"Because everything is worth
examining, and if you don't examine your view of the world, you are
still subject to it, and you will find yourself doing things that--
Never mind."
Unknown Armies
is a great little RPG. As I once wrote in a review, "UA
is, I'll be the first to admit, possessed of some flaws -- but it
bubbles with
such creativity, originality, potential, and brilliance that it
overwhelms
those flaws." Unfortunately, it never caught on in the way it probably
deserved to. (And it probably never will: Too many other games have
stepped in and stolen its stuff over the past decade.)
One
of the (many) great things about Unknown
Armies, however, was the "What You Hear" section. In the
world of Unknown Armies
all the half-crazed conspiracies and crack-pot theories and urban
legends you've ever heard are true at one level or another, but in a
way
completely alien to anything you might have expected. "What You Hear"
was basically a rapid-fire conglomeration of one- or two-sentence
rumors that peeled back the mundanities of the world and revealed them
to be something horribly different. They were a distorted lens through
which
the world could be viewed and used.
The great thing about them was that they
could be used in any number of ways: Disinformation. Intriguing
background detail. Full-fledged adventure seed. Idle chit-chat from a
nervous underworld contact. All kinds of stuff. And all of it
mysterious and enigmatic and awesome.
Circa 2004, a guy named RemyBuron started a thread
on RPGNet for people to post UA-style rumors. Here a couple
examples:
There
is
no state of Wyoming. I mean, have you ever met anyone from there?
If
you had been crucified would you ever want to see a cross ever again?
The common symbol of a crucifix actually wards off the power of Christ
rather than invoking it. That most people believe differently is one of
Satan's greatest successes, just above killing a carpenter by nailing
him to a wooden structure.
A few months later I started a thread for UA-Style
Rumors: Dungeons & Dragons.
Recent free-associating resulted in memories of the thread surfacing
out of the deep murk of my brain, and I thought it would be fun to
track the thread down and loot the stuff I had posted in it. When I
did, I was pleasantly pleased to discover that the thread has been
periodically revived over the past several years -- with the most
recent spurt of activity coming just a few weeks ago (and including
someone describing it as the "best
thread ever").
Without
further ado, here are my UA-style rumors for D&D (including a
couple of new ones that never appeared in the thread). Check out the original
thread for lots of good stuff from other people.
Mages were all born centuries ago. In
fact,
they're not even human. No, seriously, think about it: Have you ever
known a kid who grew up to be a mage? Nope. All the mages you've ever
known are already adults, and most of them are old. Apprentices? Most
of them are duped slaves. The few who can actually cast spells are
actually archmages. They're just putting on an act to keep up
appearances.
Dragons aren't really that impressive.
In
fact, even the biggest of 'em don't grow any bigger than a large dog.
The rest are just bullshit spun by would-be heroes trying to look
important.
You ever notice how the king is never
seen
without the queen? That's because he's really a living mannequin. The
real king died years ago. If you watch closely, you can see the queen's
fingers twitching the invisible strings.
Underdark?
There's no such thing. The dark elves just live on the other side of
the planet. (Although it's true that you can get there through the
dungeons -- some of them go deep enough, although you have to watch out
for the gravity shift.) And they're not evil. That's just racist elven
propaganda. They don't like anybody without pointy ears and alabaster
skin. They think we're all orcs.
All those monsters who prowl the
wilderness?
They were put there by the king. The court wizard makes 'em, and most
of them are mutated from prisoners. You can see the lights in the
wizard's tower every night from the rituals. Why does he do it? To keep
us commonfolk stuck in the cities and the villages. If we were able to
travel safely and talk
to each other we'd be free of him soon enough.
The gods are a sham. A couple hundred
years
ago some powerful elven spellcasters set themselves up as "gods". Now
the elves effectively rule the world, and their duped priests don't
even know they're doing it. The dragons know the truth. That's why
they're hunted.
Somewhere in the Duchy of Colbane
there's a
village. Everybody there is a mind-slave controlled completely by a
lich. Everybody.
Bags of Devouring don't actually
destroy
anything. They just transport it to another bag. The most powerful
person in the whole multiverse is the guy who owns the bag all the Bags
of Devouring empty into. I only know this because a friend of mine told
me. I've never seen him again.
