This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details.
Star Trek
I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek the Next Generation lately. I hadn’t seen it in many years, although I watched the whole thing as it came out in the eighties and nineties. I have obviously been watching it with different eyes this time around. I have noticed things in it that I don’t think I could have seen before. I wonder, for instance, about Mr Data. Would he have been such a sympathetic character today, as an AI in humanoid form? I think about how many of the episodes had no action, how many were just talking heads and techno-babble and whether Sci-fi TV shows today could get away with that. I ponder the special effects and make-up and marvel at how well they stand up 35 years later. But I have also been looking at these episodes with TTRPGs in mind. Now, of course, Star Trek has been made into a number of role playing games. I have never played any of them and this post isn’t about them. This post is about the crew of the Enterprise. Not Picard and Riker and Troi and Worf, but the ones who you see occasionally pass the bridge crew on one of the ship’s many lushly carpeted corridors, the ones having their own conversations in the background in Ten Forward, even the ones who so consistently took the con after Wesley Crusher left. They would get names sometimes and every so often, they’d even get lines! There are a couple of those that are recurring characters, such as Ensign McKnight and Robin Lefler. The most iconic of these, Chief O’Brien, went on to enjoy a major role in two Star Trek shows. But when he first appeared on the Enterprise, he was an unnamed bridge officer. Total NPC. He only became someone when the show creators decided he had to be someone.
The Quantum NPC
So this is what I have started doing for crews in my Spelljammer campaign. I think it would work in any game where you have a lot of NPCs that hang around in close proximity to the PCs all the time. So it works particularly well for ship crews.
In the main campaign, the party lost their original crew in the best possible circumstances. The crew, a bunch of spirits who had lost their memories and were not initially aware they were dead at all, finally fulfilled their goals and were able to shuffle off to whichever outer plane would have them. So, the PCs were forced to hire a whole new crew to take care of rigging and swabbing and whatnot. Now, I did not want to spend an entire session where they press-ganged or interviewed eight or nine NPCs that I would then have to name, outline and give voices to. That kind of thing can be fun but I don’t want to spend two full hours at it. Instead I told them that they picked up eight new competent crew members and that we would come up with their characters as and when they were needed.
So this is how that works, you imagine the scene where the PCs are on deck, in the foreground talking about something like how to defeat the weird root creatures that have invaded the ship from some eldritch, otherworldly space. In the background, just like in Star Trek, you have a few crewmembers, maybe they are even in uniform, but they are ill-defined and unremarkable. This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details. But then! They need one of the NPCs to be good at something, a specialist, an expert. Or maybe they just need a buddy, someone to talk to, or someone to listen. That’s when the players get to stretch those imagination muscles!
Pulling the NPC Out of Their Quantum State
The NPC existed in theory but not in practice. They were always there as a number, but not as a person, not as a character. Until the players make them up. The GM asks a player who this NPC is, what their name is, their ancestry, their job, what their personality is like. The players generally end up working together to do this but I usually start by asking the player who decided they wanted one of the quantum NPCs to become real for some reason. I ask that particular player the type of character they want in this situation with the understanding that, once they have been defined, they will forever be part of the crew, taking up one of those eight spots. It’s just like Blades in the Dark items. You know how many slots you have to fill when your PC is out on a Score but you don’t define the items until you need them in the narrative. Once you have said you have “A Blade or Two,” though, those blades are filling one of those slots. Same-same but different.
In this manner we got these three NPCs:
Deckhand Dewey – kobold, he/him, spry and wiry and can fit in little places.
Cook – Barry Keoghan (this is the consequence of allowing the players to name NPCs) – orc, he/him, big guy with big arms, beer belly, loves food and loves cooking. His chef hat does not fit very well. Apron always slightly dirty. Has a space rat companion.
Mr Cannon – Halfling he/him – weapon-master.
As you can see some of them got more detailed description than others. Barry Keoghan was described thoroughly partly because of who I asked to describe him and partly because of the moment I asked for his description, i.e. a quiet moment aboard ship where they had some time to talk about provisions and joke about silly Disney movie references. Meanwhile, Mr Cannon was created in the literal heat of battle. But that was ok, because the idea was always to flesh these NPCs out as time went on. We did, for instance, in subsequent sessions, discover that Mr Cannon had a wife waiting for him at home and that Barry Keoghan had some sort of tragic love-affair in his past.
I think, in future I will bring Between the Skies to bear on the Quantum NPCs as they are being birthed by the players, giving them desires, bonuses, hindrances, quirks and all the rest. Time allowing, of course.
The Quantum NPC method has the added advantage of endearing the newly created NPCs to the players from the off. They are, after all, fully their own creations. From the players’ point of view, I believe it was also quite devastating when both Mr Cannon and Deckhand Dewey got breath weaponed into oblivion by a lunar dragon along with the rest of the NPC crew (apart for Barry Keoghan who was in the galley at the time of the attack.) Unforgettable.
Dad-quest
Dad-quest is getting under way tomorrow night. Our resident Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth is rounding up a crew of misfits (the other players with their new characters that I discussed here) and a few more Quantum NPCs and spelljamming out to the Amos Expanse to find his Dad. Can’t wait to see what new crew-members the players come up with this time!
I’m off to Cork for the weekend so I won’t have time to come up with anything new today. Instead I thought I would share a couple of posts from last year. I wrote these at a time when I was first experimenting with some homespun rules and borrowed mechanics for our D&D 5E campaign.
This first post is preparatory to introducing a Blades in the Dark style engagement roll to our Spelljammer game.
I’m considering an option that harks back to Dark Sun. In 2nd Edition Dark Sun, a player started, not with just one PC, but a whole stable of them, called a character tree.
Mid-season finale
The crew of the Cadabra were going home. After weeks of adventure across Scatterspace and all over the Rock of Bral, they have arrived back at First Home, the asteroid/inn/shipyard that was their first stop after leaving their world behind in the first place. They could justifiably expect a warm welcome since they freed the shipyard from a Neogi infestation last time. But they weren’t expecting to be confronted with a crew of kobolds from their home island to be there. Kobolds who probably thought the PCs had murdered their queen. They also weren’t expecting to find Becky Fullpockets’ personal spelljamming vessel there. They had been struggling against the machinations of the technomagical billionaire ever since they fled their planet. It looked like they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, with no escape!
