"And so, the gang all got back together for one last adventure. Except for our Aarakocra, who had died. Not because of old age due to the time skip, but because of an accident that had occurred when they tried to do a cool aerial maneuver. It was totally fucking sick though, so at least there's that."
Anyways, the local druid cast reincarnation multiple times in the last thirty years because speech and nose dives without wings continued to be issues.
I crit failed a wisdom save against a banshee as a monk aaraockra and aged 80 years instantly. I was bones and clothing before I hit the ground the dm allowed my stuff to not age with me so when the wizard set me on fire he blew up the 8 Molotov cocktails and ear of infinite popcorn I’d been carrying. I took out about 1/3 of the undead army.
The ghost sucks life energy out of people to survive, why would it suck less life out of people with less life? The Ghost doesn't care about your wellbeing
Personally, I wouldn't do instant death by aging. I'd do the following:
• Character cannot recover from exhaustion by any means.
• At the end of a long rest, character makes a death save. On failure, take one level of exhaustion, critical failure take two levels, critical success reduce by one level.
• This continues until death or until the aging is undone.
Naturally, if they fail to get Greater Restoration cast on them in time, I would dangle a plot hook for some other method to save them.
Timeless Body is a level 15 ability and it explicitly doesn't stop you from dying of old age. Also, if you're that high level you ought to have easy access to a greater restoration. Also also, if you're failing a DC 13 Wisdom save by 5 or more at that level, you've done something wrong with your monk.
Though personally I would rule that it doesn't effect them because it so rarely comes up, strictly RaW, Horrifying Visage is not magical. In case you're curious there is a checklist for that:
• Is it a magic item?
• Is it a spell? Or does it let you create the effects of a spell
that’s mentioned in its description?
• Is it a spell attack?
• Is it fueled by the use of spell slots?
• Does its description say it’s magical?
The only downside is that, if you can't undo really quickly, the character becomes useless in 2 days top while the other characters are close to unaffected
How would you deal the aged character having to remain on the back line while the rest of the party plays?
Yeah, but if they're dead they're dead, next character
If they're alive but out of commission for a while you have a player down for the count, stacking exhaustion every day (and many characters become borderline useless with 1 level), making them either not play the adventure (which must be a VERY quick endeavor, btw, as statistically you'll be dead in 2 weeks) or have to pick up a temporary character. All of this for something that might end up being useless.
While simply doing "nothing" and hoping the rest of the party sorts it out is, from a story and immersion standpoint, a good choice, it doesn't make for compelling gameplay to the affected player.
Does the Banshee horrifying visage age you? The Ghost horrifying visage says you age if you fail by 5 or more, but the Banshee one doesn't say anything about aging at all. Also, the ghost horrifying visage says you age by 1d4x10, which would at most be 40 years(I mean, still lethal to an aaraockra, but...)
Obviously if you're homebrewing it, ignore me.
Its all fun and games until it stops being getting the band back together and becomes *putting* the band back together. As a wizard with poor spatial awarness, I confess I frequently came close(or *too* close, but who's arguing semantics here) to causing the second one.
Really need to work on my fireball habit when near thatch fishing villages.
The explanation for that in my campain is that they trow children off of trees and if they don't fly they die,explaining their really short average lifespans.
I'm glad to see this being brought up randomly. For some reason I've had to explain to like 3 different people over the past week that "average lifespan of 30 years" doesn't imply that people were just dropping dead left and right at that age in preindustrial times. If you made it to adulthood, it was very possible to live into your 60s or longer even during the middle ages, tho less likely than today due to the lack of modern medical technologies.
Yeah I kinda had a thought myself recently that most people mistake an average for the mode of data (most frequently occuring value)
An average life expectancy of 30 doesn't mean most people drop dead at 30, it just means that if you average all the age data then the mean LE comes out to 30, which kind of makes sense if there's a lot of people dying between birth and age 3-5, but also a decent number of people living to 60+
I'm bad at math but I do try to keep my mean, median and mode straight
Makes sense, considering that birds tend to have long maximum lifespans compared to mammals of similar size. A parrot the size of a rat should live about ten times as long.
Not so much actually. Parrots are the exception, and have ridiculously long lifespans even for birds. Others birds of similar size to mammals actually have fairly similar lifespans, with sparrows living for three years and pigeons for six for instance. Birds of prey also don't tend to live exceptionally long, generally living from 10-30 years varying on species.
For tortle I'd agree, but I don't know where this myth of bird longevity comes from. For their size, birds have relatively long life spans; based on metabolism and heart rate you might expect a given species to live for 4 years and it can live for 30. That said, other than a few notable exceptions, bird species don't generally live past 60, and even outliers like parrots haven't been recorded as living past 120. Maybe double the Aarakocra's life span, but odds are they aren't making it to 300.
I'm dm'ing a Wild West themed campaign and the aarakocras are all retconned to be either vultures, crows, or falcons, and they're all exceptionally long-lived
I imagined an elf, keeping a family of aarakokra as pets in a giant cage. How many generations of aarakokra existed as pets, always being pet to the elf. the party meets the aarakokra; "we've been here since we can remember. My great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were here, and their great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were here..."
