Café de Nuit

Baron Zamedi wrote:

Also do you know Bartitsu, the Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence ? Here's a documentary movie about it. And be sure to check out the essays by Barton Wright linked on the wikipedia article), if only for the fotos of fine english gentlemen practicing effectively jujitsu. I always found it a great inspiration for envisioning/fleshing out the Paridonian Divinity of Mankind.

Yeah, Im well aware about Bartitsu and I too find it very inspirational for the DoM monks, in fact I think I'll describe Paul's fighting style as a mix of bartitsu and box/kickboxing.

...and not to forget The Manly Art of Quarter-Staff. BTW the quarterstaff is a special monk weapon and costs zero gp.

These pictures are astounding!




(Ranjan's the one on the right, methinks.

InVinoVeritas, I just wanted to let you know I just finished reading through Something Old, Something New - your story is quite simply amazing. First time I ever read 43 forum pages in one gulp. I love the way you reuse players' ideas to feed the story development. Please keep it up - your players are very lucky.

Gosh, thanks, Igor. That's awesome. I'll try. I've been blessed with great players that throw themselves into the world!

My next chapter is starting far more philosophically and slowly--side effect of how I ended it--but I know the direction from here.

By the way, I'm thinking of turning Something Old, Something New into a module or a novella--perhaps both! So, any thoughts (what worked, what didn't) would be most welcome.

I loved how you would sometimes reuse something a PC had said or done and give it a new spin in the heat of a scene through internal dialogue - like that "When does a severed body part become an object of its own" question that returned during the battle with the first automaton. Also how you would look for ways to always make spells and class powers come alive, like the colorful descriptions of the confusion spell or the Bardic Knowledge check to identify Suki. And of course, how you always try to say "yes" to the players' ideas, like when you let Callahan have a bucketful of explosives the second he asked for some, then sat back to see how he would play it out.

I expect that turning it into a module would be difficult, though, at least without a major flexibility boost. What would the events play out like with a totally different group? What if the PCs kill off Aleck early in the adventure, for example?

Now to find a picture for Brida, that is hard.

Perhaps this this comes close? This not so much. Or perhaps we can modify from this female halforc or this bigger version. This looks good too, or this

It's all right, Giamarga. I'm usually not one to look for a perfect picture of my characters - I like to leave the exact depiction to the "movie screen" inside each person's head. But those are very good finds. The Flickr ladies are scary.

Igor the Henchman wrote:I loved how you would sometimes reuse something a PC had said or done and give it a new spin in the heat of a scene through internal dialogue - like that "When does a severed body part become an object of its own" question that returned during the battle with the first automaton. Also how you would look for ways to always make spells and class powers come alive, like the colorful descriptions of the confusion spell or the Bardic Knowledge check to identify Suki. And of course, how you always try to say "yes" to the players' ideas, like when you let Callahan have a bucketful of explosives the second he asked for some, then sat back to see how he would play it out.

I expect that turning it into a module would be difficult, though, at least without a major flexibility boost. What would the events play out like with a totally different group? What if the PCs kill off Aleck early in the adventure, for example?

Thanks for this input! Certainly, part of the strength was playing off the players' inputs, and that's all DM work instead of adventure or story writing. Also, something like killing Alek can change the adventure... so I have to make sure that Alek was vaguely threatening enough that attacking him was a bad option, yet compliant enough that attacking him wasn't necessary.

The Confusion spells were lots of fun! I've always had great fun making spells memorable, and in an environment like Ravenloft, it's doubly important. As for the Bardic Knowledge, Little Diversions is already coming back into play in the next story.

The hard part is to try to direct the action in ways you want it to go, but to make sure that the players decide to go in the direction you want of their own volition--like with the exploding mask. But with every step along the way, I had to think about the movie-worthiness of the shot. Frame it, tell the story, deliver the horror punch just when the players think they have the upper hand.

I still have to think about how to put the pieces together in a fun story--probably the novella is the better way. The players then do what you need of then with each step.

I'll opt out of the campaign, guys. I don't mean to be rude, but I can't believe we started this a month ago and have barely entered the house. I can't imagine how long it will be to question or have any kind of interaction with the Dulaponts. This is my first PbP campaign, I was just not expecting this to be so slow-moving.

-Marcon

I shall ask, then, whether the rest of you still wish to continue, or I should let the unsettled house fade away. I also expected things to move a lot more quickly, but I keep getting distracted by other projects. For this, I apologize. I can't promise I'll be able to accelerate the pace significantly anytime soon, unfortunately. Like I warned you all, I am not the world's greatest dm ...

I like it, and wish to see it continue. We could, however, pick up the pace, somewhat. These things usually move at the pace of the DM's posts.

I'm in and seconded.

I'm in and seconded.

Thirded.

I'm still in. Hey, I know how slow these things can go.

Hi Guys, I will be semi offline this week as I'm on a vacation with almost no chance to go online. I'll try to post once in a while though.I will be back with better access come Monday.