In one final session that took three hours (which is two more than I hoped it would take and one more than I expected it to take), we wrapped up our game of The Quiet Year with a much more detailed map than we started with and an idea of what the world looked like after that year of relative peace. We’ve got a fully underground society, a mysterious Labyrinth that defies mapping and contains seemingly limitless treasure, and a yearly pass of horrific monsters that will kill or infect any being unfortunate enough to be caught outside by their organized sweep with The Rot. It was a lot of cool stuff that has left the group in a situation where they’re well-off as adventurers but maybe not super well-off as a society. Sure, they’ve got a decent amount of food and livestock, not to mention more water than they could need, but their population isn’t super big and they only have enough food because their population is small. There’ll be a lot of problems facing this community thirty years down the road, when we start up the Dungeons and Dragons campaign side of things, but I think it’s well-within the group’s ability to handle them or die trying. Not sure which is more likely at this point, given that I’m starting them at level one and this world’s rough on characters of all levels, but I’m interested to find out!
Continue readingThe Rotten
Building Out The World Around The Rotting Haven With The Quiet Year
Due to one of the three players in this group being unavailable and me not wanting to start the game without them, we’re on session two of side-game stuff. Last time, we used the Heroic Chronicle and some session time to build characters and this time we started a game of The Quiet Year to help build up the community that would eventually include the characters we made last time. We only got through two seasons since getting the game going took a bit of work and we used Spring to get into the swing of things, so we’ll be returning to this game for at least part of our next session to wrap it up, probably do a little character stuff, and then likely end early since I’ll need time to draw the lines on the timeline between where The Quiet Year ends and the Dungeons and Dragons campaign begins. I’m good at improvising and getting things going with little to no lead time, but I know things will work better if I take the time to actually prepare rather than try to bust out a decent half-session immediately. Since this group has attendance issues and is still relatively new to working together (without the instant chemistry that my other campaign, The Magical Millennium, had), I want to make sure the sessions really stick the landing, especially since I need to do more directing and game running work than I do with my other group. With The Magical Millennium, I’m pretty sure they’d play without me if I couldn’t make it, roleplaying scenes and making up a new events to put themselves through as they went. With The Rotten, I need to work to draw some of the players out a bit more and pull them toward creativity, a fact that was pretty apparent this past weekend.
Continue readingHelping My Players Create Some Real Characters For My New Campaign, “The Rotten”
After more missed than played sessions, we’ve finally moved into the preparation process for the full campaign I’m still tentatively calling “The Rotten.” Given that we wound up focusing the game on building and protecting a community rather than far-flung adventures or something like that, the name feels less apt than it would for pretty much any other campaign idea I had. This still takes place in the world I’m calling “The Rotten,” so I won’t change the name or tags until I come up with something better, in which case I’ll go back and fix all my other posts. Gotta keep your tags organized! Other than settling on a general idea, I rolled stats with the two players who were available, talked through character ideas, made some modifications and flavorful tweaks to existing classes, and then ran through the Heroic Chronicle with both players. If you don’t know, the Heroic Chronicle is a system included in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount Dungeons and Dragons book that is designed to help settle characters into the world of Exandria, of Critical Role. I mostly use it to give my player characters a few built-in hooks in the homebrewed world we’re using, a few extra tidbits of power, and some interesting secrets since rolling on a table is a great way to prompt that kind of thinking in people who maybe aren’t as practiced at it as I am (and that absolutely helps even if they ARE as practiced as I am). I also do a lot of soliciting my players’ opinions, offering ideas, and tweaking the results until we’re all happy, rather than rely entirely on rolls because the players often have at least a concept that they want to stick with and some of those results have VERY specific implications for characters. At the end of the process, I get some built-in hooks, my players get some fun secrets to keep from each other in order to build drama, and everyone gets at least a few interesting little power-ups. Everybody wins.
Continue readingWrapping Up The Prologue To The Rotten Haven
In one hell of a turn-around that I saw coming thanks to the character creation process for the prologue to my “The Rotten” campaign, my little group of evil player characters killed the entire leadership of the rebellion–and a huge chunk of the town besides–despite having landed in a situation they were incredibly lucky to escape from. You see, they’d decided to take up with the maligned Lord Besk, chief necromancer in charge of maintaining the barriers around this Haven (a city made safe from the undead creatures that walked the fading remnants of the material plane by those very barriers), because he and the city council he had wrapped around his finger were willing to pay them. This turn-around, necessary because their plan to slowly assassinate individual targets one at a time fell apart almost immediately due to bad rolls, was so complete and thorough that it instantly wrapped up our prologue and set the stage for the game that will take place in the shadow of the city they’d destroyed. And, you know, underneath the heel of the Great Lich they’d helped create since that’s what Besk was up to this whole time. That and somehow controlling the massive nightwalkers that had introduced The Rot to the world and were slowly draining everything of its life. Thanks to all that, I get to keep all their PCs around as generals and trusted lieutenants for Great Lich Besk and sprinkle them into the campaign in appropriate places! Sure, I’ve got a ton of work to get them from level one to whatever level the player characters will be ready for that kind of challenge, but there’s no denying how nice it is to have the later parts of the campaign already fleshed out.
Continue readingPlayer Characters As Rotten As Their Setting
Currently, my other Sunday group has completed our second session of the prologue I’m running for our game. This is my second group in my “The Rotten” setting and while I STILL don’t have a proper name for this group (I’m calling our prologue “The Rotten Haven” but that name is built from the setting name and the current focal point of the game rather than because it reflects the game in any way other than these sparse setting details), we’ve solidly landed our group in the game. While the characters all started out fairly neutral, the past two sessions have seen them take a sharp turn towards villainy and I’ve had to pivot my preparations from being focused on building out the evil side of the game to building out the good side of the game. Sure, there’s definitely some question as to whether or not each group is truly Good or Evil, but one side is engaged in behavior that is mostly morally good and the other side is doing things that are mostly morally bad. There’s nuance if the players want to dig into it, but considering that they decided to go the assassination route and a mixture of really good rolls on my part (I rolled a LOT of natural 20s last night, even given the huge number of dice I rolled) and bad rolls on their part meant that they got found out multiple times. As their decisions snowballed, I made sure to characterize their actions a bit, trying to illustrate what kind of people they had become as a result of their thus-far undefined past adventures and were becoming in the eyes of the citizens who once saw them as heroes. All of which culminated in them fighting a battle against all of the leadership of the rebellion they’d planned to assassinate, but all at once instead of being separated into manageable chunks.
Continue readingIntroducing A Prologue Into My New Dungeons & Dragons Game
As I promised last week, I’ve now run Session 0 for my new Sunday Dungeons and Dragons campaign (which I do not have a name for, yet). The group has talked through a little bit of what we’re interested in doing and while I still got the same caveats I had last week, the things I expected to fly under the radar have flown under the radar. It’s not that I’m hiding that the whole world of this game is a metaphor for climate change and any stories that take place within it must necessarily grapple with that world-defining thing, I just didn’t explicitly say it. I did talk a bit about the state of the world and how things will likely go in it, but I forgot to mention that this world isn’t really something that can be fixed as many high fantasy D&D games might expect. There’s no going back, only forward. The players might improve things for a lot of people or find a way to prevent things from getting too much worse, but the tipping point has been passed and all that remains to be see is how long it takes for the rubble to settle and who gets taken down with it. And to continue living, connecting, and building community all the while.
Continue readingHere I Go Running Dungeons & Dragons Again
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.
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