@@sebastianscauldron3255 the non binary thing. Seemed a bit forced. Still liked the video series though. I personally like to just have a couple of the doppelgängers hanging around in Phandalin
@@pikapal94 subverting cliche and expectations by changing the gender isn't "virtual signaling" which is defined as "The action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue." in this case, this is not what he was doing, the video's creator was suggesting subverting the cliche that the characters are always male or that drow are always evil
Glad to hear it! Tryna cultivate good vibes & good times. Glad your players are loving it - it makes it that more enjoyable to watch their characters suffer later on :)
Glad you enjoyed! Having notes from Glasstaff on the Redbrands is just a super simple foreshadowing tool - one that you can steal for any villains with henchmen in your campaigns. It's a super easy & effective way of highlighting HOW the villain treats their henchmen and how they see the world!
200 subs???????????? Commenting for the algorithm and subbing for what it’s worth. This is wonderful content and I hope you get the recognition you deserve!
Also! My nezznar is a magical scholar (a la lutes and dice) who is looking for the forge to create a weapon to fight drow in order to fight against the oppressive matriarchal society that tried to stop him from achieving anything. (Drow males usually can’t study magic) He met Vyerith and Vhalek (the doppelgänger twins) in the wild, recently cast out from their home when their true parentage was revealed, and they formed a bond. The twins had been swindling people out of food and coin for some time now, and had gotten rather good at surviving on their own, and Nezznar was able to fight off the orcs and goblins of the Many Arrows Tribe that attacked them as they travelled. Our boy T.B.S. negotiates with the fractured pockets of the cragmaw tribe upon reaching the sword coast north region, gaining these new allies through a display of strength and a promise of weapons to defend themselves against the many arrows goblins. When nezznar hears about Gundren and the forge, he sends the twins to get his intel from his mansion in Neverwinter, with no intentions to hurt innocents in the process of finding the forge, and when that doesn’t work, he passes the task off to the goblins, who don’t have such a functional moral compass. In my adventure, the black spider isn’t necessarily a bad guy. The party is a threat, and he knows that should they find the forge first, he will lose the chance to not only study it’s magic to sate his own curiosity, but also the chance to make a weapon to stand against the high priestesses of Lolth (and potentially lolth herself) that have made his life in Mezoberranzan miserable, and allow him to return home to continue his study of magic. He punishes the redbrand who murders the father in Phandalin, and makes an example of him in the manor, hanging his body over the nothic pit. (various limbs are missing from the corpse) The letter to Glasstaff mentions “controlling these uncivilized thugs” and makes it clear he does not approve of the actions of the redbrands, as they simply existed to distract the townsfolk, at least initially. Vyerith and Vhalek slowly become more evil over the campaign, since they’re the ones stumbling upon their new powers, and Vhalek will become exponentially more so if his twin sister is killed at cragmaw castle. If both Vhalek and Vyerith are killed doing their increasingly despicable deeds, Nezznar is left with the deaths of his own found family, and while he hates the PCs for taking them from him, he also saw what they became when given power, and vows not to become corrupted by power as they did when he ousts the matron mothers of menzoberranzan. He secures the Forge, reaching it through the convenient drow-friendly mushroom shortcut (skipping the flameskull and stuff) and is in the process of creating his own magical weapon when the party arrives. I modified the forge to operate on souls. It works (mostly), but a soul must be sacrificed in order to power it. (Enter the lost laboratory of kwalish! Soul powered machinery! Batteries! Moral ambiguity!) The party enters the room just in time to see a drow woman’s throat slit on a raised platform across from the forge. A poetic sacrifice, and, in Nezznar’s eyes, another evil destroyed. He may not care to hurt the innocent people above, but the drow matriarchs, those are another story entirely. This is his mistake. The woman was a high priestess of Lolth, a woman who had wronged him time and time again in menzoberranzan, and taking her life to create a magical anti-lolth weapon was enough to alert the spider queen to his presence. She is conflicted, proud of the perceived backstabbing nature of this particular male, and of course angry at the blatant mutiny and attempted overturning of her rules for the drow society at large. A voice, sweet but tinged with malice, echoes through the chamber, coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once. “You have crossed me for the first, and very last time, Nezznar. If you wish to be an outcast, then so be it! Prove your worth, and you may just live. Now bow to your queen!” Nezznar looks to Vyerith with fear in his eyes as he drops to his knees, the blade clattering to the ground, the spider staff in his hand glowing with a deep purple light. “Kill the rest.” Nezznar stands up, stumbling