It will be at least another week yet before I start playing in a new (to me) Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign. I thought we might start last week (the day I wrote this), but one of the players wound up being busy and the fact that this game is specifically a campaign wrap-up means that we really can’t play without someone. I mean, they could probably play without me since my character is being introduced pretty late into the campaign (as part of the game’s revival and conclusion), but I don’t think they will. Not after inviting me to join them and everything. Luckily, thanks to an early pandemic game that didn’t last very long, I had a character who already existed in the game’s world so I could just level him up, kit him out, and then work with the Dungeon Master to figure out where he existed in this world a little bit further down the timeline. It even works out thematically because the campaign in which this character first appeared was about slaying a dragon that had its own cult and this campaign wrap-up is about a campaign of dragon slayers who accidentally let part of the soul of an evil undead dragon escape from the magic crystal they’d been trying to protect. As it turned out, not all natural twenties are good things, especially when it comes to the targeted application of a Dispel Magic spell. A natural twenty on that could do a lot more than you intended.
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Vox Machina Season 2 Is As Violently Messy As This Post Is Meandering
After many months of waiting (I promised to watch with a friend and I do my best to keep my word when I’ve got the choice), I finally watched Season 2 of Vox Machina. These twelve episodes, clearly broken into three-episode chunks with particularly hefty cliffhangers meant to hook the viewer at the end of each weekly chunk of episodes (at least, you know, when the episodes where initially released), cover the beginning of the longest arc of the streamed Critical Role Campaing 1 tabletop game, from the arrival of the Chroma Conclave (an alliance of Ancient Dragons) to the climatic battle against the the first of the four Ancient Dragons that has conquered the kingdom the heroes called home. While much of the first season’s changes were made to adapt the show from a streamed tabletop game to a cartoon, much of the second season’s changes were made to make the story as a whole flow better (on top of continuing the changes required to adapt the story). It even mixes up a lot of the individual story beats from the streamed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but it tells a much cleaner story in doing so. Over all, I have to say I like the cartoon more than the streamed show. Sure, watching a bunch of professional actors play dungeons and dragons is fun, but it is also super time-consuming. They really belabor the various plots, big and small, of a tabletop game in a way that is fun to watch as an on-going streamed game, but not really something that would make an interesting or particularly engaging story in any other medium. While I do hold a special place in my heart for the 100 episodes of Critical Roles Campaign 1 that I watched, I think that adapting the story to a cartoon has allowed it to become the interesting and engaging story I remember rather than the somewhat long and belabored story I have been unwilling to watch a second time and unable to push myself to finish.
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