Slowly, as I continue to recover from months of constant exhaustion, withdrawal, and pain (not necessarily in that order), I’m getting back into my various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. This past weekend, it was time to get back into The Demigods of Daelen, my sorta-hack of Dungeons and Dragons 5e to make the numbers big and the storytelling potential just as big (don’t have to worry about the variability of a d20 as much if your bonuses to rolls are huge). Sometimes it feels more like I’ve hacked Roll20 rather than the Dungeons and Dragons system, but given that I’ve consciously and carefully taken the “bounded accuracy” core of D&D 5e and dramatically shifted it to work in a different way, I think I could probably call this a hack. One I’ll probably never write up and formalize in any way because you could probably get this effect much more easily using a different game system, but one that works for my crew of players who seem to prefer playing something that at least resembles Dungeons and Dragons over trying any new game system long enough to really get a feel for it. Anyway, this time we spent a good forty-five minutes catching up and then another forty-five minutes getting a player’s character finished. After that, we unified our players ahead of their upcoming mission, had a fun chit-chat-in-a-bar scene, and then promptly moved on to the main challenge the party will be facing for the first adventure of this campaing: a massive, orb-like mechanical contrapation that is very slowly but inexorably rolling its way towards a large-ish town that it will absolutely crush, slowly and painfully, if it is not somehow stopped. The session came to an end right as the party dealt with the first challenge pertaining to this strange almost-orb, as they were preparing to enter it, and I’m excited to see how the party deals with the challenge I’ve brewed up for them.

Since it had been a month and a half since we last met, we spent a little time catching up right at the start, but that quickly turned into spending a lot of time catching up. We went through the normal chatter at first, but then one of my players started asking about my well-being, in regards to both my withdrawal and also the project I’d been doing at work that I couldn’t talk about for a long time. This set me off a bit, since I’ve been so frustrated with work lately, and I wound up having to tell the whole story of everything that’s been going on with my job over the last three and a half months. I mean, aside from writing about some of it on my blog, I haven’t actually talked to many people about it since I don’t really want to bring people down with what feels like my relentless negativity and misery. I won’t refrain from talking about it if I’m asked or if there’s a conversation lead-in for it, but I generally haven’t been bringing up the specifics or trying to steer the conversation in that direction because I don’t want to bring people down. Which means a lot of people know various parts of what’s been going on in my life but no one but my therapist really knows the whole of it. Like I said, I don’t want to bring people down. It’s enough that I’m miserable, so why spread that around to other poeple? But my friend asked so I spent a bunch of time describing what had been going on and fielding the indignant comments and queries of my friends. It was a bit cathartic to be able to break it down quickly and validating to see my friends form similar opinions about it all, but it was also pretty exhausting.

So, once all that was done and the dead air of me waiting to hear what had been going on in my friends’ lives had hung around long enough, I moved into working on a player’s character. He hadn’t been around the session prior, so he missed all of the checking and updating and fixing that had happened at the start of the last session. I walked him through the big parts of it, glanced through the parts of his character sheet that he’d already finished, and moved the rest of us on to talking about the various media touchstones we’d set up for this game. Two of my players had read Gideon the Ninth since starting the campaign, but all talk of it stopped when we discovered that the final player hadn’t actually read it despite playing characters who were basically Gideon The Ninth in all my tabletop games (save one) for years. We talked about that for a bit and didn’t really touch on the Percy Jackson books (which I’ve promised to resume reading), but we did eventually convince the player to get over the cultural recalcitrance she’d embraced in regards to the series so that was good. In fact, she’s been updating the discord server as she listens through it with her thoughts on the matter and it’s made for an entertaining distraction from my workplace frustrations.

Once all that was done and the final player had finished his character sheet, I got everyone together in an inn with as little preamble as possible and tossed them into some roleplaying so they could get a feel for their and each others’ characters. They had a fun time getting to know each other and talking about what they’d all been up to recently before eventually pivoting into talk of what was to come and how they were hoping this additional character would be willing to come along and help with the task they’d been given. This character was also being drawn in the same direction, so he agreed. After a bit more banter and some fun around one of the characters trying to start a bar fight (via their semi-divine will rather than a thrown punch) in a tavern that was filled with calm people enjoying a peaceful evening, they went off to bed and woke up the next morning now able to notice the distant thrumming noise that had been slowly approaching them ovenight. They could even see the source of this noise on the horizona and figured out pretty quickly that this thing was the contraption they’d been sent to deal with. As they got closer, after rolling their daily encounter/event d100s (and thereby altering the challenge ahead of them), they were able to make out that it was this massive spherical structure make up of a uncountable number of spikes or pistons on the outside of structure that slowly rolled forward as the rows of spikes/pistons in the rear pushed the thing forward. Around it were hundreds of birds, diving and swooping around it and occasionally landing in its trail of distruction to pick at the ground before returning to the air. Behind the sphere was a few dozen people, following in the wake of this half-mile-diameter sphere as it slowly moved forward and left a trail of horrible destruction in its wake.

As they got closer, they were able to guess that the people following behind the sphere were those whose homes had already been destroyed by this device in it’s eight days of slow movement. As they got closer and talked with this group’s representative–a tough, leathery woman in her fifties named Anna–the party quickly became aware that this crowd was at least sort of worshipping this device. The party’s face, the character they’d just picked up, started in on convincing the crowd to give them what information they had and at least stay out of the party’s way, but an inopportune comment by a different player character started to sour the mood of the crowd and the muscle of the group trying to silence them through fear didn’t exactly help matters either, especially when both players flubbed their rolls and undid most of the work that the party’s face had done. He was able to salvage things in the end, mostly, but it did resolve with a few of the most fit members of this little Cult of the Divine Sphere going with the party to make sure that they didn’t shut it down before it fulfilled it’s divine purpose since, after all, it’s not like the gods would create something like this that would destroy their homes without it being a part of some greater divine mandate. No, definitely not.

So now, with the worst of that challenge behind them (they succeeded on three of the five skill checks for this social encounter), the party sent their horses back to the town with a message warning them to watch out for this sphere and readied themselves to climb up the side of it toward the nearest access patch. There will be a few more challenges ahead of them yet, but the fact that they cleared the first of five is a good sign! All without having to fight anyone or expend resources they’d need for the rest of this challenge! Sure, they’ve got four people following them that might turn on them if the party decides to shut this device down (which is the mission they were assigned!), but they’re just normal humans. As one of the player characters put it “why not just kill them? It won’t take them long to make more.” Nothing but the best and most normal attitudes for this group. Which is why I’m looking forward to seeing what happens as they start venturing further and further into this strange spherical mechanism. I can’t wait to see how they choose to engage with it and behave as they go. It’ll certainly be interesting…