towards the party. “I’m sorry…” And then his body goes limp, then stiff, then regains it’s movement, the eyes now black voids, the face showing no emotion. The test of Lolth has begun. First stage of combat, Nezznar and some demon spiders. Defeat. Nezznar’s body falls to the floor, broken and bloody. The party takes a moment to breathe and process the events that just occurred. Phase two. Hundreds of tiny spiders appear to crawl out from under Nezznar’s corpse, sewing wounds back together with glowing purple webs. A cocoon forms, the wizard fireballs the body, no effect. The smoke clears as the last of the spiders vanishes back under Nezznar’s body. Suddenly, with a powerful spasm, his back legs arc backwards, in a direction drow legs are not meant to go. A horrible cracking noise of bone and splitting sinew echoes through the chamber. And then the screaming starts… Nezznar endures the horrific transformation into a drider, the ultimate punishment for displeasing Lolth. Nonsensical sounds, attempts at words, escape his throat, expressions of desperation and pain. This is no longer Nezznar. This drider is accompanied by 2 more (custom) demon spiders and a reanimated, Lolth controlled high priestess body, normally an impossibly deadly encounter for a level five party, but the monsters have a weakness to the weapon Nezznar forged, and the paladin was quick to pick it up and put it to use. The fight was exhausting, and everyone nearly went down once or twice, but as the magical sword was stuck into Nezznar’s chest for the last time, he stopped screaming, collapsed to the ground, and whispered “the forge”, before passing away. The same arcane symbols that had lit up across the floor when the priestess was killed began to glow, and the forge lit up again, this time with a bright purple flame. The sword in the paladins hand seemed to vibrate slightly as he walked closer to the flames, and he dropped in the sword. Now they have a sentient sword with Nezznar’s soul residing inside. Perhaps the fabled gnome tinkerer kwalish can find a way to power the forge without spilling blood, and possibly, find a new body for Nezznar so he can complete his unfinished business…
Wow! First of all, thank you so much for such a lovely and kind comment - comments like yours make me genuinely so happy to read and it put a stupid grin on my face when I read it. Secondly - holy shit! That's some fantastic villain work you've done there! I LOVE the moral ambiguity and grey areas that you've had Nezznar explore, going from someone who wants to write their own wrongs to a full-blown villain in their own right - and having him turn into a drider at the end I think is such a fantastic use of poetic justice. You've got some fuckin' lucky players I'd say - if I was in your campaign I'd have had a blast! I'm so excited for your campaign to progress and to see if Nezznar is able to get a body back - and if the forge is usable without spilling blood (in my mind - and you don't need to do this of course - I think that the forge you've got there should NOT be usable by someone who can't shed bled. It'd be a really interesting exploration of the 'how far do you go for power' concept which I think is super cool). Thank you so much once again!
@@sebastianscauldron3255 oh they can’t, unless they meet kwalish from that extra life adventure, who specializes in soul powered technologies 😏 Soul batteries? Who cares, if you don’t know how the sausage is made, right?
Also they’ve already denied Nezznar a way out of this body in the third or fourth session without even being near phandalin lmao. Poor guy. They’re gonna flip when they find out that apple from the sunless citadel was going to him originally. Couple ways they can bring him back: kwalish could put him in his powered armor thing, the one with a “magic jar” kind of effect. Throw another subject into it. Boom, new Nezznar. Alternatively, the first drow they kill with that blade, if revived, could be Nezznar. (If you have any other cool ideas to bring him back, by all means lmk, my players would be happy with either but I’m kinda eh about them) After coming back he may just fall in with the cult of the dragon. He’s forsaken Lolth, but a certain dragon goddess might appreciate his tenacity and give him the power he seeks. Rematch against Nezznar with levels in dragon sorcerer, anyone? It could lead to a cool moment during the final battle where Nezznar doesnt REALLY want to fight the players because he does owe them, but also they’ve been a massive thorn in his side and are stopping him from attaining the power and redemption (not moral, just “hey look I’m a cool badass backstabbing wyrmspeaker now Lolth”) he’s after. His NPC flaw is: I require power of my own, but I fail to realize that a lust for power is easily exploitable by those that are already powerful. Oh also when his eyes went black and he essentially lost free will, Vyerith went to check if he was okay and she got spider staff-d through the heart, just to show the progression of his loss of self to the players, because those two were inseparable, especially after vhalek was killed by my rogue.
Great Video and Great Ideas! So what du you do if you only prepared the redbrand hideout but the group already wants to go to the wilderness an search for cragmaw Castle? Do i have to prepare all of Part 3 too before I start the Adventure? So what do I do In case they skip the town or just follow the First quest they get?