Look, you've gotta stop casting fireballs. They're
dangerous. No, seriously, stop laughing. I mean they're dangerous.
There's this dungeon you can't go to any more. It's full of
fire.
All the time. Some wizard cast three fireballs in quick
succession and they all kind of... collapsed into each other. Ripped
open a vortice to the Plane of Fire. I used to go delving with a wizard
who was scrying on them at the time. He told me that if it had happened
on the surface it would have wiped out the whole world. Seriously.
Liches? Not really undead. In fact,
most of
them aren't even that powerful. They're posers. I heard that a bunch of
apprentices who couldn't master more than basic weavings cooked up the
whole "lich" thing as a secret society. They used a couple of simple
illusion spells to wow a couple of hick villages and build a rep. Some
adventurers managed to take out a couple and, hyped up on their own
egos, built up the rep of the Liches even more. But now things are
changing: The group is attracting more powerful members. And my friend
Jacob heard some nasty rumors about that coup in Covartain last year.
Something about "lich-ghouls"...
Have
you ever noticed how there are always exactly 6 members in every
adventuring party? That's the number of the Beast. Think about it.
Tell me about it. My friend got hooked
on
those things. This would have been back before I lost my eye. It got to
the point where he couldn't get through a day without drinking one.
Then it got worse. He had to use more and more powerful cure wounds potions
to get the same kick. He was downing two or three potions every hour.
And then they stopped working altogether. That's when he switched to inflict
wounds. Gods, that's an ugly way to die...
I
find designing these rumors for D&D particularly interesting:
With
UA you can just look a the world around you and add a spice of oddness
or magic. But D&D is innately strange and magical. You can't
just
say, "There's a dungeon with weird stuff in it." Dungeons are supposed to be
filled with weird stuff. Shapeshifters and covens and illusions are all
part of the package. In
order to get that full UA-style punch, therefore, you need to look a
the typical expectations of a D&D campaign and then
deliberately
invert those expectations. Force 'em to look twice and re-evaluate their preconceptions.
Got an idea for your own UA-style rumor? Hit
the
comment button.
A couple of years ago David Myers, a media
professor at Loyola University, published "Play
and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt". The paper
described how Myers conducted a sociology experiment in the City
of Heroes
MMORPG while playing a character named Twixt. To sum up:
(1) Myers would enter a PVP area in the game
and
use whatever tactics were legally allowed by the rules of the game in
order to win the area.
(2) These included tactics which other
players
felt were "cheap", disrupted the normal cross-faction socializing,
and/or interefered with non-PVP exploits being used to "farm" the zone.
(3) Other players attempted to force Myers
to
abandon his tactics by insulting, denigrating, threatening, and/or
ostracizing him. (Myers was harassed in the chat channels and forums,
expelled from his guild, and even received real-life death threats.)
The conclusion Myers wants to draw from this
experiment is simple:
"He said his experience demonstrated that modern-day social groups
making use of modern-day technology can revert to "medieval and crude"
methods in trying to manipulate and control others."
As he put it in the original paper, "That
is, the
social order within CoH/V seemed to operate quite independently of game
rules and almost solely for the sake of its own preservation. It did
not seem within the purview of social orders and ordering within CoH/V
to recognize (much less nurture) any sort of rationality -- or,
for that matter, any supra-social mechanism that might have adjudicated
Twixt's behavior on the basis of its ability to provide, over time,
great knowledge of the game system...."
I'm somewhat conflicted.
PLAYING
TO WIN
On the one hand, I'm an advocate of Sirlin's
philosophy of Playing
to Win. (If you aren't familiar with it, I highly recommend
following that link.) When it comes to purely competitive games --
games
like Street Fighter 2,
Starcraft,
Twilight
Imperium, or football -- those who don't play to win
are clearly engaging in irrational and needlessly self-defeating
behavior.
But should the PVP area of an MMORPG
necessarily
be considered a purely competitive environment?
It certainly can
be: For example, the Warsong Gulch
mini-game of capture the flag in World of Warcraft
takes place in a sequestered game map: The only reason to go there is
to enter into a PVP competition.
