Another weekend down, another session of The Magical Millennium in the bag! As we have been for the last few sessions, we’re still in the middle of the Lock-In at school. This past session covered almost two hours of time, which would mean we’re actually picking up the pace if it weren’t for the fact that we weren’t able to finish up the final match of the dodgeball tournament and so didn’t REALLY get through a whole two-hour period. In the time we did cover, though, we got to see everyone except the Cleric run off to sign up for the “random party” Adventurer Escape Room activity. Only one player got randomly selected for a time slot they’d chosen, unfortunately, but that just means that everyone else will feel a bit more ready when they go to compete in the time trial version with their established party after the dodgeball tournament. We got a little bit of conversation between the Artificer and the Bard, a pair we don’t see much, saw the Cleric almost have a panic attack as they sought out some peace and quiet, and saw a fated confrontation between the Barbarian and Group B’s fighter on the dodgeball court (well, we saw the start of what the Barbarian’s player is describing as a fated confrontation with her character’s foil. I’m pretty sure it’s just some jock-on-jock competition, but we’ll have to see how it goes). After that, we managed to actually end on time since one of the players had to leave right away. Now, we’re looking at some potential scheduling woes as we approach the winter holiday season and must face up to the reality that skipping even one session means going a long time without getting to meet up again.
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Wrapping Up Worldbuilding For “The Rotten”
In one final session that took three hours (which is two more than I hoped it would take and one more than I expected it to take), we wrapped up our game of The Quiet Year with a much more detailed map than we started with and an idea of what the world looked like after that year of relative peace. We’ve got a fully underground society, a mysterious Labyrinth that defies mapping and contains seemingly limitless treasure, and a yearly pass of horrific monsters that will kill or infect any being unfortunate enough to be caught outside by their organized sweep with The Rot. It was a lot of cool stuff that has left the group in a situation where they’re well-off as adventurers but maybe not super well-off as a society. Sure, they’ve got a decent amount of food and livestock, not to mention more water than they could need, but their population isn’t super big and they only have enough food because their population is small. There’ll be a lot of problems facing this community thirty years down the road, when we start up the Dungeons and Dragons campaign side of things, but I think it’s well-within the group’s ability to handle them or die trying. Not sure which is more likely at this point, given that I’m starting them at level one and this world’s rough on characters of all levels, but I’m interested to find out!
Continue readingBuilding Out The World Around The Rotting Haven With The Quiet Year
Due to one of the three players in this group being unavailable and me not wanting to start the game without them, we’re on session two of side-game stuff. Last time, we used the Heroic Chronicle and some session time to build characters and this time we started a game of The Quiet Year to help build up the community that would eventually include the characters we made last time. We only got through two seasons since getting the game going took a bit of work and we used Spring to get into the swing of things, so we’ll be returning to this game for at least part of our next session to wrap it up, probably do a little character stuff, and then likely end early since I’ll need time to draw the lines on the timeline between where The Quiet Year ends and the Dungeons and Dragons campaign begins. I’m good at improvising and getting things going with little to no lead time, but I know things will work better if I take the time to actually prepare rather than try to bust out a decent half-session immediately. Since this group has attendance issues and is still relatively new to working together (without the instant chemistry that my other campaign, The Magical Millennium, had), I want to make sure the sessions really stick the landing, especially since I need to do more directing and game running work than I do with my other group. With The Magical Millennium, I’m pretty sure they’d play without me if I couldn’t make it, roleplaying scenes and making up a new events to put themselves through as they went. With The Rotten, I need to work to draw some of the players out a bit more and pull them toward creativity, a fact that was pretty apparent this past weekend.
Continue readingPlaying The Adults In A Campaign About Teens In The Magical Millennium
For the first time in maybe the whole campaign, we had an extended roleplaying scene between one of the player characters, the party’s Artificer, and one of the teachers at the magical high school (Adak’s Academy Of Magic). This happened a couple hours into the lock-in, as the rest of the party sifted through the aftermath of their previous encounter with the brother of one of the other player characters (the party’s Bard) and then moved to join the screening of Shrek. Rather than join them in doing something they felt was pointless, the Artificer snuck off to work on a personal project in one of the magic item fabrication labs and was found out by a teacher who proved to be more sympathetic and understanding than maybe the Artificer had expected. Once the two of them had talked it out, the Artificer rejoined the rest of the players in the gym since the party had left the Shrek-themed movie room when Shrek had finished to playing volleyball against some of their classmates in the open gym. They played another game of volleyball and we wrapped up our session with a bit of chitchat afterwards. Other notable events include a quick but momentous B-plot during the “catch the Artificer up on what had happened during the previous session and then talk about the revelation that the Bard’s brother had been part of the group that had accidentally started the growing anti-magic movement” segment, a quick hack of volleyball rules that wound up taking much longer than expected, and a long post-game discussion of whether or not the Group B party was there to play the part of character-opposites that the party (Group A) would need to eventually kill. It was a pretty great game and the first time I felt like I was absolutely at the top of my game since early August. In short, it was another great session with this group.
