After five sessions, which feels like both more and less time than I expected, we’ve wrapped up the second arc of my The Leeching Wastes campaign. The first arc involved fleeing from a home that was directly in the path of a horrible monster in hope of finding a new, safer place to call home and the second arc has been all about settling into this new home while dealing with some of the consequences of people’s actions as that integration occurred. In the last session, one of the player characters was brought under the influence of the monster sealed within the heart of the tree that made up the center of The Grove and given the command to free it. The party failed to stop her despite the emotional price they were paying in their attempts, but the unnamed goddess (connected to her by a bargain said goddess made with the player character’s former lover who had sacrificed herself to save the player character) had one last trick up her sleeve that she’d been holding off since it could easily kill that player character. In order to save everyone, the player character risked her life and ultimately survived, but only just barely. The session ended with the remaining members of the party–two NPC allies in tow–settling down to rest while they waited for their tied-up friend to regain consciousness so they could figure out what the hell had just happened. It was a very draining session that lasted less than an hour and a half and quite a place to pick back up from this week as we went through the arc’s denouement and moved forward in time.
Continue readingTabletop Gaming
Want To Be A Better GM Or Player? Play Widely.
One of the best pieces of advice to give someone who wants to improve their writing skills is to read widely. The idea is that you will be exposed to more and more writing in a wider variety of forms, including those outside of whatever genres you might choose to focus on, all of which is useful to you as a writer because it will give you more tools to use in your own creative work. After all, the various writing tricks authors use, their various stylistic quirks and so on, aren’t limited to a genre. If you see something cool and interesting in a science fiction story, you can figure out how to incorporate it into a fantasy story. Or if you find a particularly interesting way of phrasing an idea in a piece of nonfiction, you can find ways to do similar things in your own fictional works. The more you’re exposed to, the more you’ve learned and can incorporate consciously and unconsciously. Which is also true of running tabletop games (and storytelling as a whole, but you can pretty much extend any of this advice into any type of storytelling with enough abstract thinking, so I’m going to stay focused). The more games you play or run, the better you are. This is fairly self-evident to most people since that tends to fall under the “experience makes you better at things” bit of wisdom. I’d suggest taking it a step further, though, and suggest that you play a wide variety of games rather than just sticking to the ones your prefer.
Continue readingThe Penultimate Session Of The Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One more session of Heart: The City Beneath behind us and now we’re down to the last two players of a group that originally had six. One fell by the wayside immediately, before we even began the second session of our worldbuilding game. The second left after she realized this game was not for her and that she needed more time in her weeks. The third left when her character died a single session after the second left and she decided to reclaim some time for herself rather than carry on. The fourth has now stepped aside, one more session later, as his character finished a transformation that has been brewing since that first worldbuilding game. The final two players are both on the cusp of their own ends, each carrying a Zenith move they have either already used and are seeing play out or are saving to use at the right moment, whatever that might look like. Things are coming to a head and every single roll holds the potential to spell the end for each character, as it did for the fourth player’s character. Still, the story holds us all bound and determined to see it through and. at the very latest, in just another week from when this post does up, I will be writing about how it all came to an end.
Continue readingA Situation So Bad It’s Good In The Leeching Wastes
My now-Wednesday group, currently playing The Leeching Wastes, has now met four times in a row! What a record! This time, what was supposed to be a short ritual turned into a whole-session activity that was incredibly emotionally fraught. The cliff-hanger from last time, an abysmal saving throw result, wound up snowballing first into a bit of confusion about the reason the party was there at all, grew further into a bit of inter-party misdirection, and then finally landed as a combat encounter that I didn’t expect to go as poorly as it did. I mean, I know I say this a lot, but I really don’t expect quite so many unlikely things to happen in the tabletop games I’m running despite apparently being a magnet for this kind of improbability. Nothing useful for winning the lottery or having a fortunate life. No. I just attract incredibly unlikely but still possible outcomes but only in tabletop games I’m running. I’m going to avoid speculating about how that’s reflected in my life (I already talk to my therapist about that more than enough), but it really was staggering how a part of the session I expected would take half an hour wound up taking the full hour and forty-five minutes we played (we got another later start since I was finishing up dinner and we were still chitchatting for the first half an hour). I was absolutely mechanically prepared for things to go horribly wrong since a game like this needs stakes for the victories to mean as much as they do, but I was not emotionally prepared. I was not mentally prepared. I had to pause quite a few times to figure out how to proceed or, at the very least, where to find my notes about how to proceed since we have once again taken something I expected to come up later and dropped it onto third level characters.