No better place to end part of a season than on a cliffhanger. And that’s what we did right there. We have been on a break from our Spelljammer campaign for a couple of months now. It’s given me a break from 5E and allowed us to play some other great games in the meantime. But now, it’s time to come back, sort of.
Spin Off
A few months (IRL months, that is) before the crew of the Cadabra reached First Home for the second time, they said goodbye to one of their number. Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth, who had to be rescued from two ship-wrecks in quick succession might have been labelled a Jonah by many crews, but the Cadabra was different. They welcomed him on board with open arms and he adventured with them for a while. But, eventually, he was always going to go back to look for the father who went missing from the first of those two ship-wrecks. Now, while his erstwhile comrades are heading back to their homeworld, Azimuth is armed with a little knowledge about the stretch of Wildspace Papa might be found in and a ship stolen from Becky Fullpockets. He’s preparing an expedition of his own to go find his real dad… Not that gnome who pretended to be his dad during that short period where he’d lost his memory (long story, dear reader.)
The rest of the players are coming back too, but they’ll be playing new characters for this spin-off. Azimuth needs a crew for his ship, after all. We are getting together tomorrow night for a session-0 type thing. I think everyone is looking forward to trying some different classes/backgrounds/species compared to the ones they have been playing for over two years in the main campaign. Although, Azimuth’s player, David, doesn’t get a new character, he does get to pursue his PC’s main drive and its a great welcome back to the group for him.
As for me; I’m looking forward to yet another shake-up in this game. I’m planning to use the progress-based travel rules that I mentioned in my Prep Part 2 post last week. And, as well as that, I have something very special up my sleeve for the meat of the adventure, which I can’t reveal here and now (my players read this blog sometimes.) I’m definitely going to write about it after the fact, though.
Change of Cast?
The introduction of new PCs into the campaign, even though its a spin-off, raises the question of what happens once Azimuth joins back up with the main crew again. I’m considering an option that harks back to Dark Sun. In 2nd Edition Dark Sun, a player started, not with just one PC, but a whole stable of them, called a character tree. I believe you were supposed to begin with four characters. This was to help counter the lethality of the setting, giving a player back-ups in the inevitable event of a PC death. This made a lot of sense, especially considering the amount of time it took to create characters. Go check out my Dark Sun character Creation series to witness exactly how long that took.
So, my thinking is that, once this spin-off is done, if they want, the players will be able to swap PCs in or out as they like. This should have the double benefit of providing the players with a bit of variety and allowing them to almost fully crew their ship with their own characters, rather than just NPCs. I’m currently thinking through how I’ll handle character advancement if I do allow this. In Dark Sun, if I remember correctly, the PC only gained experience when they were actually played. No vicarious levelling. I think this makes a lot of sense, but it might be more difficult to adjudicate with milestone levelling.
What do you think of these ideas, dear reader? Have you ever run a spin-off campaign like this? Would you be happy for your players to switch between active PCs like I’ve described?
I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions.
Still Prepping
This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt blog.
Click on the link above to take in the blogpost that’s piloting this bandwagon. Wagon-jumpers abound. You can find a very nice read on the same topic and a handy list of related blogposts on the Among Cats and Books blog.
And here’s a link to the first post on this topic on the dice pool dot com.
Between the Sessions
I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions. Its approach to random encounters in particular is one I highly recommend. The encounters are built, not just to make your session interesting, but to introduce potential allies and enemies, recurring characters, locations, objects. In short, they help you to truly build your campaign without relying on GM-written plots that the players may or may not want to interact with.
The methods and tables introduced in the book make for interesting, impactful characters and occurrences. And they have depth, too, enough to hook your players and keep them hooked. You know that old story that your players would die for the unnamed goblin you just made up on the spot but won’t give a shit about the NPC you spent two weeks crafting an elaborate back story for? I feel like the techniques in Between the Skies are almost designed to prevent that. Why? Well, firstly because, if used as your main way to drive the game forward, you are not going to be spending so long lovingly hand-crafting those NPCs, you are just going to roll them up on the tables provided and not worry about whether or not the PCs run into them, because whatever they run into will be interesting and fun enough to capture their imaginations. So, all the NPCs are more like the loveable nameless goblin and you don’t feel the need to make sure the PCs interact with any of them in particular. This has the effect of allowing the players to dictate the direction of the game to a large extent. This is a good thing!
Let’s Interact with the Mechanics
So, Huffa’s advice when it comes to travel is that, unless it is going to be interesting or important, skip it. I can get behind this approach. Recently, I have tended towards the idea of the journey being the game, but sometimes, when you know the next scene you need to play is across the city and its a relatively safe place, just skip to it, or montage it if there is something interesting to see along the way or if its a good opportunity for conversation between characters.
If and when you want to play the travel, though, Between the Skies presents you with two options, progress-based travel and route-based travel.
Route-based travel
Using this method, you use a map, just a basic one that includes routes and locations along them. You roll once on the Encounter die between locations and resolve that before arriving at the next place. Simple. The book includes several ways to generate route maps and destinations but I won’t concern myself with that here.
Your route map should have options, different ways of getting from A to B with more locations in between your starting point and the final destination depending on how long you want the journey to last.
This gives me the impression of beating the resistance of a delve in Heart. Before the journey starts, determine the journey length. There is a helpful table that indicates the amount of Progress points required to reach the destination depending on how long the journey is. You record progress through the resolution of Encounter Die rolls.
The Encounter die works as follows:
Encounter
Something Approaches
Environmental hazard
Complication
Hint as to what is nearby
Progress/breakthrough/boon
So you only get progress points on a 6.
What I did
As with everything in Between the Skies, you can take it or leave it. I have used a combination of the two methods, where I decided that a spelljammer ship journey from the Rock of Bral to the First Home asteroid would take three days and I would have them roll on an encounter table once per day. So this is the table I used:
Wildspace encounter table d6
1-2 No encounter 3 Environmental/Ship Hazard 4 Ship Problem 5-6 Encounter
When you only have three days and so, three possible rolls on the table, I felt it was better to increase the chances of actual encounters/problems/hazards occurring. If it was a more exploratory journey, I would use the progress-based method as described in the book.
Now, using the tables in this book, of which there are many, you should be able to create a fascinating encounter on the fly, but, if you can, I think its nice to prepare a few beforehand, at least one of each kind. So let’s do that here.
I thought it would be a good idea to roll up some options on the spark tables in the book and add them to a d4 table for each encounter type (environmental/ship hazard, ship problem and ship travel encounter.)
