Monthly Archives: May 2021
Do ttRPGs Need to Define Death? Fire? … Steam?
More than one ttRPG has made its players giggle when they realize there are no rules about what a character being dead means. Sure, there are rules that tell you when you die and (sometimes) how to come back, but nothing that says, for example, “A dead character can not take any actions.”
So, the argument goes, the Rules-As-Written game lets your dead character keep running around and doing things, right?
Okay, so that’s a silly example (though it DOES come up in some game groups). And a common counter-argument is, that’s only a problem if a game actually defines TOO much, so the GM and players expect everything to be defined. We all know what dead means, right?
Well… maybe. Like, if a spell can only affect and object, and not a creature, which is a corpse? Surely I can’t use Charm Creature on a corpse, so it must be an object? So can I use Fix Object to make a mangled corpse pristine?
Similarly, some games go into fair detail about different kinds of damage, for example tagging things that do fire damage with a [Fire] keyword. But we all know what fire is, right?
So if a Squirming Rat Mound takes double damage from fire, the players and GM all know that burning oil, a lit torch, and a firecube spell all do that double damage. But what about a cone of embers? Steambolt? Superheated frying pan? Jalapenos?
Now, yes, as long as the GM and players can all agree on how things ought to work, it doesn’t matter – But there are three good counter-arguments to that position.
First, if a GM and their players feel things should work differently, but it’s not obvious they have different opinions, that can cause during-the-game unpleasant surprises and debate. If a fire elemental is immune to fire damage (and maybe they shouldn’t be), and the players focus a blast of superheated steam at it, what happens? The GM may declare that since fire resistance is heat resistance and thus prevents damage from steam, and the elemental is immune to fire, it is immune to steam. The players might argue that steam is water, and water puts out fire, so the elemental should not just take damage, but take double damage like it does from a water elemental’s wet fish slap power, or Biggly’s Aquatic Hand spell.
Second, even fit the GM perfectly well can make all these rulings, many GMs don’t want to have to do any more mental work than absolutely necessary. If everything that does fire damage has a little [Fire] tag, that makes things easier for those GMs. Of course, there’s a limit to that. Like, do [Acid] and [Base] attacks have different tags? Can you counter an [Acid] attack with a [Base] attack? Are there strong [Acids] and weak [Acids]? Is the level of complexity being kept where it belongs?
Third, scenario assumptions can be built off these rules. Even ignoring the complex question of special cases such as Organized Play efforts for different groups to have the same experience when running the same encounter with different GMs, a scenario may have been built assuming a specific set of rule interactions. If an encounter with fire elementals in a sewer assumes that the steam pipes running alongside the pipe can be used to easily defeat the elementals, so there are twice as many present as normal, a GM that rules those don’t hurt the elementals is altering the adventure design plans without even knowing it.
I’m not claiming their is an objectively correct answer here. I tend to lean toward defining things that are going to come up a lot, trying to give some broad general rules and guidance, and then leave it t the GM to adjudicate rarer interactions… but that’s based on my gaming preferences.
What are yours?
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Appendix O – Ragabonds
I originally presented the idea of Ragabonds, a form of fantasy migrant culture not built directly off any real-world society or group, in a series of Twitter posts. But some people asked if I had compiled them, so here they are. 🙂
Ragabonds
No one knows the Ragabond Rules’ origin, which state that Ragabond kithpacts must be allowed to travel freely. While many kingdoms that follow the rules allow nearly anyone to travel freely if they didn’t otherwise cause trouble, the Ragabond Rules are respected by numerous tyrannies, totalitarian theocracies, even dragons and devils.
The Ragabond Rules predate the elven empire of Te Astra, the Pact of Akkesh, and even the Tarsian Palatinate, but are not as old as the Jotunlaw or Drakkenjar. Further, while no divination can reveal any reason why, rulers who violate them tend to come to bad ends.
Thus for centuries, Ragabond Kithpacts have wondered freely through lands blessed and cursed, rich and poor, bright and dark. If they interfere in local matters individual Ragabonds lose their protection, but are still excellent sources of trade and news. Of course the Ragabond Kithpacts also have restrictions imposed by the Rules. None may band themselves in armors, gather in numbers more than 120, or be in sight of the same drop of water, green of plant or pinch of earth for more than 90 days or each year. Freedom costs stability.
