User talk:Balmz/Penumbra Monarch (3.5e Vestige)

Ratings

	Eiji-kun opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	I remember this now. I have a huge amount of stuff just below trying to help patch its issues. I see I have run into a brick wall. I can do nothing more.

Ganteka Future opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.

Well gosh, what a clunky mess this is. Most vestiges have 3-5 abilities, because tracking abilities and getting to switch them out daily and all that is a thing, it needs to be easy on the player and DM so you don't keep having a "whoops, that's not how that works", because if any class that happens with, it happens with the binder, with experienced players who've been playing D&D for like two decades and know the system. This gives nine abilities for some reason, is generally boring, makes everything have different cooldowns. Shade Drain on a higher level bad guy you're fighting probably just has a good chance of ending your campaign in an unsatisfying way. It also isn't interesting, like most everything else here. What a clunky mess (I say again). You should sandbox this and rework it, trim out a lot of the fat, focus on what its goals are to bring to the table for a character in why they'd want to bind it, and make it easy to use.

Leziad opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.

I tried to reason with you, I gave you plenty of time. now it time to hatebomb. I won't lie this vestige is awful, it abilities barely follow how vestiges normally work and they for some reason don't scale at all. I have a problem with most of those abilities, Umbra Gift is just +3 attack (why) and some DR while most of it offensive abilities are just SoD, SoS or just insane damage. Despite all this it somehow weaker than most vestige of it level, given it provide no real utilities whatsoever.

Review Time

I was poking around your stuff. The name sounds interesting, but I was disappointed by the legend. It is somewhat bare bones. It reminds me of SCP articles where they redact everything with the idea that less is more, but they go so far that there isn't much left to hook. The story summarises as "Mystery bad guy with darkness theme appears, is defeated, wants to come back." which is the story of like... every reoccuring boss ever. I dunno, what makes this one special or unusual from Ganondorf #823?

But fluff is fluff, the real stuff is the mechanics, the crunch. With a DC 40 you will usually fail against this vestige. That's fine, I just don't find anything here justifying the high DC. It's mostly a moot point. It makes you pompous, so a heavy diplomacy penalty makes sense. Bluff a bit less so.

The special summoning is hyper expensive. You are spending 107,000 gp on a focus!!!! What is this epic-level spell shinanigans? Man, with an 8th level slot, DC 40 binding check, and a focus of a nation's GDP this thing probably lets you shoot nuclear bombs out of your dick as a free action! What do we get?

Oh.

Oh...

Ohhhh....

Honestly I don't know what to say really. Usually the issues is that something is too powerful and OP (and honestly trying to amp the power to match the price would be a folly), but this is dramatically underpowered even for a base 8th level vestige. The earliest you'd see this is level 15th and classically at 17th, but we have here is one decent power which is worded poorly: Lethal Breath. Confusion for a short time for Con damage. Con damage is the nicer of the two. It says "or". What determines that? Do you choose it, or is it random? And what part of the fluff of Ganondorf #183 describes why their breath is lethal anyway?

The rest of the powers, well... Dark Surge is, from what I think, supposed to be a 1 round action. It does a fixed amount of damage you were supposed to be doing 8 levels ago or more, with a save. Breaching SR means nothing; all vestige powers are supernatural (and thus breach SR) unless stated otherwise.

Shade Leech is Dark Surge but a single target vampiric touch, but even worse, trapped at 6d6! And there is a Reflex save... for what seems to be negates? That's even worse.

And lastly Shadow Hands, a "whopping" 8d8 with an uncertain range, and an uncertain type of physical damage. I can only think "swarm damage" since that's the only typeless physical damage I know of. Again with the saves for half.

And all of the powers only have the thinnest of connections to what the vestige is, that being something darkness related and bad. This is both fault of the powerset, and the fluff not explaining what exactly we're looking at.

Needs work. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 02:38, 23 June 2018 (MDT)

So, called it, it's TTYD's Shadow Queen ain't it?

Anyway I wanted to offer advice on the fluff part of this (the mechanics are also still messed up but that's for another day). I mentioned before that this seems very dull, that it's just a random dark themed bad guy who got defeated and returned. Part of this is because you're basing it off of a fairly generic villain, but you can still pull off vestiges based on other stuff and make it interesting.

What I do when I'm basing things on another source is I take the idea behind it and make it my own. Don't just repeat the story TTYD has but ask "How would I run this story in a classic D&D game?" This is actually pretty easy; as I said it's fairly generic. In this case it's up to you to add a bit more flavor by possibly expanding on who this shadow-themed conqueror was in their prime, how exactly they got sealed away and what makes the nature of their sealing special. Anyone can stab a conqueror, so why did this one not die right? How did it end up in a state of limbo? If they started out being a mysterious eldritch being, why is their current state any more special? And how did an eldritch being come into being in the first place? Why did this thing, eldritch as it is and unconnected to human desires and whims, want to conquer in the first place?

