D&D 5th Character cards - Verity, Level 3 Warlock

Rounding up the Highcliffe City Guard, I decided to add an infiltrator-type character, the kind of that can walk amongst the underworld with ease and disappear without a trace if needs be. And these things come easy for a certain flavour of Warlock.

As the concept was a character with a shady past trying to redeem herself, giving Verity a Criminal background was almost compulsory, and it rounded up her skillset nicely. And with the Pact of the Tome, she has access to a wide variety of spells to expand the utility.

But what really makes the character shine in an intrigue and investigation type campaign are her Warlock powers and invocations. With Mask of Many Faces, she can blend in or disappear in a crowd, Gaze of Two Minds allows her to mentally track a willing collaborator, and Awakened Mind lets her to communicate telepathically with anyone. In a way, these abilities could be seen as OP in this type of campaign, as they can be used to sidestep quite a bit of legwork. but then again that can be said of almost any kind of magic. And as the character still has to do things to get results, getting herself deliberately into harm's way, I feel that this kind of character would give more to this kind of campaign rather than making things trivial. And the fact that one can create this kind of character straight out of the core set of rules -without any clunky multiclassing, to boot- is a good indicator of the versatility of the 5th edition D&D.

Besides, since Verity is a NPC, I can use her to deliver information for the PCs to act upon, and not to worry overtly how she could have acquired such information, as I have decent abilities to fall back on.

'Roguish with a dash of magic' is probably my most favourite character archetype, and I could see myself playing a character like Verity. And although she's built a bit like a one-trick pony, there's still breadth in her abilities to be of use in multiple situations.

Traveller Reskins: Small Craft

The various Small Crafts were never the intended focus for my Traveller Reskinning project; in fact, I originally considered doing the Ship's Boat, the Launch and a Fighter, and leave it at that. Well, one fighter turned into two designs, and when trying to figure the High Guard rules for the Small Crafts, the idea of a System Ferry slowly formed. It represents a type of craft that is used to transport passengers short distances in space, from Capital ships to Space Stations and other similar habitats - essentially a mobile airlock. It uses a 10 dTon hull, with minimal thrusters and has batteries instead of a reactor of any kind.

So with a 'bonus' ship, I thought I was ready to make a full PDF page. However, as I assembled the ships to the layout, I realized that there would be too much white space for my liking on the design. Something had to be done, and inspired by the Whartson Hall audio game recordings of Traveller at RPGMP3.com, I grabbed the Pinnace as a space filler.

And from there, things just went downhill. Somehow, I could not get the idea of the Modular Cutter out of my mind. It is not a glamorous ship, but the utility aspect of it started to haunt me, especially as there were no concrete examples of the various configurations in the rulebook. I wanted to see what an ATV compartment would look like, and that's when I knew I would get no peace of mind until I were done with the designs.

The rulebook mentions ATV, fuel and open modules, and I included the latter as the 'default' one; it is also quite simple to make one's own designs on that module. In addition to the already mentioned modules, I decided to include a basic Cargo Module, a Survey or Scout Module with living quarters for two, and a frontier Medical Facility, with an operating theater, sleeper pods and isolation wards.

In a way, the hardest one to make was the Fuel Module, due to it's simplicity. Just to make it more interesting, I had to add the service tunnel/crawlspace. Since it had Fuel Scoops, I also wanted to include fuel purifiers to the design, but as they were not mentioned in the rules I eventually left them out.

It also occurred to me that these modules could easily be used in creating a rudimentary planetary base or habitat. In that case, some sort of passenger module would be needed, and I was going to include one but just ran out of space. But Habitat Module, and some sort of connector modules might not be a bad idea...

Well, now I feel I have done everything I should with the Small Craft designs. Actually, the only one left out is the 95 dTon shuttle, and since that would eventually be just a enlarged version of the Pinnace, I think I'll give it a pass. Unless of course I get some horrible pangs of guilt for leaving things incomplete.

Oh, and as usual, the PDFs can be found from the Downloads (PDF) section.

D&D 5th Character Cards - Merilee, 3rd level Wizard

What any Watch Constabulary that wants to actually solve any crimes needs is Perky Forensic Examiner, and in D&D, that calls for a Wizard. Specifically, one from the School of Divination. Merilee is all about research and finding things out. She's a bit reluctant to go out on the field, but even there her Portent ability can be of significance.

Like the rest of the Watch members, Merilee was built with default ability scores. She was given the Sage/Librarian background, to really drown herself in digging out any and all esoteric tidbits from the Grand Library of Hieronymus. But although she can be a bit bookish, she's also quite outgoing, especially in familiar company.

Like Wilf, Merilee was raised in an orphanage. She does not quite know who her parents are, but she has made some educated guesses about them, based on her heritage, and has come to a conclusion that her mother was an elven debutante from one of the Nine Houses, and her father a young Neheniri merchant. She has a nice stipend from her parents to live by, enabling her to have her own house in town - which is in process of turning into a library, gradually. She has also noticed that her elven heritage alone cannot keep her all slender and willowy, but that she has to watch what she eats quite closely, despite her sweet tooth. And the fact that Shimmie seems to have an endless store of dates, spiced nuts and pastries with him and is eager to share does not help matters.

Of all the characters so far, Merilee was perhaps the easiest to stat. I think the default scores do give a good spread to play with, and yield to quite balanced characters stat-wise. I was at first a bit meh about the different traditions for wizard, and I still think that there maybe should be a bit more mechanical difference between them, but I have to say I like the roleplay potential for the Diviner's Portent ability quite a bit. No matter how you roll, those stored rolls can be used to good effect. Well, rolls of 10-11 may not be so useful, or at least can be circumstantial, but generally it is a nice little concept.