Each Kithpact addresses these needs in their own way. Some form caravans of pachyderm-carried houdahs, or horse-drawn carriages, or well-laden mules and horses. Others travel in small fleets of nimble boats, or exist as walking nomads, carrying all that they own on their own backs or in travois.
Most Kithpacts have a route they travel over 2-3 years, ensuring they never risk overstaying their time in one place. Even so, these often take them through many different lands, leading each Kithpact to pick up some notes of multiple societies and cultures. A Kithpact is likely to have drawn music, art, language, mysticism, religion, stories, crafts, lore, and traditions from many lands–some from their current route, others from lands traveled centuries ago. Only adherence to the Rules themselves unite all Ragabonds.
Every few years, numerous Kithpacts will gather in a land that allows such things, sometimes called a Pactdom. this is a time of great celebration, but also a risk. As soon as more than 120 Ragabonds are in one place, the Ragabond Rules no longer protect them.While each Kithpact is unique, those of one Pactdom are often similar, and may answer to a single Ragabond Matron, or a Council of Caravan Masters, or the Bishop of Rags. These governments are separate from the Ragabond Rules, but no less rulers of their citizens than any landed nobility.
Most Kithpacts are made up of the same peoples as the lands they travel, and recruit new Ragabonds when their numbers are low. Multiple ancestries and ethnicities are often found within one Kithpact, and their bloodlines are as intermingled as all their culture. Freedom is crucial to all Ragabonds, and the willingness to give up nearly everything to be free is the one thing that is common to all of them. A Ragabond that lacks that drive eventually leaves their Kithpact, and settles down in one place.
Ragabonds are often misunderstood by the cultures they interact with, but not more or less than other foreign lands. They may be seen as flighty for not setting down, or shameless for having little room for modesty, or evil for mixing multiple traditions and religions together. For some Pactkiths, these things are largely true. For others, they aren’t. For many, it depends on the Rangabond. But Ragabonds all have advantages in wide perspective and eclectic training, because they move freely through lands where others dare not, or cannot.
The Rules
The Ragabond Rules state that Ragabonds must be free to travel, trade, talk, sing, craft, perform, and be free of harm or harassment.
These protections last only as long as the Ragabonds themselves do not violate the Rules, requiring them to wear no armor, gather in no number greater than 120, and to take to action to harm the bodily person, wit, or livelihood or any they encounter unless the Ragabond believes doing so is mandatory to keep their own body, wit, or livelihood secure, and even then only in even and minimal measure. This doesn’t mean Ragabonds are all pacifist or vegetarian (though some are). A hungry Ragabond is free to hunt if needful to nourish themselves, and free to study fighting and use it whenever threatened if they fear there is no hope for peaceful safety.
The Ragabond Rules also require Ragabonds to shun for a year and a day any of their own they find to have broken the Rules willfully or foolishly. Those shunned spend that time unprotected by the Rules, though they may (or may not) still travel with their Kithpact.
Ragabonds are treated with suspicion in major towns and cities in Merothia, but seen as trade and news lifelines in smaller towns and villages–though if local youth choose to become Ragabonds themselves rather than aid in their parent’s farms and shops, that can breed ill-will with the abandoned families. Older empires tend to see them as annoyances–not a danger, and not worth struggling against, but not a group you are happy to see walk down the road. Less established groups and marginalized people often welcome Ragabonds as kindred in their lack of towns and walls, though this feeling isn’t always reciprocal.
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Gaming Hobby vs Gaming Pastime vs Gaming Socials vs Gaming Career vs Gaming Collector
I personally think most tabletop game players fall into one (or more) of five categories.
Gaming hobbyists like playing games, but they also enjoy working on games. Like someone building ships in bottles or having a reading group, there are aspects of the tabletop games they like to interact with outside of strict gametime. They may well read games for fun that they know they’ll never play, or study game theory, work on game builds, prepare complex campaigns or character histories, and otherwise spend a great deal of time with the elements of the game outside of time spent playing it.
Pastime gamers are people enjoy playing tabletop games, but primarily want to focus on the play aspect. they aren’t interested in game theory, or working on aspects of the game outside of game-time. If a player, they don’t want to have to study the rules or character advancement in order to be able to have fun. If a GM, they don’t want to have to spend a lot of time preparing a game session. For pastimers, the games are GAMES, and time spent interacting with the games in non-play ways is not fun.
