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Swamps in TTRPGs
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ก.พ. 2023
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Swamps is cool, I think every environment should be explored more as a character than just a minor detail. Enjoy some shenanigans and examples of descriptions, dangers and adventures in da swamp.
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Treating the environment as a character in its own right is a genuinely great way to make sure it contributes to the experience. Thanks for the tip and the outstanding examples!
No problem!
One of my favorite parts of the video was the frog idea. Got me thinking, and I think I might throw a frog version of rakna-kadaki from monster hunter at my players
It’s even better cuz I’m currently working on a city that happens to be named after someone I know.
Honestly this gives me an idea to actually make the environment its own character, and have the land itself be inhabited and imbued by minor gods. Maybe if you go out of your way to slay one of the gods of an area of land, the land slowly corrupts back into a state of flat white void with nothing but the sky above it.
The party is traveling through the swamp and they find the half submerged ruins of a castle. They continue on and discover a second ruined castle lying under the water. A bit further along they find a third castle, this one apparently burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp. And then finally they come across the fourth one, and that one had stayed up!
I thought they were stacked on top of each other?
Aye but what about the great big tracts of land!
@@toddkes5890 you are correct
@@toddkes5890 I actually looked up the quote and it doesn’t specify. He just says he built one, it fell over, and then he built the next one. That could mean he built them one on top of another, but it could also mean he built them in new places each time.
Is this Loss?
I plan on including a swamp that was warped by the energies of the abyss. The residents are called "Floridafolk".
I bet you'll base the random encounters on Florida man news articles?
Floridians
Personally I think environmental hazards are an under rated threat and swamps are perfect for low to mid level encounters with environmental hazards. Imagine fighting a gang of bullywugs in thick mud that acts as difficult train or could swallow cause you to drown if knocked prown. But the bullywugs are not affected in the slightest, it even makes them stronger by protecting them from fire damage. That's how you use low level monsters to threaten mid level players.
I'd love to see more of this. It feels like world building 101 with examples which are always great. Thank you kind sir!
In Fall I had a session set in a swamp. I had the party fight a Vrock, turns out flying is kind of useful in a muddy terrain.
Babe wake up new runesmith
Thanks, Runesmith. Now I have Smash Mouth running through my head.
Hey now, Runesmith is an all-star
@@erikwilliams1562 I'm a believer.
I was planning having my players go through a swamp, now I know what to do, thanks smithy
I like the encounter at the end. Currently working on a desert campaign myself.
Shambling mound and will-o-wisps are a potent combination in swamps. The shock damage that wisps do will heal and buff the plant mounds and the group will suddenly start paying more attention (especially if one or two players fail perception and end up halfway in the mound to start combat).
I love how you mentioned treating the environment like a character! I'm currently working to make more interesting stories/encounters by incorporating the environment more, so this was really helpful! I might add a thing or two from this into my weather system I'm working on for 5e combat :)
Fantastic video. Would love to see one on forests next (not particularly dark forests, although that's a valid variant)
I’m from Louisiana. So I’ve seen a few swamps. It would be interesting to also add an environmental hazard that anytime players want to cross a waterlogged part of the swamp, they have a chance to just not find the bottom.
I designed a swamp in my campaign that’s populated primarily with a few crocodilian people. A hag lives at its center, and using the body of a baby she tricked a local many years ago into giving her, she makes a Letiche. Letiche are creatures from Cajun mythology that are said to be the souls of bastard infants which fuse with gators to create unholy monsters which rock boats and drown those who dare enter the swamp. I revised it a bit to be a bit of a mix of giant crocodile with some of the mimicry of a Leucrotta. The party might be hired to investigate the sounds of a crying baby deep in the swamp only to find the horrid monster waiting in ambush for them.
I personally reccomend your channel to anyone I meet who wants to become a storyteller or better, a DM. Continue as always, love your content, it's mind-opening and such a wonderful ... i don't know the word XD (sry, english no my primary language)
I made some mosquito folk for my campaign with some traits pulled from vampire spawn and a little bit from bug monsters. All the other swamp folk have a superstition that they somehow control the mosquito populations and thus mutter curses whenever they’re brought up.
I was planning a haunted mansion session for Halloween, loosely taking nods from the Disneyland attraction. The Disney manor is in a New Orleans section, which honestly translates to a cool swamp concept. Having the submerged mansion, maybe the remains of an old town and riverboat, and creepy mediums that can talk to ghosts and try to drive out the party.
