Tabletop Highlight: What to do When You TPK

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It finally happened. Because of some mistakes, poor decisions, or just a run of bad luck, you’ve encountered your first TPK. Don’t worry! A Total Party Kill isn’t the end of the world! You have options! But first, as you should do any time you have a serious, potentially irreversible character death or one that felt like a particularly stinky pile of bullshit, take some time away from the table to breath. Thankfully, only characters have died. The players can still play, the DM can still run, and the game can go on. However, it will likely be different. That’s okay, though. Every time anything major happens, the game changes. This will be just one more of those changes.

The first option is generally the easiest. Instead of being killed, the party has been captured and now must escape the clutches of some dreaded foe. Finally, the rogue can put that escape artist skill to use! The paranoid ranger who has a chime of opening hidden on his person is finally vindicated! The barbarian… well, they just hulk out like usual, but it’s still fun! They’re short on gear, don’t have many hit points, and are on a time limit! They need to escape quickly or quietly. If they’re spotted, they need to move fast. If they get stuck, they might need to make some tough choices about who lives and who dies. If they can remain hidden, they might need to find the hole in the guard rotation so they can escape undetected. Maybe they need to talk their way out and suddenly the paladin’s high charisma is good for more than never failing a save. Or maybe the wizard finally gets a chance to show just how capable he can be in a pinch, even without an hour to prepare his spells. No matter what choice you make, it’s sure to make a memorable adventure.

The next easiest option is to have a conversation with your players. There are three options most players take, sometimes individually but usually as a group. First, they might elect to create all new characters who are going to pick up from where their previous characters left off. Sometimes they’re intentionally recovering the remains, sent on a mission to find the now-dead characters by whoever sent the characters in the first place. Sometimes they’re doing their own thing and stumble over the remains of the dead characters and choose to pick up from where they left off. If they don’t do that, another option might be to just create new characters in the same world, doing their own thing, in a space far from where their characters died. Maybe they’ll eventually have to defeat the villain their previous characters fell to at some point, but maybe not. This is a new adventure and that doesn’t mean they need to even inhabit the same world, much less inhabit the same area of said world. The third option is to decide to stop playing. Some players might decide they want to move on to something else, now that the journey their character was on came to a conclusion. That’s totally fine, as long as they’re not departing angrily. If they are, or if all of your players are choosing to abandon ship now that their characters are dead, it might not be a bad idea to look back and assess if you were running a game they wanted to keep playing.

Another option, which would require a lot of work to keep the players from feeling like you just saved them for expediency, would be to have them wake up in a stronghold of an ally. Maybe they were brought back to life or maybe they were rescued, but it must have been for an important reason, whatever the method. Maybe this ally wants to use them for something and figured having a group of adventurers in their debt due to being returned from death would be sufficient motivation to get them to do whatever this ally wants. Maybe it isn’t an ally but a previously neutral NPC who wants the characters to work for them. Perhaps there’s even some kind of curse or geas placed on the characters that forces them to work for this NPC and now they need to not only pursue their given goals but figure out how to escape from the NPC controlling them. This would be a lot of fun because it’d require a lot of clever thinking on the part of the players, though I can understand that it wouldn’t work for every group.

There’s always an undead campaign. It’d work really well if they died fighting a necromancer or failed to disrupt some horrid ritual that would give the souls of everyone mortal on the material plane to some evil god. Maybe something didn’t go entirely wrong and some aspect of who the characters was before their transformation lingers. With the right kind of build-up, you could create an adventure where they either embrace their new undead forms or find a way to undo their transformations. Maybe they find the last divine caster in the area who was saved from the ritual because they were praying within a consecrated area and they can be returned to life. Or maybe they figure out how to save their souls and then take on the new undead overlords before (or maybe after) using a miracle spell to return the world to the way it was before the ritual went off.

There’s always retconjuration, the magic of changing how things happened, but that almost always feels cheap unless they died because they all rolled a bunch of fails in a row while their enemies rolled nothing but natural twenties. I’d recommend against it if you have literally any other option. You could also effectively un-do their death by stripping them of their gear and saying they managed to just barely survive, but they were looted and left for the vultures. Whoever beat them did to them what they’ve likely done to countless other humanoids and monstrous races. That would be a fun spin on things and I’d love to see how a group of players recovers from being stripped of everything that wasn’t hidden. I love creating moments for improvisation and outside-the-box thinking, so I’d really enjoy seeing what my players did in that case. I might do it as a one-off, sometime, just to see.

All of your options pretty much fit into three categories. Figure out how to get the current characters back into play (capture, not-quite-dead, or undead), create new characters (who may or may not encounter the corpses of their former selves), or just stop playing. If you have any ideas of other options, besides what I’ve listed here, I’d love to hear about them! I’m really curious about what other people do in TPK scenarios when they come up.

Under the Gun

Wren 3 Comments

Living underneath an orbital defense cannon was interesting. The geostationary satellite cast its shadow elsewhere, most of the day, but Fred always made sure he was outside when it passed through his town. He’d been a child when they first put it in orbit, but he still remembered just how safe he’d felt, knowing it was up there.

Now, he just liked sitting in the shade and marveling at human ingenuity. In two generations, they had gone from launching orbital defense cannons to no longer needing them. They’d become a last, defunct line of defense in a war that was over. Curios from a past that stuck around because they weren’t worth taking down.

Today, as the shadow passed overhead and Fred enjoyed his lunch, something about it seemed a little off to him. As he munched his way through a ham sandwich, he looked at the familiar dark outline about his head. It took him a couple of minutes to figure it out, but he eventually realized that the shadow seemed off because the various shapes in its profile were on the wrong sides.