Environmental/Ship Hazard
We’ll start with the hazards. For each hazard you want to prepare, you roll 1d6 to determine the hazard type and then d66 to generate a hazard keyword on the Environmental Hazards during ship travel table in Between the Skies.
I shared this table in the last post so lets use the results I rolled up on that.
3 Ship Hazards
Roll 1d4
Hazard 1 – Storm, Flood
Hazard 2 – Disorientation, Sphere
Hazard 3 – Obstruction, Cold
Hazard 4 – Trap, Haunting
I then go ahead and prepare a few details of the hazards. Here’s the first one as an example.
Hazard 1
A solar storm rolls in from the direction of the sun.
The gusts of solar winds batter the ship
The deck is flooded in light and other solar radiation
All those on deck risk blindness
There is also a chance of taking radiant damage
All on deck must make a Dexterity save, DC 15 to avoid blindness
If they are afflicted with blindness it lasts 1d4-1 days. If you roll a 1, Roll 2d12-1 for the number of hours it lasts
Even if they saved against blindness they must make a Constitution save, DC 15, against radiant damage. If they fail they take 4d6 radiant damage. If they succeed they take none.
This goes for the ship too, if the damage roll beats the damage threshold
You can see that I took the hazard type fairly literally but moved it into a wildspace context. A solar storm seemed obvious but also pretty cool. The keyword, “flood,” took me a little while to work out but I thought flooding the deck with light seemed both like a cool, spacey event and something that could present a real problem for the PCs.
Obviously, you can prepare the details for each entry in the table. They don’t have to involve a lot of work but putting a little extra preparation in at this stage can remove the need for it at the table.
Ship Problem
Similar to the hazards, you simply roll up a problem type and a problem keyword on the Ship Problems tables in Between the Skies. I did this four times and created the d4 table below.
4 Ship Problems
Roll 1d4
Problem 1 – Armament, Separation
Problem 2 – Quarters, Shrinkage
Problem 3 – Cargo, Disappearance
Problem 4 – Bridge (spelljammer helm), Error
Here’s the detail on one of these entries:
Problem 2
One of the crew has stowed something large and awkward in the crew quarters. It is limiting the amount of space available to sling hammocks and the rest of the NPC crew is unhappy about it. This crew member refuses to be parted from their huge steamer chest as it contains something of extreme personal significance. The PCs will need to resolve the interpersonal issue.
You can see that the details here are left deliberately vague. You Ould ask the players to decide which member of the crew is the problem, what’s in the chest that’s so important and, most importantly, how the resolve the issue.
Encounters
And finally we have encounters. There are a lot of different encounter tables in the book. You can choose the one that best describes the surroundings of the PCs at the time. There are two space encounter tables, one for known space and one for wildspace. They are d66 tables. Once you have done rolled on them, you can get some more inspiration by rolling on the encounter keyword, detail and related entities tables. Once you have rolled on the Encounter distance and awareness tables in Between the Skies to determine how far away the encounter is and how much attention they are paying to the PCs you can roll on the d4 table below.
You’ll note that the results on the table below are not all similar. For instance, encounter 2 doesn’t have a related entity. In general, such entities, as generated by the tables in Between the Skies, are sentient NPCs so I didn’t think it necessary for the parasite I rolled up. But mostly each of them includes an encounter keyword, a related entity, and two encounter details.
5-6 Encounters
Isolationists – Confusion, Related Entity – Unknown NPC, Glittering, Prayers
Ship Parasite – Loss, Scales, Experiments
Ruins, Ancient – Mourning, Related Entity – Petty God, Knots, Miscommunications
Stowaway – Battle, Related Entity – Creature, Eggs, Blindspots
Stowaway
Size, substance and form table: Very small biota, piecemeal. Weakness: True name Needs: Brains Characteristics and details: Pacifist, stalks Behaviour: Social: Family: 5 appearing Demeanor and current behaviour: Protective, healing Attacks: Blast – teleporting
For the final example, I’m using the creature generation tables in the Entities chapter of Between the Skies. You can see all the details and keywords that I rolled up above.
Along with the keywords, battle, eggs and blindspots, that came from the original encounter detail rolls, these will make for a fascinating encounter with some sort of very small fungal entity that has escaped a battle to find refuge aboard the PCs’ ship. The mushroom creature has a desperate need for brains to help heal its young but will not take them by force. Perhaps they only consume the brains of dead beings. Perhaps they have a blindspot that means they cannot sense constructs. And maybe, also, they have crawled into the ship’s stores to try to feed on the eggs, mistaking them for heads containing brains. I like the idea of them lashing out with a teleporting blast to deposit attackers some way off the deck of the ship, leaving them to perish in wildspace. If the PCs can figure out the creatures’ true names, they’ll be able to get them off the ship, but how?
Conclusion
I think you can see the fun you can have preparing encounters and encounter tables using Between the Skies. Once again, dear reader, I can only urge you to go and purchase it. It’s so useful and you won’t regret it!
“The Discourse (TM)” has been focusing on running published adventures/modules/campaigns as opposed to custom/homebrew/sandbox games for the last little while. First Quinns reviewed Impossible Landscapes, an epic and almost legendary campaign for the modern Cthulhu-ish game, Delta Green. This is the first time Quinns has reviewed a campaign/published adventure on his RPG review channel, Quinns’ Quest, so it was unusual enough to spark a significant amount of discussion all on its own. And then Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and Rascal reviewed the same campaign. I believe this was purely coincidental, especially as Impossible Landscapes came out about five years ago now. Both are great reviews in their own right and are based on full play-throughs of the campaign so you know they’re of real value. You should check them both out.
I have opinions on the conversation, of course. I have shared a lot of them in other posts from the last year or so, actually. If you want the summary, though, I had a lot of bad experiences running D&D scenarios in the past, especially from the AD&D 2nd edition era. I found they were difficult or impossible to just pick up and run. In fact, they required maybe more preparation time than adventures and campaigns I wrote myself. The one published 5E campaign that I ran, Storm King’s Thunder suffered from the same issues, actually. This made me feel like it was a “me” thing. But, it turns out, a lot of GMs feel the same way, according to Bluesky, at least.
However, I have had my mind changed somewhat by running pre-written adventures for some other games, particularly Free League’s Blade Runner, Dungeon Crawl Classics and, to a lesser extent, the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin.
