Leaderboard

.

Personally I've always enjoyed subverting long held morals as well. I explored it with Fzhuzhem, having him justify his actions to druids by playing off the personality of nature. For those unaware nature is an incredibly generous force, some good study material that can be consumed in a matter of minutes would be the children's book "The Giving Tree" in which the tree gives everything to this boy as he grows up simply because he asks. Nature will always sacrifice itself for druids simply because they call upon it. Every druid spell uses their own personal energy and/or the energy of life around them. It's why despite game mechanics druidic resurrection is incredibly immoral to them. You have to kill a lot of stuff that wasn't past it's time to save one person that was. Fzhuzhem justified himself to druids by telling them that nature was caring and kind but was taken advantage of by all the races of the world. Sprawling cities where forests were, factories belching toxic fumes and spilling waste water into the environment, and that the Nightmare, which is part of the dream (thanks old gods) was the way nature would finally fight back. I wanted to explore why a Nightmare Druid becomes a Nightmare Druid. When you're told that Nightmare is just another way life can take shale and that a Nightmare world would restore nature to it's rightful state, it can become appealing. The other thing I wanted to work on afterwards, and still may if I return, was The Icon, who got some screen time before I made the call to resign before I burned out. The Icon was meant to be a powerful and mysterious living artifact of Holy power that case judgement on those it interacted with using a very black and white methodology. As the story would develop he would become a powerful ally to those he found righteous but become more and more difficult to work with given his refusal to aid those he did not see worthy of the light's grace. Even possibly becoming dangerous. The yin to Fzhuzhem's yang. Where Fzhu justified evil as good (I mean he didn't really need to justify it to himself, he was just fucking with druids) he would refuse to justify his actions at all despite them not being the most ethical means to conduct himself. A good support NPC should blur the lines of what is good and bad if they're powerful because they have less reliance on others. They don't have to make sense to people that can't help them, instead they should have people deal with the difficult choices of altering themselves or keeping up appearances for that person. There should also be contingencies that the DM plans for in an OOC manner that can help aid the players against plot elements in existing stories but isn't necessarily broadcast to players, such as the goblin space program allocating assets to provide a mortar strike against Fzhuzhem in the final battle. I saw a lot of people think outside the box and that was good but I also saw a lot of people try to improve their own power and story relevance rather than work their character into the environment and attempt to find aid where it already existed. There needs to be a considerable amount of that. Also lots of naked hotties.