u/Llewellian

Ok. This might sound crazy, and yes, now, that the smoke cleared up and the Whiskey faded away with the guys... it sounds... different. But nevertheless, somewhat to explore. An Idea, born btw.... while we were playing Retrogames (Panzer Dragoon Oortha)

So... we are a bunch of very old RPG, Videogame and Tabletop Players. 50+ old guys. 15,20 years ago, that is, until our GM married... we played a lot of Battletech and especially Crimson Skies Tabletop. It was (still probably is) the hottest shit since sliced bread in our opinion.

We are currently actively playing DnD: Obojima, Zombicide and DSA.

Now we search some recommendations for a good system that could help us homebrew this Trainwreck of a game halluzination born from some "Do you remember" thoughts in a group:

How cool would it be, if there is a Game where you have normal Fantasy Charactes, that form a crew. Like in so many Games. Plottwist - the Crew is exactly like in the Stories from Crimson Skies. And the whole worldbuilding then should be like a Fantasy Crimson Skies... Pirates Nests, Flying Fortresses (Gasballoon driven) , kind of Good guys, kind of bad guys... Thrillseekers. Aerial Dogfight Combat with different "breathweapon" Dragons. And inbetween normal Ground Action with your characters.... (who are all kind of Pilots, but one is a Healer, one a Mechanic or so, maybe Spellcasters.... Fighters, etc).

We kind of seek a 2 in 1. Easy, Fast paced (gosh, i still love that Hex-field helper for the Maneuvers in Crimson Skies to get how much g-Damage you need to avoid), the easy Damage forms that the different Bullets / Rockets made into your Wing and Body Armor....

And it would be cool if it lets you do kind of "Heroic" Shit that the newspapers would write about....

Two weeks ago, i asked you for your help, some tips on this.

Bascially it boiled down to: "When players try out to play blind characters (e.g blind fighters like Zatoichi) or antropomorphic characters like "Dog-Humans" that rely on smell a lot...

Can i describe scenes a little more from "their viewpoint" to raise immersion?

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1tsa1om/two_of_my_players_want_to_test_me_made_a_blind/

And you helped. Got a lot of DMs, quite a few very good posts, and i also digged through my esxperience of 30 years of Larp, camping for a long time in the bush and... i just pinged two old Larp buddies who i knew have been for a very, very long time in Special Forces Departments of their countries army. I got some... surprising tips.

One example scene (that i wrote down before the game) where i introduced the character. The players loved it - and yes, it is pretty different to how i described things before. I learned something. Smells seem to also help the other characters. More immersion to a scene and such.

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The sun seems finally to set and the shadows here in this street catch up with you. You feel the temperatures change, from a hot summers day, towards the night. You pick up the sparrows now getting more active, making a ruckus in a bush somewhere near you. Overall, the air seems to get clearer somehow, the sounds getting more crisp.

You tap your way down the street, following the description of that boy you asked the way to that tavern.

And yeah, at the end of the street, you seem to hear some sounds you deem to be a tavern. On your way further down the narrow street, to the left upwards, an open window. You hear a young couple in a heated discussion. Some ceramic breaking. To the right of you, a baby.... crying. A mother singing, some giggled "Oh oh oh" hummed inbetween. Guess somebody really shat himself.

The street is filled with evening scents. Cooking. Burned fat, sizzling meat, cabbage soup, cooked grains. Hints of geosmin, the dust reacting with the air getting more damp. Dry fir resin, lime, chalky smells. Cooling tar. Also, these cracking sounds. Half timbered houses settling in with the temperature change.

You enter the tavern. A real FIST in your FACE of smells and sounds storming your ears and nose. Old beer, spilled moonshine, perpetual stew, dry and dusty, earthy notes of rotting drying up straw, loamy notes from the kicked up floor. Piss and somebody probably puked a day or so ago. A mixture of discussions, cards slammed on tables, burps and laughts.

Sweat tells you a lot about the people here. No hints of this rusty, nose cringing smell of Sweat in a Gambeson with a Chainmail. More like, sweat in linnen. Sundried. This is definitely a workers, a farmers place. Yeah. you get hints of cheap blacksmith coal. Cow and Pig shit. Rotten fruit. Very cheap ale. Onion Farts and rotten teeth and bad breath.

As you arrive at the bar, following the steady squeaking sound of a damp cloth rubbing on ceramic and hearing three times the dark, grunted "Ok" from there when somebody yelled for more beer...

... you smell that bartender. Dried beer. Liquor. Sweat. Lots of it. Pipe smoke. Real shitty cheap tobacco. Garlic. Stew. And this extremely sweet, caramell notes in the sweat smell tells you something - he will not getting to be very old. You assume his bad mood based sound to be connected with a lot of back pain. Guess that this person already has problems with his Intestines.

After you showed him that wooden badge you got for that job, you hear only that gruntled, slightly drunk "Through the curtain. Down the hallway. When the shitters left, open the door on the right, up the stairs, then left, through the door. "

You walk through that stinky curtain. Mildew. Old potato. Ash. Rancid Fat. And yeah, you can tell where the shitter is. OH BOY. No way to miss that one.

