The Horrible Spider-Man!
over 2 years ago – Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 02:40:33 AM

Today's monster of the day is the Edderkop. That is, I recently learned, Danish for "spider." This is also for backer Vic L, who was tearing his metaphorical hair out looking for this little bugger (see what I did there?) earlier.

You can see this one has some missing bits. Notably, the "some sort of poison." 

One of the things I'll be doing is providing a nice list of sample toxins - venoms and poisons and other nastiness - that creatures can bring to bear on adventurers. Different threat levels, mechanisms, etc. I'll cover some of the common real-world venoms and poison types, toss in some magic stuff, and that should help GMs tune their surprises for their own campaigns.

This example also suffers from too-small text in the secondary stat block, which will be fixed in the final export for the PDF, assuming we fund.

Our barbarian Ylva is still there for scale, meaning the typical Edderkop is maybe 5'6". 

Variants?

It wouldn't take too much work to have different types of Edderkop for your campaign, either. Brown Recluse Edderkops, Black Widow Eddercops, Trapdoor Edderkops...that's the sort of mix-up that you can throw at your players, starting from this basis. If this Edderkop is a web-slinging spider, perhaps a Goliath Birdeating Edderkop is SM +1, ST 20, and when threatened exudes a cloud of hairs that on a failed HT roll gives the Itching irritating condition, and on a particularly bad failure maybe induces a Seizure instead. Because monsters gotta monster.

I hope those who celebrate Thanksgiving had a happy one!

Nerdarchy and Monster of the Day
over 2 years ago – Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 08:28:56 PM

I was on Nerdarchy!

David and I spent maybe half the time talking monsters and the Bestiary, and then a lot of time talking about shields and swords and other things. 

Monster of the Day

I'm going to try and post one of these per day. They're very, very work-in-progress level, designed to show off some of the layout, art, and abilities.

As an example, I think the "Green Hag," which is the SRD name for the creature, is best renamed the Swamp Hag, or swamp witch, which would be mýrarnorn. She needs a grapple attack (Wrestling-13 for 1d+3 control, Reach C) as well.

Monster of the Day: Gremlin
over 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 01:13:58 PM

This is a creature that appeared without art in Forest's End. These guys are like Norðalfs, but with the murderosity tuner turned up to 11. The gremlin shows the use of the Ylva silhouette, and the new attack table format that will be a fixture of the actual book layout. It doesn't show the increase in sizing for the text in the secondary stat-block; once I get back from Thanksgiving travel you'll start to see those.

Ylva is a henchman or hireling created with Delvers to Grow.

Shadowplays: A Nordlond Campaign Podcast
over 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 11:57:03 AM

One of my frequent backers is also a podcaster, and is recording Actual Plays in the Nordlond Setting.

You might want to check it out.

Shadowplays: A Nordlond Actual-Play Podcast

The Calm Before Turkey Day
over 2 years ago – Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 04:27:53 PM

Morning!

So, it's the beginning of Campaign Day 6. We stand between $27-28K, about 80% of the way to the goal. So it's going to be one of "those" campaigns, where it's decided in the back half. That's OK...Nordvorn was the same way, and it was my best campaign for the DFRPG to date.

Below the waterline, roughly 100 folks joined without following first, and a very impressive 45% of followers have already backed. That's tied for my best-ever total, and that usually increases in the last days of the campaign. If one looks at it sideways, that projects out to something like a potential pool of backers and late-joiners enough to hit maybe 840 folks...but possibility and likelihood are very different things.

The key is simply reach. 

With that in mind, I'll be on Nerdarchy today at noon Eastern, and I'll have a few new monster samples to demonstrate. Nerdarchy Live can be found here, and if there's a better link, I'll share it.

Media

With that in mind, here are a few places you can mention the project if you felt like it.

• A couple of Twitter Posts. SJGames and the DI post. New artboard image. A thread with "what's in the book" plus how it's portable
• My Facebook posts can be shared
• SJGames Live from last Thursday
• Talking Crit with Tenkar and Bad Mike
• An RPG.net thread
• An ENWorld thread
• A reddit thread. And another one.

If there are others, let me know!