Continuing with the prompts from d4 Caltrops’s d100 Table of Topics to Blog About, ever onward into the blog mines.

27 – How difficult is it to be brought back from the Dead? Is such a thing even Possible? I stuck the Scarlet Citadel under Ptolus (because, again, it says there’s a megadungeon down there but doesn’t detail it other than some bits in the Banewarrens adventure), and one of the party members was swarmed and killed by clacker beetles. The rest of the gang retreated with her beetle-bitten corpse and took her to a temple where she was raised in return for a favor. I think the favor wound up being doing some community service in the Necropolis, and that’s where the Barrowmaze came in. Before she was raised, she had a vision of herself on the River Styx, and the god of ghoulish hunger was stalking her from the shores.

Can you be raised in Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King, good question. I don’t think Shadowdark has any raise dead-type spells, so that suggests no. I’m ok with that, raising the dead implies some weird knock-on effects that most campaigns don’t reckon with. A demigod might be able to properly reanimate you. There could be a fantastic location or magic item that could do it. But I think it will be exceedingly rare.

28 – How do you deal with any Jitters or Nerves before Running a Game? I don’t know if I really get them. I’ve run a lot of games for strangers at conventions and game stores, and you definitely have to sort yourself out under those conditions. I suppose I try to remember that we’re all there to have fun, myself included. Getting started can be awkward, so I rely on routine as much as possible. I think I’m actually more nervous running for friends, especially for friends who aren’t experienced role playing gamers. It feels very revealing, showing this weird thing I’m into where I make goblin voices and have little figures fight each other. In that case, I rely on their feedback to be sure they’re along for the ride. Once they are, we’re good to go.

29 – How do you determine if a Character can successfully Swim in your Games? This generally gets glossed over, especially in 5e. I’d like to make it be more significant in Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King. It could set up interesting problems that need to be solved. One thing I can tell you is, you can’t swim in armor. When I swam in high school, we would train sometimes by swimming in sweats, and if you have both sweatpants and a sweatshirt on, good luck with that. It’s exhausting. So no, sorry, you aren’t swimming in plate mail.

But to answer the question, I think I would assume characters have basic competency in swimming. Maybe if a player declares their character can’t swim, they get something else in return, like another language. I’ll have to think about that.

30 – How do you determine the Weather for the Day or Season in your Game? Well, you roll, of course.

Ptolus is described as having an identical climate to Seattle, and listen, I’m from the Midwest. You know, where D&D came from? So the whole Pacific Northwest centering of the industry is a very strange thing to me. I can go on a whole rant about how it’s bizarre that this hobby industry is centered in one of the most expensive cities in the US, and how if you want a living wage, maybe move the industry back here, but that’s besides the point. My Ptolus has four proper seasons, just like Michigan, even if we’ve only gotten through a couple months of game time in the course of our adventures there. Weather just isn’t very interesting in 5e, it’s purely scene dressing.

In Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King, I’d like to use something like a hex flower with regional modifiers. This matters for travel times and exhaustion, and it can prompt events like flooding, forest fires, or rockslides. There’s ritual magic that depends on the weather and elementals that ride the lightning down from the clouds. You might be able to slip into the Dwarven tunnels if they open their floodgates. Dungeons can flood or have mold blooms. Some monsters might be have reaction roll modifiers for certain weather conditions, or they might be more likely to stay in their lairs or leave to wander. And of course, weather affects the morale and movements of armies. The weather is definitely going to matter in this setting, and I’ll have to make sure that it’s easy to determine and track.