Another weekend down, another session of The Magical Millennium in the bag! As we have been for the last few sessions, we’re still in the middle of the Lock-In at school. This past session covered almost two hours of time, which would mean we’re actually picking up the pace if it weren’t for the fact that we weren’t able to finish up the final match of the dodgeball tournament and so didn’t REALLY get through a whole two-hour period. In the time we did cover, though, we got to see everyone except the Cleric run off to sign up for the “random party” Adventurer Escape Room activity. Only one player got randomly selected for a time slot they’d chosen, unfortunately, but that just means that everyone else will feel a bit more ready when they go to compete in the time trial version with their established party after the dodgeball tournament. We got a little bit of conversation between the Artificer and the Bard, a pair we don’t see much, saw the Cleric almost have a panic attack as they sought out some peace and quiet, and saw a fated confrontation between the Barbarian and Group B’s fighter on the dodgeball court (well, we saw the start of what the Barbarian’s player is describing as a fated confrontation with her character’s foil. I’m pretty sure it’s just some jock-on-jock competition, but we’ll have to see how it goes). After that, we managed to actually end on time since one of the players had to leave right away. Now, we’re looking at some potential scheduling woes as we approach the winter holiday season and must face up to the reality that skipping even one session means going a long time without getting to meet up again.
Continue readingRoleplaying
Playing The Adults In A Campaign About Teens In The Magical Millennium
For the first time in maybe the whole campaign, we had an extended roleplaying scene between one of the player characters, the party’s Artificer, and one of the teachers at the magical high school (Adak’s Academy Of Magic). This happened a couple hours into the lock-in, as the rest of the party sifted through the aftermath of their previous encounter with the brother of one of the other player characters (the party’s Bard) and then moved to join the screening of Shrek. Rather than join them in doing something they felt was pointless, the Artificer snuck off to work on a personal project in one of the magic item fabrication labs and was found out by a teacher who proved to be more sympathetic and understanding than maybe the Artificer had expected. Once the two of them had talked it out, the Artificer rejoined the rest of the players in the gym since the party had left the Shrek-themed movie room when Shrek had finished to playing volleyball against some of their classmates in the open gym. They played another game of volleyball and we wrapped up our session with a bit of chitchat afterwards. Other notable events include a quick but momentous B-plot during the “catch the Artificer up on what had happened during the previous session and then talk about the revelation that the Bard’s brother had been part of the group that had accidentally started the growing anti-magic movement” segment, a quick hack of volleyball rules that wound up taking much longer than expected, and a long post-game discussion of whether or not the Group B party was there to play the part of character-opposites that the party (Group A) would need to eventually kill. It was a pretty great game and the first time I felt like I was absolutely at the top of my game since early August. In short, it was another great session with this group.
Continue readingUncorking Emotions In The Magical Millennium
One of my favorite parts of my The Magical Millennium campaign is that all of my players are willing to go all-in on roleplaying in a way that I can rarely predict. Sometimes people escalate when I didn’t expect to provoke a response or wind up digging into something I assumed was going to be passed over quickly, and I absolutely love the feeling of needing to scramble in order to continue the scene without breaking stride. This last session, as the party started the Lock-In they’d been planning as they dealt with the local emergency in the background (they all kept their cell phones since the barrier around the Hellmouth broke and while all the parents absolutely agreed that keeping all of their burgeoning adventurer children under close supervision by much more powerful adventurers and trained educators was a great idea, they still wanted to be able to get ahold of them if something else happened. Which means these teens also have access to outside information and that’s definitely never going to come up even a little bit), I got to see my players in fine form.
Continue readingPlayer Versus Player Roleplaying In The Magical Millennium
Another week and another Dungeons and Dragons session in the bag! This week, I got to run The Magical Millennium again. Our last session involved a Parent/Guardian-Teacher Conference and the party’s first adventure (which only included four of the group’s five players, unfortunately) and this one started off with a little bit of back-tracking for the player who couldn’t be there for the last session. After all, her character needed an opportunity to start on her homework (to interview an experienced adventurer, with bonus points if the adventurer was active before the Adventurers’ Guild began operating). From there, we moved into spending some time going through the finances of the previous year’s Junior Student Government (discovering conclusive proof of the previously suspected embezzlement along the way), more interviews and homework, an incredible bit of Player-versus-Player roleplaying, and then some wrap up as the players moved to establish individual emotional connections over group ones while also trying to finish putting together the lock-in they’d dreamed up as a way to help their absent player character eventually escape the cult they’re a part of. Just normal teen things, you know? It was a lot of fun to preside over a session like this, largely filling in the blanks, keeping tensions between the player characters and not the players (which was not much work, since they’re all good roleplayers, even if this group is still relatively new to playing together), and finding ways to keep the story rolling forward even as the difficult social dynamics of high school students from very different backgrounds threaten to slowly rip the group apart. This game continues to be a blast and I am eager for the next session, even if I still have to wait two weeks (as of writing this, anyway).
