As I get more and more rest and gradually recover from my extreme burnout (and probably wind up back at just “bad” burnout instead of “extreme”), the idea I had for a TTRPG campaign just won’t leave me alone, so I’m going to start working on development (well, I already have been, to be completely honest). It might yet go nowhere, it might go somewhere fun, or it might follow the course of all of my campaigns by starting out with promise that slowly dwindles as I burn out and my less-than-engaged players stop putting in any effort. I don’t know. I’m definitely not getting my hopes up about being able to play out the idea I had in its entirety. I just… I WANT to be doing this again. I cut out so much of my day to day life and the one thing I miss the most, that still fires me up the most, that I only ever think of along the lines of “I wish I hadn’t had to end this,” is running games. I want to get back in the storyteller’s chair. I have such an interesting idea that I’ve been letting cook for a while and I really want to do something with it. I mean, I could write a story about it, but I really miss collaborative storytelling. I really miss looking at friends as I run a game and roleplay through whatever situations we wind up in. Dipping my toes back into D&D as a player has also whet my appetite for this kind of storytelling, so it’s all kind of coming together. I’ve got an interesting story, the world is practically building itself, and I think I’ve got four people who would be just as committed to playing this game (and doing their homework for it) as I am.
Continue readingWorldbuilding
Dorohedoro Is The Weirdest Anime I’ve Ever Watched And Enjoyed
Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.
Continue readingThe Draw Of Greek Mythology In My “Demigods” Campaign
As I’ve slowly gotten my players working on their characters, gods, and religions for our upcoming session zero, I’ve watched as every single one of them has turned to exclusively Ancient Greek Mythology for their frame of reference. Some have even just pulled from it directly. This isn’t a criticism, mind you. Given my own familiarity with ancient Greek mythology, the touchstone of the Percy Jackson series, and the sort of cultural space that ancient Greek mythology holds in the US, it really makes sense that people would gravitate towards this as their first point of reference. A few of them are taking it further, of course, starting at an ancient Greek god or an idea inspired by an ancient Greek god and then departing from that point of commonality, but not a single one of them even went with a known Dungeons and Dragons god of any pantheon (which also includes the ancient Greek gods, I believe, but that doesn’t count). Again, I’m not super surprised this happened, but I am now left facing the problem of how to continue developing this pantheon and world without getting too caught in the various trappings of ancient Greek mythology. I mean, that’s fecund ground to work from, but there’s a little too much rape and misery for the kind of game I’m hoping to run. I want things to be taken seriously, I want threats to have meaning, and I want my players to struggle with the power balance of the world they’re in, but I don’t want to do that by relying on the horrible yet pervasive tropes present in most of ancient Greek (and Roman) mythology.
Continue readingBuilding A Dungeon All My Own
For the first time in what feels like YEARS (and is definitely at least “years” if not “YEARS”), I started running an actual dungeon in one of my Dungeons and Dragons games. For a long while now, as I’ve tried to explore more expansive storytelling and dealt with groups more interested in narrative than mechanics, I’ve avoided putting my players in what one might consider a stereotypical dungeon. I’ve had some dungeons, sure! I had my players run through a dungeon-esque wizard’s tower that was actually a testing site for traps and puzzles to be used in other dungeons. I trapped my players in a nightmare realm where they had an “ever-renewing” eighteen hour period to solve the puzzle of this time-and-space-locked demiplane. I’ve even made proper dungeons that wound up not getting explored by my players because they chose a different route forward. I think the last time I had a proper dungeon was back in 2019 or 2020, the last time I had a “classic” Dungeons and Dragons group with a “classic” mix of characters played by players who were interested in what it meant to be a D&D Party and to play their classes, specifically. Which is a bit funny to admit because, once upon a time, I loved nothing more than a good dungeon. I was scattering those things every which way. You’d think that would have still happened even in my more expansive play style now, if it was something I cared about, right?