Gaming socialites don’t mind playing games, but primarily want the social interaction that comes with regular tabletop sessions. They might be just as happy if their friends wanted to watch movies, or fly kites, or build treehouses.
Career gamers make money from creating, playing, or otherwise being involved in games. This includes game writers, editors, and everyone working in game companies, but also professional streamers, distributors, GMs-for-hire, and so on. Many people slide into gaming careers through being gaming hobbyists, though this is also one of the categories where you may be driven to be engaged with tabletop by something other than fun.
Gaming Collectors want to pick up everything for one or more games, or all of a type of game element, for the same reasons stamp and coin and sports card collectors do. They are often hobbyists, and sometimes career gamers, but they may also just be driven to collect with no other involvement in the games they pick up.
These all mix and match, of course. Some people collect dice obsessively, never using most of them, and are hobbyists for one game system they love, but mere social gamers for other systems their friends prefer.
I’m not making any value judgments, either. But it can be useful to consider why people engage in games, and in what ways, both as a career gamer, and as a hobbyist with friends who are neither career or hobby gamers, but still play tabletop games with me.
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Building New Things That Feel Iconic
I love making new fantastic things. Not just “fantasy” things, but amazing and otherworldly things you could find in supers stories, or ancient mythology, or scifi, or weird west tall tales, or all of the above.
I especially love to make new things that feel like they have a long, established, iconic niche even if they are brand new. Obviously that’s a great *goal*, but it’s extremely difficult to do without making something that’s just a pastiche. It’s also extremely difficult to know when you have succeeded.
I do have some tricks I try to apply. Firstly, I often find if I can’t explain a thing within the number of characters allowed by a Tweet, I don’t have a firm enough grasp of what the core of that thing is. Second, I try to think about what the base of a thing is, and what the expansion is.
For example, today I had an idea leap into my head (likely due to insomnia-induced fatigue toxions) which I described thusly:
Ghortal are 7-8 foot tall unguligrade bipeds with roughly bull-like heads featuring tusks and 2-7 curling horns. Immune to undeath, if infected their faces take on skeletal features as their aging slows and they gain occult power.
They have a strong clan structure.
The base of ghortal is clearly that they are a kind of minotaur-kin, though with tusks and more horns. But then the idea is expanded to give them a special immunity to undeath, and a reaction to undead exposure that’s unique to them.
Minoaturs are clearly iconic, and there are a lot of similar beast + biped creatures in myth and fiction. Bovine skulls being used as masks and symbols is also extremely common, so I wanted to find a neat way to combine those into my minotaurs-with-extra-pointy-bits concept to make ghortal new and more interesting.
As for how I know when I have succeeded — it’s always a matter of how other people take to the idea.
But it’s sure a good sign when a professional cartoonist is so taken by the idea, they do art for it. Relatedly, here’s art the amazing Stan! did after reading my ghortal post earlier today. 🙂
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Guest Blog: Stan! on “It’s Never Too Late to Chase Your Dream”
Recently I have invited several colleagues to submit guest blogs for me to highlight. This one is by Gaming veteran and cartooning luminary Stan!
If you are involved, or getting involved, in tabletop games and are interested in having me feature a guest blog of yours, let me know! You can drop me a line at owen.stephens@gmail.com.
Heya, folks! I’m Stan! … yeah, one name with weird punctuation … yeah, there’s a story behind that … but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because Owen said that he could use some pinch-hit blog posts and he figured I’d have something interesting to say. I guess we’ll see about that.
Those whose gaming memories stretch back more than fifteen years might recall that I used to have my name on a bunch of products and had a bit of a reputation for work done on D20 Modern, Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Dragonlance: Fifth Age, Legend of the Five Rings, and a bunch of other lines and titles. I did game design, wrote novels, and drew comics … heck, I even got nominated for awards in all three categories. But of my own volition I moved on to other types of work—a fair bit of it in the managerial side of gaming, but also doing the kind of writing work where my name doesn’t go on the cover of the product.