This is a link to my first post on Electric Dreams, the introductory Case File for Blade Runner:
I will say that, despite my generally favourable outlook on most of these modules, I still find I have to to do a lot of prep for them. The main fear I have is messing things up so bad that I essentially spoil the rest of the adventure. Although, I should really have more faith in my abilities as a GM at this stage. I feel like I can probably improv my way out of any hole, to be honest. But it does not change the fact that I spend hours rewriting long paragraphs presented in module texts into digestible bite-sized bullet-points. I am running another Dragon Age scenario right now. Amber Rage is from Blood in Ferelden, an anthology of scenarios for the game that came out in 2010. It suffers from verboseness and unnecessary detail and makes for a lot of work from the GM. I’m enjoying the contents of the scenario but its presentation is horrendously dated and needs a sprinkle of OSR magic to tighten it up, in my opinion.
I realise that none of the modules I have mentioned here are anywhere close to having the size and epic scope of something like Impossible Landscapes, but it doesn’t change the fact that they have largely changed my mind about running anything pre-published. The one I have my eye on right now is Dagger in the Heart for Heart: The City Beneath. Actually, I have a post about that right here too:
At the end of the last post I wrote about my current Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign, I noted that the caravaners were on the cusp of an encounter with some Armadilloids. The section of the book describing the Steppe of the Lime Nomads has a list of random encounters just like all the other sections do. And, just like the other ones, the detail you get about an encounter is minimal, to say the very least. You might get a level for the creatures or NPCs encountered, and maybe a word or two of description. This leaves quite a lot in the hands of the GM and, potentially, the other players at the table. Perhaps the characteristics of the encountered entity would emerge organically in play. Maybe the GM will have prepared specifics for each potential encounter, with regards to physical descriptions, motivations, weaknesses and strengths for instance. In the case of this encounter. I knew I did not want it to be an automatically violent one. I wanted the Armadilloids to be sentient but different enough as to be inscrutable. I could probably have just written a description, but I have Between the Skies, so why should I?
I took to the Entities chapter of the book and started rolling. I started with a roll on the Size, substance and form table. I rolled a 7 for size. That gave me Very large (giant-size.) I liked this. It immediately brought to mind the Armadillo super villain first encountered way back in Marvel Secret Wars II some time in the 80s. So I had a picture in my mind.
Next, I rolled a 6 on the Substance table, meaning they were Animal. That corresponded with my general idea so far, which was cool. On the Form table, I got a 13 on the d66 roll. That made them Bipedal (which is a word, that, when you say it out loud, sounds weird, we discovered.) It was still matching the picture I had in my head at this stage, except for the fact that these bipeds also had wings. For my purposes I thought it best that they be stubby vestigial wings. It’s the Grasslands, it’s not safe to fly there.
This next bit was so good. On the Weaknesses and Needs tables, I started to see the situation emerge. I rolled a 34 on the Weakness table, which meant they were Confined. Now in the previous session the players had rolled on the encounter tables in UVG and we had established already that there were ten or so of them and they were merely silhouettes on the horizon. They could see the Armadilloids so they were not obscured by any sort of physical trap. But a pretty cool phenomenon in UVG is “stuck-force.” These are invisible barriers and shapes and containers of nothing but force. They litter mainly the skies of the UVG, left over from a time long gone, when fantascience and magic dominated and their practitioners left these eternal artefacts dotted all over, making flying an incredibly dangerous prospect (as I hinted at above.) So, I came up with the situation where the Armadilloids had been trapped in a sphere of this stuck-force and had been unable to free themselves. The next table was Needs. I rolled a 62 on that, which gave me Directions. But I didn’t like this one so I opted for 26 instead, Escape. Perfect.
Next was Characteristics and details. These tables round out the looks and important idiosynchacies of these creatures. First I rolled a 21 on the Notable characteristics table. You know those big ol’ Armadilloids are rolling around like Sonic (I know Sonic is a hedgehog, ok? Just roll with it.) On the detail table, I got a 34, Tatooed. Adding a little more to this, we see that they are tattooed all over with the pictographic stories of their lives. I love this detail.
Next come a pair of Behaviour tables. I rolled on the Social behaviour table, which indicates their numbers, even though I already knew how many there were from our roll on the UVG tables. Why? Well, it also suggests the type of groups they habitually congregate in: Couple, Family, Herd, etc. I rolled a 6 and got Pack. This fit perfectly as well. I actually skipped the behaviour and current demeanour tables because I already had a good idea that they would be eager to be freed, some of them going stir crazy, rolling around inside the sphere, some simply sitting in the grass, and one of them standing with his hands raised against the stuck-force sphere trying to will his way out.
This next one was fun: Attacks! I rolled a 6 on the Mechanism of attack table, making it a Blast. The Attack keyword I rolled up was 33, Draining. So, from these words, I decided they would have a Charisma Draining Psychic Blast power. It never came up in play, thankfully. Why? Because the PCs figured out how to free them and then were invited back to their mushroom growing burros where they were rewarded with three sacks of Regular Mushrooms.
They also spent the night there around the Armadilloids fire, despite the fact the big orange guys could only speak in some brand of “meep meep” language. They all consumed copious amounts of magic mushrooms and got high as fuck using the wonderful tables in the appendix of Fungi of the Far Realms.
Since I rarely get much time to prep sessions these days, this method was really valuable. It allowed me to do what I needed to do on the train on the way to work, using the pdf of Between the Skies, an online dice roller and the word processor on my phone. I have been using Between the Skies for some other games too in the last few months, most notably our Spelljammer campaign. It has made for enormously memorable and unique encounters in that case. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go get it on itchio or on Exalted Funeral!
Final Plug: Shadows Return
I backed a project from Ian Hickey of Gravity Realms last year, The Price of Apocrypha. It was a really successful Kickstarter, especially for a small, indie, Irish creator, and it was fulfilled and delivered incredibly promptly.
Well, Ian has another great project in the works on Kickstarter right now, Shadows Return: House of the Wraith Queen. Its a mega dungeon style adventure for use with Ad&D 2nd Edition, D&D 5E and OSR games. It’s fully funded but there are only a couple of days left of the campaign and you could still help it reach some stretch goals! Go back it!
As a final note, I have recommended a lot of books and products recently and I like to think I always do here on the dice pool dot com. I do this purely because I believe in the books, the products, the creators, not for monetary or other rewards!