But the PVP area Myers was competing in
presents a
more complicated situation: Other players clearly had coherent and
rational non-PVP reasons for participating in that area. Myers may have
been following the rules of the game, but should that automatically
give his agenda priority over the agendas of the other players in the
game?
At one level the question really becomes:
Why are
we playing these games?
And,
frankly, I have no doubt that Myers would have found similar responses
to his "griefing" tactics even if he had been using them in a
completely and indisputably competitive environment. Sirlin elucidates
the fundamental nature of scrub
behavior, and it's absolutely trivial to find complaints of
"cheap sniper!" or "spawn camper!" in any number of FPS
deathmatches. (Although would the responses have become so severely
virulent without the accompanying disruption of a social norm? That's
an interesting question.)
But I think there is a deeper failure of
self-analysis on the part of Myers.
TWIXT
IN THE REAL WORLD
In his paper, Myers writes:
In
real-world environments, “natural” laws
governing social relationships, if they exist at all, are part of the
same social system in which they operate and, for that reason, are
difficult to isolate, measure, and confirm. In Twixt’s case, however,
two unique sets of rules – one governing the game system, one governing
the game society -- offered an opportunity to observe how social rules
adapt to system rules (or, more speculatively, how social laws might
reproduce natural laws.) And, the clearest answer, based on Twixt’s
experience, is that they don’t. Rather, if game rules pose some threat
to social order, these rules are simply ignored. And further, if some
player -- like Twixt -- decides to explore those rules fully, then that
player is shunned, silenced, and, if at all possible, expelled.
Myers
assumes
that the game rules
should naturally define the rules of society. That society, in failing
to live by those rules, is acting irrationally.
To analyze
the
legitimacy of Myers assumption, let's hypothetically apply Twixt's
behavior to the real world:
Twixt
enters a small town. He sees a woman he desires, so he rapes her. He
then moves on to other women and begins raping them, one after another.
The people of the town don't like what Twixt is doing: Attempts to
physically restrain or kill him fail (either because he's too strong or
perhaps they are unarmed while he has a gun), so he quickly finds
himself ostracized from society. People avoid him, and when they can't
avoid him they try to shame him into changing his behavior.
From
Twixt's point of view he's playing by the rules of reality: The system
is clearly set-up to reward mass procreation and a wide "sowing of the
seed". Nor is he breaking any natural laws of reality. In fact, people
keep praying to God for Twixt to stop and God never does anything to
stop him. That only proves that Twixt is playing by the rules. (Myers
specifically uses the fact that the GMs in City of Heroes
didn't punish his behavior as indicative that his behavior was within
the rules of the game.)
Twixt
is just "exploring those rules fully". And Myers apparently expects us
to consider the efforts of the townsfolk to have Twixt "shunned,
silence, and, if at all possible, expelled" to be "medieval and crude".
But I think
we can all agree that Twixt the Serial
Rapist should
be punished and ostracized by society.
Myers
writes, "If either natural or system laws governing social order in the
real world are in any way analogous to the game rule sof the COH/V
virtual world, we can conclude that social orders in general
are more likely to deny than reveal those laws." He goes on to say that
this denial "seems drastically and overly harsh, even unnatural".
But
the very nature of society is to deny the primacy of natural law. "Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" has been pretty
consistently shown to be a spectacularly crappy philosophy (as Twixt
the Serial Rapist demonstrates). A healthy society, on the other hand,
tends to operate on the principle that "your freedom ends where my nose
begins".
Myers, on
the other hand, seems to willfully
ignore the fact that his flailing hands are smashing into people's
noses.
IN
CONCLUSION
But
while I find Myers' general conclusions regarding the function of
society to be wrong-headed, I remain conflicted regarding the specific
example of behavior in City
of Heroes.
While
"your freedom ends where my nose begins" is a relatively solid
philosophy in the real world, we obviously set it aside when we sit
down to play a competitive game. (Football, for example, would be a
relatively boring game if all the players politely agreed not to invade
each others' personal space.) In fact, I would argue that one of the
things that makes a game appealing is specifically the
fact that it constitutes a safe environment in which we agree to
abandon certain social norms.
(And,
by extension, one of the reasons why "The Most Dangerous Game" is such
an appealing scenario is because it ironically inverts the paradigm
again by removing the safety of the game-space.)
