Hello all! My name is Rgbunpro and I've been working on this game idea for a very long time, all the way back since at least 2010, probably earlier I honestly can't remember. Anyway, here I am now with an actual idea of what I'm doing. I am making this thread because there are certain things I want to do and I'm not sure how to do them, and I always find it's better to ask when you don't know. So here's the game background:
We all remember where we were on that day, at home with family, at our jobs, with our friends or loved ones. But that was the day it all fell apart. April 25, 2015. The world went to shit. Of course that’s not where it began.
That story begins a year earlier in South Carolina; with a man named Jim. Jim was an average guy nothing special, worked the fields all day and loved to hit the bar after work. Then he would go home and pass out just to do it all again the next day. That’s probably what made him the ideal target.
You see, what we didn’t know at the time was about the ships floating above earth, unnoticed by us. They had some kind of cloaking tech that kept them off of our radar, not even our astronauts caught a glimpse of them. These were the warlocks, a group of aliens who sought to take over our planet.
They sent a single agent down, to south carolina. That Agent happened to find Jim drunkenly stumbling his way home. No one knows for sure what happened to Jim, but we know that agent replaced him. Warlocks can change their shape, pretend to be someone else.
Thing is, no one can perfectly replicate another person. Maybe the first one got away with it, but there were more. Eventually an entire town was taken over by the warlocks. They continued to spread until someone finally caught on.
A man named Dr. Morris began to notice that people were acting strange. Eventually he caught a conversation between two of them that was damning. He investigated more and eventually caught one in the act. The warlocks had no idea this had happened, or that Dr. Morris had recorded it.
When Morris came forth with this evidence he was taken into protective custody by the FBI. The FBI started to investigate, try to learn more. Meanwhile the CIA sent a man in to try to capture one so they could study it. Didn’t work out well for them, the agent was lost. After that they were deemed a threat to mankind.
The army was sent to south Carolina to get rid of the warlocks. However, even with the small force that they had, their advantage in technology led to a standstill, with neither side gaining any advantage.
At the time, the United States was engineering a secret bio-weapon named GX-11, however it was heavily untested. They deemed this a good opportunity to try it out. GX-11 was unleashed on south Carolina in hopes of wiping out the Warlocks. No one was ready for the effects.
GX-11 did wipe out a large portion of warlocks, but it killed off many humans as well. What was worse was that they came back. The dead began rising from the ground and hunting the living. GX-11 had unleashed a plague of zombies.
When word reached the United States government, they deemed the situation too out of control and authorized the use of nuclear weapons, though the public was not supposed to know. Nukes dropped on south carolina. The nukes only made things worse.
Not everyone died in the nuclear fallout, some survived, though they were heavily mutated. The freaks and mutants started moving forth from the wasteland of south carolina. But there was a more pressing matter at hand.
You see, tucked deep away in the south carolina woods was an outpost of a holy order, The order of the Paragon. They held the temple where they guarded a large magical seal, the seal that barred the door to hell. However, the magic had grown weaker over time and so the seal was not strong enough to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear missile.
The temple was destroyed and the seal the hell was broken. Demons poured through and humanity didn’t stand a chance. The demons were not affected by the radiation, nor the zombie plague and so they were able to overpower the area easily. From there they quickly gained control of the world, driving the remnants of humanity into hiding.
So that is where we are now, hiding like rats in whatever small spaces we can find. Holding onto some hope for a better future. Hoping not to die at the hands of some horrible creature or another. Stay hopeful my friends, things look bleak but humanity always finds ways to survive.
TL;DR Version:
Invasion of the pod people led to military action in the form of a bio-weapon. Bio-weapon made zombies. Nukes were launched at zombies. Nukes broke magical seal to hell. Apocalypse ensued, demons roam the earth and humans hide underground in a giant city.
Hopefully I succeeded in making one of the most ridiculous apocalypses possible. Anyway, I'm trying to make it into a playable game that for the most part sticks to 5e rules, but it's difficult to translate a system based in medieval fantasy into a modern-day post-apocalypse. That and there's some custom things I'll be putting in as well. I'm posting this thread cause I'm trying to get help on how to make some of these idea work.