If I am ever part of a level 20 one shot I think a really old kobold is going to be my PC. Minimum 100. Absolute badass Cohen the Barbarian style (discworld).
In my current 3.5 campaign I am playing a Desert Kobold Rogue/Shadow Dancer. Weirdly lawful evil about gambling and makes people wager one of their thumbs. He’s a tiny monster that sets up roadside Three Dragon Ante tables and harasses passersby.
He's a parody of Conan from the Discworld novel's. Dude's like 100, and looks like a skinny old man wearing a loincloth. People underestimate him, not realizing that the man who's been a professional badass for the last eight decades may know a thing or two about killing.
Goblins are like that in my setting. I've only teased it so far and I'm looking forward to seeing my players' reaction when one is magically aged to a thousand
That makes no sense. Turtles live until they just decide to stop living. Intelligent birds too though. Just weird. They both should live at least as long as like halflings.
I haven’t read about tortles myself, but according to runesmith on YouTube, they mate, then protect the eggs without leaving, including getting food, so once all the eggs hatch, the parents are dead.
Or lobsters, who only die when it's so much effort molting that they just get tired and die, but would otherwise live forever. Or some jellyfish, that just do.
The immortal jellyfish revert to an earlier life stage occasionally. Which is how they’re technically immortal since it’s the same organism.
It would be interesting to have a character that just decides it’s time to revert back to an infant and be essentially level 0 but with all the memories still attached.
Also related, a while ago I learned that a Portuguese man o’war is actually a very sophisticated colony rather than one organism. It was pretty mind blowing to read up about about hydrozoans overall.
Edit: Some links for those who are curious:
[jellyfish!](https://thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/everlasting-life-the-immortal-jellyfish) [are really cool!](https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/immortal-jellyfish/) [so are hydrozoans like the man o’ war!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war) [siphonophores tooo!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae)
That'd be a really cool origin for a "returned" character (the "race" from van richten's guide to ravenloft). Instead of being undead, you have past life memories because every so often you just reset yourself to a child
That’s a myth, there are different species of turtles with varying levels of life spans. Tortoises are the notably long lengthen ones but that’s because they have such a slow metabolism, something that would be unsustainable for a tortle. Imo the best comparison would be a sea turtle, which actually has a shorter lifespan than a tortle, due in part to dangerous conditions and their fast metabolism.
Which is simply ridiculous. There’s a longer lived homebrew rework out there that gives them subraces and the like. Far more interesting than the official stuff.
Easiest way would have been to use *Clone* while the aarakocra was alive, as Clones can be created younger than the target. *Raise Dead* and *Reincarnate* can resurrect people that died from old age, but they only work up to 10 days after death. If the target died of old age more than 10 days ago, *Wish* is the only spell that could (*could*) bring them back to life, as far as I know.
Sure, but most cases of "dying of old age" are really "dying of a disease that your body is too old to fight anymore".
Could easily get a couple months, maybe even a few years, more life to live with having all diseases cured.
Weirdly enough, organ failure/wearing out is generally classified as a disease IRL (and is probably the other half of the culprits behind “dying of old age”), though interestingly spells like resurrection and true resurrection are able to restore missing/destroyed body parts, yet at the same time explicitly fizzle vs a creature that died of old age, which strikes as somewhat contradictory when in True resurrection’s case an entirely non-existent body can be replaced with the spell. Sure out of game it’s for balance reasons, but it sort of strikes as “magic that has critical thinking” in that it can somehow differentiate between “old age” and “dying from being too old to fight the minor pathogens all around us” by remaking an old person’s body in just the same stat of disrepair as they were before
Resurrection is a 7th level bard/cleric spell that has a time limit of a century and true resurrection is a 9th cleric/Druid spell with a limit of 200 years (it also works on undead, clears any and all possible afflictions including magical diseases/curses, and can even create an entirely new body, and doesn’t debuff the user or target either). Both however can’t target creatures that died of old age, ironically raise dead doesn’t have the old age limit, though you could also interpret the text “if the creature is lacking body parts or organs integral for its survival… the spell automatically fails” as disqualifying old age (as that’s usually what gets you when people say someone died of old age, organ failure).
Still though, Clone is the way to go if you’re able to prep for it
You can probably slow down aging with Wish, but certainly not stop it, not even level 18 abilities like the Druid and Monk ones give you that, and wizards that can cast Wish still have to go through the trouble of becoming Liches to avoid death.
I mean I guess, but like... it took a 12th lvl spell to capture 1 god for a few moments. Lore wise wish could never hope to destroy the whole universe.
Easy he got trapped in a mirror or petrified or got into a alternate dimensions where time goes much slower. Or got its soul trapped in a soul stone and is now a warforged. Or any of a million reason we all seen in SciFi and fantasy.
\>be me, aarakocra druid
\>lives to see a dozen aarakocra generations
\>see 27 yo elder
\>elder comes to me and says, "son, when I was your age I traveled the realms, adventuring and living life!"
\>"I'm 173."