It looked like someone had just spun the whole thing around. Fred pulled out his cell phone and pulled up the space transit blotter, looking for a reference of a satellite maneuver, like they do during maintenance. Today turned up empty.

After a few more searches left him empty-handed, Fred leaned back and watched the cannon again. It was clearly pointed down at Earth, rather than just rotated around on a different axis. Suddenly, the looming shadow around him wasn’t the constant comfort it once was. It felt like he was sitting, eating a boring sandwich during a break from a dead-end job, right underneath a gun. One shot was all it would take to-

Saturday Morning Musing

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Lately, I’ve been noticing that a lot of musicians I follow have been disappearing from parts of the internet. Or, at least, some of their music has been. In the past two months, links to songs I posted are now broken and playlists I’ve created on YouTube and Spotify have empty spots where favorite songs used to live. Some of these are songs I’ve listened to for years that are now gone. Some of these are the albums that got me into the musician that I can no longer find anywhere but on my iPod. Sometimes, I even begin to wonder if I’ve gone crazy. I mean, what else could I think when I have a four-track EP on my iPod of Kyle Andrews music that 20+ pages of google results knew nothing about? No one, not even the friend who first got me into the artist, remembers that album. If you’ve heard of the album “Damn Baby You’re Cold” by Kyle Andrews, please let me know. I’d really like confirmation that I’m not insane.

For the most part, though, there are traces left behind. A split second of video because the YouTube video player displays “This video is no longer available” or something similar. A listing for a song in a playlist, but the text is now dark grey and Spotify keeps telling me that “This song is not available. If you have the file on your computer you can import it.” I can’t find that song anywhere online, except I can still purchase the entire album it’s on from the author’s website or from iTunes. All of these great videos of my favorite live performer doing small shows while walking down streets in little towns in Europe are gone and my heart breaks that I can’t hear the haunting beauty of his voice echoing off old buildings in little alleyways and mixing with the bustle of people stopping to listen. Thankfully, someone else uploaded it a long time ago. Unfortunately, the quality is much lower and the greater range I could hear in the other video isn’t present in this one. Still, at least I know this one used to exist for sure.

I’ve been trying to figure out if this particular kind of artist, indie rock seems to be the only genre I follow with this problem, is in the middle of some kind of legal battle or if they’re trying to remove some of their older work from the internet. I mean, that’s a shame since I loved sharing their music, but I can understand that they probably want to get paid and having their music up on YouTube probably isn’t super conducive to a living wage as an artist. Still, I really wish I could share the majesty of Kyle Andrews singing about getting a lump of coal for Christmas from an ex-lover or about what he’s going to do with his current lover at Christmas if the world doesn’t end before then. I can’t even direct you to where you can buy it since nowhere I’ve found has it listed.

I worry, a lot, about erasing the past. Or losing it. I’ve been guilty of trying to ignore it and of hiding from it, but now I do everything I can to remember the past without getting stuck in it. When chunks of it, especially chunks that were super important to me, go missing, it makes me worry. Not because I’m concerned about falling back into my bad habits, but because I worry that time will eventually just make me forget. Unlike my iPod, life doesn’t have a shuffle setting that might let you rediscover old favorites you haven’t heard in years. Sometimes you get a prompt that reminds you of something you’d forgotten a long time ago, but it often disappears again if you don’t work to keep it around. If I hadn’t bought that album all those years ago, choosing instead to just listen to it on Soundcloud, I’d have lost it forever. Part of me wonders what else I’ve forgotten that I’ll never experience again because I never followed up on it or made a commitment.

With how much I’ve forgotten about my past, some that I’ve tried to forget and some that just vanished along the way, I’ve got a bunch of half-memories I’m not even sure are true. I for-sure remember going on Hayrides with my original church’s youth ministry group. I remember the faces of the people I met there and the friends I grew apart from as we became teenagers. What I’m not sure I remember is whether or not I had a crush on this one girl in there who may have confessed her feelings for me at the end of the hayride, as I was about to walk home (I lived a few blocks away from the stables that put the event on). I know I never saw her again after that night because her family was moving away and I know that, if I’m remembering events that actually happened and not some amalgamation of dream and memory, I didn’t realize she was confessing feelings until I thought of it sometime in my last two years of college. Can you image how insane I felt? The thought randomly popped into my head, that I’d missed someone confessing their feelings, and I couldn’t tell if it was something that actually happened or if it was a dream that twisted a memory of the last fun I had before a shitty year.

I’d make a joke about getting older, but I have so many similar memories from my childhood and pre-teen years. Things I half-remember spaced throughout a bunch of time I worked pretty hard to forget. Some things come back if I did for them, but I’m always cautious when digging in that particular minefield. I’ve already been devastated by realizations I’d carefully hidden from myself. It sucked and it not something I want to do again, even if one of the therapies I’m doing with my therapist is specifically for digging up and processing these kinds of memories.

I really wish there was a way to find the answer to any question. Google used to feel like that, but I’m pretty sure that’s always been a bunch of garbage. It just seemed like it knew the answer to every question and we were too naive to question whether or not it really did. Now, I’m left wishing that everything I was taught growing up about a wise, powerful figure in an adjacent realm is true so I can eventually learn the answer to every little mystery I’ve encountered. That’d be heaven in my eyes: finally getting all the answers.

 

Watching, Waiting

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Last night, I watched the moon.

I stood outside and waited for it,
From the first glimmers of starlight
That beat down on me,
            Cold and isolating
            As they spoke of size
            And depth and space
            That were beyond me
            And my little life,
To the bright corona of light
That told me the moon was sitting
Behind trees that stood tall,
            Proud of the ground
            They held against
            The rising tide of Humans
            Clearing ground for fields
            And planning subdivisions.