It's good to finally see some Florida representation on this channel 😂
I loved this idea! I learned about treating "anything" (like a location like this) as a character from the Fate rpg. In that game, one of its "secret rules" is that anything can be represented as a character, with skills, aspects, and special abilities!
I was already making a homebrew world that’s mostly swamp called Florinda - losing my mind that this is the latest video- very useful though!
One of my favorite old 3.x precon adventures is set in a swamp: the great halfing bayou race (Source: dreadmire, a giant swamp setting handbook from spellbinder games), where the party winds up having to be the crew for a halfling's boat as they engage in some wacky racers but in a swamp hijinks. Its got lizardmen, giant spiders, leeches, explosive swamp gas, just dozens of weird encounters all framed around around a fun set peice.
The whole book is kind of a trip, with a lot of fun ideas and a lot of questionable jank. Could be fun for idea hunting in newer editions or actually using if you're still stuck in the past like me!
I really enjoy the scenarios and quests you throw together. I would love to see a whole episode with just rapid fire ideas.
I love swamps! Not just in games, but in real life as well. They're fascinating biomes that are often not given enough attention to detail.
There's gonna be a shrek reference isn't there?-sees thumbnail- Off to a great start
I always use current environment to the current situation, giving the party hell or giving them a nice experience. This inspired me experiment a bit more on the possibilities, the Battle of Ramree Island is my favourite ww2 battle and this video gave me the idea to try a put it in dnd.
Now that wizards of the coast are scared they need to stay that way
2:01 when you showed that video of insects outside that patio my first thought was “ok time to grab both the flamethrower and the fire extinguisher to both kill the insects and stop any fire that I make in killing them
I think you found your new series!!! I’d love to see one of these for each biome (especially the under dark). If you looking for a name I’d mirror your basically (monster) series and go with advancely (biome)
I really recommending looking into Delecti's Swamp from Runequest's Glorantha setting. Long story short, Delecti is an ancient necromancer who body hops to keep from getting pulled into the afterlife. He's been experimenting for centuries and there's things like dinosaur zombies, whales, etc. in his swamp. That's deep inland. He's also created his own version of vampires to serve him. Fun stuff.
So glad you’re back! Full steam ahead!
Excellent content with great, actionable ideas. Plze keep it up!
Why did the formal "goodbye." fucking send me, thank you for this joyous laughter.
Wetlands are great, man. Probably my favorite biome, even above mountains.
Gonna be running a three-shot set in a super unforgiving jungle location and this really helped out a lot. The trudge through the jungle isn't just a backdrop, it's the focal point. The jungle is more of a hindrance than any of the displacer beasts or dinosaurs I'll be throwing at the party.
I had a swamp in a campaign I ran that started out as just a throw away location but grew into one of the most important places in terms of lore and locations of import.
The campaign just started, the characters were fresh and I wanted them to go do something of relevance for the town they were in to establish a contact that would be giving out campaign plot relevant quests so decided they'd get a job to recover old records from an abandoned outpost. I look on the map (custom world) and see a spot a river goes through that's relatively nearby and doesn't have anything going on for future storyline so I drew a little blob in around a point of the river and labeled it '_____swamp', a space left open to name the thing later.
Party goes off on adventure, they head into swamp and I'm just making up random encounters. I decide to roll the chart just to see what comes up for inspiration and 'Yaunti' shows up. The characters were still early level and that sounded like it'd be a bit tough so rerolled and got undead skeletons. So I thought, hmm, I'll combine the two together and it became an encounter with undead yuanti skeletons with one being garbed like a priest. They were pretty bog standard skellies but for flavoring I emphasized their 'yauntiness' in terms of dress and apearance. The party wins, I roll treasure, it was a tough fight for them and fudge it a bit by giving them an extra magic item on loot table rolls. End up with cursed bracer of something, can't remember but I felt bad so instead changed it that the bracer's curse makes the person start taking on physical characteristics (scales, fang, etc) that would become more pronounced as the curse ran it's curse (character levels). I thought it would be interesting curse, a mix of bonuses with severe social negatives.