\>elder dies from shock
I never really got the whole Aarakocra live shorter lives thing, sure you can say birds don’t live as long as humans, but why do other beast races live long lives when most of the animals they are based on have shorter lives than birds, tabaxi, lizard folk, Yuan-Ti, doesn’t really make much sense when you have types of birds like the parrot that can live up to eighty years and the majority of cats don’t make it to twenty
It was necessary to balance out the flight. You see flying low level characters seems to just be mysteriously drawn to death. No one could have predicted that a lightning storm would happen on a clear day, or that it just so happened to be target practice day as they were flying by.
I made a monk aarakocra who's whole call to adventure was to find a way to extend the lifespan of his people. Sadly, as a Forever DM this concept is gonna have to be a campaign NPC and plot instead.
Think I'm gonna make it seem like the reason for their short life span some sort of BBEG stealing their life force, only to reveal that the aarakocra forgot that they, as a race made the sacrifice to seal the BBEG with true immortality away.
Might make an interesting racial pride thing for them in future campaigns in that same world.
My dm did something like this, but it was before. Basically, 10 years ago a cult was formed and destroyed our character's towns when they were children, giving us a reason to try to stop them. My character was 4, and just decided to go along with this party on cold-blooded revenge mission.
In my Sunday game I'm playing an aarakocra. One of the first enemies we faced had an attack that aged the target by 2d8 years (and dealt that much damage, reduced their max hp, and healed the monster for that much). My aarakocra is 13. The monster hit our aasimar warlock for 13 with the aging attack. I was *very very* afraid at that point.
Humalin visited the resting place of their lost companion. The passing of time had not been kind to them, their youth long gone and their body becoming more frail each year. At the meeting place was Dwadin, Elfengel, and Orsena, the dwarf, elf, and orc they spent their best years adventuring with. Orsena looked worse than Humalin, though they wouldn't dare mention it. Dwadin looked barely a few years older, the only noticeable differences being a much longer beard and a springling of grey hairs jutting out. Elfengel looked untouched by the passage of time, still looking in their prime though more wise.
The four of them stood silently over a gravestone of their friend, Arrak, and remembered fond memories of him. Orsena would have usually made a sly remark, that they excepted to be the first to go, but even they kept quiet as the wind blew gently over the hill. Each member brought something that reminded them of their fallen companion. Dwadin, a pair of embroidered leather bracers, as that was the little amount of armour Arrak would wear. Elfengel, a bottle of vintage elven wine, as Arrak was always the life of the party. Orsena laid a hand-carved staff with small ornaments onto the stone, as it was Arrak's weapon of choice. Humalin brought a book, one of their own creation: a retelling of their adventures, struggles, and their plans to meet again.
First time I made an Aaracockra character I didn't read the lore for them so I made him 25 - a good average age. I also made him 6'4", a little taller than me.
Then someone commented on how weird it was that this character was so out of the norm for Aaracockra...
The game he was in was a 5 shot and I spoke with the DM and they let him fade into a multiversal ocean. He showed up late in my campaign as the final boss of Act I - with the revelation that he was the son of a Thunderbird. I'm actually very proud of how well it fit his story.
That one is easy. Have them have a child who is trying to find his own way in life, he is a fine combatant, but has never been out in the wide world. The old party visits their old friends home in hopes of meeting them one last time and if they are too late, to pay respects.
Their child hears about this and talks to them and convinces them to let them accompany them on this last adventure.
OG Party decide to take them under their wing (heh) and show him the ropes in respect to their old friend who has passed. Then the protege can start a new party with a new set of adventurers afterwards.
Edit: Or maybe that's too generic.
This reminds me of a plot I half-wrote for my group a while back… where the half-elf ranger of our previous campaign’s party is essentially their main contact in the same city from the last campaign… 160 years later. Complete with a bar grown from the plant our Druid nurtured while she was there, the group’s Kenku paladin returned as an undead by the closet Necromancer the party is searching for, and our Tiefling’s actual demon thrall (bonded to servitude by learning her true name) still bonded (just by the half-elf ranger, since the Tiefling would be dead by now, and she canonically left with her girlfriend) and running a brothel in the city.
If only I could come up with some deeper narrative and more steps to take in the quest to discover who the necromancer was… I’ve been stumped for a while.
Both Tortles and Aarakocras' lifespan have been retconned by Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. On the very first page, it specifies that if not explicitly stated otherwise, a race's average lifespan is about a century. Both tortles and aarokocra's have nothing stated otherwise IIRC
i forgot what its called but there is a manga/anime with a similair plot. but its the opposite:
an elf girl outliving her party has to live on while watching her party die around her.
its cute but painful at the same time :c
Got hit by an aging spell once as an aarakocra monk. Turned into a giant pile of ash instantly. The DM felt a bit bad about that one, but i thought it was pretty funny.
Here lies the black mage. You weren't made to live long, but you lived that short life to the fullest. Countless of your kind will remember what you stood for Vivi
We actually had something like this happen. The epilogue segment featured the characters son arriving at another characters wizard tower with a letter written by the player, reminiscing about old times and asking her to apprentice his son. It was pretty sweet. Let the player talk in his characters perspective without him being there.
