Continued from yesterday:
So I'm a noob DM who next weekend will be setting up a new D&D campaign set in a desert continent known as Zaru'gesh.
Any tips for a noob DM, ideas for cool npcs/encounters/stories, or decent desert-esque pics to share?
Feel free to turn this into a general desert-themed game thread.
I'll post a compilation of ideas I copy-pasted from helpful anons last night for those interested:
>Exotic Caravans
>Harem Girls
>Oasis Paradises
>Sphinx riddles.
>Scorpions.
>Chariot archers.
>Depending on magic levels, sailboats which fly just barely touching the sand, driven by wind.
>Snake-people.
>Ancient temples to the moon.
>Creepy biblical salt fields.
>Rumors of a secret oasis more bountiful than a thousand palaces.
>Giant fucking statues. Just fucking giant sculptures. Get some scale in there. The age of these will depend on your setting.
>Nomadic cannibals.
>Defend a caravan from Raiders sent by the prince of thieves.
>Den of the prince of thieves should be an incredible town hidden away somewhere, defended by magical sandstorms or desert mirages that can only be navigated by those who know the secrets.
>Prince of thieves needs xyz, raids caravans for xyz, gains a bad reputation. Is actually using xyz to help an oppressed population being abused by an evil trade prince/water baron/slave lord.
>Quicksand.
>Virgin sacrifice for predictions and other types of future-telling.
>Matriarchal assassin cult patronized by competing merchant princes/whatever for thousands of years.
>Cats as a familiar/symbol of wizards and witches
>Perhaps have one kingdom of mortals ruled by a mummy lord or dry lich, who keeps his undead nature a secret. He gained his position as ruler in the past by being the only one not in need of water to survive, and gradually took control of the largely water-based economy.
>>46779095
>2016
>Still doing such shit like this
I mean... seriously? Nothing better to do in your games than random table of possible encounters?
>>46779177
I'm just coming up with ideas that will hopefully inspire further ideas. I'm also a noob at d&d (only played like 4 sessions total) and especially noob at DMing. Don't hate the noobs.
>>46779228
It's not about hating the noobs. It's how you've apparently read some early 90s handbook how to be a competent D&D GM and this thread is the effect.
First advice - play other stuff than D&D
Second advice - you heard about plot, right? Games that have one don't need random encounters.
Third advice - don't read handbooks written before... turn of the millenium? Unless you want to get the "oldschool" 0D&D dungeon to crawl, those things are not only dated, they've also describe games that nobody is playing in general for past 20-25 years
>>46779374
By handbooks I mean stuff written to help novice players and GMs get hang of things.
>>46779374
>>46779406
I see what you are saying.
>>46779441
Cheer up, I still remember how hard it was to start playing for me and it was long before internet made things easier... or became a thing, really.
But in all firness, in most cases encounters are just filler eating away time and attention from actual scenario. I'm not saying that you can't have them at all, but it's easier to start with procedural scenarios, so everything that happens is plot-related to a certain extent. If you are GMing for new players, such almost rail-roady approach is extremely helpful, since it gets impossible to lost track of the events.
Whereas random encounters mostly serve as a padding between two bigger fights, usually... with a smaller fight.
>>46779374
>Second advice - you heard about plot, right? Games that have one don't need random encounters
Random encounters can help you from falling into a rut. Also, going overboard with plot can be a bit of a pitfall, especially for noob GMs. You don't want a fully formed story, because then you're basically asking the players to cooperatively play parts in your pre-written novel, which is all kinds of bullshit. Normally, I wouldn't feel the need to warn about that whenever somebody mentioned plot, but the fact that you think that it's incompatible with random encounters sets off warning bells.
>Unless you want to get the "oldschool" 0D&D dungeon to crawl, those things are not only dated, they've also describe games that nobody is playing in general for past 20-25 years
Bitch, please. Head over to the OSR thread, then get back to me. Besides, dungeon crawls are basically what D&D is designed for, and if you aren't doing them, there's a decent chance you're doing it wrong. And while I'd certainly agree that RPGs are about much more than dungeon crawls, you wouldn't condemn a science fiction television show just because TV shows are about much more than just scifi.
>play other stuff than D&D
Nobody should eat only soup, but that doesn't make soup a bad food. And if you're halfway through making soup, you definitely shouldn't toss it out and start making a casserole would be easier.