Continue readingThe Best Session Of Heart: The City Beneath I’ve Ever Run
I ran what will probably be the final “downtime” session of my Heart: The City Beneath game. I put “downtime” in quotation marks because it was supposed to be a rather low-tension session that quickly became anything but that. Sure, our Descent Into The Rotting Heart campaign was split into two groups (last session, two party members stepped into a Fracture and the other two decided to stay in the haven adjacent to the Fracture), but they were both heading for some rest, some healing, and what was supposed to be a little bit of setup for their final delve. Instead, the party outside the Fracture went on a violent rampage that went so much better than it had any right to go, thanks to it being pretty much normal violence against our two tankiest characters while the group inside the Fracture started out following the program and then one of them quickly devolved into a series of bad roles and fallouts that not only sealed the Fracture off from the rest of the world but doomed their character to a cursed, ironic end. I’d planned to keep the session short, in the one to two hour zone, since I was super exhausted and didn’t want to tax myself, but then we wound up using the full length of the session instead. It was wild from start to finish and, in my opinion, the first time I, my players, and Heart were firing on all cylinders.
Continue readingClosing The Loop In My Dungeons And Dragons Campaign
Bumping our record to three out of three scheduled Dungeons & Dragons sessions for the first time in years, my group playing The Leeching Wastes met for our third session following the revival of the campaign. Last time, I revealed that their characters were caught in a time loop situation and that there was something going on with the moon thanks to a (relatively) young god performing her first miracle, finally living out my dream of bringing Majora’s Mask to my D&D table. This time, the party reviewed their plans, ran through a short scene that turned into a long scene (which is my favorite way that a short scene can go) between two characters, decided to wait until they could start fresh with a new loop, and one of them even turned into a weretiger. We also talked through the mechanics of the time loop and how they weren’t designed to be punishing since they’re only third level character, talked about how the checkpoints worked in case they needed to try again, and then they absolutely aced it on their first full attempt to get through, all without using the skills of the NPC I’d created to fill in some of the somewhat alarming gaps in the party’s abilities (suffice it to say that there are no terribly cerebral characters in the group). They just strolled right through it, arrived at the boss fight, and even learned a little bit about everyone’s favorite cute, little NPC that they were guiding to a central point in The Grove so she could perform a druidic ritual to help The Grove’s balance be restored. A good, fulfilling session where everyone got to have a good character moment or two, where everyone got to show off their stuff in combat, and where the paladin obliterated half of the two-monster boss fight in a single critical hit thanks to some hefty damage rolls and a damage type vulnerability. Good times, all around.
Continue readingPlaying A Shipshape Support Character In A Birthday One-Shot
Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friends for a birthday one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game. Most of the players were my every-other-Wednesday group (who play The Leeching Wastes campaign I’m running), but this group was originally formed from the available players of a group I’ve never been a part of before. Now, I’ve run a D&D game for everyone in the one-shot’s group before, thanks to our trip to Spain in 2023 and our desire to run a D&D game in a castle while we were there, but this was my first time playing along side one of the players and my first time to play under this GM since early 2023. It was nice to be back at his table, to be able to play a silly, goofy character, and to enjoy some light-hearted fun. And then talk with one of the other players for an hour and a half after that, which included discussions of creating a book club for the two of us to use as motivation for getting through interesting-to-talk-about-but-difficult-to-read books like Frank Herbert’s Dune (which we’ve both bounced off before). But I digress. This post is about the one-shot, my fun little character, and how I incorporated both my desire to create an interesting thematic character while still making one that will be an effective part of the mechanical side of the game. They were built as a nod to the limitations of a one-shot and as a means of maintaining a high degree of effectiveness that would, if used well, make my allies look good instead of me.