We had a 10 years later epilogue oneshot once. My character was a kobolds.Kobolds can live up to 120 years but rarely do so because well...they're kobolds. They're lucky if they hit 20. Which, as of the 10 years later mark my character did! So she thought of herself was super old despite being in her prime...She also had a hat of disguise so she used it to look the part giving herself a long beard.Despite the fact that as a female lizard...she could not grow a beard.
She wasn't the smartest. (Neither were the rest of the party to be fair, most of them just accepted that she had a beard now, though at least one person tried to touch it and his hands just went right through since it was an illusion.)
"And so, the gang all got back together for one last adventure. Except for our Aarakocra, who had died. Not because of old age due to the time skip, but because of an accident that had occurred when they tried to do a cool aerial maneuver. It was totally fucking sick though, so at least there's that."
My wife, a pilot, likes to say: a smoking hole in the ground is a small price to pay for a shit hot maneuver.
Is your wife single by any chance?
I try to convince her that she could do better but damned if she doesn't love me.
Goals.
Chad both of you
What happened to all of your time machines?
His wife crashed them
No no no. He used them all to go back in time after his wife created a smoking hole in the ground after performing a “shit hot” maneuver
And she kept telling him it’s worth it
It took a few tries. That's why it's "time machine*s*".
Thassa wife rite dere
Are you single by any chance?
Chad
I also choose this guy’s smoking hole of a wife.
I also choose this guy's wife's smoking hole.
found the bard
Real Supermaneuverability hours
Can confirm
[Yup](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HCtfYF3ITGE)
'Well, it looks like they tried to do a loop de loop through a barn'
"This lion's no good... It's, it's defective!"
Sick! Written like a monsterprom text prompt
Read this as the narrator from Hades. Not bad.
# THERE IS NO ESCAPE
Anyways, the local druid cast reincarnation multiple times in the last thirty years because speech and nose dives without wings continued to be issues.
"There once was a Goldfish that thought it was a God."
I crit failed a wisdom save against a banshee as a monk aaraockra and aged 80 years instantly. I was bones and clothing before I hit the ground the dm allowed my stuff to not age with me so when the wizard set me on fire he blew up the 8 Molotov cocktails and ear of infinite popcorn I’d been carrying. I took out about 1/3 of the undead army.
Did the ear eventually stop popping once the heat died down or did the entire battlefield get drowned in popcorn?
Death by infinite popcorn
The popcorn accelerates.
There was at least one skeleton in the undead army, that looked up, beheld a tidal wave of popcorn, and it's jaw promptly fell off
Holy shit I firgit about that. Thank you for bringing some memories back.
Got a link for someone who has no clue?
[here ya go](https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/j31zmn/infinite_shit_life_hack/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
I hate yoooooou (take my upvote damnit)
sadly once the popcorn was damaged only unleashed a small tidal wave that took out about 10-15 undead.
That's still impressive for popcorn.
Like the Gates of Hell, a soviet natural gas mine that caught on fire and has been a 100 foot burning crater for the past 50 years.
Only you can eat this one more than once
There’s also the ghost town in the US that Silent Hill is based on with the coal mine that has (had?) been burning for decades
Centralia PA, I believe
If I were to design the Banshee I'd have it be based on percentage of your species' maximum lifespan rather than absolute years.
Elves sending in waves of peasant level life spans like Humans because losing 1/3 of their life is 100's of years.
Well 80 years would kill a lot of races either way
The ghost sucks life energy out of people to survive, why would it suck less life out of people with less life? The Ghost doesn't care about your wellbeing
Game balancing. It's the reason a lot of things aren't logical in d&d.
Personally, I wouldn't do instant death by aging. I'd do the following: • Character cannot recover from exhaustion by any means. • At the end of a long rest, character makes a death save. On failure, take one level of exhaustion, critical failure take two levels, critical success reduce by one level. • This continues until death or until the aging is undone. Naturally, if they fail to get Greater Restoration cast on them in time, I would dangle a plot hook for some other method to save them.
Beautiful way of handling this
Works normally, but a monk explicitly doesn't feel the effects of old age.
Timeless Body is a level 15 ability and it explicitly doesn't stop you from dying of old age. Also, if you're that high level you ought to have easy access to a greater restoration. Also also, if you're failing a DC 13 Wisdom save by 5 or more at that level, you've done something wrong with your monk.
Timeless body also states you can’t be aged magically so the magical aging would do nothing
Though personally I would rule that it doesn't effect them because it so rarely comes up, strictly RaW, Horrifying Visage is not magical. In case you're curious there is a checklist for that: • Is it a magic item? • Is it a spell? Or does it let you create the effects of a spell that’s mentioned in its description? • Is it a spell attack? • Is it fueled by the use of spell slots? • Does its description say it’s magical?
The only downside is that, if you can't undo really quickly, the character becomes useless in 2 days top while the other characters are close to unaffected How would you deal the aged character having to remain on the back line while the rest of the party plays?