Continue readingHelping My Players Create Some Real Characters For My New Campaign, “The Rotten”
After more missed than played sessions, we’ve finally moved into the preparation process for the full campaign I’m still tentatively calling “The Rotten.” Given that we wound up focusing the game on building and protecting a community rather than far-flung adventures or something like that, the name feels less apt than it would for pretty much any other campaign idea I had. This still takes place in the world I’m calling “The Rotten,” so I won’t change the name or tags until I come up with something better, in which case I’ll go back and fix all my other posts. Gotta keep your tags organized! Other than settling on a general idea, I rolled stats with the two players who were available, talked through character ideas, made some modifications and flavorful tweaks to existing classes, and then ran through the Heroic Chronicle with both players. If you don’t know, the Heroic Chronicle is a system included in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount Dungeons and Dragons book that is designed to help settle characters into the world of Exandria, of Critical Role. I mostly use it to give my player characters a few built-in hooks in the homebrewed world we’re using, a few extra tidbits of power, and some interesting secrets since rolling on a table is a great way to prompt that kind of thinking in people who maybe aren’t as practiced at it as I am (and that absolutely helps even if they ARE as practiced as I am). I also do a lot of soliciting my players’ opinions, offering ideas, and tweaking the results until we’re all happy, rather than rely entirely on rolls because the players often have at least a concept that they want to stick with and some of those results have VERY specific implications for characters. At the end of the process, I get some built-in hooks, my players get some fun secrets to keep from each other in order to build drama, and everyone gets at least a few interesting little power-ups. Everybody wins.
Continue readingUncorking Emotions In The Magical Millennium
One of my favorite parts of my The Magical Millennium campaign is that all of my players are willing to go all-in on roleplaying in a way that I can rarely predict. Sometimes people escalate when I didn’t expect to provoke a response or wind up digging into something I assumed was going to be passed over quickly, and I absolutely love the feeling of needing to scramble in order to continue the scene without breaking stride. This last session, as the party started the Lock-In they’d been planning as they dealt with the local emergency in the background (they all kept their cell phones since the barrier around the Hellmouth broke and while all the parents absolutely agreed that keeping all of their burgeoning adventurer children under close supervision by much more powerful adventurers and trained educators was a great idea, they still wanted to be able to get ahold of them if something else happened. Which means these teens also have access to outside information and that’s definitely never going to come up even a little bit), I got to see my players in fine form.
Continue readingWrapping Up The Prologue To The Rotten Haven
In one hell of a turn-around that I saw coming thanks to the character creation process for the prologue to my “The Rotten” campaign, my little group of evil player characters killed the entire leadership of the rebellion–and a huge chunk of the town besides–despite having landed in a situation they were incredibly lucky to escape from. You see, they’d decided to take up with the maligned Lord Besk, chief necromancer in charge of maintaining the barriers around this Haven (a city made safe from the undead creatures that walked the fading remnants of the material plane by those very barriers), because he and the city council he had wrapped around his finger were willing to pay them. This turn-around, necessary because their plan to slowly assassinate individual targets one at a time fell apart almost immediately due to bad rolls, was so complete and thorough that it instantly wrapped up our prologue and set the stage for the game that will take place in the shadow of the city they’d destroyed. And, you know, underneath the heel of the Great Lich they’d helped create since that’s what Besk was up to this whole time. That and somehow controlling the massive nightwalkers that had introduced The Rot to the world and were slowly draining everything of its life. Thanks to all that, I get to keep all their PCs around as generals and trusted lieutenants for Great Lich Besk and sprinkle them into the campaign in appropriate places! Sure, I’ve got a ton of work to get them from level one to whatever level the player characters will be ready for that kind of challenge, but there’s no denying how nice it is to have the later parts of the campaign already fleshed out.