But here we come to the crux of the matter:
Are
MMORPGs games? Or are they digital extensions of our social lives?
That's
obviously not a question with an easy black-or-white answer. MMORPGs
create a complex shade of gray somewhere in the middle of that scale,
and they create a natural conflict between people who have different
opinions about how much they should be played as games and how much
they should be lived as a social outlet.
Myers chose to define himself as an
unrepentent
blackguard: He vigorously approached City of Heroes
as nothing but a game space and, thus, refused to acknowledge any
aspect of the social aspect of the game. This conveniently placed him
at the extreme end of the MMORPG scale, which meant that everyone else in
the game was almost guaranteed
to lie further towards the social end of the scale.
Which explains why, as one person quoted by
Myers said, "everyone hates you twixty".
I know what you're thinking: "Justin, you're
obviously confused. Vampires
suck. Werewolves bite."
But lycanthropes seriously suck in 3rd Edition.
I'm not one of those who generally
subscribes to the theory that 3rd Edition stat blocks are horrendous.
(Although I did revise
them to improve the usability of the actual block itself.)
Prepping stat blocks usually represents only about 5% of the time that
I spend prepping for a game.
But lycanthropes? I hate the little bastards.
I can generally whip out even the most
complex stat blocks with templates and class levels and fancy equipment
in 15 minutes or so. But I just spent more than two hours prepping the
stat block for a single wererat, and I'm still pretty sure that I've
screwed up the math somewhere. Probably a minor screw-up (the
sort of thing that wouldn't bother me in a private campaign); but since
this is for a professional project it's driving me insane.
It's not the multiple
stat blocks that bug me. I don't actually have any problems using a lycanthrope
straight out of the book. And I'll frequently whip up multiple stat
blocks for the same NPC in order to facilitate temporary effects
(different equipment, rage, buffs, etc.).
The problem is that the rules for creating
lycanthropes require you to create all three stat blocks sort
of simultaneously while pulling information from both the base creature
and the animal form. So you end up juggling five different stat blocks,
and if you discover that you need to make an adjustment on any one of
them you have to backtrack the change through all the other stat blocks.
On the one hand, I'm kind of looking at the
rules for werewolves in 2nd Edition and 4th Edition and wondering if
there's any reason we can't adopt that simplicity into 3rd Edition:
Just give me one
stat block and let me apply a simple template ("add bite attack") when
the were-creature enters hybrid form.
On the other hand, having gotten the rant
out of my system, I'm beginning to suspect that the real problem isn't
necessarily the rules, but rather the organization of the
rules. It seems like what the system needs is a clear order of
progression:
(1) Create base creature.
(2) Apply lycanthrope template to create
humanoid form.
(3) Apply hybrid template to the humanoid
form create hybrid form.
(4) Apply animal form template to the
humanoid form to create animal form.
And while it's nice to have the generic "use
any animal" guidelines, it would probably be easier in practice to have
separate templates for each of the established types of were-creatures.
Here's a stab at what the wererat templates would look like:
WERERAT TEMPLATE Apply this template
to the base creature to create the wererat's humanoid form. This
template can be added to any humanoid or giant.
Size
and Type: Creature gains the "shapechanger" subtype. Hit
Dice and Hit Points: Add 1d8 hit die to the base creature. Armor
Class: +2 bonus to natural armor.
Special Qualities: alternate
form, lycanthropic
empathy, low-light vision, scent
Base Save Bonuses:
Fort +2, Ref +2, Will +2 Abilities:
Wis +2, may gain an ability score increase due to additional hit dice Skills:
+8 racial bonus on Climb and Swim checks. Gains (2 + Int modifier)
skill points, treating Climb, Hide, Listen, Move Silently, Spot and
Swim as class skills. Feats:
Alertness, Iron Will, Weapon Finesse
Challenge
Rating: +2
WERERAT HYBRID TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the wererat's humanoid form to create the stat
block for its hybrid form.
Size
and Type: Small or the size of the base creature,
whichever is larger. Armor Class: +1
bonus to natural armor (if better than the base creature's natural
armor bonus) Attacks:
Gains 2 claw attacks and 1 bite as a secondary attack (-5 penalty).
