Announcements
Everything on this site is essentially in first draft form; if you spot any inconsistencies or errors*, please do me a favor and point them out to me.
- The Gray Hand meets next on 11/17
- The Second Hand meets next on 11/22
- Please see Resources page - it has been extensively updated. Pay special attention to the Character Advancement section
Change Log
2020-12-30: Changed house rule for weapon finesse to clarify that the house rule applies to any weapon with which you use the weapon finesse feat, not just ranged weapons, and I've decided in the interest of balance that those with weapon finesse should apply only their dexterity bonus to damage, not their dexterity and strength bonuses.
2020-11-29: Timeline updated for both groups
2020-11-29: Second Hand Session 11 summary and quotes posted
2020-11-28: Gray Hand Session 9 summary and quotes posted
2020-11-20: Second Hand Session 10 summary and quotes posted
2020-11-17: Information about fumbles, Cure spells, and weapon/armor magic abilities added to House Rules page
2020-11-17: Additions to Timeline
2020-11-17: Information added to Chris's page
2020-11-17: Gray Hand Session 8 summary and quotes posted
2020-11-17: Changed house rule for 0th level spells - the spells listed on the House Rules page no longer count towards your max known 0th level spells (if that applies.) Essentially you get the class-appropriate spell for free as a bonus known spell. Wizards and Sorcerers should choose one of the listed spells for their class to have for free.
2020-11-16: Gray Hand Session 7 summary and quotes posted
2020-11-15: Private page created for Chris
2020-11-05: Posted Second Hand session 8 and 9 summaries and quotes
2020-10-18: Information added to Lauren's page
2020-10-14: Information added to Karen and Bean's pages
2020-10-06: Information added to Karen, Steve, Tom, Robert, and Brian's pages
2020-10-01: Two paragraphs added to Pantheon page - paragraphs 2 and 3
2020-09-17: Significant addition to the Timeline
2020-09-17: Large addition to Argosilan page - History of the Argosilan
2020-09-12: Substantially more in-depth Pantheon page posted and shared with Adam, Bean, Brian, and Josh - check your private pages
2020-09-12: Big changes to Pantheon page, including addition of new deities
2020-08-28: Added information to Myrak and Callie's pages
2020-08-28: Important addition to The Shadows page - paragraph on Shadow ID under "Overview of the Shadows"
2020-08-28: Added Useful Substances page for Second Hand specifically
2020-08-28: Added sell values to all loot for Second Hand
2020-08-27: Posted Second Hand session 7 summary
2020-08-27: Posted Second Hand session 6 summary
2020-08-27: Posted Second Hand session 6 and 7 quotes
2020-08-26: Posted Second Hand session 5 summary
2020-08-25: Posted Second Hand session 5 quotes
2020-08-24: Posted Second Hand session 4 summary and quotes
2020-08-19: Timeline page updated
2020-08-19: Argosian Smiths page added
2020-08-19: The Thaumatic Order page added
2020-08-17: Certain private pages updated - check yours
2020-08-17: Edible Plants page changed to Useful Substances page and updated
2020-08-17: Poisons page updated
2020-08-13: The Argosilan page created
2020-08-13: Government page created and content added
2020-08-13: Second Hand's bestiary completed
2020-08-13: World Bestiary completed
2020-08-13: Gray Hand's bestiary completed
2020-08-13: Players with individual knowledge of monsters have their pages updated to reflect this
2020-08-13: Added Bestiary page to World Information with monsters everyone knows about, party bestiaries to your individual pages with monsters only your group has encountered, and specific monster pages to some of your private pages with information that only your character or a couple of you know.
2020-08-13: Added information to most player pages
2020-08-13: Added Shadowguild Warrens page to World Information
2020-08-09: Major additions to The Shadows page
2020-08-09: Magic Item Creation and Enhancement rules added to House Rules page
2020-08-09: Major changes to Timeline page
2020-08-09: Minor changes to Pantheon page
2020-08-09: Practical Information page added
2020-08-08: Pantheon, The Shadows, Timeline moved to World Information page
2020-08-08: Change Log added
Welcome to the kingdom of Karathos in the world of Rift! We will be using this website to manage inter-session interactions and gameplay for the Karathos campaign.
Both groups will exist concurrently in the same world! I'm quite excited about this and intend to do my best to pull it off, but please bear with me if there are hiccups. Please use the forum on this website to facilitate inter-group and inter-session interactions; I'll establish some ground rules for these interactions in the upcoming days, but basically we want to keep it as realistic as possible and reduce metagaming. For example, when the two groups are far apart geographically, they cannot communicate with each other instantaneously, short of the possibility of some clever magical means. I will aim to run a session for both groups in the same week, then take a week, sometimes two, off between sessions.