Continue readingWrapping Up Worldbuilding For “The Rotten”
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 readingBuilding 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 readingFinding Logic Where There Is None In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some truly impressive leaps, runs up falling debris, easily carries people while moving quickly or jumping, and then, in other cutscenes, he can’t make the small jump from one side of a channel to another (which was maybe ten feet–fifteen, tops). Hell, the dude can’t even pull himself up by his arms half the time while, the other half, he can easily support his own weight, Tifa’s weight, and Barrett’s weight without straining. Then, throw him under player control and suddenly the dude has to move slowly and carefully lest he fall into the “abyss” which is less deep than some jumps I’ve seen him make. Yes, I know the interplay between these moments is to create drama or make Cloud seem particularly heroic or cool or to maintain reasonable pathing in a video game with a lot of environmental detail that was clearly not supposed to be interacted with. But what if it wasn’t? What if there was some indiscernible but otherwise still present and consistent logic beneath it all that governed whether or not Cloud was capable of incredible physical feats from one moment to the next? There isn’t any that I know of, but sometimes I like to approach games that pull these kinds of shenanigans in a completely serious manner, as if every instance of this makes sense, to see if I can find some wild (or mild) explanation that fits what I’ve seen.
Continue readingMood Music For Themes And Villains I Might Never Use
When I start building out a world for a tabletop game, if there’s a particular feeling that I’m trying to achieve as part of that build, I will usually create a playlist to help me zero in on it. I’ll do the same thing for villains, sometimes, though I tend to avoid it since I generally want my villains to be a framework with some goals and ideals that will be given greater detail and a final shape through their interactions with my player characters (however remote or limited those interactions are). I make playlists a lot more as a player, usually one for every major step along the path of my character’s journey that go from being vague ideas to solid, smaller playlists as I hit those major beats and see what shape they’ll take, but the practice that started as a player in a D&D game has grown far beyond that point. I’ve relied on it as a part of my worldbuilding and NPC development more heavily in recent years, as I’ve moved away from standard fantasy worlds and instead built worlds to reflect past failures (from when my weekly Sunday game had a Total Party Kill and we decided to start a new game in the distant future of the world they failed to save) or to reflect specific themes (like the one I built and adapted to first a Heroic Tragedy D&D campaign and then to a game of Heart: The City Beneath). For these more thematically focused worlds, the playlists have been super helpful in reminding me of the tone I’m supposed to be setting as I flesh out bits of the world my players are about to encounter or create things out of whole cloth on the spot as I run the sessions.
Continue readingWe’re Finally Starting Heart: The City Beneath Next Session
We finally finished The Ground Itself. Our final ten showed up as our second draw and then, as we wrapped up the game, I moved us into talking about what our first session of Heart: The City Beneath would look like. I checked in with my players, asked about some thematic stuff, and then pushed us into talking about characters and how to tie all the excellent worldbuilding we’d done to the systems and nouns of Heart. While Heart was in our minds the whole time we played The Ground Itself, we were still using a bunch of the nouns that I’d come up with for the core worldbuilding proposal, not to mention the plethora of nouns we produced in our game, so we had to slowly work through the mechanics of Heart and lace the disparate elements together. It required some careful work, since we were also pushing through character creation at the same time, I had a hard out an hour before our session was typically done, and I had some other stuff going on that was distracting me, but we got through most of it. I’m sure there’s plenty more that will need to be done on the fly as we play, but that’s just part of the game. Can’t have it all built out beforehand or else we’re not leaving room for us to play the game!
Continue readingGoing Off The Rails After Adding Trains
I genuinely did not think that I’d ever look at a game of The Ground Itself that I’m using as a means of doing collaborative worldbuilding for a different game and think “this has clearly gone off the rails,” but that’s what I’ve found myself doing as I review the notes from my Sunday group’s latest session. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just something that has gone far beyond all of my expectations about what we’d accomplish in a session or two (which will soon be three since we once again ran out of time without finishing our game). We’ve wound up more focused on individuals and their places in the area than the game is designed to be, but we’ve also gone from slowly developing an area over time to wildly inventing things. It’s honestly a great energy, even if I worry that we’ve lost the plot a bit. I’ll be able to weave it all into the world we’ve going to play in when we finally get to Heart: The City Beneath, but there’s just so much stuff happening and so many vague characters introduced that I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to include it all in any kind of interesting and meaningful way.
Continue reading