Catching Up With The Demigods Of Daelen

Slowly, as I continue to recover from months of constant exhaustion, withdrawal, and pain (not necessarily in that order), I’m getting back into my various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. This past weekend, it was time to get back into The Demigods of Daelen, my sorta-hack of Dungeons and Dragons 5e to make the numbers big and the storytelling potential just as big (don’t have to worry about the variability of a d20 as much if your bonuses to rolls are huge). Sometimes it feels more like I’ve hacked Roll20 rather than the Dungeons and Dragons system, but given that I’ve consciously and carefully taken the “bounded accuracy” core of D&D 5e and dramatically shifted it to work in a different way, I think I could probably call this a hack. One I’ll probably never write up and formalize in any way because you could probably get this effect much more easily using a different game system, but one that works for my crew of players who seem to prefer playing something that at least resembles Dungeons and Dragons over trying any new game system long enough to really get a feel for it. Anyway, this time we spent a good forty-five minutes catching up and then another forty-five minutes getting a player’s character finished. After that, we unified our players ahead of their upcoming mission, had a fun chit-chat-in-a-bar scene, and then promptly moved on to the main challenge the party will be facing for the first adventure of this campaing: a massive, orb-like mechanical contrapation that is very slowly but inexorably rolling its way towards a large-ish town that it will absolutely crush, slowly and painfully, if it is not somehow stopped. The session came to an end right as the party dealt with the first challenge pertaining to this strange almost-orb, as they were preparing to enter it, and I’m excited to see how the party deals with the challenge I’ve brewed up for them.

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The Rotten Labyrinth Reveals It’s Greatest Secret Thus Far: Steve, The (Not So) Little Guy

Sometimes, you build a little something for yourself into one of your games. A silly little thing. Something fun, perhaps even just for you, to keep things interesting and provide the opportunity for some levity. Sometimes that’s a fun little NPC, sometimes it’s a stupid pun you’re building towards, sometimes it’s a situation meant to catch your players off-guard, and sometimes it’s all three of those things at once. In my most-recent session with The Rotten Labyrnith, we talked as a group to get on the same page, in-character and out, about what to do with the player character who had been petrified in the session prior. After that, the party set out to continue exploring the labyrinth keeping in mind their stated hope of finding a cure for their petrified ally and ran into the player’s (potentially temporary) replacement character. Shortly after that, and what felt like an awful lot of distrust for some random guy who ran out of a deeper part of the labyrinth in a panic (distrust they didn’t extend to the wereboar barbarian who showed up, immediately transformed, and attacked them), the party carried on, found some more stuff, and ran into a strange figure crouched in a little, half-hidden corner of the part of the maze they were exploring. Just as things started to progress in talks with this oddly long goblin (who had the most “little guy” energy I could muster), my building’s fire alarm went off and I had to evacuate, cutting the session short and bringing our play to an end without me getting to deliver the joke I’d been building towards. I wound up sending it in the text chat once I was outside and knew what was going on, but it just wasn’t the same.

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