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.
Continue readingTabletop Gaming
Random Encounters Are A Double-Edged Sword In The Rotten Labyrinth
After a few weeks of delay due to my poor health, I finally ran another Dungeons and Dragons session for The Rotten Labyrinth. It was a bit shorter than usual, due to starting almost an hour and a half late, but we still got to do some stuff. There was a discussion of what to do next and how to avoid the monster that nearly took out the entire party, there was some deliberation about how to proceed with three of the more combat-inclined party members, a surprise combat encounter complete with magical compulsions, and then a bit of treasure at the end of a long passage, accessibly only via some kind of blood magic. It wasn’t the least-busy session we’ve had and the amount of ground covered does not amount to all that much, but a lot of stuff happened on the back end that was not immediately visible to my players so a decent amount of progress was made. I’ve also solidified that they’re all going to get a level-up with their next long-rest, since they’ve clearly reached the threshold for it after their last few encounters, but I find myself wondering just how long it is going to take them to explore this labyrinth or if there’s anything I could do to speed things up. As much as I enjoy having them work their way through traps and monsters and find treasure in what amounts to maybe an eighth, at most (and even that feels like a massive overestimation), of the entire first-floor of the labyrinth, I’m worried about how much actual time it is going to take to get them anywhere. Or to, you know, develop the plot. There’s really not a lot going on in this part of the labyrinth other than the introduction to the general mystery of it all and a plethora of random encounters.
Continue readingAn Unreliable Touchstone For The Demigods of Daelen
At the prompting of my players in my “Demigods of Daelen” Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I bought and started reading the first five books in the Percy Jackson series. I’ve only made it through three of them so far (I have had a lot of other stuff going on since I ordered these a couple months ago), but each one wrapped up in a single reading session (not counting me reading a the first book a chapter at a time for exactly two chapters before I just dug in and read the whole thing). They’re light, fun books to read. There’s not a lot of tension in them, at least not yet, though there’s plenty of spirit. All of this combined makes it incredibly easy to get swept up in the story and the worldbuilding is light but deliberate enough that there’s never really a point that takes me out of the story, even when someone hops in an old plane that somehow has a gun loaded with live ammunition and uses it to shoot stuff. The whole series, up through book three at least, does a good job of brushing off the strange intersections of the fantastical and the modern without breaking my suspension of disbelief, and I can see why so many people have these books as a major influence in their childhood or teen years. If I’d read these books as a child, I’d probably feel similarly. Hell, I might even still like them because the author hasn’t done anything absolutely horrible like becoming the loudest, vilest, and most harmful terf currently living, unlike some other franchises from my childhood. Still, while I can absolutely enjoy some decent Young Adult fiction, I’m not sure this franchise is the helpful touchstone my players think it is.
Continue readingDanger Coming Home To Roost In The Rotten Labyrinth
While not as potentially momentuous for the entire campaign as the session prior, our most recent meeting of The Rotten Labyrinth was also pretty important for all the present player characters. What started out as some plans to regroup, rest, and then take another pass at the labyrinth turned into a chaotic delay as all of that was interrupted by two random encounters during their night’s rest. I rolled incredibly, uh, portentiously on the encounter table, during their watches, and while one event went unnoticed until the morning, the other was an attack on the party that almost ended in disaster as one of the stronger monsters wandering that part of the labyrinth finally showed up. The battle itself was a bit of a mixed bag, featuring both a ton of players being knocked unconscious, but also featuring a ton of players getting back into the fray just long enough to make a difference. It really put a damper on the plan for one of the player characters (the Bard) to grab the petrified player character (the Wizard) and leave for their Sylum in search of help ending the petrification. We even had that player’s new character prepped and ready to go, but we never made it there because the monster showed up and disrupted all my plans for the session. Still, we got a lot done and now the players are faced with three new problems they’re finally aware of: who touched their character’s stuff while they slept, why did that blob show up to steal their characters’ memories, and why was one of their characters unable to leave the labyrinth during the battle?