The Second Hand will meet on Saturday evenings (weekly) from 5-8 PM, although Sundays from 2-5 PM seem to be a viable backup typically. This group consists of:
- Adam (Tiras Eldraine) - Tiras Eldraine, Human paladin
- Ben (zale1521) - Zale Zanders, Human ranger
- Kaitlyn (Bean) (whatkindofbean) - Seraphina 'The Siren' Calliope Detue Virotuso I, alias Iwins, Halfling bard
- Karen (Xbow) - Rayna, Human barbarian
- Lauren (bitterist) - Ada, Half-Elf druid
- Sarah (therivanqueen) - Ren, Half-Elf rogue
The Gray Hand will meet on Tuesday evenings (bi-weekly) from 5-9 PM, sometimes 5-10 PM. This group consists of:
- Brian (SkullTT) - Myrak Envubarin, Elf wizard
- Josh (joshtrobins) - Seag El, Human cleric
- Robert (wood0257) - Amandil Eglath, Half-Elf ranger
- Steve (Not Steve) - Threlgk, Half-Orc barbarian
- Tina (Tina Geller) - Karilya, Gnome monk
- Tom V (Tom the Viking) - Keppra, Elf rogue
- Will (wdurley) - Dorin, Halfling monk
Campaign details:
- We will be using Pathfinder rules for the games; these are freely available online here: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/
- We will be sticking to the core races, classes, gear, feats, and spells. If you REALLY want to play a non-standard race or class, talk to me and we can probably work something out. Same with feats, gear, and spells. My main goal here is to keep things balanced so everyone has fun, and I'll likely be fine with exceptions as long as they aren't game-breaking.
- My games tend to be roleplay and story-heavy. Combat is absolutely an important feature, but I encourage you to flesh out your characters with backstories, feel free to use the ideal/bond/flaw concept from 5th Edition if you'd like; it can be pretty useful for coming up with character back-story ideas (overview here: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/personality-and-background#PersonalityTraits examples of each are given in the 5th edition players handbook and some can be found online.)
- I discourage min-maxing in my games (in my experience, it usually leads to other players feeling left out and unimportant, which I absolutely want to avoid) and I do my best to make sure everyone's character gets a chance to shine. If you're feeling left out or underappreciated, please let me know privately so I can make sure you're enjoying the game. The up-side of this is that you should feel free to play any of the base classes without worrying about it underperforming from a min-max standpoint; you will be appreciated and valued.
- I am building the game(s) from scratch, so don't bother trying to look for the module so you can read ahead ;-)
- The party will begin at level 7 and we will be following the Medium XP track from the Core Rulebook (don't worry too much about this unless you want to; I'll let everyone know when you should level, though I will allocate XP at the end of each session.)
- In order for the party to fit into the world and the role they will be playing, I will be restricting character concepts somewhat; it simply won't make sense in-game for people to be all over the place. See the below section for guidelines when thinking about what you want to play.
- Based on your characters' backgrounds, throughout the campaign, I will give certain characters information ranging from trivial to life-savingly relevant. YOUR BACK STORY MATTERS. A LOT.
- Corollary to the above: the world is a dangerous place, and not everything is deliberately tailored to your party's level. If you choose to enter the lair of an elder red dragon at level 6, I won't stop you, but the dragon sure will. This is one way your characters' backgrounds will come into play - a certain player may have highly relevant information about a certain monster based on their background. Note that I'm also not a sadistic DM; I'm not going to throw things at you that are designed to kill you; you'll be given enough information to have a pretty good idea as to whether you can handle something or not.
Character restrictions, guidance, and advice:
- No characters with the following alignments: LE, NE, CE, CN. If your character acts in these directions, they will face the realistic consequences of their actions.
- NG, NN, CG are strongly encouraged as alignments due to the nature of your party. LN and LG are acceptable but will be a tad awkward. Concordantly, I am relaxing alignment requirements for classes such as paladin and monk.
- At least one character from each party needs to have fairly high intelligence and at least one needs to have fairly high charisma (fairly high = 14+, 16+ would be better.) For those newer players, classes that benefit from high INT include bard, rogue, wizard and classes that benefit from high CHA include bard, cleric, paladin, sorcerer.
- Magic is uncommon in the world. This should not discourage you at all from playing a caster; however, it will influence how NPCs react to casters when they meet you. Magic is not perceived as bad, just rare. Correspondingly, magic items will not be falling out of every monster's pockets (though they do exist). If you've always wanted to try your hand with crafting feats, this game wouldn't be the worst time to try.
- As I mentioned in the email that some of you received, the parties are groups of bounty hunters who live on the border between civil society and the outlaw world. The world is a dark, gritty place, full of monsters, and the PCs have made a living for several years now by collecting bounties, be they on monsters, criminals, political targets, or really anything else that pays, as long as the job doesn't violate your ethical standards. You've made a name for yourselves within the kingdom to the point that your services are periodically hired by mayors, governors, sheriffs, lords, even the crown once or twice. As you are thinking about your character concept, consider how it would fit into this sort of group.
- Once we have the groups figured out, please talk with one another and plan out your party accordingly. A bounty hunting party would likely not be comprised of all clerics and wizards, for instance, and your characters will all know each other and have worked together for some time so we can avoid the awkward "you walk into the tavern and see a dwarf fighter, elven rogue, and human wizard sitting alone at separate tables…go figure out how to turn yourselves into a party" moment. You're free to come up with whatever party concept you want within these guidelines, but you'll make things a lot harder on yourselves than they need to be without someone who can cast healing spells and someone who is a front-line tank in each party.
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