I’m not really a big fan of “tricks.” The word gives me the feeling of something rather mean. And, as a GM, I would rather not be mean to the PCs. Challenging, sure, occasionally lethal when called for, absolutely. But not mean. The closest I have come in recent years was when I had the corpse of a recently deceased player-character possessed by a demon in order to wreak havoc at their own funeral.
The Death
Merideth, played by Isaac was the sort of tiefling barbarian that every D&D party needs: utterly heedless of danger, first into the fray every time, usually naked with naught but a bevy of rotting heads dangling from her belt. She was one of an intrepid crew of adventurers who had recently turned up on the shores of the great orcish nation of Tír na nOrc. They were convinced by a patron to assault the hideout of one of the capital’s under-city gangs. There, Merideth was murdered, predictably enough, as she charged headlong into the guards in the entrance hall. Slightly less predictably, it was a stray crossbow bolt from one of her own companions that really did for her in the end.
Merideth’s companions continued on regardless and explored the rest of the gang headquarters, as well as the maze of traps below it. There they uncovered a secret pact between the gang, An Fiacla Dubh, and the Demon Lord of the Hunt, Baphomet. This would soon bring the eternal Blood War of the Lower Planes to the streets of the city. While they were at it, they released a dybbuk that had been imprisoned in the burnt and blackened body of a prisoner chained in the maze. It escaped, but that would not be the last they would see of it.
The Funeral
The dungeon over and done with, the next session we agreed that it would be a nice gesture if the PCs, along with a collection of major NPCs from the city of Ráth an Croí gathered at a private dock to bear tearful witness to the funeral of Merideth. A Priest of, Kaigun, God of the Sea, was employed to complete the ceremony. The barbarian was laid out on a raft and pushed off after everyone had said their words of tribute and farewell. Then, viking style they shot flaming arrows at her to send her off in fire and glory to the after life.
But, just before any arrows managed to hit, the dybbuk emerged from the waters of the dock, shadowy and incorporeal. It seized the body of the tiefling and propelled her at her former comrades. Isaac, represented in this scene in his new, bardish guise, was forced to fight off his former character as were her former companions. As moments of surprise and shock go, I have rarely been prouder to present this one to the PCs. It was only improved by the nature of the dybbuk. The demon, (the 5e version can be found in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes) which appears as a translucent, flying jellyfish in its natural form almost always appears, instead, in possession of a corpse. One of its features is that it can plunder the mind of the dead one for details of its life, memories and bonds to mess with their loved-ones. I used this to good effect, particularly on her long-time adventuring pal, Antoinette, and the poor PC who accidentally killed her, the Outlaw, Josie Wales (yes, really.) Another of its features is that it gets to use the abilities of the body it possesses, meaning they had to face the formidable might of the undead/possessed barbarian as well as a plethora of other enemies who showed up for the fun.
Luckily, they other PCs all survived and they got to kill Merideth all over again. Ah, good times!
What about you, dear reader? What was the dirtiest trick you ever perpetrated in the context of an RPG… or otherwise?
Character options in D&D 5e have always felt pretty thin on the ground to me. Official ones at least. Of course there are hundreds of subclasses, species/races, backgrounds etc. out there from third party creators but it has always seemed as though WotC have deliberately limited the number of official options they put out. I sometimes wonder if I only feel that way because 5e is not my first edition of the game. Because, in comparison 2e, the various classes and species are woefully underserved in my opinion.
In the late 80s and early 90s TSR released a set of books designed to complement the basic character options presented in the 1989 Player’s Handbook for 2nd Edition Ad&d. there was one for each of the classes. These generally focused on fleshing out the possibilities for the classes with “kits” background options, class-based campaigns, new abilities and features, class-based organisations like thieve’s guilds. There were also several supplements that dealt with AD&D races. The elves got one, the gnomes and the halflings got lumped together in their own book and they even had one called The Complete Book of Humanoids, which featured a plethora of “monstrous” races as PC options.
Back in those days, my table got a lot of use out of most of these books. The character kits from the class books became standard choices in many cases and the extra racial options were very popular for rounding out PCs. But my favourite, by a pretty long way, was the Complete Book of Dwarves. I had been a fully paid up member of team-dwarf since I read the Hobbit as a kid. I loved their aesthetic, their toughness, their curmudgeonliness, and, of course, their beards. I had a few dwarven characters over the years across multiple games and systems but I don’t think I ever got to have one in AD&D as I was almost always the DM. So, instead, I used the Complete Book of Dwarves to make up Dwarven societies, kingdoms, mythologies, NPCs and Strongholds. The book contains chapters on the mythical origins of the dwarves, dwarven subraces, “Your Life as a Dwarf,” Character Creation, Proficiencies, Dwarf Kits, Role Playing and Personalities, Mining, Equipment and Designing Dwarf Campaigns. I remember getting fully immersed in dwarven world-building in a way that my players probably did not entirely appreciate. But, if I’m honest, that was for me anyway, not for them.
Stronghold Creation
So the Complete Book of Dwarves has a whole chapter devoted to generating your own Dwarven Strongholds and I have a distinct memory of being wrapped up, sick, in a duvet on the couch rolling up stronghold after stronghold. I must have recorded them somewhere but those records have been lost to the mists of time along with Cold War and white dog poop.
Now, I haven’t had a copy of the book in years. I’m not really sure what happened to the one I had, but there is a good chance it was borrowed by one of my good friends a mere thirty years ago and they haven’t gotten around to returning it yet. Understandable. Anyway, it was my birthday on Tuesday and my friends Tom and Isaac gifted me a copy of it! I had recently been going on about my particular love for this book and they’d actually listened to me!! True, true friends.
So I thought we could create a stronghold together now that I’ve got it. Strap in! According to the opening section of the chapter:
Strongholds are the homes and workplaces of the dwarves. They can range from simple family residences to huge subterranean cities. The stronghold design sequence allows you to design a stronghold, either by making a series of choices, or by random die rolling. You may also combine the two methods.
Dear reader, if you have been here for any of my character creation posts, I think you will know which way we are going. Random all the way!
Here’s the Dwarf Stronghold Design Sheet:
You can see that we are going to start with the name. Now this actually requires us to turn back to Chapter 4 first and locate the Dwarf Name Generator.
We then roll 1d4 to determine the number of syllables in the stronghold’s name – that’s a 2.
