RPG Inspiration Twitter Bot List - Sword Names Table

Instead of posting another table of surnames I've made, I figured I'd put this up. I made a list of RPG Twitter Bots I find interesting/inspirational. If you have any suggestions to be added, let me know.

RPG Inspiration Bots - a list by @antag_relations

I'm hoping to have a Magic Sword/Weapon name bot set up later this summer. I've been thinking about the few swords in Thomas' al-Qadim AD&D Church game, like Angel's Fang and Wizard Death. I created a little table to generate Sword names and then couldn't stop myself after, so I started randomly generating thousands of interesting magic sword names that will eventually go into the bot. But for now you can enjoy sword names like "Ghost Shaver" and "Moon('s) Edge".

d20	Sword Name Prefix	Sword Name Suffix
1	Foe	Wrath
2	Adversary	Slicer
3	Spleen	Vengeance
4	Death	Fang
5	Moon	Blade
6	Blood	Render
7	Weakling	Breaker
8	Gore	Shard
9	Shining	Wound
10	Silver	Shaver
11	Dawn	Death
12	King	Ender
13	Angel	Edge
14	Heart	Skewer
15	Ghost	Piercer
16	Sharp	Slasher
17	Widow's	Ache
18	Sir	Carver
19	Steel	Bane
20	Mountain	Tickler

Also, last month I converted my old Zombie Twitter RPG account into a twitter account just for my RPG nonsense, which you can follow at its new handle: @antag_relations

Wait, What? – Perplexities as RPG Hooks

Talking with Thomas about the Day of Al’Akbar, a module he’s running for our ongoing AD&D 2nd Edition al-Qadim Church game. He was asking if it felt like there was too much going on in the city for the party to keep track of and that led to us discussing how NPC’s give clues and just what hooks and focused are needed for the PCs in an adventure. I haven’t read the Day of Al’Akbar yet, as we’re still playing through it, but our party headed to the city of Khaibar, thinking it was an abandoned ruin with perhaps a small bandit camp. Our goal was to find the cup and talisman of Al’Akbar, in order to cure a disease in a city we’d like to be able to visit without fear of catching a plague and to charge the rulers a massive amount of gold to do so. Instead of the ruined and empty (or nearly empty) city, we arrived to find a re-established city with at least 500 inhabitants, multiple inns, mercenary soldiers, a bandit king and his followers and a terrorist waging a magical bombing campaign. Needless to say, this threw us for a loop and we spent two sessions exploring the town, speaking to dozens of NPCs, exploring a dozen or so labeled shops and such and trying to figure out if the tensions in the town were going to interfere with our mission of obtaining the two artifacts we had come in search of. The third session was largely us stumbling onto the aftermath of some NPC theater and using it, as well as several overpowered spells, to loot the palace of the town and locate the first part of the artifact, but we still don’t quite know what happened between the bandit king al-Farzikh and his enemy, Mad Dog, and if the mercenary take-over after al-Farzikh’s death was planned or just opportunistic. But, since none of those NPCs seem to be searching for the artifacts, it’s likely that we play next we will continue to ignore them as we move our hunt for the second artifact elsewhere in the city.

This got me thinking of two modules that I’ve run recently where I feel like the PCs were drawn into the plot despite a relative paucity of hooks, the excellent Dancing in the Ruins module for Godless, and the first published Planescape adventure, The Eternal Boundary. At 6 pages, Dancing in the Ruins, is wonderfully economical, it offers a few NPCs who can serve as quest givers, but mostly relies on the mystery to be compelling. For The Eternal Boundary, it starts with a quest giver, either faction or non-faction, but both those starts give the PCs basically the same information and send them on a quest that is largely a red-herring and then the PCs discover the real plot of the module in the course of tracking down their MacGuffin. Instead of detailed hooks what both modules rely on are Perplexities, tangles of clues that convince the PCs and their players that there has to be something more (and oh boy, there is plenty more lurking beneath the surface in each module.)

MINOR SPOILERS FOR DANCING IN THE RUINS,THE ETERNAL BOUNDARY AND N1 – AGAINST THE CULT OF THE REPTILE GOD BELOW.

Lessons from al-Qadim Church: 2nd Edition D&D in the time of 5th

Thomas runs a 2nd Edition D&D game set in al-Qadim over Roll20 most Sundays, that we've taken to refering to as 'Church', originally as a bit of a joke about our scheduling, since for most of the players it's a 9am-1pm time slot. But thinking about it, it is a time of fellowship and reflection, with parables I can apply to my (gaming) life.

I've been playing Thema, a lawful evil moralist priest of Ragarra, dedicated to bringing the 'old' Gods of Ragarra, Shajar et al back to prominence and eventually casting out the Enlightened religion in the Ruined Kingdoms area where the campaign is set. So far we've cleared goblins out a monastery, cleared over a hundred gnolls out of a canyon of caverns, killed a vampire by releasing it out of a bottle into the tropical high noon sun and escaped from a trio of giants who wanted to keep us captive to pose for their topiary sculpting, among other things. We've played most Sunday mornings since September 2015, with over 20 sessions and put in nearly 100 days in game and every week it's well worth getting up early on Sunday, even if I was up late the night before, to sign on and play.

But up above I joked about parables, so what have I learned from playing 2nd Edition D&D when we're now three and half more editions on? And what do I want to steal from 2e for my own games?

Elemental Magic of Zahkara - A somewhat biased review

So fair warning, this is far from unbiased, as I gave development feedback as this was being written, but you should all check out Elemental Magic of Zakhara. Based mostly on 2nd edition Al Qadim sourcebooks, Thomas has done an excellent job bringing the flavor of Zakharan Elemental wizard traditions into 5th Edition. Not only are the five wizard traditions provided more thematically coherent and interesting than most of the core traditions from the Player's Handbook (I'm looking at you Conjurer) but there are options for Elemental Monks, quick options to turn a boring Eldritch Knight into an exciting Inferno and Earthquake Knight with access to the domains of Flame and Sand or make an Arcane Trickster Pirate who gets spells of Wind and Sea.

To say nothing of the fifty plus spells which fill the much needed gap of elementally thematic utility spells (while not neglecting to add interesting and well-done attack spells). And then as if that wasn't enough, there's a write up of how to use the Brotherhood of True Flame as a faction.

Needless to say, but for the last week or so I've been wishing I had a game to play in where I could play a Zakharan wizard, though I can't decide at all whether I'd want to play a Sea Mage Pirate, enjoying blasting enemies with a Cone of Teeth, with it's evocative flavor text of “The spell leaves a bit of water on the ground (and often blood too), and extinguishes candles and other small flames.” or a Wind Mage with a Flying Jambiya and flying Wind Carpets to look forward too. Or a Magician who could combine the best of Wind and Sea, commanding a ship with Ghost(ly) Rigging and drowning opponents with Command Water Spirits. Never mind that other times I'm dreaming of running a Sand Mage, able to put a spell, like Sleep or Charm Person, into a handful of sand to toss onto an adversary and Sand Tools and Sand Blades available at a moments notice.

In addition, it's a mighty fine looking product, one of the best formatted I've seen so far (in my admittedly still limited) perusing of the DM's Guild. With 27 jam packed pages of content, it is more than worth a buck or two, in my humble opinion. You should check it out, give it some feedback, a rating or review (since I've refrained out of propriety) and enjoy.

You can find Thomas' other excellent DM's Guild products here.