>hey can I have some more advice? here's the advice ive already gotten
>no it's all wrong, everything you know is wrong, do it like this instead
Now I'm here to say he's wrong and everything he says is bad and not fun. What you've got isn't some list of "encounters", it's lore. It's the setting. You've got all the pieces of an adventure laid out waiting for you to assemble them.
You save an Exotic Caravan from the Prince of Thieves' Raiders and they share the legend of the Moon Temple's ancient Sphinx guardian whose Riddle tells you how to navigate the Magical Sandstorms by following certain Giant Fucking Statues and this will lead you to an ancient Valley of the Kings stocked with treasure but guarded by curses and traps. Maybe the Prince of Thieves pursues you along the way, maybe that Mummy Lord does. Hey maybe once word spreads that someone might actually know the way just about everyone tries getting in on that loot.
>>46780392
Thank you for your insights
>>46779133
You could use some sort of Hashishin assassins, where people are shown paradise through drugs and promised return if they carry out their missions (and if they die, they get more than a fleeting glimpse of paradise).
>The name "Assassin" is often said to derive from the Arabic word Hashishin or "users of hashish",(which can be used as a derogatory term in Arabic and it is the equivalent of "drug addict", in this case, "hashish addict") was originally applied to the Nizari Ismaelis by the rival Mustali Ismailis during the fall of the Ismaili Fatimid Empire and the separation of the two Ismaili streams, there is little evidence hashish was used to motivate the assassins, contrary to the beliefs of their medieval enemies. It is possible that the term hashishiyya or hashishi in Arabic sources was used metaphorically in its abusive sense relating to use of hashish, which due to its effects on the mind state, is outlawed in Islam. Modern versions of this word include Mahashish used in the same derogatory sense, albeit less offensive nowadays, as the use of the substance is more widespread.
>>46781354
That's cool that you know that, because I actually know a lot about their history as well.
--spice route / silk road
--rare desert rain causes flash floods as it takes too long to start sinking into the desiccated earth
--desert flowers that are a potent drug or poison (fluffy dandelion-like spores float on the breeze and drug all who breathe them in?)
--rituals about giving water (offering somebody your water is like propositioning them, if you don't want to do that, you must obliquely offer it by setting it down and commenting that you seem to have misplaced it, etc.)
--ritual knife fights are normally resolved at first blood
--lost cities buried in the sand
--sun delirium as heat waves push temperatures well past 120 degrees Fahrenheit
--the people who first tamed the camel and who are now its masters hold great power (to the point where their language has become the trade language of... well.. traders), and only they can transport goods across the harshest swathes of desert, following a dotted line of tiny oasis their ancestors seeded with dates to provide them with sustenance
Maybe the desert is a relatively recent thing in historical terms, or at least parts of it (think of the drying out of Egypt that preceded the rise of Egyptian civilization along the Nile). Maybe there are remnants of what the desert used to be. I've always been moved by images of ships sitting in the middle of the desert, for instance.
>>46781639
>sun delirium
Also, there's the fact that the desert can get really cold at night, something that often gets overlooked.
>>46781743
Maybe their are ships that sail on the sand? I also liked the idea of the sea of glass from The Lost Tomb of Martek, which had worn smooth by wind-borne sands, and was crossed by sailships on skates.
The Desert of Desolation module (a compilation of Pharaoh, Oasis of the White Palm, and Lost Tomb of Martek) might be a useful source of ideas in general -- http://archmagev.com/1st_Ed/1st%20ed%20Modules%20I-series%20(complete)/AD&D%201st%20-%209199%20-%20I3-5%20-%20Desert%20of%20Desolation.pdf
Al-Qadim Monstrous Compendium.
Look up Living Idols.
>>46779374
For the love of god don't listen to this asshole, OP.
>>46782889
He's partially right about random encounters though. If I wanted to see how many steps I could walk before getting pulled into a meaningless monster fight, I'd play Final Fantasy.
>>46782941
Yeah the turn of the millennium thing is what really made me 'wut' pretty hard though. Hexcrawlers are largely encounter based though, and to me they are the best example of d&d
Op here, just returned form the gym. You guys rule!
I would recommend watching some of these. I'm a pretty new dm myself and these really helped.
me.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkVdb9Yr8fc05_VbAVfskCA
I'm not even building dnd and it was helpful, so even though the setting he is discussing is pretty different from yours, i think at least some of the general principals should be useful to you.