Since 2005 I’ve been doing “English Adaptation” for various manga published by Viz Media. Basically, I take literal translations of the books and smooth the scripts out so that they’re fun to read and fit in the pre-existing word balloons. By my count I’ve done adaptations for more than 200 volumes that include titles like Ultraman, Gundam, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Demon Slayer, Monster Hunter, and probably a dozen more. I’ve also been doing voice-over scripting for various computer games whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Suffice it to say, I’ve had a pretty good career so far doing a lot of really cool things. And yet … of all the cool things I’ve done professionally, there’s one that gives me more satisfaction than the others and still calls out to me to spend all my time in that pursuit—cartooning. For whatever reason, that is my true passion. And as cool as it is to be able to make a living doing game design, or writing … and as much as I do love doing those things too … no matter what I’m doing, I’d rather be cartooning.
To be honest, I struggled with that for a while. I mean, how ungrateful was it to get a “dream career” and still find yourself wanting something more? After all, I was able to do cartooning AND get paid for it … sometimes. And gaming and writing were definitely passions of mine. How could I want more than that? And after pondering that in a self-flagellating kind of way, here’s what I came up with:
No matter where you are in life, you’re always going to dream about where you’d like to be next!
And as a corollary:
Once you know what your current dream is … it’s never too late to chase it!
During the pandemic year I’ve spent as much time as possible doing cartooning of various sorts—single panel cartoons, illustrations, caricatures, and sequential art stories. And after much hemming and hawing I’ve finally pulled the trigger and launched a Patreon so I can create a community of folks who want to support my cartooning and encourage me to do even more of it.
Having a Patreon reminds me that if I want my dream to be real, I have to WORK at it … and it shows me that there are people out there who want me to succeed. I have to push myself to keep producing work at a regular pace and to hopefully keep honing and improving my skills. I have to be responsible to me AND my patrons to make sure that I’m not just fiddling around (though some amount of fiddling around is part of the package … as it is with any creative work). My Patreon is still in in its initial months, and already I’m feeling the difference it’s making in my life. I only hope that continues.
If you want to join in, I’ve got a little reward for those who join in as founding members of my Patreon community—a group I’m calling the “Stan!dard Bearers.” I’d love to have you join us. But more than that, I hope that what I’m doing can inspire you to take the time and effort to pursue your own dreams. No matter where you are in life … no matter what your dream may be … it’s never too late to CHASE it down and make it real.
Because once you catch it … you may find there’s an even BETTER dream calling out to you! And you can chase that, too!
Stan!
Patreons
You can support Stan!’s Patreon here!
And, as always, you can support Owen K.C. Stephens’s Patreon here!
Well-Worn, Comfy House Rules
When I play a ttRPG with the same group of people over long periods, we inevitably develop house rules. Often they are minor things, just tiny pain points we wear down with mutual consent and write down, making the total experience better.
Over years, the list can become longer and long, but it’s no big deal, because we do it gradually, moving to what makes more sense for us and our play style, and we keep track of what we decided.
Which leads me to wonder:
What if you don’t actually dislike a new ttRPG, you just haven’t found all your comfy house rules yet?
Most home game groups I know have at least a few house rules, designed to smooth over little rule-burrs that ruffle the fun of multiple participants. (Even Organized Play groups often have a slightly different set of rules, which are molded carefully over time to maximize the specific play environment in which they are used.)
But when you switch to a new edition, or a whole new rules engine, those well-worn, comfy house rules aren’t in place yet. You aren’t comparing the new out-of-the-box experience with the old out-of-the-box experience, you’re comparing it to the smoothed-out-through-play experience.
And, often, the new game’s still-sharp corners are going to bother you more.
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Formatting the Drop-In Town, Part 1
A lot of ttRPG projects I am working on right now call for a way to present information on a town setting designed to be dropped into any game. Most publicly know is “Little Hamlet of Villago” for the soon-to-be-rebranded-as 52 x 4 subscription service. There are also some Age Creator’s Alliance stuff I have in various hands with similar needs, and then things on the list off entirely-theoretical future projects.
So, I have been trying to figure out how I want these settings to present info for the GM. The idea is that these can be used as bases of operation for PCs, or waystops that anchor adventures, or as places to explore, or just items in a big sandbox. That means they need to have enough detail to be useful for GMs just wanting details to play off of and offer enough ideas for a GM and/or exploring players to interact with, but also flexible enough to fit other story ideas and worldbuilding elements in with the town’s material.
When I’m trying to create game information formats like this, I find doing some practice builds a useful form of outlining.
So, visual elements can help things like this a lot, so I’d want each Drop-In Village to have a village-scale map. For purposes of a test case, here’s one available for free commercial use from Dyson Logos, “Appletree Pond.”