Good question, and one that you're going to realise is the crux of DMing - sometimes you can't predict what your players want to do, and they end up doin' shit that you weren't expecting. The short answer fix is - you gotta wing it (and best of luck to you on that)! The long answer is - DMing is all about being comfortable with the world you've created & with improvising. That doesn't mean you need to just come up with EVERYTHING on the fly - you can have lists of names, tables of shop catalogues, etc. One thing that would be great to do is have (at the very least) an idea of what else is around in the world - as there is a possibility (exactly as you've suggested) that your players decide to go straight to the Castle, or go to the Forest or go in the complete opposite direction of where you hoped they would! It's a really tough thing to do, and you'll definitely find it hard to do it first. It took me quite a while to get comfortable at improvising when my players went off track (albeit I still am uncomfortable with it), but with some practice (and a willingness to fuck up sometimes!) you'll get better at it in no time. Part 3 is quite different to Part 2 (I've got a video on Part 3 as well :P), and you'll see that it's something that you'd be able to very quickly throw together on the fly. Best of luck on your DMing adventures :)
@@sebastianscauldron3255 nah, he's an author. Writes a lot of fiction. The elders in my family love his works. I've yet to understand why. They don't enthrall me much. Just switched to higher resolution, and I see where the farce is originating from 😂
Dislike for virtue signaling.
When?
@@sebastianscauldron3255 the non binary thing. Seemed a bit forced. Still liked the video series though. I personally like to just have a couple of the doppelgängers hanging around in Phandalin
@@pikapal94 subverting cliche and expectations by changing the gender isn't "virtual signaling" which is defined as "The action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue." in this case, this is not what he was doing, the video's creator was suggesting subverting the cliche that the characters are always male or that drow are always evil
Oh nah nah.
When did I ask?
@@sebastianscauldron3255 you didnt I am just educating you for free. You are welcome
i really dont know how i got here but I do love your vibe man. I am currently DMing this and they are loving it.
Glad to hear it! Tryna cultivate good vibes & good times. Glad your players are loving it - it makes it that more enjoyable to watch their characters suffer later on :)
The term you are looking for is Bust ( For the Batman head & upper torso thingy ).
I'm such a huge Stephen King fan! your collection of books reminds me of my library. I'm especially fond of the Dark Tower series!
In one of mine, the black spider was sildur. Was a fun reveal.
Awesome! That's a really cool twist - and a great way to freak out your players!
I loved this Thank you!
I had the note for glasstaff from BS but didnt think to give the redbrands some thing from glasstaff
Glad you enjoyed!
Having notes from Glasstaff on the Redbrands is just a super simple foreshadowing tool - one that you can steal for any villains with henchmen in your campaigns. It's a super easy & effective way of highlighting HOW the villain treats their henchmen and how they see the world!
200 subs????????????
Commenting for the algorithm and subbing for what it’s worth. This is wonderful content and I hope you get the recognition you deserve!
Also!
My nezznar is a magical scholar (a la lutes and dice) who is looking for the forge to create a weapon to fight drow in order to fight against the oppressive matriarchal society that tried to stop him from achieving anything. (Drow males usually can’t study magic)
He met Vyerith and Vhalek (the doppelgänger twins) in the wild, recently cast out from their home when their true parentage was revealed, and they formed a bond. The twins had been swindling people out of food and coin for some time now, and had gotten rather good at surviving on their own, and Nezznar was able to fight off the orcs and goblins of the Many Arrows Tribe that attacked them as they travelled.
Our boy T.B.S. negotiates with the fractured pockets of the cragmaw tribe upon reaching the sword coast north region, gaining these new allies through a display of strength and a promise of weapons to defend themselves against the many arrows goblins.
When nezznar hears about Gundren and the forge, he sends the twins to get his intel from his mansion in Neverwinter, with no intentions to hurt innocents in the process of finding the forge, and when that doesn’t work, he passes the task off to the goblins, who don’t have such a functional moral compass.
In my adventure, the black spider isn’t necessarily a bad guy. The party is a threat, and he knows that should they find the forge first, he will lose the chance to not only study it’s magic to sate his own curiosity, but also the chance to make a weapon to stand against the high priestesses of Lolth (and potentially lolth herself) that have made his life in Mezoberranzan miserable, and allow him to return home to continue his study of magic.
He punishes the redbrand who murders the father in Phandalin, and makes an example of him in the manor, hanging his body over the nothic pit. (various limbs are missing from the corpse)
The letter to Glasstaff mentions “controlling these uncivilized thugs” and makes it clear he does not approve of the actions of the redbrands, as they simply existed to distract the townsfolk, at least initially.
