Liminal Ark

A weekly blog post?! Egad! Don’t look now but I may have actually beaten the rut. From my previous musings on adding modifications to the Underclock you may have seen my interest in the Stalker type enemy endemic to a lot of modern Survival Horror and how that type of foe seems like an obvious fit to way of handling random encounters. So I tried it and it felt a bit…crowded. I wanted lesser creatures that roamed between the buildings, environmental traps, and other dungeon delving horrors which took up quite a bit of space. Somehow I was also supposed to find a way to resurrect locality effects that I had missed from the overloaded encounter die. It was all just a bit much to also add in a chase sequence as an option on the list so I went back to the drawing board. I needed to separate the Nemesis (My big bad unstoppable beasty) from the Underclock without vastly increasing the cognitive load in running a complex hunter creature amidst all the other workings of my dungeon. Then I reme...

Group Background This is more of a prototype than a complete idea but I thought I could take a crack at creating a group background feature that you could add onto a group of characters with a feature they could all use as well. The idea came from Pathfinder 2E's group backgrounds, Dark Secrets from Avernus, and Shadow of the Demon Lord's Group Frameworks. Developing the ideas further for a specific adventure is probably the way to go but sometimes it can be helpful to have these kind of generic frameworks ready to riff of in the moment. It's especially useful as a device to mesh character concepts together around the adventure's main goal which normal backgrounds don't do so well. Anyhoosers here is the Shared Nemesis Group background. "Wanted Poster at Holburn Station (London, UK)"   by  takomabibelot  is marked with  CC0 1.0 Shared Nemesis You have been drawn together by the trespass of a powerful foe that has become your Nemesis. Rather than sit by and...