My Biggest issues right now are: 1) I want to have some sort of mutation thing going. The way I had originally intended it would allow for any race to be a mutant and it would allow for each mutant character to have a unique ability or 'power' that they could build off of. I'm not really sure how to do this in a d&d setting. I could make it a class but I hate the idea of everyone having the exact same mutation. I could also make it a background but that would be less in depth and likely wouldn't allow for them to build on their abilities. So I'm conflicted and not sure what to do.
2) I want to make demons a playable race, but again, I hate the idea of demons being uniform, especially since in d&d there's already so many different forms of demons. So how do I go about making a diverse population of demons playable? Do I go the route of subraces? Cause I Imagine there would be quite a few of them. Once again, I could go with backgrounds, but then I feel like that would subtract from character creation as a whole. I'm kinda stumped on this one.
I find this idea is usually not all that popular when I present it, and understandably so. I assume in a game made for a fantasy setting, most will want to go that route. But this is a project I'd like to finish because it's kind of my mind baby. So if anyone feels like chipping in with feedback, feel free to leave a comment.
I think it sounds like a lot of fun :) Biozombies, mutants, demons. Actually, it sounds something like the Shannara world, when you read tons of the books and find out what the history of the world really is. So I'm not sure you need to treat is as ridiculous at all. Shannara has demons, mutants, monster AI machines, magic, elves, lost technology cities.
Anyway, here's a first question--as you say, it's a bit of a shoehorn for D&D 5e. So why are you using 5e?
I like the system, don't get me wrong. But there are a lot of really adaptable systems out there. You're not going to be using actual 5e content for the most part, so it's not like you need 5e to have access to new stuff. One of my initial thoughts if it were me would be to use the old West End Games d6 system. That or the GURPS generic/multi-world system.
The WEG d6 system is easy to learn, very easy to adapt, and you can find the basic books on ebay still for fairly cheap. The TLDR of the system is every ability and skill has a dice pool, all of d6's. The better you are, the more dice you roll against the target number. Human average is 3d6 in an ability, iirc. A super strong mutant might be 6d6, etc.
-----------------------------------
That said, if you want to go 5e...
Mutants: let players hot swap racial benefits and abilities. A human with darkvision, a half orc that doesn't need to sleep, etc. However...all good mutant based games need drawbacks. You gotta have something bad about your mutation. Ability penalties are a good place to start, but you can also put restrictions on abilities.
Another idea I just had while typing the above is to give a mutant player some innate spell ability--give them the spell ability of a chosen 1st level magic using class. Don't give them a level in the class, just the spell ability at 1st level. So the mutant rogue also has the spells of a 1st level warlock. But again, with some drawback. They glow brightly when they cast any spell. Or all demons in a mile radius are aware of the magic being used. Etc.
Demons: Honestly, I'd treat this similar to mutants, just with different packaging. I'm a fan of a hell full of an insane variety of demons/devils. What you could do is sort out all the abilities a demon could possibly have, rank them by power (spell level, effective spell level for feats, etc), and dole them out randomly for NPCs. Let PCs pick from the list.
It's always good to go with a theme, though. Element-based, or shadow-based, movement-based, etc. The Demon of Random Cool Abilities is not as cool as the Demon of the Air that suffers damage on the ground, but can toss you around with mini tornadoes, or the shadow demon that you're never really sure exactly where it is or what it looks like.
For both, I'd think some advanced prep and tables are going to be your friend. If you want variety, a reliable way to go is "pick one from column A, two from column B, etc".
I like 5e because it's relatively easy and down-to-earth. Most importantly though it's because I know 5e. The only other system I have any familiarity with is Fate, which may or may not be the better option. My concern with fate is that it's a lot more open and I'm not even sure if I could make stats relevant
Racial abilities is something I hadn't thought about for mutants...interesting, I'll have to give that a good look and see if there's any possibility there. I was initially looking at the list of powers from ICONS which covers basically everything. The thing I'm not sure on is drawbacks, I think I'll need to get creative and make a long list of them.