Hybrid Size
Claw
Bite
Small
1d3
1d4
Medium
1d4
1d6
Large
1d6
2d6
Huge
2d4
2d6
Special
Attacks: curse
of lycanthropy (Fort DC 15); cannot cast spells with
verbal components Special
Qualities: DR 5/silver for afflicted lycanthropes; DR
10/silver for natural lycanthropes
Abilities:
Dex +6, Con +2
WERERAT ANIMAL FORM TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the wererat's humanoid form to create the stat
block for its animal form.
Size
and Type: Small Speed:
40 ft., climb 20 ft. Armor
Class: +1 natural armor (if better than the base
creature's natural armor) Attacks:
Replace all attacks with a bite attack (1d4 plus disease).
Special
Attacks: curse
of lycanthropy (Fort DC 15); cannot cast spells with
verbal, somatic, or material components Special
Qualities: DR 5/silver for afflicted lycanthropes; DR
10/silver for natural lycanthropes
Abilities:
Dex +6, Con +2 Skills:
Can choose to take 10 on Climb checks even if rushed or threatened. Can
use their Dex modifier for Climb and Swim checks.
I think that should produce 100%
rules-accurate stat blocks with less hassle.
(Pardon me for a moment while I wander away
from my HTML editor...)
And the proof is in the pudding: Despite forgetting to apply the old
age template to my base creature's stats (so that I had to start over
while I was half-way through the hybrid stat block) and taking extra
time to design a custom magic item from scratch, it only took me half
an hour to put together three wererat stat blocks for a 4th-level orc
barbarian. And I'm far more confident of the result than I was of the
mess I managed to generate after 2+ hours of struggle this morning.
(This,
of course, is the point where one of you will point out some
egregiously idiotic mistake I made in those templates and send me
crying back to my drafting table.)
You have one gimmick: A dagger that
lets you
rewind time.
You might want to try using it to some
meaningful effect at some point during your movie.
Sincerely,
Justin Alexander
In all seriousness, Prince of Persia: The Sands of
Time
is a fairly entertaining action-adventure flick. But it's not
particularly clever, and that's disappointing because a dagger that
lets you rewind time should give you plenty of opportunities for
cleverness.
I think the film's real source of struggle
is that
they turn the Prince into the infallible star of an action movie: For
example, one sequence has him effortlessly surf his way down an
avalanche of sand, parkour-leap perfectly onto a narrow ledge, and
somersault his way into the next chamber. And he's doing that sort of
thing pretty consistently throughout the entire movie.
But the
essential nature of the dagger of time is that it lets you erase your
mistakes. So if you never let your prototypical action hero make any
mistakes, then you're knee-capping your premise. The disappointing
thing here is that the dagger of time gives you the opportunity to
create a prototypical action hero who
is still a fallible human being
(because he achieves that action hero perfection through the use of the
dagger) -- thus re-creating cinematically the same basic appeal that
the game had.
The film also chickens out of using the
incredibly
funny-yet-bittersweet ending from the original game, opting instead for
a paint-by-numbers Hollywood Romance ending. Which I, personally, find
disappointing.
Final analysis: Fun to see, but nothing
you're
going to remember six months from now.
Last week I posted a rant
about the difficulty of creating lycanthropic stat blocks in 3rd
Edition. The short version is this: Creating lycanthropes require you
to create three separate stat blocks simultaneously while pulling
information from both the base creature and the animal form. You end up
juggling five stat blocks and if you discover that you need (or want)
to make an adjustment on any one of them during the creation process
you have to backtrack the change through all the other stat blocks.
I concluded that the rules themselves weren't
necessarily bad, but the organization
of the rules were unnecessarily convoluted. It would be easier if the
rules presented a clear order of progression:
(1) Create a stat block for the base creature.
(2) Apply the lycanthrope template in order to
create the stat block for the humanoid form.
(3) Apply the hybrid template to the humanoid form
in order to create the stat block for the hybrid form.
(4) Apply the animal form template to the humanoid
form in order to create the stat block for the animal form.
And to that end I created sample
templates for the wererat, which turned the rant into something rather
more useful. Noumenon liked the template enough that he asked me to
turn it into a series. I was initially skeptical that just churning out
templates would be particularly interesting blog material, but then I
realized I could spice things up a little by providing some advanced
lycanthrope characters as sample applications of the templates.
