with less tech access and production capability.
its counterpoint is the human friendly AI on Mars that functions like an administrator for the entire planet and its economy.
do you have any other ideas you feel like sharing? lore, mechanics, NPCs, etc.
Oliver Cook
I'll look up Classic Traveler, lethal is good. I mean the players are powerhouses but I want them to fear death. It is a RPGame after all and the fear of being able to lose makes it that much more fun. I feel like D&D 5e might give you too much safety or security checks (ofcourse challenge is at the DM's discretion)
I think the most "magic" I want in my universe is some sort of "force" like in Starwars. Not sure how to bring it to the table without going the fantasy route though.
I think I am going to do it where space traveling is pre-established since it'll give me the most options. Might send them out on a colony ship which crashes because of a wormhole malfunction somewhere on the other side of the system and the crew has to make it back to human federation space, perhaps crashing into hostile territory where their first goal will be survival and getting back (sorta like star trek?).
Some ideas I have right now for story arcs: >Species uploaded their conscience into an archive of neural networks as last act of survival >Planet with living tectonic plates >Planet where a fanatic spiritual species worshiped a god, but it was all caused by magnetic wave induced madness >Huge Ringworld that serves as a sort of zoo where "collectors" put species, humanoid and fauna. >Downtime consists of managing a crew and spaceship for galactic travel
also, do you guys draw your own stuff? and where do you draw inspiration from for campaigns?
Dominic Cook
sounds pretty star trekky.
>do you guys draw your own stuff? yes, but rarely and more as a form of note taking or graphical diagrams.
>where do you draw inspiration from for campaigns? anywhere really. although i like writing up quests campaigns they are, more often than not, bound to change after impact with the players. this isnt too bad imo, as i think a dm should steer and not lead. ive rarely lifted anything, more or less directly, from a movie/game/book/thing. i prefer to set up a world, give npcs goals and motivations and derive short/mid-term quests from that. after a few of these, if my players havent figured out a long term goal, ie. campaign, for me to extrapolate from, then i would just straight up tell them they either need to figure out some long term goals of theirs or im gonna put them on the rails a little bit to help a campaign along.
Jaxon Barnes
this might be of inerest to you. found a long ass time ago on this board in a WBG i think.
>getting the party together:
Every player creates their character sheet, and with that they hand you a brief backstory (you don't need a novel, 3 sentences or so is adequate, but you can write more if you want). Then they write out 3 beliefs (Burning Wheel style; if you are actually playing BW then hey awesome), and 3 goals (short, medium and long term).
Now, look over the backstories and see if anything connects well. Macguffins, family histories, whatever. If nothing goes together, that's fine, you'll connect stuff later. But if something does connect, write it down.
Now, take each character's beliefs and write out two encounters for each: one that affirms the belief and one that challenges it. You don't want a fully fledged encounter, just a brief idea. Someone has a belief like "Life is best experienced when free"? To affirm that, "PC frees slaves;" to challenge that, "A community is saved from distress by a benevolent dictator." Now, you should end up with six encounter ideas per PC. Cut them out so they're all on separate scraps, scramble them, and then sort them into similar ideas. You want them to be as dense as possible while also making sense, so each encounter is positively dripping ideological challenges that will really mean something to your PCs.
Now, you take those goals and loosely define the steps they'll need to take to accomplish them. They're gonna go off the rails so keep it fast and loose. Now, like you did with the encounters, look for overlay (but don't cut these up, because they're not isolated incidents but chains of events) between the goals. The more your PCs actually want the things in the plot, the less pushing you'll have to do to get them there
Jack Ward
It's a really cool concept, computer minds becoming gods or just the driving force behind a group of what would otherwise be inexplicably aggressive critters.
I haven't got a massive amount down just yet, mainly it's a few sketchy concepts. Like I have a city choked with horrible fumes wherein a group of people with far more modern tech have carved out a safe zone, using the toxins as a natural foe and predator deterrent. So they pretty much always have full-body survival gear and might have near-modern weaponry in addition to a better understanding of the archaotech scattered about.
Speaking of predators, part of the apocalypse emanates from the kaiju military experiments on another continent. So a whole bunch of megafauna exists and from time to time it fucks shit up.Sometimes from a massive floating fortress which circles the cluster of continents.
Classic Traveller is an old game, there's often a general for it on here, if you haven't already found it. I haven't played 5e, so I can't speak to that, but 3.5 and 4e do well at conveying the superheroic nature of mythological heroes.
I can't draw for shit, but I'm working on that. I totally dig the ideas. Another planet I was working on a while back has an upcoming neural network which was ostensibly for the purpose of instant internet access, allowing free education and communication, but really it's going to connect all consciousnesses into one via the wireless network, and as such result in a pseudo hive-mind of sophonts.
Inspiration? I read. A lot. I also talk to people who have weird ideas a lot, and their ideas bounce around in my brain until I don't recognize them as someone else's idea and I spit them out. I like to take stuff that, on the surface, looks unconnected, and weave it together too. Like Firefly and Alien is actually somewhat similar to the Age of Sail: when you're out in space, it's pretty easy to stay out of the way when you're being looked for or help won't make it.