The way I have demons set up, they would all start with the ability to cast magic, which itself is already an advantage over most of the other vanilla races. I do feel, however, that since their magic is based in shadow rather than in vanilla magic, they would likely have some different spells, so I think you're right I'll have to make a table there too. Mostly though I'm concerned about different appearances of different demons and what implications that has for their stats. In my mind, an imp won't be as strong as a large horned beast, but a large horned beast won't be as charming as a succubus. So I think, where my brain goes based off your suggestion would be to make the ability table, but to either have abilities be based on size, or have them based on certain stats. Like your demon can't use, let's say siege, which I'll say gives you a bonus to destroying doors and walls, it can't use it if it's strength stat is less than 10. So that works if you're building a strong demon.
That's probably a lot of incoherent nonsense, but this is the sort of process I go through trying to decide what I could do. I think it's going to require a lot of fine-tuning.
No, I get where you're going with the demons, it sounds good. My suggestion would be to get the abilities first, and then mold the appearance to what the abilities are. As you say, the horned beast will be the one with fewer seduction/charm skills, the succubus with more. But what it looks like can be determined based on the abilities.
Oh, and not to pitch a product--I have no financial affiliation here :) But there's an old Mayfair games RoleAids boxed set called 'Demons'...I think there was sequel, Demons II. It's made to supplement really any game system. They give some generic stats, but it's meant to be taken apart and the pieces used however players of various games want. Might be helpful, give you some ideas, charts, tables, etc.
Yeah, I agree, I'll have to do some work on abilities. Magic is more or less covered already as I'm basically just going to take normal spells and rename them to have something to do with shadows or hellfire. Mostly cause in the lore of my game, regular magic and demon magic have different sources but are functionally the same thing. It's more the less magical abilities I'll probably struggle with. So maybe I'll have to have a look at that book and see if there's anything helpful inside, Thanks for the suggestion!
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Hello all! My name is Rgbunpro and I've been working on this game idea for a very long time, all the way back since at least 2010, probably earlier I honestly can't remember. Anyway, here I am now with an actual idea of what I'm doing. I am making this thread because there are certain things I want to do and I'm not sure how to do them, and I always find it's better to ask when you don't know. So here's the game background:
We all remember where we were on that day, at home with family, at our jobs, with our friends or loved ones. But that was the day it all fell apart. April 25, 2015. The world went to shit. Of course that’s not where it began.
That story begins a year earlier in South Carolina; with a man named Jim. Jim was an average guy nothing special, worked the fields all day and loved to hit the bar after work. Then he would go home and pass out just to do it all again the next day. That’s probably what made him the ideal target.
You see, what we didn’t know at the time was about the ships floating above earth, unnoticed by us. They had some kind of cloaking tech that kept them off of our radar, not even our astronauts caught a glimpse of them. These were the warlocks, a group of aliens who sought to take over our planet.
They sent a single agent down, to south carolina. That Agent happened to find Jim drunkenly stumbling his way home. No one knows for sure what happened to Jim, but we know that agent replaced him. Warlocks can change their shape, pretend to be someone else.
Thing is, no one can perfectly replicate another person. Maybe the first one got away with it, but there were more. Eventually an entire town was taken over by the warlocks. They continued to spread until someone finally caught on.
A man named Dr. Morris began to notice that people were acting strange. Eventually he caught a conversation between two of them that was damning. He investigated more and eventually caught one in the act. The warlocks had no idea this had happened, or that Dr. Morris had recorded it.
When Morris came forth with this evidence he was taken into protective custody by the FBI. The FBI started to investigate, try to learn more. Meanwhile the CIA sent a man in to try to capture one so they could study it. Didn’t work out well for them, the agent was lost. After that they were deemed a threat to mankind.
The army was sent to south Carolina to get rid of the warlocks. However, even with the small force that they had, their advantage in technology led to a standstill, with neither side gaining any advantage.
At the time, the United States was engineering a secret bio-weapon named GX-11, however it was heavily untested. They deemed this a good opportunity to try it out. GX-11 was unleashed on south Carolina in hopes of wiping out the Warlocks. No one was ready for the effects.