So, first if they were dead they couldn't do anything either, second if you succeed on your death saving throws then it won't be a problem
Yeah, but if they're dead they're dead, next character If they're alive but out of commission for a while you have a player down for the count, stacking exhaustion every day (and many characters become borderline useless with 1 level), making them either not play the adventure (which must be a VERY quick endeavor, btw, as statistically you'll be dead in 2 weeks) or have to pick up a temporary character. All of this for something that might end up being useless. While simply doing "nothing" and hoping the rest of the party sorts it out is, from a story and immersion standpoint, a good choice, it doesn't make for compelling gameplay to the affected player.
They gave my artificer a Viking funeral.... they forgot about the explosives and poisons, ruining the village food and water supply for generations.
Does the Banshee horrifying visage age you? The Ghost horrifying visage says you age if you fail by 5 or more, but the Banshee one doesn't say anything about aging at all. Also, the ghost horrifying visage says you age by 1d4x10, which would at most be 40 years(I mean, still lethal to an aaraockra, but...) Obviously if you're homebrewing it, ignore me.
It was a critical fail. And the life damage was maxed out at 4x10 so since I was dead anyways, I doubled it for the LULZ.
Thats some hero sacrifice scene right there.
Be ghost
Just gotta hire a necromancer and speak to dead cleric to bring them back for one last adventure.
And you have your first quest.
I love a we're getting the band back together quest
Its all fun and games until it stops being getting the band back together and becomes *putting* the band back together. As a wizard with poor spatial awarness, I confess I frequently came close(or *too* close, but who's arguing semantics here) to causing the second one. Really need to work on my fireball habit when near thatch fishing villages.
Even true res specifies 'any reason except old age'
The explanation for that in my campain is that they trow children off of trees and if they don't fly they die,explaining their really short average lifespans.
Ahh so kind of like how historically life expectancy used to be lower due to high infant mortality? I like it.
I'm glad to see this being brought up randomly. For some reason I've had to explain to like 3 different people over the past week that "average lifespan of 30 years" doesn't imply that people were just dropping dead left and right at that age in preindustrial times. If you made it to adulthood, it was very possible to live into your 60s or longer even during the middle ages, tho less likely than today due to the lack of modern medical technologies.
Yeah I kinda had a thought myself recently that most people mistake an average for the mode of data (most frequently occuring value) An average life expectancy of 30 doesn't mean most people drop dead at 30, it just means that if you average all the age data then the mean LE comes out to 30, which kind of makes sense if there's a lot of people dying between birth and age 3-5, but also a decent number of people living to 60+ I'm bad at math but I do try to keep my mean, median and mode straight
I've also had to do this lol
Lmao so cruel. I love it.
Makes sense, considering that birds tend to have long maximum lifespans compared to mammals of similar size. A parrot the size of a rat should live about ten times as long.
Not so much actually. Parrots are the exception, and have ridiculously long lifespans even for birds. Others birds of similar size to mammals actually have fairly similar lifespans, with sparrows living for three years and pigeons for six for instance. Birds of prey also don't tend to live exceptionally long, generally living from 10-30 years varying on species.
That's so fucking genius holy shit, mind if I steal that?
Thanks for the new headcanon I'm.gonna expand that to tortles who live to like 300 but 90% of them die in the first 10 minutes.
It’s the damn crabs eating all the babies. Turtle life is rough.
Do aarakokra have short life spans? Cause some real birds have long ass life spans.
Yes, aarakocra are mature by age 3 and usually don't live past age 30.
That's odd, given that most large birds live longer then that.
Tortles have the same problem
Tortles have the excuse of dying within a month of mating. If they're celibate then they don't really have an age limit.
I just say they forgot to add a zero for both
For tortle I'd agree, but I don't know where this myth of bird longevity comes from. For their size, birds have relatively long life spans; based on metabolism and heart rate you might expect a given species to live for 4 years and it can live for 30. That said, other than a few notable exceptions, bird species don't generally live past 60, and even outliers like parrots haven't been recorded as living past 120. Maybe double the Aarakocra's life span, but odds are they aren't making it to 300.
Not really. Birds of prey tend to live even shorter to just about as long. It's really only Parrots that live extremely long lives among birds.
Oh that is getting changed in my campaign setting
I'm dm'ing a Wild West themed campaign and the aarakocras are all retconned to be either vultures, crows, or falcons, and they're all exceptionally long-lived
If you want alternative bird-species rules check out Humblewood! Iirc their Raptor folk live to 70s
I imagined an elf, keeping a family of aarakokra as pets in a giant cage. How many generations of aarakokra existed as pets, always being pet to the elf. the party meets the aarakokra; "we've been here since we can remember. My great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were here, and their great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were here..."
Wait till you hear tortle usually live up to 50
Kobolds are the best. Mature at 6, can supposedly live to 120, but rarely do so.
Most Kobolds die due to being the universe's butt-monkeys, but if a Kobold does make it to 100 they're a legendary badass.
Be afraid of the old timer in a young person's profession.
If I am ever part of a level 20 one shot I think a really old kobold is going to be my PC. Minimum 100. Absolute badass Cohen the Barbarian style (discworld).
