Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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Does anyone remember what old 2E AD&D books had creating pantheons and world histories?

I've gone through my library, but I know I'm missing a few books since the fire.

Maybe it wasn't AD&D but something else at the time.

I need to create pantheons, some world history, and some other kingdoms as well as a few disasters and stuff like that. (A D&D world Bronze Age collapse is something I'm toying with)

Any help?
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
Does anyone remember what old 2E AD&D books had creating pantheons and world histories?

I've gone through my library, but I know I'm missing a few books since the fire.

Maybe it wasn't AD&D but something else at the time.

I need to create pantheons, some world history, and some other kingdoms as well as a few disasters and stuff like that. (A D&D world Bronze Age collapse is something I'm toying with)

Any help?
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There's the World Builder's Guidebook by Richard Baker. That seems to cover worldbuilding but not deities.
 
2LtMashengo said:
That sounds kind of shit. Her divine gift monster in 1e followed your orders at least, even if it died after a week or so.
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1e was basically just another pet, now it's up to the GM, you could still have it follow your orders or not and other shenanigans.

Sayer of the N-Word said:
I've gone to the trouble of setting up a physical space in which real humans can interact with each other, not some Discord bullshit, because I want to leave the internet for a while. If you automatically exclude every person who is not politically in step with you, you are just recreating the hugbox/echo chamber group dynamics that inevitably fuck up online communities on sites like Reddit and Twitter and give their users adult onset autism. Yes, there is a risk, but that's how real life is sometimes.
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it's less about tribalism, but retards being retards. you're more likely to run into some form of dangerhair who simply can't shut up about stupid shit than some skinhead that screams WHITE PRIDE KILL ALL NIGGERS when rolling a nat20. the political alignment is rarely the problem, usually it's their personal attitude, and the worst of them are usually SJWs (otherwise they most likely wouldn't be woke zombies to begin with).


Jet Fuel Johnny said:
Does anyone remember what old 2E AD&D books had creating pantheons and world histories?

I've gone through my library, but I know I'm missing a few books since the fire.

Maybe it wasn't AD&D but something else at the time.

I need to create pantheons, some world history, and some other kingdoms as well as a few disasters and stuff like that. (A D&D world Bronze Age collapse is something I'm toying with)

Any help?
Click to expand...
you could ask on /tg/, it's a dumpster fire but for questions like that it should be fine.
 
ZMOT said:
it's less about tribalism, but retards being retards. you're more likely to run into some form of dangerhair who simply can't shut up about stupid shit than some skinhead that screams WHITE PRIDE KILL ALL NIGGERS when rolling a nat20.
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Rahowa types know to hide their powerlevel around normies. They also usually have something going on in their lives other than the extermination of mudpeople.

Faggots and Trannies USED to know how to do that too, and terminal lefties used also have to interact with other people so usually had something else going on other than lefty politics, but not anymore with social media. Silence is violence shitlord, so you need to 100% loudly and aggressively woke & living your truth at all times lest a video of you laughing at another player calling dwarves a "bunch of filthy diggers" get out there.
 
ZMOT said:
1e was basically just another pet, now it's up to the GM, you could still have it follow your orders or not and other shenanigans.
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That's fair enough, I just don't like the idea of possibly being eaten alive by your own ungrateful spawn because Lamashtu feels more ambivalent about you now.
It would be a pretty funny way to kill off a character though.
 
If we're dropping recommendations, here's one:

Idk anything about this guy's channel, but this video popped up in my recommended videos, and the title + thumbnail had me intrigued. The book got my noggin joggin, so I figured someone else here might want to give it a look too.
 
2LtMashengo said:
That's fair enough, I just don't like the idea of possibly being eaten alive by your own ungrateful spawn because Lamashtu feels more ambivalent about you now.
It would be a pretty funny way to kill off a character though.
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to be fair if a GM wants to fuck with you there are easier ways, but I like how it keeps lolsorandum CN tards in check. piss of your goddess in the morning, get fucked in the evening, and it's obvious why.
could also set up some nice moral dilemmas like the usual "find out lamashtu killed your parents, what now?"
 
What has people's experience been of running (or playing in) race style adventures. You know the manner of thing - race against other parties to get to the Thing, race to get to the safe place whilst being pursued by thing, race to get somewhere before thing happens. All that stuff.

There are a whole lot of movies like that. Everything from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Rat Race starring Mr. Bean, to Run Lola Run and even ones that kind of weirdly fit like Spielberg's Duel. Note I'm not including things like The Fugitive where it's about hiding and uncertainty where you're going. I'm specifically talking about the idea of a fixed, probably known, destination and usually a time component to get there.

I ask because it's a trope and every now and then somebody tries it but I've never been able to make it work well. And it's been long enough since my last failure that the lesson has become unlearned and I'm tempted to run a race style adventure. Something along the lines of "get to this thing you know roughly where it is before your competitors get to it" plotline. The weaknesses of the approach are, I think, fairly obvious. It lacks player decision making as you hand out the next planned event on the straight line, dice are rolled, continue along the line. And it can be hard to generate the sense of urgency and risk that movies deploy to make it work when people are sitting around a table joking and wanting to deliberate plans all night long.

