Castlevania on D&D

I don't usually love franchises in video games. A few have got my attention, from time to time. Assassin's Creed was one, but they lost me when Desmond story arc came to an end. And the movie? Well, I rather don't go there.

Netflix's Castlevania Poster

Another one I can consider myself a fan is Castlevania. Even thou I fell for it with Symphony of the Night, and I've not played all the games—specially the original, which I have tried but not played thru to the end. However, the theme is one of my favorite themes in fiction and gaming. And the music! OMG!
Lately, I've been working on a game design for 5th edition that I would likely try to publish via Kickstarter in the future. Is a thing I've been wanting to get going for a while now, based on this theme I said I love: gothic fantasy. So this project for the 5th edition of D&D is not just a setting, I want it to be a stand-alone game, and my main ingredients are the campaign setting I most love: Ravenloft, the plane I like the most: Innistrad, and one of the aforementioned gaming franchise: Castlevania. That's right, I'm aiming for a Ravenloft-Innistrad-Castlevania mash up I like to call Gothic Fantasy Action. Because I don't want a Gothic Horror genre, where the atmosphere and the story swallow helpless protagonists... the horror, the horror! Don't get me wrong, I love that kind of stories too, but not for this project. Nope, what I want are bad ass hunters—tragic perhaps, but not helpless—figthing fire with fire while trying to keep the corruption within themselves at bay. That's why I'm going for an action oriented system like 5th edition.

The Adari or the power of Cosmos

I started playing D&D in the mid 90’s, with the AD&D 2E ruleset. It was—of course—a blast, like it did for most of us who started playing as teenagers. In those days also, the Saint Seiya cartoon was running in my country for the first time, and we were all—as good teens—crazy about it. So, my DM created this overpowered rules he called Cosmo, of course inspired from the cartoon. D&D plus Saint Seiya, what could possibly go wrong? Needless to say, the game went into crazy town, but it was epic and funny as hell.

Nowadays, as I’m trying to do serious game design and my players wanted to play epic levels, I revisited my friend’s idea and give it a more balanced and modern form with the 5th edition rules, trying to keep the original spirit. First thing of course was to rename the power, and thus the Cosmo became the Adari.

The Adari is fit into my own campaign setting, with its own cosmology and gods, not set into the classic D&D multiverse. However, is a concept that can easily be imported into any Epic D&D campaign, with little or no changes needed.

Dark Sun: The Gladiator

The Fighter class in the world of Athas is pretty much unchanged, the only thing was to remove the Eldritch Knight from the Martial Archetypes options, and to compensate I created the Gladiator as a Martial Archetype.
Some people suggested me doing the Gladiator as a completely separate class of its own. But I think that would be redundant. I was even tempted to use the Champion archetype and just change the name to Gladiator because it kind of fits. but in doing so, I was leaving the rest of non gladiator fighters with no option but the Battle Master.
So I worked on the new archetype. I looked at some of the gladiators from previous editions. The one on the original 2E box didn't had much to choose from, and the prestige class from 3.x was too dependent on the crowd cheering up. I somehow implemented that in one of the features, but also added the ability to impress the enemies, in case there's no crowd around—no, the party does not count as a crowd!
So here it is, my take on the Gladiator of Athas, as a Martial Archetype.

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EDIT: I just changed the previous Favored Weapon feature for the Pit Fighter feature, to make it feel more like the original box gladiator.

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Gladiator

The life of a gladiator is brutish and brief, but it is the one occupation a slave can hold that also brings respect. Gladiators are heroes to the common people. Their trials and victories are the stuff of legend, and many slaves grow comfortable from the accolades their conquests bring.

Dark Sun: Feral Classes

The barbarian an the druid classes didn't required much changes. Just some renaming and tweaking for flavor sake.

The barbarian totems for example, since there are no wolves, bears and eagles in Athas, I had to look around for beasts with similar qualities. The Klar is literally a big nasty bear, so the choice was easy. The Dagorran (as presented in 4E) is a tracking beast that hunts in packs, so very much like the wolf, specially the benefits provided by the wolf totem. Finally the eagle was a hard one, I could not find a bird of prey besides the Kes'trekel, which is more a carrion bird. I really don't like it for a totem, but for now I'll leave at that—perhaps later I'll work a new totem from scratch based on an Athasian beast.

