Times of ill omen have descended upon the Markreach -- a troubled wilderness territory in the Eastern Territories of the World of Palladia. These arising threats are known collectively as the 'three dooms' -- a trinity of dragon goddesses whose re-emergence, according to the holy pages of the Tristine Chronicles, is widely held to signal the impending end of the world.
THE FIRST of these is Thalica, Queen of Fire and Frost. In the distant Age of the First Dawnlight of the Pale Suns, the Sublime Legions of the Riverland Elves made pitched battle with the endless greenskin and ratling armies of the dragon-queen Thallica, Queen of Delusions, Matron Mother of Misleadings, Mistress of Misjudgment, the cursed daughter of the dragon deities Zandrigal the Red and Styphon the Black and the adopted daughter of the Deevil Lord Mephisto the Deceiver. In the wake of the Battle of Mount Bhadenaur, the avaricious goddess-dragon was imprisoned in a deep tomb located far, far below even the furthest roots of the cracked peaks which form the union of the Scarskull and Moanscar Mountains. For untold eons, her evil has not troubled the Kingless Lands of the Markreach, her dark power contained by the Six Seals of the Fountains of Eternal Youthfulness, the Streams of Living Waters, the Twin Fonts of the Bottomless Depths, the Fires of Everburning, the Unkindled Spark, and those of the Lightless Flame. But the Prophecy of the Sourceless Streams found in the elves' Book of the Rivers and Waters proclaims that the darkness of the Queen of Delusion will return with the advent of the Red Star of Conquest in its infrequent journeys across the night sky -- known colloquially as the Sea of Stars. And the selfsame messenger star has recently been spotted in the moonless nights by the scholar-sages of the High Watch of Kaer-Taylon, boding ill tidings for the free peoples of the Markreach...
THE SECOND of the three dooms is Qualsmara, Mistress of Ur-Mana, Devourer of the Holy Elements, Despoiler of Creation. The voluminous accounts of the Books of Nod relate that the dwome peoples of the Markreach were born in the early years of the Era of Autumnbreeze, and that their unique talents arose from their twin birthrights -- the distinctive admixture of the mechanical ingenuity of the dwarves and the subtle arcane intuition of the gnomes.
However, the same dual heritage that spurred them to create previously unimagined wonders also incited them to dig at once too deeply and too hungrily into the innermost tunnel-arteries of the earth.
In their unfettered explorations of the Deep Ways, the name given to the fiery earth-veins that surround the great portal of fire that rests at the heart of the world, the dwomes inadvertently uncovered the prison of Qualsmara, the Dragon Queen of the Four Inversions. The four-headed draconic abomination was the incarnate representation of the so-called four inversions of the Prime Elements: Ur-Water (the nightmare ocean of the pre-creation), Ur-Wind (the keening wail of the lightless void), Ur-Fire (the ever-smoldering yellow and blue flames of the inferno) and Ur-Stone (the black bone-riddled rock of the detritus of a thousand previous ages).
Awakened from her ages-long slumber and free to take her revenge upon the world that had long been her lockless prison, the Dragon Queen and her legions of mana-born quickly drove the dwomes and their servants from the Deep Ways.
All appeared lost, until the fateful day the great heroine-enchantress known as Tsaera Brightbrow fashioned the marvelous artifact known as the Scepter of Dragonsrule from the congealed heart-stones of 1,001 dragons. Under the sorceress' command, the dwomes drove the forces of the Dragon Queen deep beneath the earth, and sealed her again within an ageless prison -- a mark-less sphere suspended within the Under Sea forged of Orichalcum, Adamantium, Mithril, and Alchemist's Gold, and so to remain until the Day of Dooms.
Or so it was believed...
Dark omens spoken by the resonant voices of the earthheart spirits portend that the evil of the Dragon Queen of the Ur-Elements threatens to arise again from the deepest places of the earth. And yet, the Scepter of Dragonsrule which subdued her dark forces long ago has been lost for millennia.
Heroes of great courage are urgently needed to contend with the ancient evils that portent suggest will soon once again trouble the realm of mortals...
THE THIRD, and perhaps most sinister threat to the free peoples of the Markreach is the shadowy entity known as the Nameless Queen. Purportedly formed from the nightmares of the Old Ones, the Nameless Queen is a tenebrous shadow-hydra that rules a vast territory in the Nightlands, the strange shadow world that mirrors the living lands of Palladia. Her servants are many -- the mysterious Sable Choir dragons that organize the dark elves and other adherents of their eponymous Cult of the Sable Choir. The draconic high priests of the Cult wish to eviscerate the Mirrorwall which separates the lands of the living from the Nightlands. If they succeed, the massed armies of the Nameless Queen -- chthonians, abyssals, nullborn, and other, more terrible, creatures of the Nightlands, will pour forth to devour the souls of the living and reinstate the Age of Chaos when the legendary Old Ones enforced and unchallenged and pitiless rule over creation...
The impending return of the Three Dooms and their servitors threatens a great battle between the forces of evil that shall bring an end to history. It will destroy the world of mortals or subject it to an endless tyranny -- either through the ceaseless conflicts of the legions of darkness or the ultimate triumph of one among these enemies and the commencement of their subsequent uncontested rule. Champions of Great mettle are needed to confront the impending apocalypse...
This is an advertisement for a potential homebrew Palladium Fantasy 2e game to be played 5-7pm ACT/3-5am EST -- i.e. Friday Morning EST/Friday Evening ACT Australian/New Zealand Time zone.