As the moon rose above the trees,
Full and gargantuation in context,
It threw its light into the sky,
            Reminding the stars
            That they would fade
            Before its brilliance
            And that it shone
            Only for we Humans
            And our little lives,
And smiled down on the world,
Bright on a cloudless night
To lift the veil of nightfall,
            Showing the sparse trees
            For the sentinels they are
            Of a world long lost
            That humans chose to respect
            In all that remained
            Of its wilderness.

I sat and watched as hours passed
And the moon brushed away
The canopy of pinprick stars
That tried to drown it.
            There is nothing up there
            And nothing down here
            That can stop its journey.
            All we can do
            Is sit and watch and wait
            And let it push or pull us
            Like a nightly tide
            Of human emotion.

When it finally came time
For the sun to share the sky,
The moon slowly gave way,
            Fading to a pale disc
            With no light to share
            Until it almost vanished
            In the pale blue
            Of the morning.

I took comfort in knowing
The moon was still there
As I went through my day,
            Sleepless muddled thoughts
            Fueled by extra coffee
            And the knowledge
            Of the moon waiting,
            Hanging on the horizon
            Despite the heavy glare
            Of the unfeeling sun.

Maybe I too can stay my course
Despite the inexorable feeling
That I sometimes fade away
To the point of being overlooked
By anyone who doesn’t care to search,
            That little feeling
            Of having gone away
            Without having left
            And being somehow less
            Than I know myself to be.

            I claim no special kinship,
            At least not one beyond
            What anyone could claim,
            But I do know it holds a place
            As high in my esteem
            As it holds in the sky
            And I am tidally locked
            To its influence.

Four Hours, Six People, And One Raid

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It may have taken us twice the amount of time we were initially told it would take (though, to be fair, my roommate was very clear about leaving room for it to take longer), but we managed to clear the Leviathan Raid in Destiny 2. For those of you who do not know what this is, the Leviathan Raid is a sort of dungeon. Your team of one to six players (it is almost always six as there are parts that are nearly impossible to do without six players or the best two or three players in the world) has to make their way through a series of challenges to reach the final boss, all while earning special gear that gives you bonuses while doing the raid. Upon succeeding, you are given more gear, various extra rewards, and some small side missions to unlock even more gear. Basically, you’re raiding the lair of a Big Bad Evil Guy for loot and bragging rights. On the surface, it seems pretty simple and, at least to me, boring.

Thankfully, it is not nearly so boring in practice. In practice, you and your team receive an invitation to visit the palace of the most powerful member of an alien race, The Cabal. There, you are basically given a royal guard to the main chamber of the palace, whereupon the emperor tells you that he wishes to see your strength. Your team is challenged to unlock a series of doors, take on some challenges, and eventually make it to the emperor’s throne room in order to take him on in combat after proving yourselves worthy. Every week, when the game’s challenges reset, so does the raid, which means you can only complete it once a week but you have all week to complete the raid if you only get partway through before your group needs to stop. There isn’t a lot of plot to it, but then there isn’t much plot to the Destiny games in general. You show up, kill some stuff, some alien out to get your power gets angry about it, you kill them, and then it turns out a god of some kind was behind them the entire time so now you get to add “god killer” to your list of titles. The games include various powers and small RPG elements, but they’re mostly straight-forward shoot-em-up games with little real choice or plot beyond good versus evil.

The raids, though, were the first real puzzle-solving elements of the game. There are other puzzles you need to solve, things you need to find, during the rest of the game, but there was always a quest marker to guide you to where you needed to go or explain what you needed to do. There was no difficulty other than when you got caught without cover in a giant swarm of enemies. Even then, you usually just respawn a few seconds later a short distance away. In the emperor’s palace, though, there are no explanations. No quest markers. No hints aside from what is posted online by other players and the occasional little line of text off to the side of the screen. Even if you look up a guide video on YouTube, there’s still a huge difference between knowing what needs to be done and being able to do it. Even though one of the puzzles was incredibly easy to figure out, it still took our team a while to be able to pull it off.

Thankfully, the raid is just as forgiving as the rest of the game, when it comes to death. If the entire team is killed, you just start the particular room you’re in over from the beginning. Anything you’ve already completed stays done. If just one person is killed, the team has the chance to revive them, though each person only has the ability to revive someone one time. If you fail to revive your teammate in the specified amount of time, then the entire team is killed and you must start the room over again. This mechanic allowed us to restart rooms as soon as we realized we’d messed up, which saved us a lot of time. If we’d been forced to attempt to play out every attempt we’d screwed up, we probably wouldn’t have finished the raid that night. Hell, there was only one room in the raid where screwing up didn’t result in all of us instantly dying, so it was usually pretty clear when we missed something or someone had forgotten one of their assignments.

All six of us have known each other for a while, at least in passing. My roommate, the organizer, is the common thread that connects us all right now, so I was worried there would be communication issues because we weren’t used to each other’s voices, play styles, or communication styles. Despite that, we all got along really well. There were a few tense moments where frustration with our repeated failure or a repeated gripe resulted in a few disgruntled words, but that was about it. Even then, most of it can be chalked up to all of us not playing together as a group and not really seeing each other’s skill levels aside from the few windows provided in the raid. For the most part, there wasn’t time to sit around watching how your allies played. Your only gauge of their skill was their success or failure at their assigned tasks and they were difficult enough that even the most experienced among us struggled to perform them correctly. We all learned a lot about each other’s abilities that night, but only in specific areas.

Our communication, though, was amazing. We all fell into our roles naturally, we had clear lines of communication, and we constantly refined our short hand for call-outs, directions, and affirmative responses. There were a few times when the leader had to ask someone to shut up, but it wasn’t ever more than once. Everyone listened patiently, everyone was willing to help out, and everyone had good suggestions for how to make things easier. We may still need to work on our understanding of each other’s over-all abilities and play styles, but we definitely established a rapport with each other that will make future group gaming easier than ever.