It’s a great map, and it would need a scale, labels for road names and numbers for the buildings and locations of note, but that’s easy to add. It’s also useful to think about, because linking those tags to the text they match is going to be important.
Ideally, key buildings would also have both a map of their layout, and art of their exterior appearance. Obviously that would be more expensive than most projects can justify, but let’s pretend we’re doing it for the moment. Again, for this example I’ll grab a Dyson Logos map of an appropriate building, though it may not perfectly match my map outline.
Both exterior and interior art can help give the feel of a place. I’m not going to order custom work for a test case, but you can do a lot with stock art. Here’s a good exterior art piece to use for Twin Norkers, even if it’s not a perfect match of the map’s details.
I don’t think I’d ever want to give a interior map, exterior art, and interior art of the same location unless there was some good adventure-driven reason to do so, but let’s pretend I would. Here’s a shot of the Twin Norker’s dining room.
So, before I even get to the text, I can see if I use all these options I’m going to be looking at 2-3 pages of info for a single location, which may well crowd out the setting and game information a GM needs.
One thing learned, I’ll leave this thought experiment here and talk about presenting text info next time.
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Guest Blog: Dustin Knight on Breaking In
Heya folks!
Recently I have invited several colleagues to submit guest blogs for me to highlight. This one is by Dustin Knight, who has written for me and for other publishers, and whose experience breaking into the ttRPG industry is 20 years more recent than mine. A lot of how I did it isn’t relevant anymore (“Write for all the print RPG magazines! Like, ah….”). I thought someone with more current advice might be useful to readers.
If you are involved, or getting involved, in tabletop games and are interested in having me feature a guest blog of yours, let me know! You can drop me a line at owen.stephens@gmail.com.
Howdy, my name is Dustin Knight (aka KitsuneWarlock on Discord), the author of Fox’s Cunning at Know Direction and freelance author for Paizo, Everybody Games, and a contributor to Rogue Genius Games 52-in-52 program. You can find my 2020 work on my old blog. I’m an active member of the Venture Corps for Pathfinder Society and run the lodge here in Kent WA and I’ve begun doing live 30 min Twitch streams every Friday at 4 PM PST. When Owen asked me to write a blog describing my experiences breaking into the industry the first thing that came to mind were two words:
Write Now.
Becoming a tabletop game designer had been my dream since the 5th grade. Why did it take me almost two decades to finally write something other people would read? Sure, I was on many forums writing guides and discussing builds, even generating some content like fan-made Magic cards and rules for play-by-post roleplaying games. But nothing I could show a developer or publisher. Then I heard the best advice of my career: “Write (Now).”
You don’t need a contract. It doesn’t have to win awards. It can be a blog or a twitch channel or a subreddit. Just get your content out there in a way that you feel comfortable sharing who you are with your future colleagues. It can be reviews, stories, interviews, game mechanics, or even just a tirade on some niche decade-old book you’re fairly certain no one even remembers! Get your content out there, take notice when people appreciate it, and give people more of what they want. You don’t need a special license, but if it helps feel free to print this out:
But what about me?
I knew since the earliest days of 3rd Edition that I wanted to be a professional game designer. But even back in Jr High I shelved the idea in the same headspace as winning the lottery. Even when I started designing my own games in High School, I felt like it was something I’d slowly work on my entire life and only ever pursue legitimately after retirement. I went into the Architecture program at CSU Pomona without realizing I was only doing it to challenge myself (and because I loved drafting maps for RPGs), and went on to Philosophy and Graphic Design with the side-dream of possibly breaking into the tabletop game industry as a production artist or art director. After some graphic design freelance work and a couple years of gig work, I moved from California to South Carolina and found real estate. And Pathfinder.
My childhood friends back in California were very much dedicated to 3.5e, so until I moved to the Carolinas I only had maybe a dozen opportunities to try Pathfinder. Being a “forever GM”, I was enticed by the prospect of being a player at the (relatively) local Pathfinder Society lodge in Savannah. I was hooked and quickly found myself a core member of the lodge, helping to organize games, going to conventions, and even playing games online. After countless nights discussing what character options were and weren’t allowed in Pathfinder Society, I was invited to volunteer my time to Organized Play as a volunteer. I started my blog back in 2018 to share some character builds and “review the AR”, literally going over all the new character options coming out for Pathfinder Society that players may have forgotten about during the substantial gap of time that existed between a book release and when the book was legal for Pathfinder Society. These posts became a smash success for highlighting new options that were challenging to parse using the official Additional Resources layout. Around the same time I started hanging out on the Know Direction discord, excited to find a Pathfinder community with an anime channel!