If I was taking this on, I'd probably approach it like this: The Penumbra Monarch was just a power hungry evil sorcerous who conquered the land with her powerful shadow magic. (This is comprehendible because humans understand powerlust and conquering, our history is full of it.) But no empire is forever, and in the midst of the darkness she spread was the spark of light and hope. (Just some poetic speech setting up the fact that there are heroes.) They went out on a quest to defeat her, and through years of struggle they ended up face to face against the monarch in her castle. (This sounds like a previous campaign, that's interesting.) They sundered her spells and shattered her wards and the monarch faced imminent defeat. She could not bear to suffer the humiliation of defeat and attempted one last experimental spell that pulled the Deep Shadow into the world. (Here I give the special reason why she is a vestige and not just dead. Deep Shadow is a good excuse as any. If you're not familiar with it, check your Manual of the Planes for details on that.) However the spell was incomplete, and instead she was dragged into the deepest depths of the umbral planes, and then she fell further and further, until she and the shadow could not be distinguished. (More poetic license.) Still, those who remember her may attempt the beginnings of the ritual she attempted, and in doing so call her back to the mortal realm. (And this implies that binders are starting the first parts of casting her spell. That's cool. Now this thing sounds like you're wielding the anti-life equation or something.)

So I'm not going to toot my own horn and say this story is "better", that's subjective. But I will say that there are differences. I tried to adapt the idea of the Shadow Queen idea from TTYD to D&D. You need not tell the whole story, she doesn't need to come back for a second time like she did in the game, her background lore is enough to justify the existence of a dark something waiting for you to call on it. I tried to avoid "mysteries" and "unknowns" on things that don't need it. Those things are spices. For that reason she's no longer an eldritch creature inherently, she has a reason for acting, and even the means of her vanishing and becoming a vestige is now known (even if the details of how she did it are a mystery, that's where you put your spice).

Perhaps this helps you for the fluff. You will still need help with the mechanics.

(And just for emphasis, that special summoning is utterly unworkable.) -- Eiji-kun (talk) 19:41, 25 June 2018 (MDT)

Review Part Two (The Crunch)

Right, so I said I'd get to the mechanics. Here we go.

I will admit, I have not played Thousand Year Door, so my knowledge on the subject will be going off the various wikis and whatnot. That said, how the mechanics are translated are still fair game. So, remember earlier when I said "and honestly trying to amp the power to match the price would be a folly"? Yeah, that applies here. But one at a time, let's look at the stuff.

So, about that special summoning. It is sticking out like a sore thumb. I feel like I need to discuss the purpose of material components and focii in the game. Material components are a joke, literally, but are sometimes used as a deterrent to repeated castings of a spell much in the same way XP is used as a method. Forcecage is a really good spell but its not used often because it's also a very expensive spell to use on what is essentially a consumable item. Focii are not quite like material components; it's a one time cost so its less of a deterrent and more of a gateway. And to be honest most of them don't even cost anything, they are there for fluff like the bag and candle of the summon monster spells. Sometimes you have a focus item that cost something like magic jar, usually because the focus is needed as part of the spell's function like a place for your soul for magic jar, or a means of observing for scrying. And these things are not expensive. The most expensive focus I found was legend lore which is a terrible spell that you won't be casting often anyway for material component, focus, and time reasons. I am not including the "focus" for soul bind since that one acts more like a material component. So the point is that focii are fluff things that are used as soft gateways, soft pre-reqs to use of a spell or other ability.

Having a focus for a vestige is unusual but not impossible, but if it is going to be used it should be akin to what you expect for a spell or similar ability of this level. This is functionally an 8th level spell in function, and even if we took the most extreme example of a focus cost, soul bind, for 15th level it would come out to a cost of 15,000g. And frankly even that is unjustified. The only thing you need to express for the focus is "you need a fancy rich people's crown". And this is cheap. A royal outfit is ostentatious. How much is it? 200 gp. That seems like a fine focus cost for something "rich and fancy".

Also, save your players some math. Give them the total cost of crown + jewels. This is just weird, like, "This hamburger will cost you $3.25 plus $0.94 plus $1.07. Solve for X."

But right, to the powers themselves. First I'll address what you have, then I'll suggest what you should use. When it comes to binders, binders are the poor man's warlock. They have some familiar powers; they usually have 3-5 powers. Some abilities are passive, some require actions, and some are especially good but come with a 5 round cooldown. This is how all vestiges function.

Piercing Energy: This is basically a non-power. Basically nothing blocks untyped damage anyway. I think there are like... 2 monsters. In all of D&D. And both are epic. So yeah.