Unfortunately, due to our scheduling issues, we won’t be able to repeat the raid more than once a month. In my opinion, that’s plenty. Maybe, once we’ve done it a couple more times, it’ll feel like less of a time-sink to run through it. I know just thinking about it is tiring me out again… It was still a ton of fun, though, and I’m really looking forward to doing it again. I’d love to recapture that feeling of hard-won success when we finally defeated the raid boss.

My Favorite Family

Wren 1 Comment

One of the first webcomics I ever read was Brawl in the Family by Matthew Taranto. I honestly can’t tell you which comic number I started on, what year I started, or even how I found out about it, but I know it was one of my “original” webcomics. I got used to my daily routine of typing in website addresses to check for updates with this comic and I still automatically start typing the address for Brawl in the Family, or “BitF,” in some days. Unfortunately for me, the comic hasn’t updated in almost four years. Thankfully, that was a choice made by the creator as he moved on to other things and he was able to give it the ending he desired.

Brawl in the Family started about three months after Super Smash Bros. Brawl, or just “Brawl,” came out and was mostly about the characters from that game, though a lot of the comics featured Kirby initially and, ultimately, they were not restricted to only the characters in the game. They eventually adopted a sort of expanded “Nintendo-verse” to include a ton of Nintendo characters that never appeared in a Smash game and the occasional non-Nintendo character who showed up in something with a Nintendo character. While the comic tends to feature the characters on their own, doing gags or stories involving mostly their respective worlds, the fact that Brawl included characters from a huge variety of games and worlds allowed for a lot of hilarious single-strip crossover gags and huge, world-colliding story lines.

Brawl in the Family started a gag-a-day comic drawn by a man with a dream of telling funny stories about Kirby eating things. There wasn’t much plot to start, beyond the low-key animosity King Dedede, Kirby’s main villain in some of his games, feels toward the plucky pink ball of suction. Even that isn’t a constant as the one-off events of the webcomic eventually paint a picture of a growing friendship between the penguin-esque creature that is King Dedede and the small round master of destruction that is Kirby. There isn’t much plot beyond the individual stories, but there’s tons of continuity. Characters often depicted as shallow caricatures find elements of humanity and develop a surprising emotional depth under the guiding hand of Taranto (which, coincidentally, wound up actually being canon).

Honestly, if I had to pick one thing about this comic that I had to endorse above all else, it would be the alternate canon that Taranto creates in the comics. Kirby and King Dedede are enemies, but only sort of, in official Nintendo canon. Taranto takes that a step further by making them begrudging (at least on Dedede’s part) best friends who have more in common than you’d think at first glance. Samus and Captain Falcon are actually in a serious relationship that’s working out pretty well for them. Mario is still a plumber, Meta Knight used to look like Kirby, Waddle Dee (a copy/paste minion of King Dedede) would be an even more ruthless and awful king than Dedede ever pretended to be, and Waluigi is almost sympathetic. Hell, in stuff Taranto has done since the end of the comic, Waluigi actually is sympathetic.

I’ve always been a little leery of a lot of “fan canon” because of the level of ownership a lot of people display over their favorite characters and intellectual properties. You only need to look at the shit-show that is the vocal minority’s reaction to The Last Jedi to see how an excess of attachment can lead to some really disgusting behavior. Taranto, though, makes the characters his own but still manages to acknowledge that they belonged to someone else first and they belong to everyone who wants to share in the joy they bring to the world. He creates his own canon in the expanded Nintendo universe he’s pulled together but always acknowledges, mostly in little ways but sometimes in big ways, they the characters have a life outside of his comics.

When it comes to the topics of his comics, he covers everything from Kirby eating something weird and turning into something weirder to the delicate balance between hero and villain when molding young heroes. There are abusive men on power trips, women who save themselves, the unending question that is Birdo (seriously, look her up), and a healthy fascination with Solid Snake’s disturbingly well-depicted buttocks, all without ever going beyond a PG rating. That’s pretty impressive for a guy in his twenties (as Taranto was when he created this comic) given that I can’t seem to go a single blog post without swearing all over the damn place. There are comics about pushing kind people too far, the strength of friendship, the redemption of minor villains, and the power of song when it comes to depicting the troubles of the villainous. Because not only Does Taranto go from rough, blue lines and a basic depiction of the characters to a wonderfully shaded comic in high detail using mostly shades of blue, but he creates musical comics and songs for a lot of his major milestones. They’re hilarious, incredibly touching and, if you see the loneliness inside Waluigi that makes him lash out at everyone around him in an effort to garner some attention because no one cares about him even when he’s not being awful, tear-inducing. Yeah, I’ll admit I’m a little over-invested in Waluigi, but Taranto gives him a great deal of tragic depth despite there being almost no canon information about him beyond the fact that he shows up for sports, parties, and racing whenever the Mario crew gets together.

In addition to the stories he creates for these characters, Taranto also takes on a lot of the classic “video game webcomic” tropes and ideas in what feels like an exciting and fresh way. In one, Mario jumps on a Goomba and has to look on from the sidelines as that Goomba’s family appears to mourn him and hold a funeral for their dearly departed. The Thwomps are clever, Koopas throw their own shells, there are countless jokes about all of the weird power-ups Mario gets in some of his recent games, and Link never once speaks a line of dialogue aside from a few inarticulate shouts. Despite occasionally leaning on a lot of the common knowledge of most people who’d find his comic, Taranto does a great job avoiding relying on it to the point that less-versed people wouldn’t get his jokes. If he makes a particularly obscure reference, he usually has a helpful explanation in the text post below the comic and there you can see just how much he loves the games he draws and writes about. Reading this comic for any amount of time makes it incredibly clear just how passionate he is about these games and it is incredibly infectious.