Vyerith and Vhalek slowly become more evil over the campaign, since they’re the ones stumbling upon their new powers, and Vhalek will become exponentially more so if his twin sister is killed at cragmaw castle.
If both Vhalek and Vyerith are killed doing their increasingly despicable deeds, Nezznar is left with the deaths of his own found family, and while he hates the PCs for taking them from him, he also saw what they became when given power, and vows not to become corrupted by power as they did when he ousts the matron mothers of menzoberranzan.
He secures the Forge, reaching it through the convenient drow-friendly mushroom shortcut (skipping the flameskull and stuff) and is in the process of creating his own magical weapon when the party arrives.
I modified the forge to operate on souls. It works (mostly), but a soul must be sacrificed in order to power it. (Enter the lost laboratory of kwalish! Soul powered machinery! Batteries! Moral ambiguity!)
The party enters the room just in time to see a drow woman’s throat slit on a raised platform across from the forge. A poetic sacrifice, and, in Nezznar’s eyes, another evil destroyed. He may not care to hurt the innocent people above, but the drow matriarchs, those are another story entirely.
This is his mistake. The woman was a high priestess of Lolth, a woman who had wronged him time and time again in menzoberranzan, and taking her life to create a magical anti-lolth weapon was enough to alert the spider queen to his presence.
She is conflicted, proud of the perceived backstabbing nature of this particular male, and of course angry at the blatant mutiny and attempted overturning of her rules for the drow society at large.
A voice, sweet but tinged with malice, echoes through the chamber, coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
“You have crossed me for the first, and very last time, Nezznar. If you wish to be an outcast, then so be it! Prove your worth, and you may just live. Now bow to your queen!”
Nezznar looks to Vyerith with fear in his eyes as he drops to his knees, the blade clattering to the ground, the spider staff in his hand glowing with a deep purple light.
“Kill the rest.”
Nezznar stands up, stumbling towards the party.
“I’m sorry…”
And then his body goes limp, then stiff, then regains it’s movement, the eyes now black voids, the face showing no emotion. The test of Lolth has begun.
First stage of combat, Nezznar and some demon spiders.
Defeat. Nezznar’s body falls to the floor, broken and bloody. The party takes a moment to breathe and process the events that just occurred.
Phase two. Hundreds of tiny spiders appear to crawl out from under Nezznar’s corpse, sewing wounds back together with glowing purple webs. A cocoon forms, the wizard fireballs the body, no effect. The smoke clears as the last of the spiders vanishes back under Nezznar’s body. Suddenly, with a powerful spasm, his back legs arc backwards, in a direction drow legs are not meant to go. A horrible cracking noise of bone and splitting sinew echoes through the chamber.
And then the screaming starts…
Nezznar endures the horrific transformation into a drider, the ultimate punishment for displeasing Lolth. Nonsensical sounds, attempts at words, escape his throat, expressions of desperation and pain. This is no longer Nezznar.
This drider is accompanied by 2 more (custom) demon spiders and a reanimated, Lolth controlled high priestess body, normally an impossibly deadly encounter for a level five party, but the monsters have a weakness to the weapon Nezznar forged, and the paladin was quick to pick it up and put it to use.
The fight was exhausting, and everyone nearly went down once or twice, but as the magical sword was stuck into Nezznar’s chest for the last time, he stopped screaming, collapsed to the ground, and whispered “the forge”, before passing away.
The same arcane symbols that had lit up across the floor when the priestess was killed began to glow, and the forge lit up again, this time with a bright purple flame. The sword in the paladins hand seemed to vibrate slightly as he walked closer to the flames, and he dropped in the sword.
Now they have a sentient sword with Nezznar’s soul residing inside. Perhaps the fabled gnome tinkerer kwalish can find a way to power the forge without spilling blood, and possibly, find a new body for Nezznar so he can complete his unfinished business…
Holy crap that was a whole book, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t read that whole thing lmao
Wow! First of all, thank you so much for such a lovely and kind comment - comments like yours make me genuinely so happy to read and it put a stupid grin on my face when I read it.
Secondly - holy shit! That's some fantastic villain work you've done there! I LOVE the moral ambiguity and grey areas that you've had Nezznar explore, going from someone who wants to write their own wrongs to a full-blown villain in their own right - and having him turn into a drider at the end I think is such a fantastic use of poetic justice.
You've got some fuckin' lucky players I'd say - if I was in your campaign I'd have had a blast!