Regarding the druid, I gave the circles a little name tweak, and created new circle spells lists, more appropriate for Athas peculiar geography. I was tempted at first to use just four types of terrains: the Tablelands, the Sea of Silt, the Ringing Mountains and the Forest Ridge—I guess someone can try this simpler approach and use the desert, coast, mountain and forest spell lists, respectively. But I rather worked on the types of terrains presented in the 4E Dark Sun Campaign Setting book. Some of the spell lists may seem repetitive, because the differences are subtle. My three main focuses when creating the lists was theme, traveling, and survival in each particular terrain. Let me know what do you think.

Barbarian

Brutality is a way of life in Athas, as much in some of the cities as in the dwindling tribes of Athas’ harsh wastes. Nibenese sages claim that the potential for savagery is in every sentient race, and the history of Athas seems to support their claim.

Dark Sun on 5th Edition

I remember back in the late 90s when I flip to the back of my AD&D Dungen Master Guide. There was this list of campaigns, with cool logos an tiny covers of material on the side page. There they were all of the now classics, Mystara, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Planescape and Dragonlange. But from all the descriptions this one catched my imagination like no other:

The Dark Sun world is the AD&D game's most savage game setting—a desert realm scorched by a relentless sun, blasted by the destructive magic of generations of evil wizards. It is a land of evil sorcerer-kings and powerful psionincists who command astounding mental powers. In this wild and brutal landscape, a single adventurer can alter the course of history and forever change the world. One of those heroes could be yours!

Most savage game setting! I wanted it so bad. Unfortunately, back in the day getting D&D material in my country (Mexico) was quite hard. Specially in my home town. When I finally got a chance to visit a gaming store in Mexico City, I had to suck it up and buy the only box they had, Forgotten Realms.

Ever since the Dark Sun setting it's a thorn in my side. Now the material is available as PDF in dndclassics.com but my players and I had stopped playing 2E long since, 3E didn't see any Dark Sun official books, and even though there was a Campaign Setting book for 4E, the fourth wasn't my edition at all.

Now I'm back playing 5th Edition. And as I said in my last post, there's a psionics playtest for 5E. Thus and the fact that I'm about to finish my Rise of Tiamat game (All players must die!) I've decided to take that thorn out and play a Dark Sun campaign, even if that means making a whole bunch of house rules.

Starting with the house rules, I present to you my take on the wizards of Athas. I tried to capture the feeling of careful casting and mastery of the Preserver vs reckless casting and quicker advancement of the Defiler. I hope you like it! (Italics are text taken from the original boxed set)

Athasian Wizard

A wizard is able to capture and master magical energies. However, in Dark Sun, magic is irrevocably linked to the environment. The casting of magical spells and the enchantment of magical items always draws energy directly from the living ecology in the vicinity, destroying the life there. Wizards can choose two paths toward mastery of magical energy.

"It's a trap!" Finding traps in D&D 5E

My first time as a player, in the not so new D&D 5th Edition, I played my favorite class (of course): a Rogue. Back then, I hadn't read thoroughly the PHB so I made the wrong assumption, by reading the skills list, that my Rogue will be needing Intelligence (Investigation) to look for traps. Imagine my surprise when I tried to look for them and my DM tells me to roll Perception! We argued a little, but at the end I conceded (because you don't want to piss-off your DM =P), and ask him to let me change my character, so that I may have proficiency in Perception instead of Investigation. He agreed.

And that was it. I was going to just accept that now you look for traps with Perception. Even when it felt weird, because (for me), when you're looking for traps... well, you are actively looking for them, right? For me that's "investigating", and it kind of fits the Intelligence stat because you're supposed to know what you are looking for. I mean, when I think about it, if me (the actual real me) was supposed to be in a dark dungeon looking for traps, I will die on the first step because I have absolutely no clue what a trap should look like. It's a know how, knowledge, ergo Intelligence. I consider Perception (and Wisdom) a more intuitive thing, instincts and senses are involved. But anyways, as I said, I was accepting the new system as is. Until running The Rise of Tiamat adventure!

Perception and/or Investigation?

So here I was reading my beautiful new module, when I found out —in the Tomb of Diderius section— that a player can make a Wisdom (Perception) check DC 24 or an Intelligence (Investigation) check DC 18 to find a plate that is part of a trap, but not the trigger. The trigger itself was somewhere else and it required a successful Wisdom (Perception) check DC 22 (I'm not including any details about the actual trap to avoid any spoilers). Now, hold on a second! Why can a character find part of the trap with either Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation)? And why is way easier to do so with the latter? Alright —I said to myself— the actual trap still requires Wisdom (Perception) check to find, let's stick to that. So I kept reading, and three pages later I found another trap, that can be detected with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check DC 15! What!?