If you’re looking for a completed Webcomic to look through, enjoy gag-a-day styles, and don’t mind wading through less-than-stellar artwork before you get to the really good stuff, I can’t recommend Brawl in the Family strongly enough. You may not enjoy every minute, but it’ll take you on an emotional journey beyond your expectations of a video game webcomic based around a bunch of character beating the tar out of each other.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 22

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

The first few days passed easily enough. I had trouble since my leg was only barely better and my muscles had weakened while I was recovering, but I still managed to stay on my feet the entire time. The two Wayfinders who couldn’t stay on their feet, though, were very grateful that we’d built the sleds a little bigger than we absolutely needed to. The Nomads had no trouble keeping up since we started out a little more slowly, but everyone was feeling worn out by our fifth day. After being able to rest in a warm and safe shelter for so long, even with the reminders of what we’d lost to get that shelter, it was especially difficult to be back to camping in the snow and constantly feeling cold.

I did what I could to keep morale up. I made a point of talking to everyone when we made camp, had very public conversations with Natalie about how great our progress was, and did everything I could to make our shared meals more interesting. However, there wasn’t much I could do since most of our rations where the light-weight, easily prepared kind and there wasn’t a lot of them to go around. We were all on full rations, of course, since we were moving, but there wasn’t much beyond the basic requirements. Nutritional supplements to make sure we got our vitamins, oatmeal, vegetable soups, and small portions of dried fruit and meat. Enough to stay healthy, but not enough to really feel like we were eating.

By the end of the first week, we were all sick of the food. There was no variety to be had, though, so there wasn’t much we could do aside from soaking the dried fruit in the oatmeal overnight and sticking the dried meat into the soup. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried that particular delicacy, but it’s basically a bunch of lumps of wet meat floating in soup. There isn’t much flavor mixing that happens. The whole idea is a lie you tell yourself to make the idea of eating the same food over and over again more appetizing.

Our only real stroke of luck as we traveled was finding a stand of fir trees right along our path on the second day. We took a bunch of branches to tie to the last sled so that they rubbed out some of the tracks we left. There were still signs of passage, of course, but it wasn’t clearly a sled and a bunch of people anymore.

At the end of the second week, we were all starting to get angry. We were still on track for rations and progress, but tempers flared every time we ate. There hadn’t been any scuffles and no one seemed inclined to start one, but the camp was a sea of sullen frowns that made it clear that no one wanted to talk to anyone. Not even my best attempts at charm could persuade anyone to talk or boost morale beyond the melancholic neutral it returned to between meals.

Midway through our third week, I called my first staff meeting. It was a little overdue, but we hadn’t really needed one until Lucas limped over to me at the end of the day and requested a private chat. Once we’d all gathered in our tent, I gestured for him to speak.

“One of the more injured Wayfinders, Morgan, slipped back into a coma today. I think the cold, combined with our general lack of access to proper food and more advanced medical treatment, is going to take them. They’re still responsive, but only barely. I couldn’t get them to eat anything but liquids.”

“Shit.” Camille put her face in her hands. “I thought they were fine?”

“Last I’d checked, Morgan was the more stable of the two.” I looked around at my friends. “What changed?”

“Eighteen days on a sled in the cold is barely enough rations to keep us going is what happened.” Lucas clenched a fist around his crutch and looked down. “It doesn’t help that we all feel useless riding along while you guys haul us around.”

“No, it probably doesn’t.” Natalie leaned forward and placed a hand on Lucas’ shoulder. “Our only other options are to leave you behind or probably rip open your wounds by forcing you walk. Right now, we need to make good time since we’re already two days behind schedule and that’s not going to get any better if we make you limp.”

Lucas closed his eyes for a moment before taking a deep breath and sitting up, moving his shoulder out of Natalie’s reach. Natalie pulled her hand back and sighed. “C’mon, Lucas. It’ll be another ten days at the most. Then we’ll be there, we can take the time to resupply and wait. There’ll be enough space for all of us to get inside again and tons of food. This is one of our exclusive depots, so it should even have one of Cam and Marshall’s food bags in it. That means meat and bread, at least.”

Lucas shrugged and Camille crossed her arms. Before she could start tearing into him, I jumped in. “Lucas, what’s really the matter? You know we’re not leaving you behind and you know that you’re not going to walk for more than an hour before you’d be back on that sled with your recovery set back a week. What’s really going on?”

Lucas looked up at me, his face slack and his eyes more empty than I’d ever seen them before. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore, Marshall. I think that, when we get back to Chicago, I’m done.”

“Oh.”

Lucas looked back down at the ground and folded his hands over his injured leg. Silence reigned for almost a full minute before Natalie cleared her throat, breaking us out of our stunned reverie. “I think that, at the very least, we’re all going to take a long break once we get to Chicago. You’ll have time to rest, Lucas, before you need to for sure make a decision. At the same time,” Natalie turned toward Camille and I, glaring, “will respect whatever decision you make.”

“Of course we will!” Camille nodded, looking indignant. “We all volunteered for this and we love you. We won’t even think less of you! We’re the oldest active Wayfinders by half a dozen years, at least. Most would have retired by now.”

Lucas smiled and a little of the life returned to his face and eyes. While Camille was forcefully positive and Natalie was quietly supportive, I sat back and took it in. Lucas, the best scout I’d ever had and one of my closest friends since I left my parents’ home, was retiring. He’d gotten so worn out that he wanted to quit the organization we’d built together and I hadn’t noticed it was happening.