Ok, But When Did You Break into the Industry?
Paizocon 2019. Roll Credits.
In all seriousness, I moved to Washington in 2019 and responded to an invitation to play Pathfinder Society with the Australian lodge a couple days before to Paizocon. We were playing exclusively Seeker (high level) modules in preparation for the high-level tier of the final 1st edition special, Siege of Gallowspire. We were invited by Tonya Woldridge to visit the Paizo HQ for a tour, and the day before Paizocon I wrangled Alexander Augunas into playing a high level game at the convention site where I showed off what he lovingly called: “the most broken character I’ve ever seen.”
As the game progressed more and more people gathered around. By the time we were done, we had amassed a respectable cluster of industry insiders, including Mark Seifter and Owen K.C. Stephens (the Gamefather). I sat there dumb-struck as more and more authors showed up, paying their homage to the Gamefather as I quietly nodded and tried my best not to audibly gush in the presence of all these industry titans. That’s where I first pitched my Cards for Everybody to Alexander Augunas and scored my first assignment!
Some chance encounters with developers from Paizo during the convention and an appearance at the Freelancer panel got me on Paizo’s radar, and after some email correspondences with their developers I landed my first assignment: Wayfinder Origins!
Five months and four sets of feat cards later, Alex invited me to write a guest blog post on Know Direction. Little did I know at the time, but the network was using the guest blog week to test our mettle and shortly after invited me to become a member of the Know Direction network! Thanks to KDN my audience exploded and I suddenly found myself writing reviews, toolkits, builds, & even being featured live on stream with the rest of the KD Crew!
I now have an audience, multiple up-and-coming releases (including Lost Omens: Grand Bazaar, a Pop Culture Catalogue release with Everybody Games, and more 52-in-52 products), and the confidence to acknowledge everything I’ve written here without trying to sabotage myself with a dozen-and-one excuses for my successes.
So How Did You Do It?
Write Now.
(Has that sunk in yet? Okay, I’ll throw in some more useful advice while you wait for wordpress to install.)
1.) Accept that everyone has imposter syndrome. I first heard this from Kate Baker after I got my first Paizo writing assignment, and I wish I had learned it ten years prior. Owen wrote a great article on it in 2018 that’ll do the topic more justice than I ever could. (Yes, that was intentional.)
2.) Accept that there is always an audience. It might not be the next best seller on Drive Thru RPG, but if you have a genuine passion for something you go ahead and do it. You already have the inspiration for that passion project, and at worst it becomes another product under your belt.
3.) Accept your image. Back in 2018 I toyed with changing my username out of fear that I’d be considered “the kitsune guy”. Alexander Augunas talked me out of it, reassuring me that having that kind of identity is a priceless commodity. Most of us have some kind of online identity and profile. Embrace it! Heck, my first successful twitch video was my review of the kitsune ancestry!
Overall I’m extremely grateful for all the factors that came together to help jettison my career this far, and grateful for Owen giving me this space to reflect on my career and promote my work. You can follow me on twitter, follow my bi-weekly blog Fox’s Cunning on Know Direction, and check out my 30 minute Friday 4pm PST Twitch streams that alternate between RPGs & Card Games! I’m also an active participant of Super Smashfinder, Pathfinder Society and you can most readily message me on Discord!
Patreon
The Know Direction Network is one of the greatest source of ttRPG cotnent currently out there, and you can support them at their Patreon.
And as always, you can support this blog by joining my Patreon!
Bad Ideas for TV Shows Featuring Fire Elementals
After the burning controversy over if fire elementals shouldn’t be immune to damage from fires, along with a guest blog retort with counter-proposals, I decided to go in a different (sillier) direction today:
Top Ten Bad Ideas for TV Shows Featuring Fire Elementals
10. The Larry Smolders Show
Can a fire elemental host a late-night talk and variety show? Well, with the catchphrase “I’m What’s Hot!,” Larry Smolders is sure going to try!
9. How I Met Your Tinder
A mature fire elemental explains to its offspring lil’ flames how it met the prime flammables its burned to create them. But it’s a long, twisting, story, and no one is sure what’s getting turned into coals until the last episode. And somehow there’s a dating app involved?
