Erratica Reduex

Over in the Giant in the Pllayground forums people started a thread about different ways to destroy a large city in D&D. That is, taking down a well defended, populous city the size of say` Forgotten Realm's Waterdeep perhaps.

Unfortunately, most of the suggestions have involved high level magic: plagues, crop destruction, a wight apocalypse, and the like. All of which I find boring and uncreative. Now myself, I could destroy that city with no magic or army at all, just using a maxed-out Diplomacy skill, and time.

Here's how my evil plan would work:

1. Encourage the city to specialize in manufacturing a single product, say an improved version of carts and carriages.

2. At the same time, encourage an Empire-wide, even continent-wide project of good roads, thereby encouraging people to buy the carriages. This provides easy access to and from the city.

3. As the manufacturing boom expands and the city focuses on the very profitable business, encourage the immigration of a disliked race (say, displaced elves maybe) as cheap labor. Encourage unrest and oppression of the downtrodden race.

4. At the same time, encourage the dominant race of the city to actually live outside the city in townships, and commute using the new roads.

5. After about ten-twenty years of this, and when racial tensions get high enough, spark a massive series of riots. This should trigger the wealthy dominant race to use the good road network to leave for greener pastures.

6. Now you're ready to move in for the kill. Suddenly reveal that other cities have been developing a similar manufacturing capability, and that they have been more innovative and responsive in making the product so that the market the city has depended on collapses.

7. And for the Coup de grâce, follow the riots with about 40 years of a corrupt and incompetent city government.

In the end, you'll have a ciity that's a shelll of itself, with no prospects for making things better. Effectively, it will be destroyed. Sure it will take a while, but it's a simple project for say, a half-elf bard with maximized Diplomacy+ of 40+

Fortunately, it's just a game I can't think of any plan so evil happening in the real world.

OK, so I admit it: as a kid I liked playing with my G.I. Joe (original large size) and Johhny West dolls action figures. I also like perusing art site for interesting character designs, and one of my favorite parts of WoW and City of Heroes were the character builders. 

That's why I've been having a lot of fun with Anime Character Maker 2, It's a nice simple program where you can select from a menu of features and clothing, and come up with a basic character design fairly quickly. In some ways the choices are fairly limited, but it's a nice start, and it'll be easy to add more features in the next several versions of this, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes.And as a quick way to churn out basic characters, it's not bad.

As an example, just for fun, here is an anime version of my character Zanne from my current D&D game. The trick was getting the proper absent minded expression for him.

After months of careful analysis and playtesting of D&D 4th edition, I have come to this conclusion about the game:




Eladrin are Dr. Strange.
Elves are the Goddamn Batman.


And that is all.

Now back to your regular Livejournal experience.