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 readingTabletop Gaming
The 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).
Continue readingPlayer Versus Player Roleplaying In The Magical Millennium
Another week and another Dungeons and Dragons session in the bag! This week, I got to run The Magical Millennium again. Our last session involved a Parent/Guardian-Teacher Conference and the party’s first adventure (which only included four of the group’s five players, unfortunately) and this one started off with a little bit of back-tracking for the player who couldn’t be there for the last session. After all, her character needed an opportunity to start on her homework (to interview an experienced adventurer, with bonus points if the adventurer was active before the Adventurers’ Guild began operating). From there, we moved into spending some time going through the finances of the previous year’s Junior Student Government (discovering conclusive proof of the previously suspected embezzlement along the way), more interviews and homework, an incredible bit of Player-versus-Player roleplaying, and then some wrap up as the players moved to establish individual emotional connections over group ones while also trying to finish putting together the lock-in they’d dreamed up as a way to help their absent player character eventually escape the cult they’re a part of. Just normal teen things, you know? It was a lot of fun to preside over a session like this, largely filling in the blanks, keeping tensions between the player characters and not the players (which was not much work, since they’re all good roleplayers, even if this group is still relatively new to playing together), and finding ways to keep the story rolling forward even as the difficult social dynamics of high school students from very different backgrounds threaten to slowly rip the group apart. This game continues to be a blast and I am eager for the next session, even if I still have to wait two weeks (as of writing this, anyway).
Continue readingRolling With The Unexpected As A GM
During a recent D&D game I got to play in (it’s the wrap-up of another campaign that some of my friends used to play in years ago that needed another player to round things out as they try to bring it to an end this year), things went a little off the rails. I’ll claim some responsibility in starting the process since I decided to act in a situation that the other players didn’t seem inclined to and wound up preventing a bad guy from magically escaping. Sure, this meant that we got to show the entire city that they were being ruled by a terrifying Adult Red Dragon, but that also meant that we were stuck in a room with an angry Adult Red Dragon and a ton of bystanders who had no hope of surviving an attack from him. It was rough, seeing half of those people die as the party of intrepid adventurers tried to intervene against some of the named and known unsavory NPCs at the ball we were all attending, but we forced a dragon (the leader and ally of the aforementioned NPCs) to reveal himself and set up an interesting situation that we’d need to flee. Only, when it came time to run, the battle immediately turned sideways. This sudden shift was only made possible by a series of moments that, individually, seemed largely unremarkable, but ultimately ended with one of our group knocking the dragon unconscious before a Contingency spell zipped him away from us. Which, needless to say, really knocked the plot and session plans (current and future) asunder. I wound up talking to the DM afterwards (he is one of my dearest friends and a brother to me, along with being my longest-running tabletop game player), about how these kinds of things happen, the choices we make as GMs, and how to live with what happens after the fact (we wound up branching pretty far in our conversation, as we often do, since he’s also been around pretty much every time something similar happened to me).
Continue readingPlayer Characters As Rotten As Their Setting
Currently, my other Sunday group has completed our second session of the prologue I’m running for our game. This is my second group in my “The Rotten” setting and while I STILL don’t have a proper name for this group (I’m calling our prologue “The Rotten Haven” but that name is built from the setting name and the current focal point of the game rather than because it reflects the game in any way other than these sparse setting details), we’ve solidly landed our group in the game. While the characters all started out fairly neutral, the past two sessions have seen them take a sharp turn towards villainy and I’ve had to pivot my preparations from being focused on building out the evil side of the game to building out the good side of the game. Sure, there’s definitely some question as to whether or not each group is truly Good or Evil, but one side is engaged in behavior that is mostly morally good and the other side is doing things that are mostly morally bad. There’s nuance if the players want to dig into it, but considering that they decided to go the assassination route and a mixture of really good rolls on my part (I rolled a LOT of natural 20s last night, even given the huge number of dice I rolled) and bad rolls on their part meant that they got found out multiple times. As their decisions snowballed, I made sure to characterize their actions a bit, trying to illustrate what kind of people they had become as a result of their thus-far undefined past adventures and were becoming in the eyes of the citizens who once saw them as heroes. All of which culminated in them fighting a battle against all of the leadership of the rebellion they’d planned to assassinate, but all at once instead of being separated into manageable chunks.