The player running the drow mage infected (it was an evil party campaign) decided that instead of looking for a cure, he was going to lean into it. He decided that his calling the world was to genocide all th yaun-ti in the world, including himself, as they are all tainted abominations, again including himself, and he would do so by infiltrating them from within and rising to the top of the social hierarchy. He declared himself The False Prophet.
He was level 1 by the way, and already had a character long term plan for a world shaking event. Well done.
That turned into a major B plot, his search for, research on and subversion of Yuan-ti cults.
That swamp now had some distinction and due to the geography of the area, it became a re-occurring location for remote, desolate and/or 'lost world' orient plot points. After a while I realized that this one tiny swamp was busy as hell, having undead, lizardmen, feral cannibal halfings who wear goblin skin masks, a couple of Eldricth horrors and the world setting's Baba Yaga too. And it was just some swamp I threw in just cause I needed it for one quest. Fun when stuff happens organically like that.
Me, a Louisianian: Ah yes now I can finally run a d&d game that reminds me of home.
But in seriousness, to add to this I want to say that swamp folklore is also something to think about. Ghosts and Spirits are said to inhabit the swamp, and idea swamp witches come from the practitioners of VooDoo out in the swamps outside New Orleans (we call em Voodoo queens).
I think the game "Gabrial Knight: Sins of the Father" does a great job showing off how you could use the dark nature of VooDoo in you'd own D&D games.
Swamp gas enhancing EVERY fire based action (like fireball) would be funny :p
My players just had a whole arc in a swamp, wish I had seen this vid before its got some great tips!
Ones I’ll make sure to use when they return or be literally anywhere
I have a campaign going on where the Empire the PCs come from committed a war crime against two separate Kingdoms of elves by diverting a major river, turning one Kingdom into a desert and the other into a swamp. Just to make sure the now swamp elves do not get too comfortable in their poisoned, stagnant bog, Lizardfolk were encouraged to move in.
I've been building a campaign around an organization terrorizing a great forest, lead by a black dragon who's corrupting it into swamp land. This is exactly the inspiration I needed, thank you, you absolute legend
Glad to have you back Mr.Smith
I'm known as the master that puts swamps, if its a forest they just call it a light skin swamp, a city a concrete swamp and so on...
Alligator tastes like chicken but you have to pound the meat so that it’s extra transparent. Make sure the meat doesn’t group together it makes it too chewy. I personally like dipping it in egg and flour and salt.
Honestly, if you are looking at possibly doing pathfinder, I HIGHLY recommend sinking your teeth some of the lore/setting books Paizo releases. They are 1000x better than any setting content that WotC ever puts out and is all REALLY interesting and well fleshed out. They arent gonna be valuable to 95% of the userbase who either run homebrew settings or are only ever players, but its great content for those who want inspiration for homebrew, this sort of youtube content, or actually want to play in Golarian
Been rewatching your "basically" series to get my Logan fix, and came to the realization that we do not yet have a "basically goblins".
For the Pathfinder players: don’t forget Leshies! Always remember that Leshies are a thing for wild settings.
Swamps are easy, for every 4 of them there's a Phyrexian Obliterator chilling about
Interesting... thanks. I actually have the party going to look in a swamp for a lich's phylactery which is guarded by a black dragon. Thanks for tips on how to use the actual enviorment,
Love that you are releasing more Videos again, thank you🙏😁
Have a setting in one of my group's homebrew settings called The Moors. Entire place is Lovecraft Country - thick forests that block out the sky, assorted marshes and bogs.
I really like this kind of video, I’d love to see more in the future.
Have you ever thought about doing a video about dinosaurs and how to use them?
One thing I notice people never mention is that wetlands have a lot of variation. Moors, marshes, bogs, and fens all have subtle differences. Marshes being among the standouts here due to being very flat and having few trees. Use the differences to your advantage!
Now I have to add a swamp, thanks Runester
Geezer here... Many sessions out yet, but I am planning to use the old, Airship down. Should put the kittens off into swamp lands. Game on.
good to hear you
I came up with a concept for a campaign that's just seeing how many obscure player races you can cram into an isolated plateau, and I think your swamp advice fits pretty well. I'm going to share what I have so far, if anyone wants to add their notes.
There are two races of pterosaur people living on the tepui/plateau above a village, and the village relies greatly on trade from the isolated culture of reptiles. These two races have a social hierarchy that separates the wingless pterrans from the winged Pterafolk, and for as long as anyone can remember this hasn't stopped their culture from functioning. When your adventurers visit the village at the foot of the plateau, everyone is worried because trade with the pterosaur people has suddenly ceased, and once your players begin to investigate they see that the two races have become locked in a war for dominance.