Continue readingCreating The Mythos Of The Demigods of Daelen
We finally did it. We had our first session of the something new game I started up to replace The Magical Millennium (which remains on hiatus for the time-being) and even though two of our players couldn’t make it, we had a successful first session. I designed the campaign to be playable with as few as two player characters, so having a few people out isn’t a huge bother for me or the game I’m running. It’s still Dungeons and Dragons 5e, of course (2014 version for everything except I’m including the Weapon Mastery feature for 2024 because that feels appropriate for this collection of powerful characters), since most of my players aren’t that interested in going far afield, but I’ve done an intense bit of hacking and homebrewing to alter the basic systems to work on a different scale than the game was originally intended to run at. Most of this is just massaging numbers a bit (a thing I can do because the “Bounded Accuracy” of 5e allows me to alter the numbers in ways that have predictable outcomes), but there’s a few changes to how the rules play out, how success and failure should be interpretted, and how the mechanics of the game are designed to interact. Most of which is not stuff my players need concern themselves with since I’m the one running the show and I know how to alter everything appropriately. What my players are supposed to be concerned with is building the myth of their semi-divine character!
Continue readingMessing With Powers Beyond Your Ken In The Rotten Labyrinth
We’ve had another session of my incredibly maze-focused Dungeons and Dragons campaign, The Rotten Labyrinth and this one was a bit of a doozy. Well, from a certain perspective. Most of which I can’t actually post about because it features stuff that my players have yet to discover, chief amongst them being the ramifications of what they did in this last session. Sure, we all started with fun and games as we slowly reassembled where negotions with Steve the Goblong had been before all the sirens and the fire alarm had forced all thoughts of tabletop gaming from my mind. He safely led them through the maze, carefully pointing out that they should just follow him and not poke around other hallways that much since those paths weren’t definitely safe like his were, Which was immediately punctuated by the party finding a trap and then failing to disarm it by enough that they set it off instead, which triggered not just a normal trap, but a new secondary trap that was right next to it. They all survived thanks to some healing, but they stopped exploring other hallways after that, obediently followed Steve to the place he said there was a problem his community of Goblongs needed solved, and then wound up performing a religious ritual at an alter to a representative of the god of mazes and pathways and whatnot that this whole labyrnith had been built to worship. Once that was done and the strange tinnitus-like ringing noise had faded, Steven revealed his true movement speed as he quickly left the party behind. Which is fine for most of the party because the ones who performed the ritual can’t get lost in the labyrinth any more now that they have been magically connected to it. Like I said: it was a bit of a doozy.
Continue readingSetting The Table For Mythological Mayhem With The Demigods Of Daelen
We’ve officially had session 0 for my new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Demigods and Dragons? Dungeons and Demigods? Anachronistic Mythology? I don’t know what I’m going to call it yet [I figured it out by the time of publication and it’s in the title of this post now], but it’ll have the word “Demigods” in the title because that’s an integral part of the concept. Probably, anyway. The longer I think about it, the more ideas I come up that don’t use the word, but I’ll definitely keeping tagging the posts I write about this campaign with the word, so at least I’ll be organized still. I thought for a while about doing something with “Scattered Divinity” or “Inherited Divinity” to emphasive how everyone was playing children of gods, but then one of my players wanted to play a mortal raised to demigodhood, so I had to toss out most of those titles since that character doesn’t really fit with that theme and it is important not to misrepresent something as important as the source of everyone’s powers. That’s kind of a big deal, you know? All of the campaign ideas I’ve got for this general concept involve that in the later stages at the very least. For some, it’s an important part of every major arc of the campaign. I still need to solidify what direction I want to go in, though, so that clarity will come in the future. For now, it is enough that everyone has a divine parent or patron, character concepts and connections, and a rough draft of their character sheet. That’s what I needed most of all during our session 0 and I managed to get through it all by the two-hour mark when one of the players had to leave.
