thebardingreen

Arnock, on the night of his joining. Kiteo, his eyes opened! Vulcans at Decatur!

One of my favorite campaigns that I've run several times, the antagonists are a conspiracy of powerful undead who plan to undeadify a bunch of high-level characters and influential nobles (including a blue dragon, at one point), adding them to the conspiracy and creating more dangerous antagonists for the PCS.

At each stage of the game, the undead have several plans hatching all at once and it's difficult for the PCs to figure out what they all are and stop them. And they have to prioritize. There's also an Imperial senate they have to keep track of (like how many votes they have on their side versus how many votes their opponents have, both those under the influence of the undead and those just on the wrong side of the political game).

Each time they save someone, they add a powerful ally to their side, each time they lose someone... They now have a new dangerous enemy to worry about. By itself, this raises the stakes.

Here's some cool battles from that game... Each one is really nasty, but less so if the characters go in having done research and had previous successes. What makes them cool is that I spent the time to create the opponents... Not just stats but agenda, purpose and personality AND the consequences of winning and losing beforehand. The following monsters from 3.5 (that's the era where I created this game, but there's so much good material from all of those source books that you can go harvest for cool monster ideas).

1) Bone Naga.

One of my favorites. An arrogant young senator / nobleman (and potential regent / imperial heir, which is important) has had a statue of himself placed in the parkland outside the Senate building, where everyone has to see it walking to and from the Senate building.

The statue is actually hollow, and coiled inside is a bone naga, using detect thoughts to spy on all the senators (and the PCs).

To soften the PCs up if they mess with the statue during the day, the nobleman's guards confront them and start a fight. If they mess with the statue at night, they get in a fight with the nobleman himself (who is a psycho cultist who's been sacrificing teenage peasants to the devil he worships and who has a necklace that can summon lesser devils). The corpses of the sacrifice victims also rise as zombies (ghouls / ghasts - depending on character level) and join the fight if the PCS are stomping.

2) Vampire Ninjas

If you take the time to make the vampire ninjas as actual characters and think through their powers, they're actually super nasty and can totally TPK if you're not careful. Mist form / bat form combined with Ninja stealth and sneak attack? The vampires are trying to off the leaders of the local thieves and assassins guilds and take their place. Those two guilds are in a manufactured gang war started by one of the vampires (a halfling vampire assassin... Think about it. It's super nasty). You use sneak attack to hurt the big fighter badly right at the start of combat. If the vampires are getting pummeled, they go in and out of mist form and then sneak attack from mist form.

3) Blue dragon fight.

In my world, dragons of all colors used to interfere in politics all the time, but then retreated from the world for some reason. It doesn't matter why, what matters is that a blue dragon has started attacking imperial shipping after literally centuries of dragons leaving the humanoid world alone.

If the characters go stop the dragon the fight is deliberately a little bit too hard for them... Like they should lose at least one or two people if they do this (Even if those people get resurrected later).

However, if they're observant they may notice that the dragon seems to be unwell and sickly. If they managed to get it to stop fighting and talk to them, they will learn that the main big bad has promised it eternal life as an undead (and the dragon is pissed because it's dying had a stupidly young age... f or a dragon... of some mysterious illness). Of course, the big bad made the dragon sick. If they can cure it, they've made a powerful new ally. If they don't deal with the dragon soon enough, the big bad will show up at the final showdown riding a dracolitch lol. If they kill the dragon, the big bad will show up at the final showdown riding a zombie dragon that can still use its breath weapon.

There are some other really good scenarios in this campaign. An Eye of Fear and Flame and an army of specters are besieging one of the imperial relatives in his country estate. An entropic reaper has been summoned from the outer planes and is stalking and murdering the High-Ranking clergy of the imperial church. If they didn't deal with the cultist guy, he summons ice devils to attack the Senate building. If they DID deal with him, his father raises an army and marches on the capitol.

Oh right, another aspect of this game is that there are various military actions going on and if the PCS don't intervene in them, they end in massacres. And of course the dead soldiers are raised to join the ranks of the undead army. Also, Charnel Hounds and Boneyards are awesome aggregate undead... The more land battles are allowed to happen without PC intervention, the more hit dice the charnel hound has when it shows up. XD

I can see the potential future value I'm setting the precedent that we can nationalize giant businesses.

I don't think Trump should be the one to set that precedent though.

Even a broken Berman is right twice a season.

I've read exactly one time travel story where that was taken into account. They were trying to communicate with the past using tachyon beams, and they had to beam them into space aimed at where Earth WAS at the time they were trying to communicate with it.

I always thought it was a "Dandy Lion," like a fancy Victorian gentleman lion.

Also

"Uhuhuh... you thaid blow balls."

"Yeah! Heheh! Yeah!"

"Based on the numbers we're seeing on reddit, I would guess there are at least tens of thousands of users who are at this present time being convinced of these things by LLMs. As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now.”

I like the part where you trust for profit companies to do this on their own.

There was an astrophysicist on the reddit thread who said this is definitely a hyperdense object orbiting a star very close, like with a 12 day orbital period. A neutron star or even a stellar mass black hole. He said one of the most interesting possibilities is that it's a magnetar.

This makes me want to implement a programming language as an alternate tabletop magic system. Maybe give my players runes to experiment with and let them figure out it's a programming language.

It's all the flat earthers who lurk in this community.

I thought Musky boy wanted to SAVE the Earth from humans and that's why we need to go to Mars??