Continue readingIntroducing New Tension Into The Magical Millennium
After months of slowly building (which is the unfortunate reality of running a game for a group that meets every other week), I finally introduced the first piece of narrative tension in my D&D campaign, The Magical Millennium. I built some tables, set up some ideas, hinted at what is to come, rolled some dice, and stayed true to the design sentiment that my players and I agreed on for this campaign. Now, finally, after months of slice-of-life roleplaying with some intermittent bits of modern-fantasy and danger being packed in around that, I’ve finally introduced the first bit of high fantasy tension. What began as a simple job to help (and protect, if need be) an herbalist pick herbs in the area north of the city–close but not too close to the massive barrier that sealed off the hellmouth that threatened to plunge this area into death and chaos back at the start of the titular Magical Millennium–turned into a quick hike back to safety when the barrier cracked and a moment of intense danger when something came blasting out of that barrier to land in front of the party. Casual herb collection and a nice hike through the woods as the group failed to address the inter-party tension was all but forgotten as the booming crack of the barrier flooded the area with infernal energy and the woman they were helping directed them all to follow her down a faster path back to the parking lot. Once they reached safety, after ploughing their way through a Hook Horror (half-dead from being blasted out of hell but more than capable of killing any of them but the barbarian in a single turn), they were debriefed by the emergency response groups, sent home, and eventually collected back up for the planned lock-in that had added “make sure the young adventurers don’t do anything stupid” to its program for the evening. All in all, it was a great session and while I think I could have run it better if I’d been better rested, I’m happy with how it turned out.
Continue readingThe End Of Friends At The Table Season 8: Palisade – Making Good On An Old Threat
Spoiler Warning for the mid-season peak of Friends at the Table Season 8: Palisade.
After an incredibly long time (not that I’m complaining about the length, of course: I love a long podcast), the eighth season of Friends at the Table, Palisade, has come to an end. Even the post-mortem has finished up. By the time you’re seeing this, the audio version of the post mortem stream should be up on the main podcast feed and you’ll have probably either settled in to listen all the way through it, have already listened to it, or have made plans to listen to its five-star runtime over the weekend (the stream was just over five hours long, so I’m sure the audio will be a similar length). If one of those three things does NOT apply to you, then there will be nothing for you in this post (or there was a in the podcast episode going up which, you know, happens). If you’re uncertain about committing to Friends at the Table but like a good audio story or enjoy a good tabletop gaming podcast, you should absolutely start listening to it (it’s also available in any podcatcher you might use, on Spotify, and, of course, iTunes). It’s got thousands of hours of entertainment, amazing science fiction and fantasy work, and a great general vibe that shifts from relaxed and fun storytelling between friends to tense and emotional storytelling between friends. I have easily listened to more hours of Friends at the Table than any other podcast and I would not be surprised to learn that I’ve listened to more Friends at the Table than all my other podcasts put together. It’s really good stuff, there’s so much of it out there, and now I’m going to need to fill my idle audio hours with something else while they take a break following the monumental undertaking that was this latest season.
Continue readingNear-Death Experiences In The Magical Millennium
Things took a turn for the intense during my group’s latest session of The Magical Millennium. What was supposed to be an easy job standing guard for a few hours outside a warehouse while it was cleaned up so some pests couldn’t get back inside turned into an intense and almost deadly combat encounter. The general framing for this was that the party, all first-level characters and in their first semester of Magical Ability school, signed up as guild members sponsored by the school as part of their second week of class. They were tasked with going on an adventure as a group, spent some time picking out a few from the Magical Ability Level 1 group, and then tried to fit in their other homework and social activities between the three jobs they’d taken. For reference, all “class” powers in the D&D system use, in this world, either woven magic (spellcasting) or ambient magic (everything else), so their school teaches them how to harness their powers as the students figure out the extent of their powers and their willingness to live a life relying on said powers. This adventure and the interviews I’ve covered extensively in past posts, were meant to get the characters (and the players) to appreciate the guild system. The idea was that they would learn about the protections it affords to both magical and non-magical people, the way it helps people find an appropriate tier of labor for whatever job needs doing, and provides the guild members with a means of ensuring no one swoops in to steal work out from underneath them. Unbeknownst to my players, they picked the one job of the six on offer that was build in as a cautionary tale about blindly trusting in the system they’re buying into. Thankfully, though, they all escaped with their lives even if the group feels even more fractured than it did after the last session (which is saying something since at least one player made a back-up character after that one).
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