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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Starting To Party With The Party In The Magical Millennium
After two skipped sessions, we finally returned to playing The Magical Millennium. When last we left our beleaguered students, it was their first day of magical classes and they’d survived a harrowing encounter in the lunchroom. They’d breezed through their first day of classes–aside from that one disastrous lunch period–even earning a commendation from the teacher of their Adventuring Class for a stellar performance, and then went their separate ways at the end of the day, united by their experiences, the assignment that they perform as a party, and the single group chat one of them put together. It took three sessions, but we’d finally finished the first day of school!
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 readingFinally Revealing Tabletop Secrets Two Years Later
It took a year and a quarter (from December of 2022 to March 2024), but I finally managed to run another session of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I started back in 2022 to give my DM and friend a way to rest between running his own sessions without having as much downtime for our group. That wound up not working as well as I would have hoped since we only played this campaign six or seven times total, including a few sessions of playing The Ground Itself to build a new home area for our Player Characters, but now we’re back at it! At least once, anyway. We’ll see if we can keep up our “every other week” schedule. Which, you know, I get the appeal of that for a lot of people, given the general demands on everyone’s time nowadays, but I really miss my weekly games. I miss having that dependability and repetition. I miss knowing what I’m going to be doing every week. The consistency was nice, even when it was only ever me running weekly games (or, in more recent years, trying to run weekly games and ending up in the “monthly at best” zone), but every-other-week is way better than “not at all” and probably a lot easier for most people to consistently attend. Regardless, I’m glad to be back at this game I was super excited to be playing in 2022, that I wrote about multiple times (since all but the latest of my GM Suggestions posts were about creating this world and I posted the introductory short story I wrote for it), and that I had to set aside for a while. I wound up bringing back an altered form of it last year, for my Heart: The City Beneath game, but that version of the world changed pretty significantly to reflect the mechanics of Heart: The City Beneath and never quite felt the same as my first version of it did.
Continue readingReturning To Dungeons & Dragons With The Strongest Session 1 Of My Life
After over a year, I finally ran a session of Dungeons and Dragons 5e again. Two, actually, in quick succession (which in this case means one on Sunday and one on Monday). It was like settling back into an old, familiar chair that, despite feeling exactly the way you remember it, is sitting in a room that only looks like the place it used to be. It was familiar and everything worked exactly how I thought it would, but everything also felt a little off. Like there was some detail that I was missing that would explain why the desk was slightly further from the chair than I thought and that the sunlight was in my eyes more than it used to be. Which can pretty much be chalked up to that year being my longest break from running some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game since I started playing it in 2010, coupled with my still-settling feelings about returning to a game that has as troubled a history as D&D does thanks to the shit Hasbro has tried to pull as the owners of Wizards of the Coast. Still, I was able to work through those feelings and, despite the frenetic pace of my prep during the forty-eight hours prior to the first of the aforementioned games and the twelve hours prior to the second of said games, run what felt like a pair of good sessions.
Continue readingViolin Concerto in the Quay of Baldur’s Gate
Notes for the reader:
This is a piece of fiction I wrote almost two and a half years ago for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I was playing in. This is about the same character that I’ve mentioned several times in past blog posts and even wrote another short story for. This is Lewis, my favorite TTRPG character I’ve ever made and the only one I still miss playing, even after about a year away from the game. What this piece is, more specifically, is me expressing my enthusiasm for this character to my fellow players and GM by writing about a specific night my character endured while waiting for his companions to return.
As a bit of background, this scene follows my character, Lewis, taking out a collection of local thugs and bounty hunters who belonged to an organization called the Zhentarim. He pretended to know where their target (one of his party members and another player’s character) could be found, lured them out of their base in smaller groups, and then ruthlessly murdered them all in the street while remaining entirely undetected until the last survivors hid in their base where he then killed the remainder.
It was not a fight that should have worked out as well as it did (it resulted in the DM nerfing one of the magic items I used in this series of murders) and it was the one time I made myself feel awful for actions my character chose. It was a turning point in the character’s journey as he realized he’d become what he hated: a powerful person hurting people because he could and he knew he wouldn’t be punished for it. Sure, he had a decent enough motive, but not everyone who died that day was a vile criminal. One was a petty criminal who still had a chance to turn his life around until Lewis ended it. That’s where the scene picks up, actually. Right after he left the bar where he’d offered weregild to someone who cared about the young man he’d killed.
As for the rest of what this piece is… Well, this format was one my friends and I used a lot while we were in high school, as we wrote stories or drew comics about our self-insert characters in the slightly fictionalized version of reality we collectively made up. This is as close to fanfiction as I’ve ever written and only isn’t fanfiction because I don’t think, by its very definition, that you can write fan fiction about your own characters…
Anyway. See this video for the vibe I’m going for (dude walking around playing music) with most of Lewis’ performances. Andrew Bird also did a pretty good Tiny Desk Concert that can give you a sense of his energy and the way he uses a violin, which is my mental image for Lewis making music. To show you the looping thing I mention a few times, and the way I see it, see this TEDTalk Andrew Bird did a while ago (the first song shows it off, you don’t need to watch the whole thing).
This information and the music is mostly about setting a tone and a vibe, sharing some stuff I use as a touchstone for the way I view this character in these moments and the music he creates. In the text below, any time there’s a link, just load the video attached and listen to it as you read (there won’t be any songs with lyrics unless the lyrics are incorporated into the writing somehow). If you get to a new song before you’ve finished the old one, you can pause and listen to the rest or move one. Just don’t, you know, overlap the songs.
Continue readingMy Bittersweet Return to Dungeons & Dragons
As I sat down to run what I was ninety-five percent certain was going to be the Session 0 of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I had to take a few minutes to put aside the misgivings and constant internal debate about whether or not I was making the right choice. I had spent most of the day already, and a lot of idle time in the weeks leading up to said day, trying to figure out how I felt about returning to a hobby I had so firmly turned my back on just over a year prior. It was a difficult time, back then, as the company that owned my most-played tabletop game tried to destroy the hobby in order to make a little more money, and it wasn’t a decision I’d made lightly. I’d been running some form of D&D game ostensibly weekly (up to four times a week, during the first year and a half of the pandemic), except for a year off after I moved away from my college town to the city in which I still live, since the summer of 2010. There were other gaps in there, but no more than a few months at most. My entire tabletop history had been built around the game and I still felt compelled to turn away, to withhold my money from the company that seemed to be actively trying to drive it into the dirt. I was the sort of person who bought every book as they came out, who owned physical copies and digital copies online, through DNDBeyond, who ran tons of games and could not only run a game reference free, but quickly homebrew up something custom for my players that almost always hit my desired balance of “overpowered but in a way that’s fun for everyone.” And I still cut all ties.
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