Continue readingThe Draw Of Greek Mythology In My “Demigods” Campaign
As I’ve slowly gotten my players working on their characters, gods, and religions for our upcoming session zero, I’ve watched as every single one of them has turned to exclusively Ancient Greek Mythology for their frame of reference. Some have even just pulled from it directly. This isn’t a criticism, mind you. Given my own familiarity with ancient Greek mythology, the touchstone of the Percy Jackson series, and the sort of cultural space that ancient Greek mythology holds in the US, it really makes sense that people would gravitate towards this as their first point of reference. A few of them are taking it further, of course, starting at an ancient Greek god or an idea inspired by an ancient Greek god and then departing from that point of commonality, but not a single one of them even went with a known Dungeons and Dragons god of any pantheon (which also includes the ancient Greek gods, I believe, but that doesn’t count). Again, I’m not super surprised this happened, but I am now left facing the problem of how to continue developing this pantheon and world without getting too caught in the various trappings of ancient Greek mythology. I mean, that’s fecund ground to work from, but there’s a little too much rape and misery for the kind of game I’m hoping to run. I want things to be taken seriously, I want threats to have meaning, and I want my players to struggle with the power balance of the world they’re in, but I don’t want to do that by relying on the horrible yet pervasive tropes present in most of ancient Greek (and Roman) mythology.
Continue readingThe Rotten Labyrinth Reveals It’s Greatest Secret Thus Far: Steve, The (Not So) Little Guy
Sometimes, you build a little something for yourself into one of your games. A silly little thing. Something fun, perhaps even just for you, to keep things interesting and provide the opportunity for some levity. Sometimes that’s a fun little NPC, sometimes it’s a stupid pun you’re building towards, sometimes it’s a situation meant to catch your players off-guard, and sometimes it’s all three of those things at once. In my most-recent session with The Rotten Labyrnith, we talked as a group to get on the same page, in-character and out, about what to do with the player character who had been petrified in the session prior. After that, the party set out to continue exploring the labyrinth keeping in mind their stated hope of finding a cure for their petrified ally and ran into the player’s (potentially temporary) replacement character. Shortly after that, and what felt like an awful lot of distrust for some random guy who ran out of a deeper part of the labyrinth in a panic (distrust they didn’t extend to the wereboar barbarian who showed up, immediately transformed, and attacked them), the party carried on, found some more stuff, and ran into a strange figure crouched in a little, half-hidden corner of the part of the maze they were exploring. Just as things started to progress in talks with this oddly long goblin (who had the most “little guy” energy I could muster), my building’s fire alarm went off and I had to evacuate, cutting the session short and bringing our play to an end without me getting to deliver the joke I’d been building towards. I wound up sending it in the text chat once I was outside and knew what was going on, but it just wasn’t the same.
Continue readingDeveloping Touchstones For Something New
One of the strongest aspects of the campaign I’m starting up to run in place of The Magical Millennium (which I wrote about yesterday) is the feeling of it I had in my head. Sure, I could talk about the core themes and how I imagined the general story of such a game might play out, but it’s a lot easier to build a set of touchstones I can refer to in order to indicate specific things about the game. These often come up in tabletop games, at the individual campaign level or at the ruleset level for games that are seeking to convey a particular feeling no matter the specifics of the game. For instance, one of my favorite games that I’ve never played (though I hope to change that eventually) is Beam Saber and the rulebook starts out with a bunch of references to various mecha anime to use as a touchstone. The general purpose of a list of touchstones like this is to get as many people as possible some idea of what the game being played should feel like. Beam Saber is a game about struggling to live during a massive galactic war that you can’t hope to influence, with an emphasis on either coming together or doing what you must to eventually get out alive, so all of the anime the referenced point in that general direction. It’s a good way for specific genre games to indicate what part of the genre the game is emulating. At the campaign level, it tends to get more specific about aspects of the particular continuity of a game that you’re playing through. Typically, I tend to start out with strong ideas that don’t necessarily need touchstones, images to help paint a picture of the world, some music if I’ve had the time to figure it out, and also some of my own writing if I’ve had the time and energy to put towards it.
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