This environment is enough to inspire a new multiclass: A "Circle of Spores" Druid x "Way of Mercy" Monk.
This multiclass could create a witchdoctor character for a Swamp Encounter.
A Land Swamp Druid could do just that on it's own though. If you don't want to multi-class that is. But i see what your trying to do. 👌
Ttrpg deliverance, gotcha, can do. I'll make sure the players know it was your idea 😁👍
Man, this video would’ve been fantastic a month ago when my party went to a swamp
I was dming a game where my players were in a swamp in the feywilds trying to get information from a coven of green hags; trying to find an elf soldier that had gone missing. The hags had the soldier as a pet inside a birdcage and my players actually managed to make a deal that got the soldier back, but then when the hags had a group of perytons they used to guard their home fly down to carry them out one of the players thought they were under attack and took a swipe at a peryton. Of course full scale combat and chaos broke out after that.
One of my druid players decided to try out the conjure woodland beings strat to summon a couple pixies to transform the pali and barb into t-rexes. It worked but concentration broke on conjure woodland beings soon after. I decided since they were in the feywild the pixies didnt vanish; just were no longer under control of the druid. The pixies found the combat entertaining to watch so held their concentration on polymorph; and decided to rob the coven of hags as they were dealing with the party. Pretty fun and chaotic session.
surinam toad froghemoth is amazing thanks for that idea
Shrek and Avatar in a swamp episodes? Welp, you ticked all the right boxes in my book.
actually perfect timing. i'm hosting a session on friday where the group will be exploring a swamp planet for the first time!
Confirming now that alligator is fire. Been eating it my whole life. It tastes like chicken and pork put together.
Its so good to have you back
I am glad you are back!
Finally, respect for the Froghemoth.
Alligator is tasty, it's got a neutral fish flavor... However, the meat is texturally similar to chicken.
Plus also, great video.
Somebody once told me
Runesmith upload, _LETS GOOOOOOO!!!!_ 😆
🍵😌👌
Thank god for this video, I was just about to throw my party into a swamp
Always enjoy your videos!
POV: Runesmith just watched Shrek and now you’ll watch him talking about an excuse to use shrek’s scenes
I really love the idea of the hillbilly matriarch froghemoth who lounges in their backwater shanty house and has a small army of spawn who do her bidding.
Where the Lizardfolk chill 😊💚
2:35 fucking killed me man lmfao
great video love the content
Bring the spell Water Walk. Worked for us.
Well! That's my trypophobia triggered 😂
I used this for an awesome lizard folk encounter now my players have a Pet giant lizard
Lego reference apprecited
Always love your videos and glad you are doing them again. Just curious, are those images all public domain? Just in case WOtC's recent change of heart is just a clever ploy to lull us back for another attempted cash grab.
Swamp ent that's massive
I Love videos like this!
Remember folks after you fight a swamp dragon make sure you partake in the meat🥩 and IRL those leathery bastards taste good👌🏽👌🏽😎
Runesmith is back!!!
Who do I talk to for writing adventures and settings??? You're very successful in that regard.
Man can't wait to send my #Pathfinder 2e group into a nasty and bug filled swamp
Basically froghemoths? Pretty please Mr Rune man
Always wanted to put my players in natural disasters.
Hurricanes, Tornadoes, landslides, avalanches, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, stampedes, lightning storms, and so on.............. Stuff the players have to run to safety from because not even Batman can handle 200 charging bison.
YOU'RE THE CHOSEN ONE, LOGAN!
This is the EXACT video I needed, at the EXACT time I needed it!
Aight , now can we get simple enviorment videos like this for various other settings?
Then once we have those could we string them all together untill we have a continent?
That's the last way I expected to Cameo in one of your videos
rats of unusual size? i dont think they exist.
side note i threw a froghemoth at my 4 lvl 3 players last session and man was that a tense couple of dice rolls. i think taking a rest in a swamp should also be something planned as swamps suck.
It's good to see you are back on track
Love swamps
they are good
I find that Swamp Water tastes like E. Coli
i love you so much, welcome back
I feel spoiled having this many videos come out so soon after each other.