GX-11 did wipe out a large portion of warlocks, but it killed off many humans as well. What was worse was that they came back. The dead began rising from the ground and hunting the living. GX-11 had unleashed a plague of zombies.
When word reached the United States government, they deemed the situation too out of control and authorized the use of nuclear weapons, though the public was not supposed to know. Nukes dropped on south carolina. The nukes only made things worse.
Not everyone died in the nuclear fallout, some survived, though they were heavily mutated. The freaks and mutants started moving forth from the wasteland of south carolina. But there was a more pressing matter at hand.
You see, tucked deep away in the south carolina woods was an outpost of a holy order, The order of the Paragon. They held the temple where they guarded a large magical seal, the seal that barred the door to hell. However, the magic had grown weaker over time and so the seal was not strong enough to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear missile.
The temple was destroyed and the seal the hell was broken. Demons poured through and humanity didn’t stand a chance. The demons were not affected by the radiation, nor the zombie plague and so they were able to overpower the area easily. From there they quickly gained control of the world, driving the remnants of humanity into hiding.
So that is where we are now, hiding like rats in whatever small spaces we can find. Holding onto some hope for a better future. Hoping not to die at the hands of some horrible creature or another. Stay hopeful my friends, things look bleak but humanity always finds ways to survive.
TL;DR Version:
Invasion of the pod people led to military action in the form of a bio-weapon. Bio-weapon made zombies. Nukes were launched at zombies. Nukes broke magical seal to hell. Apocalypse ensued, demons roam the earth and humans hide underground in a giant city.
Hopefully I succeeded in making one of the most ridiculous apocalypses possible. Anyway, I'm trying to make it into a playable game that for the most part sticks to 5e rules, but it's difficult to translate a system based in medieval fantasy into a modern-day post-apocalypse. That and there's some custom things I'll be putting in as well. I'm posting this thread cause I'm trying to get help on how to make some of these idea work.
My Biggest issues right now are:
1) I want to have some sort of mutation thing going. The way I had originally intended it would allow for any race to be a mutant and it would allow for each mutant character to have a unique ability or 'power' that they could build off of. I'm not really sure how to do this in a d&d setting. I could make it a class but I hate the idea of everyone having the exact same mutation. I could also make it a background but that would be less in depth and likely wouldn't allow for them to build on their abilities. So I'm conflicted and not sure what to do.
2) I want to make demons a playable race, but again, I hate the idea of demons being uniform, especially since in d&d there's already so many different forms of demons. So how do I go about making a diverse population of demons playable? Do I go the route of subraces? Cause I Imagine there would be quite a few of them. Once again, I could go with backgrounds, but then I feel like that would subtract from character creation as a whole. I'm kinda stumped on this one.
I find this idea is usually not all that popular when I present it, and understandably so. I assume in a game made for a fantasy setting, most will want to go that route. But this is a project I'd like to finish because it's kind of my mind baby. So if anyone feels like chipping in with feedback, feel free to leave a comment.
You should check out the modern magica unearthed arcana. I never looked into it myself, but it was themed off of a mix of magic and modern science.
For mutants, the closest 2 ideas I have is feats (like aberrant dragonmark) and variant races (like the marked races from eberron).
For demons, Tieflings. There are already a dozen or more variants with slightly different abilities and spells.
I think it sounds like a lot of fun :) Biozombies, mutants, demons. Actually, it sounds something like the Shannara world, when you read tons of the books and find out what the history of the world really is. So I'm not sure you need to treat is as ridiculous at all. Shannara has demons, mutants, monster AI machines, magic, elves, lost technology cities.
Anyway, here's a first question--as you say, it's a bit of a shoehorn for D&D 5e. So why are you using 5e?
I like the system, don't get me wrong. But there are a lot of really adaptable systems out there. You're not going to be using actual 5e content for the most part, so it's not like you need 5e to have access to new stuff. One of my initial thoughts if it were me would be to use the old West End Games d6 system. That or the GURPS generic/multi-world system.
The WEG d6 system is easy to learn, very easy to adapt, and you can find the basic books on ebay still for fairly cheap. The TLDR of the system is every ability and skill has a dice pool, all of d6's. The better you are, the more dice you roll against the target number. Human average is 3d6 in an ability, iirc. A super strong mutant might be 6d6, etc.