I folded my hands in my lap and looked down at them, not sure how to feel or what to think beyond the first feelings of guilt for not seeing the trouble my friend was having and the vague, often-ignored thought that I didn’t really have a reason to be out in the tundra anymore. Just as my mind was latching on to that thought, as it started calculating the years everyone I ever knew had been missing and the likelihood of anyone to survive all that time without getting to an enclave where they would have surely heard my name come up as the leader as the most crucial organization to the post-Collapse world, Natalie pulled at my elbow.

“Earth to Marshall. This is Natalie, requesting a comment on recent developments for my story on real life.”

I blinked and gave my head a little shake. “Sorry.” I looked up at Lucas and smiled, refocusing my mind on the friend who’d stuck with me for two decades as I led us all on a fruitless hunt for the people we’d lost. He’d never pushed, but I knew he’d given up on finding anyone well over a decade ago. “Whatever you decide to do, Luke, I’ll support you. I wouldn’t dream of doing anything less for you.”

Lucas’ eyes lit up and he started chuckling. “You all heard that, right? He finally did it. ‘Luke.’ I’ve been trying to get him to call me Luke since the day I met him. Almost thirty years of friendship and he finally dropped his insistence on calling me by my proper name.” Lucas reached up and wiped a couple of tears away. “I love you, you uptight moron.”

After a few hugs and some surreptitious eye-wiping, we all settled in for the night. First thing in the morning, I went to Morgan’s tent to check on them, but I couldn’t find anything I could do to improve their condition. I checked on them throughout the day, but their condition continued to rapidly deteriorate. By midday the next day, they were dead. My pre-lunch check found Morgan with no pulse, so we delayed an extra hour to bury them.

That night, things got worse. A sentry on patrol discovered an open tent flap and, upon investigation, realized that the three occupants were nearly frozen from the cold sweeping in through the gap. We managed to bring them around again, but all three of them, two Nomad children and one of the injured adults, wound up getting incredibly sick. Without the medical supplies the bandits had trashed, we didn’t have anything we could use to treat them. They lingered for a while, a day past when we were supposed to arrive at the depot and three days before we would have access to the medicine they needed, but they all passed away as well. When we finally arrived at our destination, it was a tired, dispirited group of people who finally walked up to the our target, a system of caves, a few hours into the morning as a light dusting of fresh snow started falling from the sky..

After telling the Wayfinders to set up a small perimeter and the Nomads to start unloading our supplies into the first chamber of the caves, I gestured for Natalie to lead the way. In the back of the winding cave system, following a path on a map Natalie produced, there was an old hi-tech bunker that used to belong to some millionaire “prepper” from before the Collapse. The prepper had never used it and, a few years after the Collapse, we’d found it still stocked with food, medical supplies, gadgetry, and batteries. We’d taken all the useful tech and distributed it around the Midwest, but we left all the food and medicine alone. It eventually became our main supply depot, with a group filling it back up once a year and every Wayfinder group that passed through taking stuff from it to resupply the various way stations we’d set up along our travel routes.

The only reason it was still viable at all, though, was because of the caves. The fact that they burrowed deep into the ground blocked all signals from entering or leaving the cave and it’s only connection to the outside world was a solar-powered keypad that unlocked purely mechanical blast doors. Whoever had funded this thing back in the day had been prepared for nuclear fallout and the dangers of EMP. It always amused me that, not only had they failed to use their bunker, the prepper had done everything right for all the wrong reasons.

When I chuckled as we walked finally made it to the bunker doors, Natalie just rolled her eyes. “Every time.”

“Every time. Like a squirrel forgetting a stash of nuts.” I smirked and shook my head. “But let’s just grab the keypad so it can get charged up. I’d like to get inside tonight.”

Natalie punched in the release code and the controller popped off the wall. The battery was dead, but the solar panel on the front was still clean and undamaged. A few hours of charging, maybe less with some direct sunlight, and we’d be good to go.

By the time we got outside, though, the light snowfall had turned into a blizzard. Everyone, even the Wayfinders, had retreated into the cave as powerful gusts of wind whipped the snow up into the air and obliterated any sign that we had passed through the area. It was impossible to see more than ten feet out of the cave and the only light we had came from the LED lanterns a couple of the Nomads held.

“Looks like we’re camping in the caves, tonight.” I sighed as Natalie started directing the Wayfinders. “Grab everything you can carry and follow me into a larger cavern that should be a little warmer. We’ll have to wait until the blizzard has ended to get into the bunker so, until then, make yourselves comfortable.”

A few hours later, after the Nomads had settled in and the Wayfinders had verified the cave system was entirely empty, I met Natalie, Camille, and Lucas in the entry cavern. “Is there any point to leaving that outside?” I pointed to the keypad in Natalie’s hand.

“No.” Natalie shook her head. “And what’s worse is that we’ve only got five days of food if we go on three-quarters rations. If the blizzard doesn’t end before then…”

“We’ll need to forage.” Lucas leaned against the wall of the cavern, looking at the snow. “In a blizzard.”

“Without our best hunters.” Camille folder her arms and joined Lucas is staring at the driving snow blowing past the cave’s entrance. “I could do it, but killing people is my specialty, not sneaking up animals.”

“We’ll figure something out.” I clapped Camille and Lucas on the shoulder. “We’ve got five days. If we start hunting now, we’ll turn up something to augment our supplies. And we’ve still got two scouts in good enough condition to go out if they’ve got someone with them. Don’t make more problems than we already have.” I smiled at them and pulled them back into the caves.

“He’s right.” Natalie made her way to the front of the group. “All we need is a bit more visibility and we should be good. If push comes to shove, if we can’t find any food and the blizzard is still going, I’ve got some ideas we could try.”