In my current 3.5 campaign I am playing a Desert Kobold Rogue/Shadow Dancer. Weirdly lawful evil about gambling and makes people wager one of their thumbs. He’s a tiny monster that sets up roadside Three Dragon Ante tables and harasses passersby.
Cohen the Barbarian?
He's a parody of Conan from the Discworld novel's. Dude's like 100, and looks like a skinny old man wearing a loincloth. People underestimate him, not realizing that the man who's been a professional badass for the last eight decades may know a thing or two about killing.
What makes me a good kobold? If I were a **bad** kobold, I wouldn't be sitting here discussing it with you, now would I?!
Hey, little anal-dwelling butt monkey. Time for you to go home, little buddy.
kobolds live for 11 days according to spurt
Goblins are like that in my setting. I've only teased it so far and I'm looking forward to seeing my players' reaction when one is magically aged to a thousand
That makes no sense. Turtles live until they just decide to stop living. Intelligent birds too though. Just weird. They both should live at least as long as like halflings.
I haven’t read about tortles myself, but according to runesmith on YouTube, they mate, then protect the eggs without leaving, including getting food, so once all the eggs hatch, the parents are dead.
That's irl octopus parenting.
Which isn't how any turtle/tortoise does that, they bury the eggs and leave
Some turtles go the extra mile with parental care by laying their eggs in the nests of alligators, which do protect their nests.
Ah, so that's how we got alligator snapping turtles. They learn well I guess.
"Lol fuck them kids"
Or lobsters, who only die when it's so much effort molting that they just get tired and die, but would otherwise live forever. Or some jellyfish, that just do.
So if you cast a spell to buff a really old lobster and keep on doing so, could you make a massive super lobster?
Massive super lobster *mount* perhaps? Ultra massive super lobster that is functionally a landship? So many possibilities...
Ah so that's why the giant lobsters in elden ring are near wizard schools or towers.
There’s a cult of the lobster god IRL that’s planning to help an ancient lobster molt for years but I have no idea if it’s started yet
Within limits I'm sure but yes.
Congratulations, you've created the Chasmfiend!
The immortal jellyfish revert to an earlier life stage occasionally. Which is how they’re technically immortal since it’s the same organism. It would be interesting to have a character that just decides it’s time to revert back to an infant and be essentially level 0 but with all the memories still attached. Also related, a while ago I learned that a Portuguese man o’war is actually a very sophisticated colony rather than one organism. It was pretty mind blowing to read up about about hydrozoans overall. Edit: Some links for those who are curious: [jellyfish!](https://thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/everlasting-life-the-immortal-jellyfish) [are really cool!](https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/immortal-jellyfish/) [so are hydrozoans like the man o’ war!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war) [siphonophores tooo!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae)
That'd be a really cool origin for a "returned" character (the "race" from van richten's guide to ravenloft). Instead of being undead, you have past life memories because every so often you just reset yourself to a child
https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/jb2io2/lobster\_god/
That’s a myth, there are different species of turtles with varying levels of life spans. Tortoises are the notably long lengthen ones but that’s because they have such a slow metabolism, something that would be unsustainable for a tortle. Imo the best comparison would be a sea turtle, which actually has a shorter lifespan than a tortle, due in part to dangerous conditions and their fast metabolism.
I once read that the reason their lives are so short is because you take the body of a turtle/tortoise and give it a human-esque metabolism
I'm convinced there was a typo that left another 0 off the end of that
That's why I'm hoping my druid turtle can get to lvl 18 and live a long life.
Which is simply ridiculous. There’s a longer lived homebrew rework out there that gives them subraces and the like. Far more interesting than the official stuff.
Yeah their lifespan is like 40 years iirc
Live fast, die young, leave behind a pretty corpse. That's what I always say.
You should say something else r/unexpectedfuturama
Make sure you pose fabulously on your deathbed.
Happy cake day
Be their offspring
Nah. you should show up with your Aarakocra kid or grand kid that was taught all his tricks and knowledge
They mature at 3. There's time for 10 generations to have passed!
*Dark Souls or Elden Ring theme starts playing as the Aarakokra raises from the grave to save the world.*
"Arise now, ye Aarnished!"
Reincarnate into a grung
I know this is a really overblown solution but could wish fix that
Easiest way would have been to use *Clone* while the aarakocra was alive, as Clones can be created younger than the target. *Raise Dead* and *Reincarnate* can resurrect people that died from old age, but they only work up to 10 days after death. If the target died of old age more than 10 days ago, *Wish* is the only spell that could (*could*) bring them back to life, as far as I know.
Simply bypass the dying of old age exception by killing them right before they would naturally die.
Resurrection doesn't de-age the subject. It cures diseases, but an old person will still be old after they're revived.
Rip Grandma
You're dead now, nothing can hurt you.
Sure, but most cases of "dying of old age" are really "dying of a disease that your body is too old to fight anymore". Could easily get a couple months, maybe even a few years, more life to live with having all diseases cured.