So, on that note: Welcome to Movies &
Lycanthropes Week at the Alexandrian.
Today is a bit of a rehash as we return to the
wererat templates (although the sample NPC is new), but tomorrow we'll
have completely new material.
Note: These templates are designed to create 100%
rules-accurate stat blocks. In other words, applying these templates
should give you the exact same stat blocks that you would get if you
applied the template from the 3.5 core rulebooks. They're just
providing a cleaner, quicker way of getting there.
WERERAT
TEMPLATES
WERERAT TEMPLATE Apply this template
to the base creature to create the wererat's humanoid form. This
template can be added to any humanoid or giant.
Size
and Type: Creature gains the "shapechanger" subtype. Hit
Dice and Hit Points: Add 1d8 hit die to the base creature. Armor
Class: +2 bonus to natural armor.
Special Qualities: alternate
form, lycanthropic
empathy, low-light vision, scent
Base Save Bonuses:
Fort +2, Ref +2, Will +2 Abilities:
Wis +2, may gain an ability score increase due to additional hit dice Skills:
+8 racial bonus on Climb and Swim checks. Gains (2 + Int modifier)
skill points, treating Climb, Hide, Listen, Move Silently, Spot and
Swim as class skills. Feats:
Alertness, Iron Will, Weapon Finesse
Challenge
Rating: +2
WERERAT HYBRID TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the wererat's humanoid form to create the stat
block for its hybrid form.
Size
and Type: Small or the size of the base creature,
whichever is larger. Armor Class: +1
bonus to natural armor (if better than the base creature's natural
armor bonus) Attacks:
Gains 2 claw attacks and 1 bite as a secondary attack (-5 penalty).
Hybrid
Size
Claw
Bite
Small
1d3
1d4
Medium
1d4
1d6
Large
1d6
2d6
Huge
2d4
2d6
Special
Attacks: curse
of lycanthropy (Fort DC 15); cannot cast spells with
verbal components Special
Qualities: DR 5/silver for afflicted lycanthropes; DR
10/silver for natural lycanthropes
Abilities:
Dex +6, Con +2
WERERAT ANIMAL FORM TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the wererat's humanoid form to create the stat
block for its animal form.
Size
and Type: Small Speed:
40 ft., climb 20 ft. Armor
Class: +1 natural armor (if better than the base
creature's natural armor) Attacks:
Replace all attacks with a bite attack (1d4 plus disease).
Special
Attacks: curse
of lycanthropy (Fort DC 15); cannot cast spells with
verbal, somatic, or material components Special
Qualities: DR 5/silver for afflicted lycanthropes; DR
10/silver for natural lycanthropes
Abilities:
Dex +6, Con +2 Skills:
Can choose to take 10 on Climb checks even if rushed or threatened. Can
use their Dex modifier for Climb and Swim checks.
BRADOCH
THE WERERAT
Bradoch is an
elderly, orcish wererat. He has been isolated from his tribe and his
kind of decades now. His only companions are his faithful rats, who
surround him in great hordes throughout the forest. Bradoch is
intensely protective of the rats, and he hates the goblin tribes (who
hunt them for food).
Note: Bradoch is
currently unschooled in the common tongue. But if he is brought into
frequent interaction with local human populations, he will make it a
point to learn it as quickly as possible -- either relying on his own
interaction or falling back onto using his rats as spies.