Lethal Breath: So for some reason here and everywhere else you have fixed damage amounts at nearly random amounts too. Why do these abilities not scale? Damage effects classically deal XdX damage per level, or per 2 levels, depending on what it is supposed to do. This is uptyped damage in a wide area, so it seems perfectly fine to do XdX/2 levels. That means at the soonish you get this (level 15) you deal 7d6 damage. This is less damage than normal, traded off by its unresistability, and that's fine. And because it's so fine, I would suggest either this gets a 5 round cooldown or it steals the breath weapon cooldown of 1d4 rounds.

For some weird reason the alternative is Con damage. On one hand, Con damage is waaaaaaaaaaaay better than a puny 6d6 damage, and not something you want to hand out at will. On the other hand at this level you may be running into more and more things immune to ability damage. Not that many, but enough to consider it. Either way it's like... "You can either attack with this squirt gun, or you can attack with this bazooka." This is not a choice.

Dark Surge: So I am pretty sure you still mean a 1 round action because that is almost but not quite what you described. So it's a huuuuuge area, and is an arbitrary average 78 damage which is actually more damage than normal for 15th level. Ironically its biggest downfall is not the long casting time, it's the area. This is "Kill your party, the ability." Unless you are truly alone you are a threat to your own. And if you are, you're probably dead anyway. I don't know what to do with this.

Then again is said "Foes". Does that means allies are safe? In which case, why would I not use this ability every round forever while riding my horse, obliterating all life that dares approach me from anything other than sniping range? Now it's just broken again.

Shade Leech: Well, regardless how Dark Surge works, looks like I have a quicker single target Dark Surge that also drains. Remember how I said the average damage was 78 smackaroos and how this was very abnormal damage for 15th level? Yeah, this, but now you are also unable to die as you heal 34-78 damage each round. So yeah this just doesn't work. Oh, and for gravy more ability damage. It didn't need it.

Shadow Hand Barrage: So I was reading about her powers and shadow hands were part of her powerset. This is another abnormally strong but eventually outpaced damage effect this time in a line. It also lasts for 3 rounds, which makes this battlefield control as well. It comes with a prone effect this time, and by bypassing DR the bludgeoning damage may as well be untyped damage.

Shade Lightning: These ranges are absurd, did I ever tell you that? This one's damage is just through the roof. Where do you get these numbers? And why would I spend a round charging up my dark surge when I could spam this every round and kill all life not in sniping range forever? Once again by bypassing immunity, it is essentially untyped damage.

Drag to the Depths: Whew boy, mass area grapples with invincible hands and 4 round duration. I will be addressing the nature of the power of vestiges soon, but the tl;dr is "this is too much".

Penumbra Hands: It's still going. Why are there so many powers? This brings in physical attacks into your power arrangement, but compared to the previous stuff it's also unimportant.

Shade Safety: "You gain +6 on attack rolls and damage reduction 30/magic" Lol what.

SO.... about binders and their power level...

I made a comparison to warlocks. Like warlocks, they are chock full of at will abilities or almost at will abilities. The warlock damage scales with level, as it should. Their actual invocations, the ones that mimic spells, seem to be a bit behind. This is intentional. The supposed trade off for infinite ammo is weaker ammo; in short the warlock doesn't get the top tier spells like time stop and wish at their high levels because their abilities are at will. They are further constrained by a limited invocations known list, something binders actually bypass since like wizards they can swap out their powerset every day in exchange for being limited to groups of powersets (the vestiges). But these are still at will casters.

If you are going to give your binders a damage ability (which mind you not all vestiges have), you should scale their damage. That way whatever level they bind this, the damage should always be level appropriate. And you must remember that these have the potential of being cast every round forever. You can abate that by introducing aforementioned cooldowns, but in the end it's still at will.

The other thing you have to remember is at these high levels, binders will be packing more than 1 vestige at a time. This is why you can go without a damage ability, because the slack can be picked up by another vestige. So this is not their only powerset in the world. For that reason, and for reasons of length, this is why most vestiges have at most 5 powers, and many more less than that. And like before some of those are passive so you aren't drowned in option paralysis. You know your powers, few as they are, and can spam them as needed.

When I see things like Shade Safety, I see an effect which is not appropriate for its level. When I see Drag to the Depths I ask "why isn't this just a Bigby's Hand spell effect?" When I see Shade Lightning, I see "why isn't this spammed forever".