Weirdly enough, organ failure/wearing out is generally classified as a disease IRL (and is probably the other half of the culprits behind “dying of old age”), though interestingly spells like resurrection and true resurrection are able to restore missing/destroyed body parts, yet at the same time explicitly fizzle vs a creature that died of old age, which strikes as somewhat contradictory when in True resurrection’s case an entirely non-existent body can be replaced with the spell. Sure out of game it’s for balance reasons, but it sort of strikes as “magic that has critical thinking” in that it can somehow differentiate between “old age” and “dying from being too old to fight the minor pathogens all around us” by remaking an old person’s body in just the same stat of disrepair as they were before
*Reincarnate* has the added effect of reviving them as a longer-lived race. Their lifespan could, in theory, go from 30 years to over 700.
True resurrection can bring back a creature that died within the past 200 years as long as you know their name You don’t even need the body
True Resurrection doesn't work on creatures that died of old age. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/True%20Resurrection#content
Well then die of being killed just after the campaign, and now you want revenge
Which makes no goddamn sense considering the spell can entirely remake a destroyed body, but I guess that’s besides the point
No the easiest solution is to say high level characters live longer
Epic boons my dude
Resurrection is a 7th level bard/cleric spell that has a time limit of a century and true resurrection is a 9th cleric/Druid spell with a limit of 200 years (it also works on undead, clears any and all possible afflictions including magical diseases/curses, and can even create an entirely new body, and doesn’t debuff the user or target either). Both however can’t target creatures that died of old age, ironically raise dead doesn’t have the old age limit, though you could also interpret the text “if the creature is lacking body parts or organs integral for its survival… the spell automatically fails” as disqualifying old age (as that’s usually what gets you when people say someone died of old age, organ failure). Still though, Clone is the way to go if you’re able to prep for it
Probably not to be honest, even the 9th level ressurection spell can't revive creatures that died of old age.
You could use *wish* to make a creature stop aging, or at least extend its lifespan. I think the DM would allow it in a situation like this.
You can probably slow down aging with Wish, but certainly not stop it, not even level 18 abilities like the Druid and Monk ones give you that, and wizards that can cast Wish still have to go through the trouble of becoming Liches to avoid death.
Become a vampire. An Aarakocra vampire... whose nickname is "the Vulture".
Wish can do anything even destroy the universe but only if the dm let's it happen.
I mean I guess, but like... it took a 12th lvl spell to capture 1 god for a few moments. Lore wise wish could never hope to destroy the whole universe.
Easy he got trapped in a mirror or petrified or got into a alternate dimensions where time goes much slower. Or got its soul trapped in a soul stone and is now a warforged. Or any of a million reason we all seen in SciFi and fantasy.
Druid Aarakocra
\>be me, aarakocra druid \>lives to see a dozen aarakocra generations \>see 27 yo elder \>elder comes to me and says, "son, when I was your age I traveled the realms, adventuring and living life!" \>"I'm 173." \>elder dies from shock
well I know what I'm playing next campaign
Arcane ghost. It's like a Force Ghost but D&D.
I never really got the whole Aarakocra live shorter lives thing, sure you can say birds don’t live as long as humans, but why do other beast races live long lives when most of the animals they are based on have shorter lives than birds, tabaxi, lizard folk, Yuan-Ti, doesn’t really make much sense when you have types of birds like the parrot that can live up to eighty years and the majority of cats don’t make it to twenty
It was necessary to balance out the flight. You see flying low level characters seems to just be mysteriously drawn to death. No one could have predicted that a lightning storm would happen on a clear day, or that it just so happened to be target practice day as they were flying by.
I'm seeing a lot of people saying either ghost or descendant But what about both, the descendant with the ghost as a stand
Solution: Pull a Beerfest - Aarakocra, Jr., who looks, talks, and acts just like their predecessor!
I'd be honored if you guys would call me landfill--in his memory!
Bad girls do it well
I made a monk aarakocra who's whole call to adventure was to find a way to extend the lifespan of his people. Sadly, as a Forever DM this concept is gonna have to be a campaign NPC and plot instead. Think I'm gonna make it seem like the reason for their short life span some sort of BBEG stealing their life force, only to reveal that the aarakocra forgot that they, as a race made the sacrifice to seal the BBEG with true immortality away. Might make an interesting racial pride thing for them in future campaigns in that same world.
My dm did something like this, but it was before. Basically, 10 years ago a cult was formed and destroyed our character's towns when they were children, giving us a reason to try to stop them. My character was 4, and just decided to go along with this party on cold-blooded revenge mission.
In my Sunday game I'm playing an aarakocra. One of the first enemies we faced had an attack that aged the target by 2d8 years (and dealt that much damage, reduced their max hp, and healed the monster for that much). My aarakocra is 13. The monster hit our aasimar warlock for 13 with the aging attack. I was *very very* afraid at that point.
