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.
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Helping 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 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 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 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 readingNot Another D&D Podcast Is Worth Your Time
Of all the people I’ve ever talked to who got into the various tabletop gaming shows and podcasts created by ex-College Humor people (Such as Dimension 20 and Not Another D&D Podcast), I’m the only one who has followed my particular path. I’m sure there’s other people who have followed the same route given that there’s billions of other humans and millions of other people who fit into the same broad media categories that I do, but I’ve yet to find any despite keeping my eyes peeled. After all, most probably followed the various comedians or College Humor itself as it began to fracture in the collapse of the online advertising marketing (fomented, of course, by Facebook’s outright lies about video views), which makes sense! A lot of the modern Actual Play shows that quickly rose to prominence did so as a result of bringing an existing audience with them (one need not look further than Worlds Beyond Number for recent proof of this). I wasn’t really into the type of humor that College Humor relied on, though, and wasn’t really into internet comedians in general (and I’m still not, to be honest). They’re just not my thing. So I only discovered NADDPod (and through them the rest of the now DropoutTV network) three years ago, when they were about halfway through their second full campaign and I happened to stumble across a song from the finale of their first campaign on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
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.
Continue readingHere I Go Running Dungeons & Dragons Again
As I can snatch a couple minutes here or there, I’ve been spending my spare time and brain power on gearing up for another Dungeons and dragons campaign. Apparently, that’s all anyone–aside from one of my players, anyway–wants to play these days and as much as I want to play different games, I’d rather play D&D than nothing. It’s not like I can’t enjoy this, after all. I’m here for the stories. I just wish I had the opportunity to tell different stories and to play with a group of people more interested in the broad range of stories I want to tell. I already need to keep this one a little more limited than I’d like, focused on story elements that aren’t analogous to problems we face in the real world since one of my players has specifically requested that, along with no more fighting the personification of abstract and awful concepts, like capitalism. Not because it didn’t work out the last time I did it, but because this friend doesn’t want to encounter a real-world problem we can’t actually fight in the real world. Which is a huge limitation since there’s tons of interesting story ideas that allow people in a D&D game to fight something we, in the real world, can’t fight. I get this player’s meaning, though, so I’ll do what I can to comply, but there will be some amount of real-world issues involved because I can’t imagine running a game for very long that DOESN’T have some kind of real-world analog.
Continue readingParty Plot Twists In The Magical Millennium
After a month that felt so much longer than a month, we’re finally back to playing The Magical Millennium! I’ve missed this group a lot, even though I’ve managed to find ways to stay busy, so I’m glad we had enough people still available to meet. One player, a doctoral student in the middle of probably the busiest part of her doctoral program, hasn’t been able to make it for the last two sessions, but I mostly just feel bad that she’s so busy and swamped with her work that she doesn’t have the time to relax and do things like playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m sure she’ll free up eventually, but I definitely missed her presence during the last two games. We’ll have to figure out what her character was up to at the party while everyone else handled their first party of the year with what has mostly amounted to success. Sure, there were some flubbed rolls in there, but I’m always looking for ways to let my players fail forward and it was pretty easy to do here. This time, my players tried to sneakily follow some of their peers, jumped off a roof into a pool, made some friends, and even had a fun mix of inter-team conflict and bonding. It was a really great session, even setting aside how happy I was just to be back playing this game again.
Continue readingThe Longest D&D Campaign I’ve Ever Played In Has Ended
My occasional Thursday night Dungeons and Dragons game has finally come to an end. A weird end, if I’m being honest, but an end. Which feels pretty fitting, all things considered, given the basic premise of the campaign, the way we rarely had consistent players, and how quickly things devolved on the mechanical side of the game despite the Dungeons Master’s attempts to use a ruleset he’d found online to better balance out the way the game is built against the way we were playing it. Our campaign of battles ended not with a final climactic fight against some supreme foe but with a solved puzzle that ended a glorious battle that wound up being a bit of a pushover once we all committed to fighting it during the two hours of our three-hour session time since we solved the puzzle in the first half hour of actual play and decided just to do an “alternate ending” where we fought everything just to use up all the time we’d scheduled.
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