Slowly opening the door. First steps up the stairs. Your nose is catching something. An open window. Somewhere above you, probably next floor. And - that creak. Thats not the settling wood. Thats someone shifting his weight very slightly. Behind the corner upwards of you. The cool night wind brings you scents, from somebody upstairs. Around the corner.

Camelia seed oil on steel. Somebody loves his knifes. Like a chef. You could pick up that peanutty sweaty metal coin smell everywhere.

Damp fur and this very light smell of forest and grass and algae. That weight shifting. Thats not shoes. Hooves. There must be a satyr up there. Somebody who washed himself in a river before coming here.

What are you going to do?

There was a storm warning, we had heavy thunderstorm fronts travelling over Germany, some places had even Tornado Warning because local radar showed heavy rotations.

One small town where it seems a small tornado touched down was Blieskastell in the State of Saarland yesterday. Shortlived, broke only a few smaller trees and ripped on 9 houses in one street parts of roofs off and threw the burned clay roof tiles (each have a weight between 2 and 4 kilos, about the size of an A4 Paper Sheet) around.

Current estimates are F0-F1.

https://preview.redd.it/fntau2yy115h1.png?width=1081&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b29dae91e4f74624ca65fca79480cc1e3d3b279

Damage Photos by the local firefighters here in this newspaper source: https://www.sol.de/fotogalerie/fotos-unwetter-beschaedigt-mehrere-haeuser-in-blieskastel

Ok, as written in the headline. 2 of my players (and good friends) want to test me a little bit and said, for the next game within our 4 player group they want to play a dog-human and a blind warrior elf based on Zatoichi with extreme good smelling abilities.

They asked me, if for that, i could describe the world, rooms, characters, NPCs all with a little more words regarding how they smell or how their actions smell and such.

Ok, i got quite a few things covered, because i know how quite a few things smell (30 years of Larp) on hot summer days or 3 days unwashed and sleeping somewhere in the forest and such...

But... how would i ever describe the smells that are cause by doing magic? Ozone? Fire? Smoke? Components?

How do some creatures smell? Elves? Orcs? Goblins? It would be pretty lame to just weasel out and say: "Yep, smells like Goblin here..."

German articles below. Dendrochronological dated to oaks from 370-250 before Christ. Found during construction works around 8 m below the current city level.

The Archeologists from the State office (Bayerischen Landesamt für Denkmalpflege) consider themselves in interviews as "flashed". "We never expected that, we do not know currently what exactly it is... we are on it..."

It seems that the silt and mud from the River Main which buried that more than 2k years ago kept all the oxygen from it, so that all the wood and else structures have been preserved.

https://www.archaeologie-online.de/nachrichten/eisenzeitliches-bauwerk-laesst-forschende-staunen-6645/

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/hafen-aus-der-eisenzeit-sensationsfund-am-main-in-aschaffenburg,VKFHBrV

https://preview.redd.it/zaycyrjygh3h1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=0dd031dd4e141a96ea7c5ae0040c589d0e0ce2c6

https://preview.redd.it/obfjxtt2hh3h1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=9752965e2cb68a809ec32f02a1c497851d0e5213

I am currently mulling a big sandbox campaign, that i already had played with people in parts. Basically, its a Fantasy Oregon Trail Campaign. Players are called in / get paid to protect/support (among a lot other of such characters) a complete Trek with lots of families with Prairie Schooners, Vardos (Gypsy Wagons), the poor ones have only Mormon Style Handcarts and so on.

I was thinking of a Trail that only takes 40 days through unknown, yet unclaimed Land at the edge of a Kingdom, at a speed of around 10-15 miles a day and then founding, building up a village. Again, much inspiration taken from classical Western Stories.

The thing is:

When is such a trek too big? Or too small? To give the players choice. To have enough redshirt-settlers to die in attacks, or to fight in the background?

I dived into the real world history... saw that most Treks had only around 20-30 Wagons (if even), like, a 100 people, often less. The biggest reported had 300 people. 85 Wagons/Carts.

They stretched for miles. And the logistics... that is... gigantic.

Like, calculations and some book sources told me that most of those schooners hat 4 Oxen +2 spare. Vardos had even more. And Horses, with the exception of a tiny few for the scouts and protectors are scarce, need too much special food.

With Milk Cows, Goat Herds and Sheep Herds we are talking about 300 big Animals that need to graze in the evening and night.

Is that too big to play with a kind of moving village of 300 NPCs? But if i tone it down, like, down to 50-80 people (Norm of a lot of Trail Treks), would you think such a small amount of people would create this "village" feel? That amounts of "choices" they could make?

Two female Satyr Bards in a Tavern

Prompt: A tavern scene in Dungeons and Dragons, two female Satyr Bards playing music for the guests. Their clothes should be not too sexy, no big cleavage. In the background, tables of different heights, seating different races, from Halflings to very tall Humans and Elves. The scene is dimly lit, by candles and oil lamps and light coming from a fireplace. The people listening are captivated by the music.

4 Adventurers in a Forest

The text to generate this was:

A picture from a Fantasy RPG. A female centauress and a female Faun with a panflute and a female mouse-girl with a priest staff and robe and a male dwarf with a long red beard holding an axe and carrying a shield on his back, all wearing colorful adventurers clothes, walking through a forest. Light filters through the canopy and reaches the mossy ground. The path is broad enough for all to walk on.