“See?” I skipped ahead a couple of steps to catch up to Natalie, wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “We’ll be fine. Let’s get back to where it’s warmer and rest for a few days. Even if the food is still bland, it’ll be nice to catch up on our sleep.” I gave Natalie a quick peck on the cheek and then let go of her. Camille picked up my positivity and Lucas laughed as Camille all but shouted cheerful aphorisms at him. I let the smile linger on my face as it vanished from my mind, replaced by thoughts of Lucas’ impending retirement and my own doubts about continuing as an active Wayfinder.

As we joined up with the rest of the Nomads, I pushed the thoughts out of my head again. This time, they didn’t leave completely. They stayed on the periphery of my mind, waiting for a quiet moment they could sneak into. That night, as everyone but the sentries slept around me, I lay awake and contemplated the past and the future.

Tabletop Highlight: Slogging Through Open War

Wren Leave a comment

I’ve always been interested in the idea of a D&D campaign focused around participation in a war. A lot of “classic” D&D campaigns usually include participating in a war, but that’s often tangentially. In version 3.5, the recommended method for including players in a war setting campaign is to give them specialized missions. Stuff like being a strike team sent to seize an important asset, protecting important figures, or capturing important enemy figures. There’s a feat that can be applied to building an army, called “Leadership,” but it is one of the feats that can be most easily abused by an unscrupulous player and all it really does is provide a character with a small army of a few hundred people.

What I’m looking for is to make the players participate in the actual war itself. Giant, sprawling battlefields filled with magic and mighty heroes like something out of an anime. Great battles with terrible consequences for all the poor souls who survived the battle. Rules of conquest, for conquerors and the conquered. The important moments and decisions that are the only things that separate success from failure. Diplomacy to end wars and failure diplomacy to start them. I want something enormous in scale that dice alone don’t really support all that well.

I’ve tried making my own rules. Role-playing through plan making sessions, mixing in a few strike missions to give them something immediate and impactful to do before sending them off to roll a bunch of dice to emulate a day’s worth of combat. Trying to send them into large encounters to have them act as a rallying force to either break through enemy lines or patch up their own lines. Showing how much difference a bard can make by letting them affect as many allies as can hear them over the din of battle and then watching as the relatively minor boost literally turns the tide. Watching the bloody hell that is a wizard or sorcerer unleashed on a battlefield of basic soldiers. The problem has always been that it inevitably breaks down into some rather boring math. There’s no real tension or suspense since the end is pretty much decided from the outset.

For instance, the tank in my current campaign has over 100 HP (the “average” human warrior has 8) and his armor class (how hard it is to hurt him in combat) is 27. Most average human warriors who appear on the battlefield are going to have a spear and a +2 bonus to hitting things and will do 2-9 damage per hit. Which means that, when they roll their die to attack, they will never get a high enough number to hit. If you’re using “natural 20’s” as “critical hits,” then that hit automatically beats whatever AC it’s up against. Statistically, my current campaign’s tank will get hit once out of ever twenty attackers. On the flip side, the same character has a +20 to hit, can hit more than once, and does a minimum of 8 damage per hit. He’ll hit the average warrior every time and kill them every time. If we assume the tank never gets healed, gets hit once every twenty attacks, and is in a position where he can only get attacked once per round of combat (which lasts six seconds), then he’ll get hit once every two minutes for an average of 5 damage, which he’ll be able to do for about an hour before he needs to stop or dies. If he has any kind of protection from damage, which he’d be sensible enough to get in this scenario, he can easily get it down to an average of 2 damage a hit, which means he could keep going about two and a half hours without a break before being overwhelmed. With the healing he can do on his own, he could get himself another hour, at least. With a little pre-planning and the right allocation of magic, he could double all of that, for six hours of fighting and killing. During all this time, he’s killed almost 2,200 enemy soldiers.

The numbers sound nice, but that’s just a talk through of what happened. I could tell him that he did those things, but they wouldn’t really mean much to him because there was no real risk to him and he did nothing terribly exciting. He just slaughtered a bunch of mooks. The same is true of archers. They can stand behind the tank and, with the right boosts, kill a target for every arrow they get to fire. Right now, if the tank’s ally did that, he’d kill almost 5,000 people and that’s without taking a single hit point of damage. After he did that, he could take the tank’s place and then fight for about four hours, bringing his total up to just over 6,000. Throw in a wizard of the right kind and he could probably double that number, over the same ten-hour period. Only the rogue wouldn’t have that level of combat efficacy, but you could easy send him to go kill officers because not even luck will save them from his sneaking abilities. He could easily kill one or more officers or important figures every five minutes. In ten hours, that’s 120 officers or leaders. That’s most of the army’s command.

Throw it all together and you’ve got a pretty typical D&D party taking out an entire army on their own. But it’s boring as hell and there’s no real tension. It’s just numbers on paper. I want more than that. I want to give them a reason to be excited about victories, rather than have them be a foregone conclusion. I want them to feel real fear as they figure out if their character will live or die. Unfortunately, as you can see here, having to chop your way through a bunch of mooks even when you’re already beat up isn’t a big deal. The only tension comes later when you have to fight the guys giving the orders.

Matthew Colville is producing a book for the fifth edition of D&D that’s supposed to include rules for warfare. He apparently uses them in his own games and, after seeing the internet’s response to some of his home rules, he’s now going to share them with us. Having not actually watched any of Colville’s games, I don’t know much about his rules. I’d really like it if they had solutions for the problems I’m facing because I sure as hell don’t. All I’ve got is math and one-off missions that miss the true scope of a war.