That means we roll 1d20 twice on the Dwarf Name Generator Prefixes table – that’s a 7, Dal- and a 16, Nor-
We go ahead and combine those in the most pleasing sounding configuration, I think that would have to be “Nordal” for me
Then we flip back to Chapter Ten and roll 1d20 once more on the Stronghold Suffix Table – 15, -lode
Put em all together! Nordallode! It definitely has the sound of a place name made up for D&D but we are going with it
Next! Subraces Present. Ugh. Yep. This is the bit where it becomes a little problematic. Obviously, the whole subrace business in D&D is slightly odd. If you applied it to humans you would be talking about different ethnicities, but D&D doesn’t do that with humans, does it (I mean thank fuck, right?) (I’m deliberately skirting around the variant human unearthed arcana options because I think it’s best to do that.) Anyway, the Subraces Present section wants us to make sure we know which is the main subrace (i.e. the most numerous,) the dominant subrace, and which other subraces exist there. This section also includes a table that tells you how many of the dominant subrace are in your stronghold, while pointing out that this only refers to the number of male dwarves. The number of females is, for some reason, half this number and the number of wee dwarflings is half that again. Look, I don’t know. How they came to such decisions is beyond me and clearly did not even strike my tweenaged mind as something noteworthy at the time.
OK, so, I’m going to roll on the Subrace Table to figure out which is the Main Subrace in Nordallode. The same table determines their numbers. Once again, the table has different potential populations of subrace for each (Deep Dwarves can have 3d100+50, whereas Gully Dwarves can only have 1d100+50.) As for numbers of males to females, I see no reason to abide by the nutty, unexplained logic in this section. I’m not even going to split them up.
Ok, Subrace Table, roll 1 – 32 – Gully Dwarves.
Number – 1d100+50 = 108
Now to find out which is the dominant subrace and how many other dwarves subraces live in the stronghold. Let’s roll on the Dominant Subraces Table.
61, Hill Dwarves
This means there are 1d4 Other Subraces in the stronghold according to this table. I rolled a 2.
I’m beginning to get confused and frustrated by this whole subrace business. The first table got me to roll to determine which was the main subrace and how many of them were in the stronghold. Now, I’m told to roll on a different table to find out which is the dominant subrace (is this not the main subrace?) and then roll to find out how many other sub races are in the stronghold? But, so far, I have rolled two different types of dwarf for main and dominant…
If I continue on to the next page, it tells me to reduce the number of the dominant subrace by a percentage depending on how many other subraces are present. But, I have not actually rolled the number of the dominant subrace yet.
Forget it. I am scrapping the Hill Dwarves. Long stand Nordallode, home of the Gully Dwarves!
I will keep everything else the same. Now, with 2 other sub races sharing their home with them, the Gully Dwarves must reduce their numbers by 25%. That brings them down to a mere 81.
I’m now going to find out how many and what type of other subraces are present.
I roll 1d100 on the Gully Dwarves Subraces Table and get 74 – Mountain Dwarves. I roll 2d10 to determine their numbers and get 14.
I roll again for the second minor subrace and get 52 – Hill Dwarves. There are 3d12 of these beardoes – 20
New population of Nordallode – 115
From the book:
Hill and mountain dwarves may be found at any depth and living with any other subrace. They are clannish and keep to themselves. They are likely to be the employers of other sub races. While these others will likely be in the stronghold on a fixed term contract, it is not unusual for a stronghold to have enclaves of other dwarves who have been there for generations.
Time to figure out the stronghold’s overall alignment. This does not determine the alignment of every member, just the general outlook.
2d6 – Obviously this table has each of the sub races along the top as some of them are more likely to be evil than others (aaaagh.) Nordallode turns out to be Chaotic Neutral.
Let’s move swiftly on from all that nonsense.
Let’s figure out the Type of Stronghold we are building:
Another d100 roll and I get a 14, which means it is a Secondary Stronghold and gets to increase its population by 100%
New population of Nordallode – 230
Secondary Strongholds are second only to Major Strongholds and can be independent or allied with a Major one. I think we will call Nordallode an independent stronghold!
How old is our stronghold? Good question!
For Secondary Strongholds we roll 2d6 to find out how many generations of age Nordallode is – That’s 8. Pretty old… except, there is a Racial Modifier. Gully Dwarves subtract 2 from that number. So its 6 generations (no fucking idea.)
And how old can the dwarves of Nordallode live to be? No roll here:
Gully Dwarves – 250 years (this is the lowest possible life expectancy and its determined entirely by subrace…)
What type of government does our stronghold have?
It’s back to the d100 rolls – 89 – Oligarchy! Why, of course! How fitting! (Wah!) Oh wait, there are more modifiers here. Gully Dwarves add 10 (for whatever reason) and we have to add another 10 for being of Chaotic alignment! That makes it 109. It’s Anarchy baby!
Time to roll on the Attitude Table to find out what our problem is.
It’s a d20 roll this time. That’s a 112 – Isolationist. Lock those gates!
This means that 75 – 100% of the population is in the frikking militia.
What are our major resources in Nordallode? Well, the book shies away from telling you exactly what you’re rich in, instead, just giving you an idea of its monetary value.
It’s 1d20 on the Stronghold Resources Table and I got a natural 20! WOOHOO! Things are looking up for my poor little Gullies. That means it’s Rich!
There is an optional part of this table – the starting gold modifier, that applies to PCs who come from this stronghold. So, if your character did come from Nordallode, they would start with an extra 1d10x10gp. Pretty sweet. But wait! Another racial modifier means that you take away 10 from the original d20 roll because Nordallode is a Gully Dwarf stronghold… Born to lose. So, this actually means that my downtrodden dwarves start at Average Resources and so get no starting gold modifier at all. FFS. There is a +1 to the roll for being a Secondary Stronghold, but that doesn’t improve it from Average anyway.
OK, time to find out what Nordallode’s Relationship with Other PC Races is. We need to roll 1d20 four times on the table of that name. I am going to factor in the modifiers at the start this time. I get a +1 for being Chaotic Neutral and, for being Isolationist, I must treat any roll of 4 or less as a 9:
Elves – 12 – Threatening
Gnomes – 13 – Cautious
Halflings – Nat 20, becomes 21 – AT WAR!
Humans – 12 – Cautious
Nordallode, not friendly to outsiders.
Properly, this should only be rolled for the races that live nearby but since this is entirely experimental, I rolled for all of them
OK, we have figured out who we hate above ground, time to go to war or peace with someone underground too. Love the War/Peace Table:
Its another d20 roll – That’s a 1 which actually means Nordallode is at peace!