Continue readingBringing An Old D&D Character Back For A New Shot At Life
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.
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.
Continue readingFinally Halfway Through The School Day In The Magical Millennium
This past Sunday, we held our second session of the Dungeons & Dragons game I’ve titled The Magical Millennium. This is the modern fantasy D&D game I’ve mentioned previously, featuring high school students in a bit of a genre mash-up I’ve taken to describing as “slice-of-life but with fantasy tensions,” and so far our first two 3+ hour sessions have involved going through the first four periods of the first day of school in a new year. Last time, we covered character introductions, a few notable NPCs, terminology they’d all need to know, and establishing some of the background drama the second-year students were coming into the game with. It was a lot of fun, especially as it ended with a Illusory/virtual reality fight the players absolutely dominated. This time, since the fight I’d planned to start with had been unceremoniously ended by a hefty expenditure of limited resources, we focused on what the students did with the latter half of their homeroom period, a bit of background on how magic works in the world, their class schedules, and how classes were going to be formatted through their days. Also when they had lunch period, which wound up being the battleground for our first social encounter when a bit of incredibly forward flirting was misinterpreted by an NPC. We got to go all-in on new systems and high school drama, which felt like a lot of fun to me, even if we only made it through another two and a half periods of their eight-period day.
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 readingRoleplaying Magic Item Effects In Dungeons and Dragons
Last night, during the “every so often on Thursday when enough people respond affirmatively” Dungeons and Dragons campaign I play in, one of the other players commented on how reckless I was playing my character. I was a bit surprised they’d said anything, since I’m playing the party’s tank, a Barbarian with a super high AC and Hit Points to spare, but I had slowly been escalating my character’s behavior over the last few sessions. I’d gone from looking out for my allies to jumping straight into danger and even trying to get eaten by creatures large enough to do so. I had a logical explanation for all of it, most of which centered on my character’s ability to remain at a single hit point instead of falling unconscious if I passed a fairly easy constitution saving throw that got a little bit more difficult each time I made it. Behind that, though, I actually had a different reason for behaving this way at all and I finally got to spill the beans when this player started commenting on the fact that my character was betting his soul that he’d be alive after the pit fiend that he was face-to-face with had “died.” The Pit fiend didn’t take the bet and I got to explain that I was doing all of this reckless, ill-advised stuff because my character (known to the party as Sir B. F., which only one of them knows stands for Sir Biscuit Fluffington since he’s a Wizard’s cat who was awoken to consciousness by ambient magical energy and transformed into a large, beefy Cat Man when he got transported to the world we’re in) had a magic item that made him immune to fear effects. He was literally incapable of being made afraid and I decided to take it a step further by making him incapable of feeling fear.
Continue readingI Played So Many Tabletop Games Last Week
Last week was a pretty active week for me, in terms of tabletop gaming. Three of four possible games happened and I enjoyed each of them in incredibly different ways. While I’ll save my ruminations about my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath for Friday, I have plenty to write about from the Elden Ring themed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e I played last Thursday and the game of Pathfinder 2e I played two days later. As I’ve mentioned before, the Thursday game is one that has been going on for a while and meets at least somewhat regularly. I’m still fairly new to Pathfinder 2e and the group I play with every other Saturday, but I’ve been settling in well despite our scheduling issues and enjoying the somewhat more intense roleplaying that game provides compared to the encounter-heavy Dungeons and Dragons game I play. The two of them make for a lot of fun experiences since I’m very comfortable with D&D’s rules, so I can just relax and enjoy some silly combat stuff, and I’m always happy to do a bunch of roleplaying, so I’ve got a fairly easy environment in which to learn Pathfinder 2e a little better. I’ll admit that some of my knowledge gains in that game feel a little futile given that the remastered version of the game is coming out soon and I’ll have to unlearn and relearn a lot of stuff when that happens. Especially since some of that stuff is what I’ve been very focused on previously since my character, a rogue who dabbles in alchemy and tons of crafting, apparently lands in a lot of areas being reworked from one edition to the next.
Continue reading