In the mean time, I’m going to just stick to large, unwieldy encounters segregated by rooms in towers or castles in lieu of effective warfare rules. It makes it a lot easier when it’s just a bunch of waves for the players to beat down.

 

The Portal

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Timeo stared at the portal, uneasy with the wash of pale light that emanated from it. He’d heard from Gellis there was nothing to fear on the other side of the portal, but Gellis had been through it so many times that he seemed immune to the odd feeling of the light as it lingered on his skin.

Gellis also didn’t seem to notice, but he was a little different after every trip to the outer realm. It was hardly noticeable unless you looked back and saw how much changed happened.

The first time he noticed, Timeo started monitoring everyone who want through the portal. Anyone who was gone for a significant amount of time came back changed in a similar way. The degree of change tended to vary by person, but it was always the same type of change. Timeo was surprised that no one cared when he pointed it out.

“It’s fine. Nothing to worry about.” they’d tell him. He wanted to believe them, but he’d done his research and new that what they told him wasn’t true. His presentations and appeals fell on deaf earths. Fennrel actually laughed at him.

Today was the day, though. Timeo could no longer put off going through the portal. If he did not contribute to the enclave’s well-being, he would be cast out. And then they’d force him through the portal, anyway. Today, he had an appointment with his destiny.

After making sure all of his gear was prepared, Timeo took a deep breath, opened the glass shield, and stepped through the portal. The sun beat down on him, various creatures screamed into the air, and Timeo took his first breath of fresh air. Resolute despite the cancer-causing orb in the sky, Timeo strode off toward his first day of college.

Saturday Morning Musing

Wren Leave a comment

No matter where you live, what you do, or who you are, there’s a lot going on in the world these days. The only way you can escape it is if you’re being willfully ignorant that the world is going slightly (I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have a bit of a tendency to understate things) crazy and that only works for upper-middle class white dudes and rich people. Even then, it probably still intrudes on your life because global politics and the constant stream of fear and anxiety pumped into the world by modern “journalism” are almost impossible to get away from unless you cut off all human contact, including the internet. Especially the internet.

I don’t really want to go into all of what’s going on, because I honestly can’t escape it and I don’t have anything new to add to it. All my thoughts and feelings have already been said and probably been said better than I could with the energy I’ve got right now. It’s really wearing me down to be spending the vast majority of my time trying to keep track of what’s going on from as many sources as possible so I can hopefully uncover the truth of what’s happening. Even then, I know it’s mostly impossible without being a first-hand witness to most of what is going down because there’s bias not just from individual sources, but from entire groups of people based on what kind of group they are or if they’re reacting to something in particular.

I spend so much time and energy trying to follow what is going on, picking the battles to fight, and doing everything I can to advocate for human decency and respect of all non-shitty life (sorry, shitty lifeforms, I’ve got no time for you) that I barely have the energy left for doing my daily writing. Things were different when I had a significant other. The world would fade away a bit when we were together and I couldn’t help but forget everything else for a bit. Now that I don’t have that, I’m relying on myself to take breaks when I need them and I’m actually really bad at that. If I do not have something that requires me to take a break or to rest for a while, I will not take a break. I will keep working or procrastinate until there’s no point in working and then feel terrible about not having done any work. In the past three weeks, last night was the first time I consciously decided not to do any writing work and just read a book instead of fretting about my blog or the book projects I haven’t touched in months.

I realize this isn’t healthy. I need to be able to rest and I shouldn’t rely on someone else to pull me away from my work long enough to unwind. I need to figure out how I can pull myself away from my work and to find ways to rest. Video games, reading, and TV don’t always work and sitting around by myself is often more likely to be a recipe for anxiety and stress than rest. Even meditation isn’t a sure-fire help these days since I’m still caught up in the feelings of my breakup and struggling with the daunting task of trying to date again. Any time I try to quiet my mind, thoughts of what I used to have or of how much I struggle to meet new people intrude. It’s daunting and frustrating.

Even when I do manage to relax or to avoid thinking about my relationship status, the news inevitably intrudes. I’ll get a phone notification that someone tweeted something about someone doing something dumb or that some government official is now royally screwed because something leaked except they’re totally not because all the people who give a fuck are spineless or powerless. The few times that doesn’t happen, or that I remember to silence my phone, thoughts about the very scary potential futures ahead of the world intrude. There’s no escaping just how shitty the world is when it affects me and all of the people I care about on such an enormous scale that it’s nearly impossible to contextualize just how screwed we all might wind up being.

It doesn’t help that so many people are constantly reminding everyone that being scared or tired or feeling unable to cope is exactly what the shitty people want. Sure, taking a rest is a good idea and we should probably all do that, but so many people lose urgency when they rest and people giving up is actually what the shitty people want. They want us to stop. If we’re intimidated or worn out and stop, that’s what they want. If we’re resting and miss something important, that’s also what they want. I’d love nothing more than to be able to constant rage against the shitty people with the burning passion of a million stars fueled by the wildest dreams of poets and artists across the universe, but that’s a bit more than I can manage. No single person could contain that much power and, so far, even the best coordinated groups have proven themselves unable. Someday, someone might be able to channel that amount of strength into their righteous fury and wipe away the taint caused by shitty people, but that day is not this day.

It’s a nice mental image, but that’s all it is. If things are going to change, it’ll take a lot of people working together toward a common goal. In the mean time, I’m going to try to figure out how to rest up on the few days I can’t fight for my goals and human decency any further. I don’t think the problem is working up to the point of wanting to collapse that’s the problem (and no, that’s not me trying to justify working myself ragged), I just really need to figure out how to actually rest on the days I’m not working on whatever.

Anyway, try to not be a shitty human today and every day. Work towards the common good. Rest when you need it but don’t forget there’s a fight going on. And so on. Keep it up.