-----------------------------------
That said, if you want to go 5e...
Mutants: let players hot swap racial benefits and abilities. A human with darkvision, a half orc that doesn't need to sleep, etc. However...all good mutant based games need drawbacks. You gotta have something bad about your mutation. Ability penalties are a good place to start, but you can also put restrictions on abilities.
Another idea I just had while typing the above is to give a mutant player some innate spell ability--give them the spell ability of a chosen 1st level magic using class. Don't give them a level in the class, just the spell ability at 1st level. So the mutant rogue also has the spells of a 1st level warlock. But again, with some drawback. They glow brightly when they cast any spell. Or all demons in a mile radius are aware of the magic being used. Etc.
Demons: Honestly, I'd treat this similar to mutants, just with different packaging. I'm a fan of a hell full of an insane variety of demons/devils. What you could do is sort out all the abilities a demon could possibly have, rank them by power (spell level, effective spell level for feats, etc), and dole them out randomly for NPCs. Let PCs pick from the list.
It's always good to go with a theme, though. Element-based, or shadow-based, movement-based, etc. The Demon of Random Cool Abilities is not as cool as the Demon of the Air that suffers damage on the ground, but can toss you around with mini tornadoes, or the shadow demon that you're never really sure exactly where it is or what it looks like.
For both, I'd think some advanced prep and tables are going to be your friend. If you want variety, a reliable way to go is "pick one from column A, two from column B, etc".
Looking for new subclasses, spells, magic items, feats, and races? Opinions welcome :)
I like 5e because it's relatively easy and down-to-earth. Most importantly though it's because I know 5e. The only other system I have any familiarity with is Fate, which may or may not be the better option. My concern with fate is that it's a lot more open and I'm not even sure if I could make stats relevant
Racial abilities is something I hadn't thought about for mutants...interesting, I'll have to give that a good look and see if there's any possibility there. I was initially looking at the list of powers from ICONS which covers basically everything. The thing I'm not sure on is drawbacks, I think I'll need to get creative and make a long list of them.
The way I have demons set up, they would all start with the ability to cast magic, which itself is already an advantage over most of the other vanilla races. I do feel, however, that since their magic is based in shadow rather than in vanilla magic, they would likely have some different spells, so I think you're right I'll have to make a table there too. Mostly though I'm concerned about different appearances of different demons and what implications that has for their stats. In my mind, an imp won't be as strong as a large horned beast, but a large horned beast won't be as charming as a succubus. So I think, where my brain goes based off your suggestion would be to make the ability table, but to either have abilities be based on size, or have them based on certain stats. Like your demon can't use, let's say siege, which I'll say gives you a bonus to destroying doors and walls, it can't use it if it's strength stat is less than 10. So that works if you're building a strong demon.
That's probably a lot of incoherent nonsense, but this is the sort of process I go through trying to decide what I could do. I think it's going to require a lot of fine-tuning.
No, I get where you're going with the demons, it sounds good. My suggestion would be to get the abilities first, and then mold the appearance to what the abilities are. As you say, the horned beast will be the one with fewer seduction/charm skills, the succubus with more. But what it looks like can be determined based on the abilities.
Oh, and not to pitch a product--I have no financial affiliation here :) But there's an old Mayfair games RoleAids boxed set called 'Demons'...I think there was sequel, Demons II. It's made to supplement really any game system. They give some generic stats, but it's meant to be taken apart and the pieces used however players of various games want. Might be helpful, give you some ideas, charts, tables, etc.
Here it is on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Demons-Box-Set-Role-Aids/dp/0923763619
Looking for new subclasses, spells, magic items, feats, and races? Opinions welcome :)
Yeah, I agree, I'll have to do some work on abilities. Magic is more or less covered already as I'm basically just going to take normal spells and rename them to have something to do with shadows or hellfire. Mostly cause in the lore of my game, regular magic and demon magic have different sources but are functionally the same thing. It's more the less magical abilities I'll probably struggle with. So maybe I'll have to have a look at that book and see if there's anything helpful inside, Thanks for the suggestion!