BRADOCH
– ORC FORM (CR 6) – Barbarian 4 – NE Medium
Humanoid (Orc, Shapechanger)
DEFENSES
– AC 23 (+4
Dex, +3 natural, +6 +1 mithril chainmail),
touch 14,
flat-footed 19; hp 31 (4d12+1d8); DR 10/silver;
Weakness
light sensitivity
ACTIONS
– Spd 40 ft.; Melee
quarterstaff +6
(1d6+2) or 2 claws +8 (1d4+2) and 1 bite +3 (1d6+1 and lycanthropy); Ranged
dart +8 (1d4+2 and poison); Space 5 ft.; Reach
5 ft.; Base Atk
+4; Grapple +6; Atk Options
rage 2/day; SA curse of
lycanthropy; Combat Gearthird
eye
of the rat
DEFENSES
– AC 24 (+4
Dex, +1 size, +3 natural, +6 +1 mithril
chainmail), touch 15,
flat-footed 20; hp 31 (4d12+1d8); DR 10/silver;
Weakness
light sensitivity
ACTIONS
– Spd 50 ft.,
climb 20 ft.; Melee bite
+8 (1d4, disease, lycanthropy); Space 5 ft.; Reach
5 ft.; Base
Atk +4; Grapple +2; Atk Options
rage 2/day; SA curse
of lycanthropy, disease; Combat Gearthird
eye of the rat
POSSESSIONS:
+1
mithril
chainmail, masterwork quarterstaff, 6 poisoned darts, third eye of the rat, ruby (240 gp, worn
on cord around his neck)
Alternate
Form (Su):
Switch forms as standard action. Curse
of Lycanthropy (Su): FortDC
15 Disease: Filth Fever (Fort DC 10,
incubation 1d3 days,
damage 1d3 Dex + 1d3 Con) Light
Sensitivity (Ex):
Dazzled in bright sunlight
or daylight spell. Lycanthropic
Empathy (Ex):
Communicate with rats
and dire rats; +4 bonus on Charisma-based checks against them. Poison
(Ex):
Medium spider venom (injury DC
14, 1d4 Str/1d4 Str) Rage
(Ex):
5 rounds: +4 Str, +4 Con, +2 Will
saves, -2 AC.
Cannot use Concentration; Cha, Dex, or Int skills. Fatigued when rage
ends (-2
Str, -2 Dex, can’t charge or run). Scent
(Ex):
Detect presence within 30 feet
(60 feet upwind, 15
feet downwind). Strong scents at double that range; overpowering at
triple.
Detect direction as move action. Pinpoint within 5 feet. Trap
Sense
(Ex):
+1 on AC and Reflex saves vs.
traps. Uncanny
Dodge (Ex):
Retains Dex bonus to AC
when flat-footed.
*Skills: Can choose to take 10
on Climb
checks even if rushed
or threatened.
THE
THIRD EYE OF THE RAT
THIRD EYE OF THE RAT Price (Item Level):
18,000 gp (6th)
Body Slot: Head
Caster Level: 6th Aura: Moderate
Activation: --
Weight: --
This rat’s eye suspended in amber can be placed upon the
forehead, where it will automatically attach itself as a third eye. A
character
using the eye can automatically detect the presence of any rat within
300 feet.
In addition, they can attune themselves to a rat of their choice within
that
range as a standard action and see through the eyes of the rat.
The third eye of the rat does not
grant the wearer the ability to
control the rats in any way, but if the wearer looks through the eyes
of a rat
that they control which is currently sharing their space then they
cannot be
flanked.
Prerequisites:
Craft Wondrous Item, clairvoyance, detect animals or plants Cost to Create:
9,000 gp + 720 XP
CONCLUSION
Bradoch is fairly straight-forward: I created a
4th-level Barbarian with elite stats, applied the old age template, and
then applied the wererat template. I'm showcasing him here because my
struggles with Bradoch led directly to the creation of these
lycanthropic templates (so it seemed appropriate).
Bradoch is also a secret sneak peek at a super
secret project that I'm currently developing. The project is still so
far under wraps the only thing I can tell you about it is a hint
wrapped inside an enigma:
There is now a hidden way to access the homepage
of the Alexandrian. But that is not its ultimate goal.
Have fun speculating! More were-creatures tomorrow!
I'm having some problems with the HTML for
the sample stat blocks in the Lycanthrope
Week posts: I can either get them single-spaced or I can get
them to indent properly; but I can't seem to get them to do both. Even
duplicating the HTML from the original
pages discussing my revised stat blocks doesn't seem to work
(instead breaking the page in various ingentious ways).
I eventually gave up and just copy-pasted
them from my Word document, but I'd like them to actually look right.
Can someone with a better eye for HTML than me take a peek and drop me
an e-mail
with a solution?
EDIT:
Special thanks to everyone who dropped me a line to help out. The
problem should now be fixed. It has been much appreciated!