8. Gun’s Smoke
Marshall Ash Dillon is an Really Wild West lawman descended in part from fire elementals. He is know as having a deadly firearm… er… fire-arm, that is an arm made of fire, allowing him to shoot flaming bolts from empty revolvers if needed to enforce the law.
7. Torch Wood
Time-traveling fire elementals posing as humans pose as government agents to hunt down aliens posing as faeries posing as good Samaritans so they can turn people in rosace à l’orange.
It kinda loses the track in season 7.
6. The George Burns and Blazie Allen Show
Look, Burns and Allen are good TV, even if they are fire elementals.
5. A*S*H
Set during the Planar War, the Arcane Surgical Hospital does their best to patch up injured elementals, genies, celestials, and fiends, often with elemental doctors cauterizing wounds while trying to crack jokes to stay sane.
4. Fawlty Wiring Towers
A nasty comedy set in a hotel with an owner so cheap the wiring keeps sparking small fires… which are inevitable annoyed minor fire elementals that would rather be back in their native land than stuck burning down this moldering building.
3. Elemental
Burnlock Holmes, a fire elemental that is the greatest detective on the elemental planes, works with his assistant Waterson, to solve cross-planar crimes.
2. Burndownton Abby
In the smoldering wreck of a once-fine manor, aristocratic flame elementals ignore the fact that once the last bits of wood and cloth have been consumed, their life of consuming fine flammables will end.
1. Censor For Hire
Censor is a private detective tiny fire elemental that was part of a military Fire Team during the Planar War, who ended up on a watch list forbidding planar travel. As a result he lives in a small censor on the material plane. He is hired by other detectives (who them have to carry him around, since he can’t leave his censor), or sometimes local police, to help with cases too baffling, or too dangerous, for them to handle on their own.
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Fighting Fire (Elementals) with Fire (Damage)
Heya folks! Gaming veteran and cartooning luminary Stan! wrote a response-with-counterproposals to my blog from last Friday, which I am delighted to present to you here as another Guest Blog!
If you are involved, or getting involved, in tabletop games and are interested in having me feature a guest blog of yours, let me know! You can drop me a line at owen.stephens@gmail.com.
On Friday, Owen wrote an interesting and provocative post suggesting that Fire Elementals Shouldn’t Be Immune to Fire. As so often is the case, I was gobsmacked by the brilliance of this simple game design heresy. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like the idea would be improved with a little tweak. When I brought it up to Owen he said, “Fine … write it up!”
Damn it, Owen!
Demons and Devils
Owen’s first suggestion was that since demons and devils were placed in Hell as punishment for their evil natures, it makes sense for they themselves to share the eternal torment that the souls they tend suffer. His suggestion was that these creatures are merely immune from being DESTROYED by hellfire because they are immortal spirits. While that made some sense to me, it also made me wonder why in that case they wouldn’t be eternally on the EDGE of death, burned to near cinders but unable to succumb.
My counterproposal: In addition to being unable to be killed by fire damage, demons, devils, and other similar creatures get a new trait so that at the start of their turn, they heal all fire damage they have suffered. That way they are fresh at the start of each turn, and then get burned all over again. And if you target them with spells or other sources of fire damage, they have to take that too … they just can’t die from it, and they’ll heal it all back when their turn comes along.
In Their Element
The second half of Owen’s pitch was that Fire Elementals not be immune to fire in the same way that we creatures of flesh are not immune to fists, suggesting instead that they are adapted to their natural habitat and “see routes through the flames” so as to avoid taking damage. I suppose partly this comes down to how one envisions the Plane of Fire, but for me there are no routes “through the flames,” they are omnipresent. And my interpretation of creatures native to that plane is that they are cozy and comfortable when in the presence of natural occurrences of their element (sitting in a campfire is like a soothing bath for a Fire Elemental, likewise a Water Elemental is total at home in any amount of water).
My counterproposal: While elementals are sanguine when faced with their natural substance, they are still vulnerable to magical, chemical, and alchemical variations of it. So a fire elemental could be fine fighting in the middle of a burning house, but it’d take damage just like anyone else might from a <ital>fire bolt, fireball,</ital> or burning oil. It would be impossible, of course, to set a fire elemental on fire for ongoing damage … but the initial blast or splash sure hurts.
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Owen K.C. Stephens 