My players and I, minus one who was not feeling well, have met for the last worldbuiling session. We played a quick game of Sentinel (the second half of Sanctuary and Sentinel), that I ended without showing the full conclusion because I wanted to save that for the right moment in the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons 5e portion of this non-traditional campaign. We had a good few rounds of play before the end, thanks to there being four of us, but we still ended earlier than most of us expected. We were still building up to something bigger when the end arrived in the form of one of the deck’s joker cards, but it was just one pull before the random number I’d produced anyway, so we didn’t lose out on much potential build anyway. It just means the then-status quo will have to be significantly escalated in order for things to happen the way I envision. Which is possible! The danger of escalation was the constant backdrop of our game, so even if it never quite got there while we played, the idea was never far from anyone’s mind, so there are all kinds of crumbs and kernels that can be built into something larger. Plenty of ammunition, so to speak. I just need to take the time to sit down, work through everything we’ve built, and figure out how it all plays out. And how many years have passed. I did my best to draw out the time, to create a significant separation between the outside world and the life inside the dome that they characters will know, but we wound up less than three centuries separated and with some degree of contact for much of that. I will probably need to run the clock a while longer to really get the effect I want, but I’m also planning to toss a “long-lived peoples are rare” element into this world just to keep things a little less historically grounded. I want things to pass into myth and legend faster than they would if some poeple lived to be five hundred or whatever.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes
Sifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: Sanctuary And Sentinel (Part 1: Sanctuary)
Once again, my little campaign in the making has met and Sifting Through The Ashes has taken one more step towards it’s first stage of broader tabletop play. As my friend and player–who was a bit more familiar with MeghanlynnFTW’s Sanctuary & Sentinel–predicted, Sanctuary didn’t last all that long. We spent most of our timing building out the “sanctuary” and all its features than we spent playing the game after that. I’m not sure we even got through two whole rounds of turns before the game ended, thanks to a bad roll on my part and then a few more similarly bad rolls. It looked like we wouldn’t even make it past the first round, but we did. The rule at play here is that whenever you take a turn, you draw a card from a prepared deck of cards, look up the situation related to that card, and then roll to determine if the guardians of your sanctuary are successful in handling the threat or if they fail to take appropriate action and their enemy, The Threat, gets what it wants. When the game starts, you have to roll above a two on a six-sided die to succeed. And on my very first turn, I rolled a failure and that started us on a downward plunge because, as is often reflected in reality, it was increasingly easy for things to go bad or fail the more that whent wrong for the sactuary’s guardians. Still, we got some interesting worldbuiling building out of the game and I’ve got even more ammo for setting this all up according to my initial vision of the campaign, so it wasn’t a wasted night. It actually lasted almost exactly as long as I wanted it to, so it all worked out in the end even if we spent most of the post-setup play feeling like the game was crashing down around our ears.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Micro Versus Macro Plotting
As I’ve been to busy to really do much active preparation for this tabletop campaign (which isn’t great considering that I’m writing this two days before our next session and I need to be ready to facilitate a game of Sanctuary), I’ve been trying to keep my momentum going by working through whatever plot I might put together for the two discrete chunks of the later campaign that I can foresee. I’ve got the outline of it locked in already, and I won’t be getting TOO specific since I need to leave room for adaptation, player input, and micro-plots, but I really need to start lining up some of the more important details. Especially for the first chunk of the campaign since that’s going to be a bit more locked-in than the second chunk by its very nature. I also need to produce a map for it as well, since that kind of location-based visual will be important for a while. It won’t be unimportant later, but it will be more important earlier to help ground everything we’ve got going on. After that, I need to generate a bunch of names, some proper nouns, work out how to incorporate a few fun little details from our games thus far, and then organize it all in some way that I can reliably use and won’t completely forget about. I’ve made plenty of GM reference documents in the past, but none in quite a while and I’ve never done anything of the sort while this burned out and tired, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Continue readingShifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: Frost Shepherds And A World Ending Game
I’m a bit behind on these “Dev Logs,” but Sifting Through The Ashes has finished its second and third full sessions. We got through Spring of The Quiet Year in our first full session, Our second session saw us through Summer and Fall, and now our third session got us through a rather quick Winter and the entirety of World Ending Game (by Everest Pipkin). We had a lot of good world development, got to add some interesting tidbits, and even my players helped me build in the direction I’d indicated we were going to travel, so I was able to get more stuff done on my turns that wasn’t just strictly advancing the worldbuilding required to set up the vision I’d pitched. I was also able to get a little free-form with it. We expanded the bird cult, found some magic crystals, learned about a geothermal plant, saw a volcano cool, failed to cure a rampant disease, catalogued a lot of plants, discovered a crystal-powered mech, and even learned about some cool anti-gravity rocks. We had a pretty good run before the stars fell, the war ended, and the world began to get coated in the ash of disintegrating space debree. And then we even had five killer scenes as we turned the arrival of the “frost shepherds” (the undefined force that brings an end to The Quiet Year’s gameplay that, in our world, was drifting boats carrying refuges from all over the world) into the gradual end of the world in which we’d built our small slice of continued life. It was good. And incredibly melancholy.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: The Not-So-Quiet Year
We’ve had our first session of the tenatively titled “Sifting Through The Ashes” campaign. We had a good starting session of The Quiet Year (By Avery Alder) and while it took most of our session to get through Spring, there was a bunch of slowly figuring things out as we played and periods of thoughtful silence, so I’m hoping this next session (the day I’m writing this, actually) will go a bit faster [it did! But more on that next week]. Not that I’m in any kind of hurry, I just want to keep things moving along and there’s plenty of ground left to cover. I want to keep us moving so that we aren’t still working up to the actual game we’ll be playing by the time next year rolls around. After all, we only have one regular session a month and up to two additional sessions scheduled as/if we find a day to hold them. That’s not nothing. Three sessions in a single month is pretty good even for a weekly campaign, in my experience, and we’ve definitely gotten that this month, so it looks like we’re moving at a pretty good pace. And yet I don’t want to risk us faltering or losing steam at a crucial moment. I also want to pace things so that my players have enough time to start thinking about whatever game we’re going to play next and getting through two seasons of The Quiet Year tonight (the day I wrote this, not the day it gets posted) would mean that they have two weeks before our next session and can spend that time reading the rules for the next game we’ll play. I’ve got it all planned out and being able to stick to that plan would be nice. Not essential, of course, just nice.
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