I'm so excited for your campaign to progress and to see if Nezznar is able to get a body back - and if the forge is usable without spilling blood (in my mind - and you don't need to do this of course - I think that the forge you've got there should NOT be usable by someone who can't shed bled. It'd be a really interesting exploration of the 'how far do you go for power' concept which I think is super cool).
Thank you so much once again!
@@sebastianscauldron3255 oh they can’t, unless they meet kwalish from that extra life adventure, who specializes in soul powered technologies 😏
Soul batteries? Who cares, if you don’t know how the sausage is made, right?
Also they’ve already denied Nezznar a way out of this body in the third or fourth session without even being near phandalin lmao. Poor guy. They’re gonna flip when they find out that apple from the sunless citadel was going to him originally.
Couple ways they can bring him back: kwalish could put him in his powered armor thing, the one with a “magic jar” kind of effect. Throw another subject into it. Boom, new Nezznar.
Alternatively, the first drow they kill with that blade, if revived, could be Nezznar.
(If you have any other cool ideas to bring him back, by all means lmk, my players would be happy with either but I’m kinda eh about them)
After coming back he may just fall in with the cult of the dragon. He’s forsaken Lolth, but a certain dragon goddess might appreciate his tenacity and give him the power he seeks.
Rematch against Nezznar with levels in dragon sorcerer, anyone?
It could lead to a cool moment during the final battle where Nezznar doesnt REALLY want to fight the players because he does owe them, but also they’ve been a massive thorn in his side and are stopping him from attaining the power and redemption (not moral, just “hey look I’m a cool badass backstabbing wyrmspeaker now Lolth”) he’s after. His NPC flaw is: I require power of my own, but I fail to realize that a lust for power is easily exploitable by those that are already powerful.
Oh also when his eyes went black and he essentially lost free will, Vyerith went to check if he was okay and she got spider staff-d through the heart, just to show the progression of his loss of self to the players, because those two were inseparable, especially after vhalek was killed by my rogue.
very nice! Really like the notes
Thanks a lot! Glad you like them & thought they were interesting :)
-Let's subvert the cliches "I don't like thinking all drow are evil" at the same time "let's make nezznar a dwarf cause all dwarves mine".
...I didn't even think about that
Whoops!
When this channel gets huge, I will have been here since it only had about 100 subs. And I will be proud and feel like I contributed somehow.
Thank you so much! Certainly contributed by watching & commenting, so thank you :)
How devoid of meaning your life must be.
Great video! :D I just subscribed, keep up the videos!
Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed :)
Great Video and Great Ideas! So what du you do if you only prepared the redbrand hideout but the group already wants to go to the wilderness an search for cragmaw Castle? Do i have to prepare all of Part 3 too before I start the Adventure? So what do I do In case they skip the town or just follow the First quest they get?
Good question, and one that you're going to realise is the crux of DMing - sometimes you can't predict what your players want to do, and they end up doin' shit that you weren't expecting.
The short answer fix is - you gotta wing it (and best of luck to you on that)!
The long answer is -
DMing is all about being comfortable with the world you've created & with improvising. That doesn't mean you need to just come up with EVERYTHING on the fly - you can have lists of names, tables of shop catalogues, etc.
One thing that would be great to do is have (at the very least) an idea of what else is around in the world - as there is a possibility (exactly as you've suggested) that your players decide to go straight to the Castle, or go to the Forest or go in the complete opposite direction of where you hoped they would!
It's a really tough thing to do, and you'll definitely find it hard to do it first. It took me quite a while to get comfortable at improvising when my players went off track (albeit I still am uncomfortable with it), but with some practice (and a willingness to fuck up sometimes!) you'll get better at it in no time.
Part 3 is quite different to Part 2 (I've got a video on Part 3 as well :P), and you'll see that it's something that you'd be able to very quickly throw together on the fly.
Best of luck on your DMing adventures :)
😊
I take it you like Stephen King?
Nah never heard of him - does he make movies or something? :p
@@sebastianscauldron3255 nah, he's an author. Writes a lot of fiction. The elders in my family love his works. I've yet to understand why. They don't enthrall me much.
Just switched to higher resolution, and I see where the farce is originating from 😂
Not a problem :P
A very common comment on my bookshelf, so now I just pretend to not know who he is!
0:35 A bust (😩)
YES thank you!
Schilke trumpet MPs
good eye! used the Schilkes (14a4a of course) for a bit before swapping to the Marcinkiewicz Bobby Shew line :)
@@sebastianscauldron3255 i played on a schilke for 2 or 3 years (horn). Good MPs. Switched to Laskey
Stephen King
Who's that?
what is this intro
woke
Gave up after several minutes of talking crap at the beginning.