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.
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Preparing To Dive Back Into Heart: The City Beneath
Just in time to prepare for our upcoming session, I’ve finished running all of the smaller one-on-one sessions for all of my players from my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. I feel like I’ve managed to at least partially maintain the game’s tension and even add to it a little bit by giving each character some focused attention (to move their personal plot forward) and by keeping up a steady (if small) stream of information in the Discord server I built for my this group. I still (as of writing this) have a lot to do to finish preparing for the session since I actually know what the group is going to do ahead of time for once, but it’s work I’m genuinely excited to do since I’ve figured out how to tie the stories of all my players together in this moment. Maybe not permanently (the improvisational nature of our game makes that impossible to claim with any confidence), but enough to give us a major inflection point in the overal game as we walk up to and past what might actually be the halfway point of this campaign.
Continue readingWhen It All Falls Out In Heart: The City Beneath
In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.
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