Continue readingThe Magical Millennium Finished Their First Day of School
We did it! My Dungeons and Dragons group playing a Modern Fantasy “school-aged teen slice of life but with fantasy tensions” game I’m calling The Magical Millennium finally finished our first day of school! We got through a second period of lunch and specialty training, everyone had fun coming up with a bunch of electives, we talked through what everyone did immediately after school, and then I outlined how we’re going to handled the rest of their first week of class. We didn’t have any new social encounters (though I did have updated rules on hand just in case) since the one that seemed likely to happen during the second lunch period was avoided entirely. Neither the Non-Player Character nor the Player Character who might have fought each other did, instead choosing to abruptly look away after their eyes accidentally met across the cafeteria. It was a tense moment that passed quickly, thanks to their complete and total mutual rejection of any social contact. Other than that, we had fun making a Group Chat text channel in our Discord server (which was rapidly used by several players to simulate their chatting throughout the day) and started getting our first look into the world at large. Which, thanks to our decision to place this game in the real world and then tweak it from there, is super fun to place around the Twin Cities in Minnesota. All I have to do is open Google Maps and there is all the information I need to describe the world around them. This is honestly an incredibly fun game to play and I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun running a tabletop game of any kind.
Continue readingBringing Majora’s Mask Into My Dungeons & Dragons Campaign
This time, it was only three weeks between sessions for my recently resurrected Dungeons and Dragons campaign (the one I call The Leeching Wastes) and it was only three instead of the originally planned two because two of the players got sick. Which means this is the first time this group has had two consecutive sessions in way more than a year. In this session, after a quick review of what happened during the last session and a much longer process of updating player tokens on Roll20 and figuring out stuff for NPC tokens, we got right into it. We rolled initiative for a fight, the players realized that the enemies were super focused on the one NPC the party needed to keep alive, we started a skill challenge to cross from the edge of the territory to the party’s target location, one character flubbed a skill challenge super badly, the entire party fought against nature, and then they all discovered the world outside The Grove (where the player characters live) in was stuck in a time loop. I finally got to reveal that I had Majora’s Masked my campaign by giving them a haunted moon, a messed up time loop, and a (relatively) young being with godlike powers that listened to all the wrong prayers for all the right reasons, all as a result of stuff that had come up in our game of The Ground Itself that wrapped up in December of 2022. Sure, I had some of god stuff in mind prior to that, but I’d planned to keep it on the down low until a bit more time had passed so I wasn’t burning through every idea I’d had at the outset of the campaign before the party hit level five. But, when the narrative builds itself in that direction, who am I to deny it?
Continue readingWhat Comes After Heart: The City Beneath
Well, we finally did it. My players in Heart: The City Beneath hit their first Zenith beat (the one I’ve been working toward with the player who wanted to withdraw) and another got assigned the group’s first Critical Fallout, which we’ve altered just a tiny bit from its as-written description because the player and I agreed it would be more interesting to give him and his character something to work on as a potential end/major alteration to his character that he won’t be able to remove. It felt more fun than just killing his character off, anyway, though I suppose we’ll see how that goes when we next meet in the middle of April. Our next session was due to happen on Easter Sunday and while none of use are impacted by the holiday, two of the players will be traveling that day and largely unavailable, so we’re skipping that session and picking up in three more weeks from the “brushing off the dust” moment we left the game at during our last session. It was fun to bring an end to the Corporate Invasion moment, given how it all played out, but I’m glad we were in the middle of that arc/delve since it allowed me to provide my players with all of the information and impetus the players would need to move their characters towards the final stage of their arc. So now we’re gearing up for this final push, to see where everything comes to a close.
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