The next table allows us to see how long that unlikely situation has persisted
Peace Table – 1d10 – 7 – 2d6 generations! – That’s 4 generations of peace! Just not with those fucking Halflings obvs.
There is a War table as well but I think we have just determined that we don’t need to roll on that.
Nordallode has to defend itself from the depredations of those vicious, hairy-toed bastards. How do we do that? With our Military Forces!
Gully Dwarves have an Unsteady Morale (7)
Apparently the first reaction of Gully Dwarves to danger or conflict is to run away, whether they are members of the militia or not…
Their weapons are… “any they can scavenge,” which is not great for a militia but may make sense in a stronghold where anarchy reigns
With 230 dwarves in the stronghold, I’ll assume that 200 are in the armed forces. That means that, of their Leaders, there are 50 Thieves (level 2-6), 40 Warriors (level 2-4), 20 Warriors (level 2-6), 4 Warriors (level 8), 2 Warriors (level 10) and 2 Priests (level 1-10)
Special Forces – It says 10 to 20% of the militia have some of the specialised Class Kits from the book. I’m not going to get into that right now though as it would require the sort of dive into more general AD%D rules that I’m not prepared for. But, numbers wise, that’s at least 20.
War Machine Table! – We get 4 rolls on this because of the size of the militia and we get a +1 to our rolls because of our cool Isolationist attitude. It’s a d10 table – that makes 11 for the first roll giving Nordallode 3 War Machines, 8 for the second roll for another 1 War Machine and finally a 6 for 1 more. That’s 5 War Machines, total. Noice.
You can have Animals to defend your stronghold. The specific animal depends on your subrace, unsurprisingly. Let’s a have a cadre of Giant Beetles for the Gully Dwarves of Nordallode. That’ll scare the bejeezus out of those pipe-smoking tyrants!
let’s figure out our Total Strength
That’s Number of Leaders in the Military (118) + Special Forces (20) + Number of Dwarves in the stronghold (230) = 458. I am not sure what this number means. It seems incredibly abstract.
Conclusion
Every time I revisit one of these old AD&D 2E books, the realities of the western world, the industry, our polluted minds and questionable thought-processes of the writers of game materials largely marketed to children, smack me around the face again. When I first read this, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. In fact, I specifically remember deriding the mere idea of playing a Gully Dwarf when I was 12 years old. But I am giving that me a pass. He was a child. So, it’s harder to hand out the get-out-of-jail-free card to the creators of the books. They, perhaps unthinkingly, used their creations to perpetuate racist ideas. And I know they are fantasy races but there’s no excuse. Those subraces, as I wrote above, are the same as human ethnicities. According to the writers of this material, only some of them are fit to be the employers of the others, some of them consort with beetles and are cowardly and some are inherently evil… Need I say more?
I had a lot less fun with this process than I remembered having when I was a kid but there are still elements that spark the imagination. I like to imagine the Gully Dwarf heroes! Those few high level Thieves, Warriors and Priests, perhaps riding out on their War Beetles. It makes me wonder about the generations that came before, the founders of Nordallode, and what their lofty goals were. Would they be disappointed in their descendents or proud?
What’s your opinion on these old, race obsessed books, dear reader? Do you just shake it off or do you embrace the stereotyping and run with it?
Heather joined our campaign a bit late. She decided to sign up about the time the rest of the party popped through their very first portal to Sigil. This worked out well because her character, Panasonic (no relation to the Japanese electronics manufacturer of the same name,) was already there. This Half-orc Bard hadn’t always been there but she had made a home in the city and even gained something of a reputation as a controversial singer/songwriter. She had written and performed a tune that was perceived as being particularly critical of the self-appointed police, the Harmonium, a Faction that was philosophically devoted to the notion of laws and the act of upholding them. Unsurprisingly, this made them less than popular with many of the city’s population. So, when Panasonic first performed her song “The Safety Dance,” (for copyright reasons, a song that is legally distinct from the 80s hit by Canadian icons, Men Without Hats) a riot erupted, followed by anti-Harmonium acts being perpetrated all over the city. So, on the night when the rest of the party emerged from the end of a pipe (other side of a portal) in the the swimming pool of the Gymnasium, Panasonic found herself taking a shortcut through that very place, with a squad of angry Hardheads (a nickname for the Harmonium) hot on her heels.
Luckily, the party came to her aid, and she, in turn, acted as a sort of guide/ally to them in the alien and bewildering city.
The thing about Panasonic was, she had a fascination for Sigil and the planes in general. She was fascinated by the doors, the portals, how they worked. She always felt there was something musical about them. Also, she had been trying to find a way home for a long time. She had been shanghaied in Sigil by her sister, Sony (once again, no relation.) Sony was jealous of Panasonic’s growing popularity and so got a wizard to send her off plane so she could take her place at the front of their band. When she ran into the party, who just-so-happened to come from the same prime material world, she latched onto them as her ride home.
So, the culmination of Panasonic’s story, unlike the rest of the party, came when she emerged through the portal to Erlendhaim with the others. It was a big moment for her! She even found her sister there and somehow made amends just before they were violently assaulted by a bunch of devils.
It was then that she gained her new bard features, having fulfilled all her major character beats.
As with all of these character options, I didn’t spend too much time considering the balance implications of these. But if you like them, and you feel like you could use them in some form or other, please feel free.
New Bard Feature – Music of the Planes
Magical Notes
From 3rd level; the Bard uses an action to strike a cord on their musical instrument and summons a tiny portal which projects, from the instrument, an ethereal glowing rune in the shape of a musical note. As the the Bard continues to play, notes emerge in a stream from a plane of pure, living music. This stream of notes can have one of several effects that the Bard must choose before using this feature.
Face-melter – Attack roll using the Bard’s spell attack bonus – Range: 60ft, Damage: 1d8 + Charisma modifier thunder damage. At 6th level this increases to 2d8, at 9th level to 3d8, at 12th level to 4d8 and at 15th level to 5d8.
Break/Dance – Affect a single creature in range (60ft) causing them to dance energetically unless they make a Charisma saving throw (using the Bard’s spell save DC.) On a failure, the creature’s AC is broken, reduced by 2 as they leave themselves open to attack. At 6th level the Bard can affect two creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 3. At 9th level the Bard can affect three creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 4. At 12th level the Bard can affect four creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 5. At 15th level the Bard can affect five creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 6.
