The Latest Enemy

  I started a new campaign recently for people from my church who are completely new to RPGs. I thought this would be an excellent time to introduce them to OSR and NSR concepts with them having no preconceptions about DnD or RPGs. Saying that, I did realize that DnD has definitely been absorbed into the cultural consciousness. I had initial ideas about running my hack of different OSR concepts for them but I quickly realized they did have preconceptions about things like race and class combos, 20s being crits, and a few things they had picked up by being aware of DnD 5E without actually having played that. With that in mind I decided to approach this as a minimal version of DnD for them where we had a limited amount of races and classes to combo together. So I settled on Human, Elf, Dwarf, Ratfolk, and Dragonborn as the playable races and Cleric, Fighter, Wizard, and Ranger as the classes. I really, really wanted to have an equal amount of classes as races for this homebrew a...

I need a deity for my upcoming campaign that is a bit gamified. Something that is explicitly transactional and a bit malevolent. I came up with statues of Nuadens to do that: Every city that reaches a certain size has one: a wooden sculpture of a satyr several times the size of the average citizen. Their sinister face is covered in leaves. All is foliage except their left hand reaching out. A hand made of silver clockwork. A hand that will animate if any sacrifice is placed in their outstretched hand, dropping the propitiation into the waist deep, rough hewn, ancient fountain these statues are always set in. A single word is etched into the fountain: Nuadens. Once the sacrifice is swallowed up by the earth beneath the fountain the clockwork hand rotates to its original starting point with a suitable exchange appearing in return. This offered exchange seems to always be related to the original offering in some way. Any person will only receive something in return from the statue once ea...