Anybody got any thoughts or experience with this. I kind of like a challenge as a GM. I can make a mystery or a dungeon crawl or the ever-recurrent "you're going to a ball" adventure, that's no problem. Making a fun siege scenario or a fun race scenario or a fun one-room adventure. These are challenges. I've never got this to click and I want to. I want excitement and comedy and tension and a ticking clock. The genre is sci-fi for what it's worth but I'm interested in any ideas someone can come up with for structuring it, for introducing player agency into a fixed destination, for at-the-table tricks and techniques. Whatever stops it feeling feeling predictable and lacking in meaningful choices.
 
Overly Serious said:
Anybody got any thoughts or experience with this. I kind of like a challenge as a GM. I can make a mystery or a dungeon crawl or the ever-recurrent "you're going to a ball" adventure, that's no problem. Making a fun siege scenario or a fun race scenario or a fun one-room adventure. These are challenges. I've never got this to click and I want to. I want excitement and comedy and tension and a ticking clock. The genre is sci-fi for what it's worth but I'm interested in any ideas someone can come up with for structuring it, for introducing player agency into a fixed destination, for at-the-table tricks and techniques. Whatever stops it feeling feeling predictable and lacking in meaningful choices.
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I've done something similar with 4e, and it was cases where skill challenges worked solidly as everything moved to theater of the mind. The biggest issue was always mechanics (ie setting the "clock tick" correctly) and keeping the loud players from dominating the event.

I've also done B/X stuff where there is a thing that will happen in X time frame, be ready or get fucking wrecked.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
I need to create pantheons, some world history, and some other kingdoms as well as a few disasters and stuff like that. (A D&D world Bronze Age collapse is something I'm toying with)
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You and me both. I'm eyeing something similiar, only with B/X with some bolt-ons. I might move to Basic Fantasy to make it easier to port in Testament (thanks to @Adamska for the rec on that)

Some fun you can have with Bronze Age is bolt-on hardness scales and have Iron/Crucible Steel start to show up as near magical weapons.
Iron - especially before you start getting to scale and even basic levels of automation - requires a lot of labor. So lots of opportunities for warlords taking advantage of the power vacuum to gather slaves to work the mines and forges.
Crucible Steel needs a carbon source. Early smiths in Iran trading with Vikings would put bones from wolves, bears, and lions in the crucible to impart those properties to the sword. And it is stronger when quenched in a nitrogen & carbon rich environment. You can use a bunch of wet untreated skins, but early smiths would often just stab a slave or prisoner - so you could have a arcane weapon smith who imprisons souls in his blade for further ensorcelling.

Additionally, just to get those brains a chugging, I saw a thing where someone did the math and if you exsanguinate about 300 people you'd have enough iron for a longsword.
 
I tend to just look at and duplicate from history or other games to get ideas and then the game itself for the mechanics. For example in a setting I'm slowly working on, I've made several pantheons for the continent it's set on.

The equivalent of the French for example have a bastardized mix of ancestor heroes that became gods as well as absorbed elvish gods into the mix as well due to them being ruled by the Elves as God-Kings once upon a time. Their gods wax and wane in power a lot more due to that ancestor belief, and many cities had petty gods they worship due to it. It also results in said deities sometimes falling or turning into demons or trying to change their portfolio to stay relevant.

There's also a warring dyad between Law and Chaos; both deities are good, but they interpret the way things should be differently. This explains why their state church is known as the Church of Scales, and also why the state often fluctuates in how it's ruled depending on which of the Dyad is in the ascendance.

I find world building to be pretty damn fun when I get a chance to.
 
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Jet Fuel Johnny said:
Does anyone remember what old 2E AD&D books had creating pantheons and world histories?

I've gone through my library, but I know I'm missing a few books since the fire.

Maybe it wasn't AD&D but something else at the time.

I need to create pantheons, some world history, and some other kingdoms as well as a few disasters and stuff like that. (A D&D world Bronze Age collapse is something I'm toying with)

Any help?
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Osprey has a pretty neat Bronze Age fantasy setting in the Jackals series. It may give you some ideas, I'll try to find any PDF's.
 
WhitePanther1776 said:
Did the trove ever come back up?
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Tbh, I just use Z-library. There's a 10-per-day PDF limit but that might not be much of an issue depending on what you're after. There's a reddit thread about the different ways to get to it but I'd recommend the .onion link:


Sure, might not be the most convenient thing but it's probably the safest way since the feds shut them down because the book publishers were pissed their $100 university textbooks kept getting downloaded. The alternatives is to join a Telegram group or get their Android app.
 
Critical Role is just the tip of the iceberg of Shitty D&D Podcasts, fuck these podcasts they are everything wrong with Modern D&D. Crappy Reddit Humor, MCU Level Writing of characters and scenes, Ugly Ass Tumblr Art. I honestly think podcasting is what killed Tabletop.
 
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