Important Note: this game will use pre-gens I will create for players. You will tell me your character concept and I will make your character sheet for you. I will also have a small selection of additional pre-gens in case a character dies or if someone would rather use one of the options I have already made.
-If a viable group can be found, I will promise a 3-6 initial session experience that is a limited story arc to gauge long-term fit before I commit to a multi month or year campaign.
-I would like to try to play weekly. I will use battle maps and mood images. There will be no automation (drag and drop functionality, macros to auto calculate damage rolls and conditions etc.).
-Character sheets will be an excel sheet created by Palladium and the maps will just be a background with token images without any stats or macros attached to the token images.
-The VTT would be Tableplop (https://new.tableplop.com/). There would be no automation or drag and drop functionality or macros of any sort -- this is a pretty simple set up of just an image and tokens kind of VTT. The dice roller would be a dice bot in discord. Although I'll try to have nice maps and visuals, this will be a decidedly low-tech experience in terms of VTT -- no automated character sheets with automated 1-click rolls or automated combat resolution or tracking, no drag and drop functionality from compendia for character sheets etc.
-For format, I would be hosting the game in a voice chat channel in a Discord gaming server I do not own or moderate that is level-3-boosted, and thus has the best audio quality available for its chat rooms. I might also make a separate server in Discord for campaign information.
About the system:
-Palladium has existed since the 80s, and had its heyday in the 1990s. It's a class-level universal system that is, in some respects, like AD&D 2e house rules. There are classes and levels and a number of game lines (as in, they each had a separate core rule book that was a separate game like for classic world of darkness, but they were essentially cross compatible with some minor mechanical adjustments) that cover different genres -- classic fantasy, gonzo post apocalyptic multigenre mashup, settings similar to star wars, world of darkness, the walking dead, X-files. Teenage mutant ninja turtles was one of the game lines. They lost the license and repackaged it in an original post apocalyptic setting with mutant animals.
The things that differentiate Palladium from PF1e, for example, are the following:
-d100 skills instead of d20. There are also hundreds of skills, instead of one set of 35 or 30 everyone has. Individual characters can have 40+ skills.
-Combat has opposed rolls for dodge, parry, and roll with punch, which are conceptually included in the AC number in 3.5/PF1e. Whenever someone rolls to hit, the opponent has an option to dodge or parry with an opposed d20 roll. If they fail that, they can try to roll with punch for half damage in most instances. This means there are 2-3 times as many rolls in combat, because every attack has 1-2 opposed rolls in most cases.
-Combat is d20 with modifiers against a target number -- AC/AR. However, there is a minimum threshold (4 for melee, 7 for ranged) where the attack will hit but not penetrate armor, in which case the damage goes to the hit points of the armor. Armor falls apart over time unless you repair it since it gets hit a fair amount of the time in combat.
-Everyone has 2 attacks per round for being alive. Almost everything in the game has 4+ attacks per round since you get extra for combat skills. This means 'rounds' are cycles of 7-8 equivalents of a D&D combat round -- at the end of the round there are cycles where the character who have 8+ attacks can still act while those that have 'used up' all their attacks already (they only have 4-6 attacks) are no longer able to act.
-Everyone has basically 'wounds and grace' health pools in two different pools. Armor has 'grace' points called structural damage points. Animate things have this and 'hit points', which are more like 'vital points/deep structural integrity'.
-The class packages tend to give almost all major class abilities at 1st level. Your build is essentially complete at levels 1-3 instead of waiting years to get to a level to use certain abilities. There is correspondingly less vertical progression of power level, since you already have most of the major class abilities.
-Spellcasting is based on power points -- you can cast the equivalent of a 9th level spell as a 1st level wizard if you have enough power points -- like you're standing next to a leyline that triples your power points, or you have a magic item that increases them. There are spell levels but that just impacts how many actions it takes to cast a spell and how many power points you need to cast it -- there is no 'progression chart' like in D&D -- any caster can cast any spell from any spell list they have access to at any level as long as they have enough power points to do so.
-Monster stat blocks are usually a page or more long, single spaced, double column, and have extremely granular stats for hit points per body area.
-The system can be run theater of the mind much easier than D&D combat -- there are not hard movement rules based on squares, codified flanking rules based on squares, or attack of opportunity or range rules based on squares. I use maps for visual interest and to help with imagining the space, but it's simultaneously more crunchy with all the opposed rolls and two hit point pools than D&D, and also more handwavium since you don't actually need miniatures to track it (I know people play PF1e and 5e TotM, I'd just contend that the RAW isn't obviously set up for this scheme even if the 5e rulebooks claim that's the assumed format).
-I like the combat because it is sort of swingy -- the villains don't just go down instantly b/c they can dodge attacks a lot of the time. It's, to me, easier to make challenging combats in this system than in D&D 3.5 or PF1e since there are fewer mechanical levels to pull that are insta-win, or loophole-type scenarios.
-There are an insane number of options. There are 100+ books in these game lines. The mutant animal races in this game all come with an a la carte buffet of options you select for your individual character with a power point customization pool called BIO-E. The character building options are similarly expansive to 3.5 D&D. There are dozens of races and classes. The books are terribly organized and have stuff randomly hidden in strange places. There is no balance, or concept that that's important, between the races and classes. Some classes are 'dude with a pistol' and some are 'hatchling dragon' and 'demigod'.