Continue readingGuardian-Teacher Conferences And First Adventures In The Magical Millennium
Though we were short a player, there were still enough people available to hold another session of The Magical Millennium. We picked up immediately where we left off last time, with a few notes about how most of the player characters present spent their afternoons and evenings before we launched into the two big events for the session: a guardian-teacher conference (like a parent-teacher conference but for legal guardians who want to avoid the topic of parents) to discuss the uncontrolled magic one of the player characters unknowingly cast on their unsuspecting dorm neighbor and the party’s first adventure in a city park that had an Awakened Bush problem! Everything went well, my players had a great time, and no one was knocked unconscious despite the irritable awakened plants landing two critical hits in a combat session that was almost prevented by good roleplaying (bad rolls and cascading failures are the only reason this didn’t even non-violently). I got to make up some random NPC names, accidentally create a really cool character, and start to trickle in a little bit of information about the retired adventuring party casting its shadow over the city and the player characters. After all, if one of the players is going to make their character the second child of one of the ex-adventurers who saved the world by sealing the rifts into the fiendish planes before they could consume the planet, I’m absolutely going to find a way to do something narratively fun with that. Why wouldn’t I?
Continue readingCatching Up On The Magical Millennium
After a little bit over two months, I finally had all of my players back together again for The Magical Millennium and we not only got to catch up on what one of the characters was doing in the background of every scene previously discussed by the other players, but get through the entirety of the second day of school for all of the players who couldn’t be there last time. My players also picked out their first quests, discussed their homework, and dealt with the small revelations that came from catching up the other player (and worked on catching her up on the small revelations that come from everyone else’s scenes). We also got to have a few discussions that had been put off because one of the required players wasn’t there. It was a great time, even if we started half an hour late and spent most of the session focused on catching up rather than doing something wholly new. I’d have preferred to get some completely new stuff into the game, but there were a few scenes that came up that needed time and attention for reasons I’ll be keeping to myself for now (though I’ve already revealed to one of my players that something important happened that their character only really noticed in retrospect). Fully caught up, now, I’m excited for us to continue forward with a sort of parent-teacher conference to discuss one student’s accidental spellcasting, one or more new adventures, and the eventual introduction of the first threads of the larger plot I’ve been cooking up.
Continue readingOur Second Day Of School In The Magical Millennium
After waiting another month, most of my group returned to playing The Magical Millennium. One of the players couldn’t make it again and another one vanished fairly quickly because they lost power about fifteen minutes after they joined the session, so there were only three of us for pretty much the whole session. This made getting through the group’s second day of magical class so much easier, since we only had to deal with three players instead of the original five. It also helped, of course, that we’d already done one day of school and were familiar with how the day would go. We were really set up for success. The only real event of note, since all the players wanted to keep their noses clean after the party just two days prior, was that the founder of the school–who also happened to be their homeroom teacher–introduced them to the concept of The Adventurer’s Guild and informed them that they were all licensed to operate within the guild under the auspices of the school’s membership. After that, the party started doing researching some jobs they could go on, to earn a little money and do their group homework assignment (go on An Adventure), but stopped short of actually picking one. We wanted the whole group to be there when any decision was made, so we opted to wait until the next session, when we’d actually be close to doing one of those adventures and would hopefully have our whole group of players able to attend.
Continue readingIntroducing A Prologue Into My New Dungeons & Dragons Game
As I promised last week, I’ve now run Session 0 for my new Sunday Dungeons and Dragons campaign (which I do not have a name for, yet). The group has talked through a little bit of what we’re interested in doing and while I still got the same caveats I had last week, the things I expected to fly under the radar have flown under the radar. It’s not that I’m hiding that the whole world of this game is a metaphor for climate change and any stories that take place within it must necessarily grapple with that world-defining thing, I just didn’t explicitly say it. I did talk a bit about the state of the world and how things will likely go in it, but I forgot to mention that this world isn’t really something that can be fixed as many high fantasy D&D games might expect. There’s no going back, only forward. The players might improve things for a lot of people or find a way to prevent things from getting too much worse, but the tipping point has been passed and all that remains to be see is how long it takes for the rubble to settle and who gets taken down with it. And to continue living, connecting, and building community all the while.
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