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 readingStorytelling
The Descent Into The Rotting Heart Ends With A Slow Fade
Last night, after several months, many delays, and little bit of ad hoc scheduling, my remaining two players and I wrapped up our campaign of Heart: The City Beneath. Both remaining players hit their zeniths, we wrapped up the last trailing bits of story, and then did a post mortem since the player whose character had died/zenithed-out last session was around and available. It was a long night for all of us since we moved back our planned start time an hour, used up the the entire hour and a half of game time we’d set aside, and then wound up talking through the end of the game and what we’re going to do next for another hour. I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of all that and still am a full day later. Still, I’m glad we got to do it and I’m looking forward to a relatively quiet weekend without needing to run any games (though I will be playing in one, most likely, and doing some preparations to play in yet another game). I could use a bit of a break this weekend, after the last few weeks I’ve had, especially because I’ve got a new game to start preparing.
Continue readingConcluding The Second Arc of The Leeching Wastes
After five sessions, which feels like both more and less time than I expected, we’ve wrapped up the second arc of my The Leeching Wastes campaign. The first arc involved fleeing from a home that was directly in the path of a horrible monster in hope of finding a new, safer place to call home and the second arc has been all about settling into this new home while dealing with some of the consequences of people’s actions as that integration occurred. In the last session, one of the player characters was brought under the influence of the monster sealed within the heart of the tree that made up the center of The Grove and given the command to free it. The party failed to stop her despite the emotional price they were paying in their attempts, but the unnamed goddess (connected to her by a bargain said goddess made with the player character’s former lover who had sacrificed herself to save the player character) had one last trick up her sleeve that she’d been holding off since it could easily kill that player character. In order to save everyone, the player character risked her life and ultimately survived, but only just barely. The session ended with the remaining members of the party–two NPC allies in tow–settling down to rest while they waited for their tied-up friend to regain consciousness so they could figure out what the hell had just happened. It was a very draining session that lasted less than an hour and a half and quite a place to pick back up from this week as we went through the arc’s denouement and moved forward in time.
Continue readingWant To Be A Better GM Or Player? Play Widely.
One of the best pieces of advice to give someone who wants to improve their writing skills is to read widely. The idea is that you will be exposed to more and more writing in a wider variety of forms, including those outside of whatever genres you might choose to focus on, all of which is useful to you as a writer because it will give you more tools to use in your own creative work. After all, the various writing tricks authors use, their various stylistic quirks and so on, aren’t limited to a genre. If you see something cool and interesting in a science fiction story, you can figure out how to incorporate it into a fantasy story. Or if you find a particularly interesting way of phrasing an idea in a piece of nonfiction, you can find ways to do similar things in your own fictional works. The more you’re exposed to, the more you’ve learned and can incorporate consciously and unconsciously. Which is also true of running tabletop games (and storytelling as a whole, but you can pretty much extend any of this advice into any type of storytelling with enough abstract thinking, so I’m going to stay focused). The more games you play or run, the better you are. This is fairly self-evident to most people since that tends to fall under the “experience makes you better at things” bit of wisdom. I’d suggest taking it a step further, though, and suggest that you play a wide variety of games rather than just sticking to the ones your prefer.
Continue readingThe Penultimate Session Of The Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One more session of Heart: The City Beneath behind us and now we’re down to the last two players of a group that originally had six. One fell by the wayside immediately, before we even began the second session of our worldbuilding game. The second left after she realized this game was not for her and that she needed more time in her weeks. The third left when her character died a single session after the second left and she decided to reclaim some time for herself rather than carry on. The fourth has now stepped aside, one more session later, as his character finished a transformation that has been brewing since that first worldbuilding game. The final two players are both on the cusp of their own ends, each carrying a Zenith move they have either already used and are seeing play out or are saving to use at the right moment, whatever that might look like. Things are coming to a head and every single roll holds the potential to spell the end for each character, as it did for the fourth player’s character. Still, the story holds us all bound and determined to see it through and. at the very latest, in just another week from when this post does up, I will be writing about how it all came to an end.
Continue readingA Situation So Bad It’s Good In The Leeching Wastes
My now-Wednesday group, currently playing The Leeching Wastes, has now met four times in a row! What a record! This time, what was supposed to be a short ritual turned into a whole-session activity that was incredibly emotionally fraught. The cliff-hanger from last time, an abysmal saving throw result, wound up snowballing first into a bit of confusion about the reason the party was there at all, grew further into a bit of inter-party misdirection, and then finally landed as a combat encounter that I didn’t expect to go as poorly as it did. I mean, I know I say this a lot, but I really don’t expect quite so many unlikely things to happen in the tabletop games I’m running despite apparently being a magnet for this kind of improbability. Nothing useful for winning the lottery or having a fortunate life. No. I just attract incredibly unlikely but still possible outcomes but only in tabletop games I’m running. I’m going to avoid speculating about how that’s reflected in my life (I already talk to my therapist about that more than enough), but it really was staggering how a part of the session I expected would take half an hour wound up taking the full hour and forty-five minutes we played (we got another later start since I was finishing up dinner and we were still chitchatting for the first half an hour). I was absolutely mechanically prepared for things to go horribly wrong since a game like this needs stakes for the victories to mean as much as they do, but I was not emotionally prepared. I was not mentally prepared. I had to pause quite a few times to figure out how to proceed or, at the very least, where to find my notes about how to proceed since we have once again taken something I expected to come up later and dropped it onto third level characters.
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 readingAerith Keeps Taking The Thoughts Right Out Of My Head In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
There’s spoilers for the early parts of Final Fantasy 7 and pretty much all of Final Fantasy 7: Remake in this post. Just all over the place. The thing is lousy with ’em. Read at your own peril. Or because you’ve already played those games. Or because you don’t care and just want to read. I’m not your boss.
Continue readingA Eulogy To Akira Toriyama: How The Dragon Ball Manga Changed My Life
Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and so much more, passed away this month. I learned about it last night (on the 7th of March, since I’m writing this on the 8th and you’re reading this on or after the 15th) and have spent the last day reflecting on the impact he had on my life. I don’t really talk about it a whole lot (because it was more than two decades ago and for other reasons that will become apparent soon), but I got into manga, comics, and graphic novels as a whole because of Dragon Ball. Before finding those bright red volumes on the “new” shelf at my local library one day when I’d ridden my bike there for some books to read, my entire conception of comics was confined to the syndicated comics that ran in newspapers, so much so that I didn’t call them comics. I called them “funnies” because they showed up in the “funny pages” of the newspaper. Sure, I’d read tons of picture books as a kid and a few things that rode a fine line between graphic novels and picture books, and sure, I knew what comic books were, but they’d never been a part of my life before I picked up one of the brightly colored books and was transported to a whole new world via a whole new type of story. That moment, that first borrowing of the first Dragon Ball book, was a major inflection point in my life to the degree that I can’t even imagine the person I’d be if I never picked it up. The change wasn’t drastic in the moment, but it laid the groundwork that I’ve built a huge portion of my life on since then.
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.
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