>>46784838
screwed up the link, didnt realize the me got attached to it somehow.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkVdb9Yr8fc05_VbAVfskCA
>>46780392
>So you are a noob, right?
>All the noob mistakes you make are perfectly fine and dandy
What is this? Some self-assurance for idiots?
>>46783084
>Hexcrawlers are best example of D&D
And how exactly that makes them good? Seriously, who still plays tabletop RPGs to have a constant combat with randomly generated enemies every five steps?
>>46782889
While he makes a massive exaggeration about dungeon crawling, he's more or less right. Only the decade is off
Nobody anymore plays tabletop RPG in the style of late 80s/early 90s, when 3/4 of the game was about killing things in another chamber of the dungeon, while the remaining 1/4 is opening exposition, looting and moving between the rooms.
And those were the games that could benefit from random encounter.
If you are running a scenario, be it even most basic and sketchy one, random encounters became counter-productive. Since players will be first and foremost focused on their quest, completely random (and especially non-combat one) encounter has a high chance to derail their actions, as they will most likely assume this to be part of the story they are playing. Maybe this will be nothing, but maybe they will go as far as get paranoid and start acting really, really weird. Seen this too many times to casually say "nah, random encounters don't affect the game at all".
In their essence, RE served the role of filling the time and as justification for GM. Instead of having pre-written layout of entire dungeon, you could simply roll what's in the next room, so players won't acuse you for setting them up against something too powerful.
And yeah, OP as a noob player shouldn't play D&D. It teaches shitload of really bad habits that are then hard to overcome.
Zaru'gesh
>>46788152
>Nobody anymore plays tabletop RPG in the style of late 80s/early 90s, when 3/4 of the game was about killing things in another chamber of the dungeon, while the remaining 1/4 is opening exposition, looting and moving between the rooms.
Much better to play in the style of the '70s and early '80s, where a dungeon was fantasy Vietnam and you were trying to use your brains to avoid fights and get booty without unnecessary risk.
![CDzyfgMVIAIVGYj[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/hXTaU4N.jpg "CDzyfgMVIAIVGYj[1].jpg")
I'm trying to write down some details on a character's armor. What's the golden thing on the central character's chest and shoulder? I see it a lot in egyptian fantasy art but I don't know the name
>>46779374
>Falling for the cult of plot meme
>>46779095
I remember that there was a thread in the /tg/ archive where there was a really cool guy helping another anons to put persian stuff into his games. If I find it, maybe it will be helpful for you.
Meanwhile, I recommend you to avoid having just the classic sand-sea desert, if Zaru'gesh is gonna be a continent. I mean, you can and should have the classic sand-sea desert, it's cool, classic and your players will be expecting it. But you can also have rocky desert, mountains, etc. so it's not just sand and oasis all day. My experience is that players feel better if the landscape changes when they travel and your descriptions are also diverse. If you're always describing dunes (or forests, or swamps, or whatever), they will stop listening sooner or later. This is an advice that I give to you since you claim to be a noob, and you should remember it for all your settings. It's one of those small things.
>>46789217
I think the name in english for the chest thing is just called a pectoral.
>>46789217
A gorget?
>A gorget /ˈɡɔːrdʒᵻt/, from the French gorge meaning throat, was originally a band of linen wrapped around a woman's neck and head in the medieval period, or the lower part of a simple chaperon hood. The term subsequently described a steel or leather collar designed to protect the throat, a set of pieces of plate armour, or a single piece of plate armour hanging from the neck and covering the throat and chest. Later, particularly from the 18th century onwards, the gorget became primarily ornamental, serving only as a symbolic accessory on military uniforms, a use which has survived to the modern day in some armies.
>The term may also be used of other things such as items of jewelry worn around the throat region in a number of other cultures, for example wide thin gold collars found in Ireland dating to the Bronze Age.
>>46789254
>>46779095
There you go OP. Apparently my memory failed me and you have not only persian stuff but a lot middle eastern things in general, so it's your lucky day.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/18350298/
The whole thread is basically you're looking for (except for the tips for noobs part of course).
>>46779374
>Third advice - don't read handbooks written before... turn of the millenium?
Yeah, you should definitely draw the line just before 3e, because that marked such a tremendous leap forward in quality. I mean, there was a well balanced and thought out system.
>>46789217
Now that actually I look at them, I think it's probably just people taking artistic license with the broad wesekh collar, effectively transforming jewelry into a rather ridiculous piece of armor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usekh_collar