So if we're going to compare to spells I do what warlocks do and look at things about 4 levels behind than normal, or 2 spell levels roughly. If this comes into play at level 15 (8th level spells) then we should be looking at 6th level spells for their power level and usefulness. This is subjective; I wouldn't bat an eye at a low level vestige that gave the power of secure shelter, but that's because this is utility which is cool and now very strong even at low level, in spite of being a mid-tier spell. I would object to something like cone of cold at first level not for its damage (because it scales) but for its massive range. Speaking of which, your ranges are absurd for all your abilities right now.

tl;dr: Too many powers, too strong powers, powers not even balanced against each other, damage is wonky.

So, like I said I did not play TTYD but I do have google. Lemme see what I can do for powers. I will have no more than 5 powers; less if I can get the idea in a tighter package. What does the Shadow Queen do? Well, according to a wiki:

In battle while in her true form, she is immune to normal and defense-piercing attacks, and can only be made vulnerable with the power of the Crystal Stars. In her true form, she is able to use her hands to drain the health of her enemies and pierce their defenses. They are also capable of smashing opponents to the ground, and are considered separate enemies that can be targeted individually. Whenever they're defeated, the Shadow Queen can revive them the following turn. The Shadow Queen is also able to strike her opponents with lightning that pierces her target's defenses. When low on health, the queen will often resort to attacks that induce poison, confusion, or allergies that prevent status changes.

One of the Shadow Queen's stronger attacks is the use of several shadowy hands that come up from the ground and drag Mario or one of his partners down into the shadows and damage them with several attacks or stampede them for heavy defense-piercing damage. The queen will also attack the audience members with these hands to drain their energy to restore her to full health and power. Her strongest attack is a series of dark energy waves that hit Mario and his partner for heavy damage, but this attack takes a turn to charge up, allowing Mario to avoid it with Vivian's Veil ability. Additionally, the Shadow Queen also has the ability to temporarily raise her attack and defense by 3.

The first part about defenses can be ignored. This is D&D not Mario, and there are no Crystal Stars. It's basically a plot device shield in this context, which is breached because story reasons. We have vampiric draining as a trait, shadow hands dealing physical attacks, lightning, poison, confusion, preventing status changes, and long charged up dark wave. The other mention of shadow hands is just a permutation of the first. The raising defenses part is a bit harder to translate since D&D defenses do not work like that. It could be argued that this is an increase in AC or damage reduction.

However, what is important flavorwise about the shadow queen? Especially given the fluff?

Well, shadows for one. Thus, I elect "Shadow Hands" and "Long Charge Dark Wave" to be in. Now we have two blast abilities right now, and we want to be a versatile. What good is a vestige with five flavors of "you deal damage"? So our next selection is the thing about poison, confusion, and status change locking. Why don't we make this two powers, one about status change locking and one about poison and confusion which we'll put into one power. It says this is only done at low health so we can make this a passive death throes like ability, such as "when you drop below 50% in an encounter^{this part is important} X effect triggers", in which case the enemy or a nearby range to you is hit with simultaneous poison and confusion effects. Heck, they could even be the spells poison and confusion to make it nice and easy. I made it like this so it wasn't just another "take action, deal damage" effect. You'll want to word it so that it doesn't trigger when you start battle with less than 50% health.

As for the other, I believe there is a homebrew spell akin to what you want, but you can easily make it "Target in X range makes a Will save. Their status is locked and they cannot benefit or be penalties by any status effects good or bad for X rounds. This doesn't affect current status effects they possess." This ability is pretty good. Actually it can be used as a party buff. Thus I strongly suggest a 5 round cooldown with a 5 round duration, so only one person enemy or ally can benefit/be penalized by its effect at a time, and only with constant upkeep.

That's four powers right there. I could stop here. The long charge dark wave is just a 1 round damage spell with a reasonable range and damage, and its 1 round nature will restrict tactical use. You can also restrict use by making the area effect inconvenient, such as focused on the caster and affecting everyone involved. And the Shadow Hands... well, there is literally a shadow hands spell but if you don't feel like pulling out your Spell Compendium, just refer to the Bigby's hands spell of choice or even telekinesis. Having that at will, limited to a maximum of 2 hands, is fine. And by referencing them you do not need to reprint the entire text about how they work. You could even make the summoning time for the hands to be long if they stick around, which I imagine they do. That way if a hand dies in battle, it's gonna cost you some precious actions to bring it back.

Heck, we'll do five powers since the last one was somewhat important sounding. Give them vampiric touch. It's an ok spell, with ok damage, and just the hp drain you seek. This is actually perfectly legit to be at will at 15th level for a binder.

I am leaving out the lightning. It's just another "does damage" effect, and we have three right now. Any more would be overkill.

What do you think? -- Eiji-kun (talk) 22:43, 25 June 2018 (MDT)

Holy hell, I somehow missed part of Lethal Breath. DAZED for 6 rounds. Oh ho ho ho holy shit no. Kill it immediately! -- Eiji-kun (talk) 02:06, 26 June 2018 (MDT)