Mosh Pit – From 12th level the Bard can affect a group of 1d8 + Charisma modifier creatures to attack the closest creature to them if they fail a Charisma saving throw (using the Bard’s spell save DC.) This effect lasts until the end of the Bard’s next turn.
Transported by the Melody
From 9th level, once between long rests, the Bard can use an action to play their instrument in harmony with the planes allowing them to cast the Contact Other Plane spell. From 13th level, once between long rests, the Bard can use an action to play their instrument in harmony with the planes allowing them to cast the teleport spell. From 15th level, once between long rests, the Bard can use an action to play their instrument in harmony with the planes allowing them to cast the Demiplane spell.
Monsters of Rock
From 7th level the Bard plays a melody that opens a portal to one of the outer or inner planes to summon an elemental, fae, celestial or fiendish creature of up to CR 2. 10th level, CR 3. 13th level CR 4. 16th level CR 5.
List of Elemental Creatures
Steam Mephit (CR 0.25)
Dust Mephit (CR 0.5)
Ice Mephit (CR 0.5)
Magma Mephit (CR 0.5)
Magmin (CR 0.5)
Azer (CR 2)
Air Elemental (CR 5)
Earth Elemental (CR 5)
Fire Elemental (CR 5)
Salamander (CR 5)
Water Elemental (CR 5)
Corn (CR 5)
List of Celestial Creatures
Couatl (CR 4)
Pegasus (CR 2)
Unicorn (CR 5)
Hollyphant (CR 5)
List of Fae Creatures
Sprite (CR 0.25)
Dryad (CR 1)
Sea hag (CR 2)
Green Hag (CR 3)
List of Fiendish Creatures
Lemure (CR 0)
Dretch (CR 0.25)
Imp (CR 1)
Quasit (CR 1)
Bearded Devil (CR 3)
Hell Hound (CR 3)
Nightmare (CR 3)
Barbed Devil (CR 5)
Night Hag (CR 5)
Conclusion
This is the last of my D&D character options from Erlendheim series, dear reader. I really enjoyed coming up with these options in collaboration with my players and it was a lot of fun introducing them to the campaign with big personal story moments for the characters. I highly recommend that as a way to make your players feel very special.
This is the latest in a series of posts on the new character options I introduced for the PCs in my D&D campaign known as Erlendheim. It was based on a home-brew world of my own but intersected with the 2nd Edition AD&D version of the Planescape setting. This was very special for me as I had always loved that setting and the Planescape products from that time. It was very exciting for me to explore it with my players and I wanted to make it special for them too. So, I created, with their help, new features and class options for each of them. They have little or nothing to do with balance in the game, and most of them are overpowered but that didn’t bother me. It just meant I could ramp up the challenge of the situations they ended up in. You can take a look at the previous entries in this series here.
How to Resurrect a God
So, at a point during their adventures through Sigil, the PCs in my D&D campaign of a few years ago discovered that the god to whom most of them owed their devotion, Helm, was, in fact, dead. Or, at the very least, gone. In the Parted Veil bookshop, the proprietor and confirmed atheist, Kesto Brighteyes, confirmed this for them. This shook our Bariaur cleric’s beliefs to their core. As a senior priest of Helm, Menuk had been praying to his god all his life, and receiving spells and other abilities in return. So, if his god was dead? Who had been answering his prayers? The answer was Aegir, the elemental spirit and Fathomless former patron of our Warlock. They had been intercepting the prayers of the people of Erlendheim and gathering power from them for centuries, posing as Helm and controlling the populace. This revelation rocked Menuk to his core and he immediately lost access to all his priestly spells and features. But at that moment, he also started to hear a noise, as of a plate gauntlet scraping against stone. Only he could perceive it. And it got him thinking there must be a connection to Helm.
This set the PCs off on an investigation, following the trail that began with the sound in Menuk’s head. They had already heard of a portal to the Astral Plane, where they might find the body of Helm floating forever through that wispy sea. It was in the Shattered Temple, headquarters of the Faction known as the Athar, a fiercely anti-deity group. So, they infiltrated the building and jumped through that portal onto the petrified body of a god. Here, the noise in Menuk’s head became clearer, beginning to sound like the words, “Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray to me.” They fought an Astral Dreadnought, which had taken up residence in the region, while Menuk used the power of prayer to awaken Helm.
I inserted a “god-resurrection” mini-game here. This gave the otherwise de-powered Menuk a goal and a focus for the fight while the others struggled with the Dreadnought.
When his prayers finally woke the god, Helm’s great, mailed fist rose and crushed the Astral Dreadnought. He then transported the PCs back to his home plane, Mechanus, where he appeared to them, once more restored to his throne. And this was when he declared Menuk to be his new Right Hand, and imbued him with a new set of Clerical abilities along with all those he lost earlier.
This was one of the most epic and grand encounters and scenarios I have ever run and it was a joy to bring this chapter full circle.
New Cleric Features – Helm’s Right Hand
Below are the details of the new Cleric features that he got. As always, these were written specifically for this particular Life Domain Cleric of Helm so their usefulness might be limited. But, if any of them catch your eye, please feel free to customise and use as you want.
Channel Divinity: The Watcher Over the Fallen
From 2nd level the Life Domain Cleric can use this feature once between long rests. When any creature that is within the Cleric’s line of sight falls to 0 hit points, as a reaction, using Channel Divinity, they can choose to restore them to one hit point instead. This feature cannot be used to heal undead or constructs.
Tough Love
From 6th level, when the Life Domain Cleric summons a weapon using the Spiritual Weapon spell, it can be used to cast any of their healing spells.
Channel Divinity: Helm’s Shield
From 8th level, the Life Domain Cleric gains the ability to summon Helm’s protective power in the form of a shimmering bubble of light. Helm’s Shield surrounds them or any creature the Cleric chooses and can see within thirty feet. The Shield has an AC of 10 and hit points equal to 10 + the Cleric’s level.
Helm’s Mailed Fist
From 14th level the Cleric gains the ability to transform into the physical embodiment of Helm in the world. They take on the form of a glowing, platinum warrior, adorned in full plate and standing 14 feet tall. The Cleric can take this form for a number of rounds equal to their wisdom modifier (minimum of 1.) The form grants the following: AC bonus: +3 Temporary Hit Points: 15 + Wis modifier Spell Slots: 1 extra spell slot of any level available to the Cleric Channel Divinity: 1 extra Channel Divinity Attacks: Add +5 to hit and +5 to weapon damage (damage counts as magical damage)
The Dice Pool 