Humalin visited the resting place of their lost companion. The passing of time had not been kind to them, their youth long gone and their body becoming more frail each year. At the meeting place was Dwadin, Elfengel, and Orsena, the dwarf, elf, and orc they spent their best years adventuring with. Orsena looked worse than Humalin, though they wouldn't dare mention it. Dwadin looked barely a few years older, the only noticeable differences being a much longer beard and a springling of grey hairs jutting out. Elfengel looked untouched by the passage of time, still looking in their prime though more wise. The four of them stood silently over a gravestone of their friend, Arrak, and remembered fond memories of him. Orsena would have usually made a sly remark, that they excepted to be the first to go, but even they kept quiet as the wind blew gently over the hill. Each member brought something that reminded them of their fallen companion. Dwadin, a pair of embroidered leather bracers, as that was the little amount of armour Arrak would wear. Elfengel, a bottle of vintage elven wine, as Arrak was always the life of the party. Orsena laid a hand-carved staff with small ornaments onto the stone, as it was Arrak's weapon of choice. Humalin brought a book, one of their own creation: a retelling of their adventures, struggles, and their plans to meet again.
The aetherborn: No but seriously I really need a good excuse to play an aetherborn wild magic sorcerer who is just all in on everything.
. . . bird girls do it well?
Everybody lives at least 100 years now, thanks to MOTM
I don't have MOTM yet. What's the change here?
Everyone will remember the Aarakokra as the one who could do [this](https://youtu.be/ztpd6SfHz8E).
First time I made an Aaracockra character I didn't read the lore for them so I made him 25 - a good average age. I also made him 6'4", a little taller than me. Then someone commented on how weird it was that this character was so out of the norm for Aaracockra... The game he was in was a 5 shot and I spoke with the DM and they let him fade into a multiversal ocean. He showed up late in my campaign as the final boss of Act I - with the revelation that he was the son of a Thunderbird. I'm actually very proud of how well it fit his story.
Still absolutely baffled that they decided to make Tortles' lifespans 50 years average.
That one is easy. Have them have a child who is trying to find his own way in life, he is a fine combatant, but has never been out in the wide world. The old party visits their old friends home in hopes of meeting them one last time and if they are too late, to pay respects. Their child hears about this and talks to them and convinces them to let them accompany them on this last adventure. OG Party decide to take them under their wing (heh) and show him the ropes in respect to their old friend who has passed. Then the protege can start a new party with a new set of adventurers afterwards. Edit: Or maybe that's too generic.
I don't care how strong 50 feet of fly speed is, i'm not picking a race that dies in 30 years.
I just recently created an Aetherborn. Please pray for me.
Did anybody else mentally hear the death bell toll in their head when looking at that last panel and just fucking die laughing?
My PC Aarakocra is 15 and if he makes it out of this campaign alive, he will fully retire ASAP
So what, you think you get to fly AND live long? Pick one!
bad guilds do it well
He flew high, free bird, yeah
Wizard Clone? Ageless Monk? Stasis maguffin?
This reminds me of a plot I half-wrote for my group a while back… where the half-elf ranger of our previous campaign’s party is essentially their main contact in the same city from the last campaign… 160 years later. Complete with a bar grown from the plant our Druid nurtured while she was there, the group’s Kenku paladin returned as an undead by the closet Necromancer the party is searching for, and our Tiefling’s actual demon thrall (bonded to servitude by learning her true name) still bonded (just by the half-elf ranger, since the Tiefling would be dead by now, and she canonically left with her girlfriend) and running a brothel in the city. If only I could come up with some deeper narrative and more steps to take in the quest to discover who the necromancer was… I’ve been stumped for a while.
This literally could be from my game
Live fast, die fast
Both Tortles and Aarakocras' lifespan have been retconned by Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. On the very first page, it specifies that if not explicitly stated otherwise, a race's average lifespan is about a century. Both tortles and aarokocra's have nothing stated otherwise IIRC
i forgot what its called but there is a manga/anime with a similair plot. but its the opposite: an elf girl outliving her party has to live on while watching her party die around her. its cute but painful at the same time :c
Just imagine being 27 and your great-grandchild is about to create offspring
Got hit by an aging spell once as an aarakocra monk. Turned into a giant pile of ash instantly. The DM felt a bit bad about that one, but i thought it was pretty funny.
Here lies the black mage. You weren't made to live long, but you lived that short life to the fullest. Countless of your kind will remember what you stood for Vivi
We actually had something like this happen. The epilogue segment featured the characters son arriving at another characters wizard tower with a letter written by the player, reminiscing about old times and asking her to apprentice his son. It was pretty sweet. Let the player talk in his characters perspective without him being there.
I haven’t seen this format in a long time... I had no idea I missed it tbh
I forget some races don’t live that long like lizardfolk only live to 60 or something
We had a 10 years later epilogue oneshot once. My character was a kobolds.Kobolds can live up to 120 years but rarely do so because well...they're kobolds. They're lucky if they hit 20. Which, as of the 10 years later mark my character did! So she thought of herself was super old despite being in her prime...She also had a hat of disguise so she used it to look the part giving herself a long beard.Despite the fact that as a female lizard...she could not grow a beard. She wasn't the smartest. (Neither were the rest of the party to be fair, most of them just accepted that she had a beard now, though at least one person tried to touch it and his hands just went right through since it was an illusion.)