A geek by any other name…
It’s no secret that a minor theme of this blog is all things geeky… RPGs and Dming being the main subject of my Geeky blogging.
Last Friday, Math arrived home and showed his new iPod Touch to my wife Alex. Of course, she went bonkers over it and Math, laughing, came downstrais to join us, telling me that my wife was such a geek.
He’s quite right, she’s not a gamer, but she’s definitively a geek.
That being said, in my mind, geekery is like leadership, it’s hard to define but it’s easy to recognize when seen.
The word “Geek” has no clear equivalent in French, and up to just now, I had never checked for a definition.
My non-definition of geek used to be:
- A Nerd who’s lost his/her virginty.
Not very helpful, but accurate in the sense that geeks are often seen as more socially apt than nerds.
The Urban Dictionary as a lot of definitions for geek, most of which I disagree with. The 7th one is close to what I define as a geek:
- Someone who spends a lot of time and energy in a certain area, not necessarily computers or technology
Wikipedia has one closer to my tastes:
- A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest. This definition is very broad but because many of these interests have mainstream endorsement and acceptance, the inclusion of some genres as “geeky” is heavily debated.
This definition hits close to home. By that definition, I’m a RPG, gaming, movie, literature/writing, Internet and computers geek. My wife is a movie, TV, literature, music, health, environmental and computer geek.
Where the definition breaks down is the ‘mainstream’ part. This basically means that a football fan is not a geek… sports being too mainstream…
But I believe that a sports fan that knows all about stats, schedules and rumours would definitively register as a geek to me.
Actually, I think the key part of the definition is:
“a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream”
It’s the devotion, the energy poured into this that generates geekery (geekism?), not the subject.
I think geeks are more of a personality trait…. the object of the devotion/obsession/passion is unimportant. The mere fact that one can focus so much energy in a single subject while still remaining accessible socially as a human being defines a geek.
What do you think, what would be your definition of the geek and what is the object of your devotion?
There are a gazillion ways of doing online marketing today. Internet has given advertising a whole new identity. From the decision about domain names to the working around pay per click, everything should contribute towards advertising.
DM Chronicles, Session 10: Oh My! Drows are squishy!
This series chronicles our current D&D 3.5 campaign set in my home-grown world with Ptolus added to it. We’ve just started playing a heavily-adapted version of WotC’s Expedition to the Demonwebs pits.
As you may recall from last time, I had mixed feelings about the game and I had been going a bit heavily on the Sparling wine and Mexican beer.
In that session, the players were ambushed by Yugoloth mercenaries outside of the Styx’s Oarsman, the newest Inn and the first commercial establishment of the undead and fiend filled Necropolis. The fight was really harsh and all characters were down to their last HP when they finally prevailed. They then spent time with Doredian Mythlord, the city’s Elven leader to discuss the recent increase in Drow raids. That’s when we broke for the night.
This week, Franky was missing because he had to work evenings, much to his chagrin (Hey! That’s a French word!). As is our habit, we assumed that Cixi was out on a personal mission and we started the game.
As mentioned before, this week’s game was a test on playing it more free-form and let the players dictate where they wanted to inquire to unravel the adventure’s early hooks.
Much to my surprise, the adventure started with Eric telling me that the last fight against the Yugoloth had given his fearless Cruguer a taste of his own, very final, mortality. Say what you want of the troubles of having a psychodramatist/method actor in your group, I absolutely love them to make something of a harsher than expected game!
You see, Cruguer is a Hellbred, a “race” made up of repented Evil souls stolen on the way to Hell by the Powers of Good and given a second chance on the material plane. The clinch of that (oh so fluffy) race from the Fiendish Codex II is that if slain, resurrection is not a possibility. The character’s soul goes directly to the Nine Hells of Baator for some quality time with the Devils who own it.
Cruger spent the first part of the adventure reviewing his equipment and asking questions about fighting the Yugoloths and the Drow so he could better deal with the threat. All players joined in the fun and several items were sold and purchased.
Aravar offered the services of the Library of Iritidil’s House (The Elven ‘club’ so to speak) and a short discussion on the Drow was had. That’s when it was mentioned that the Drow had concentrated their raids on Emerald Hill (Elven neighborhood) and the Temple District (The city’s area where this campaign started).
That’s also when I told them that the four priests able to cast True Resurrection in Ptolus were slain and their cathedrals destroyed in the last few days. At each site a symbol of a stylized skull was found (See image Those who play Ptolus might recognize it, but I use it out of context since Ghul never existed in my campaign). Worse still, they could not be raised the lower level resurrection or Wish spells… Definitively bad news.
The players already had an idea where the Drow might be, based on clues I dropped last game. However they were enjoying asking CSI-type questions about where the raids were centered and whatnot. So I decided to lay a scene based on them patrolling the Temple area late at night.
I told them that there were lights coming from the abandoned elven temple where they ‘popped-out‘ 9 sessions ago. Not being the stealthy type, th group basically entered the temple going “Who goes there?”.
That’s when the saw a furtive humanoid huddled with a large one. The smaller one jumped up and ran away through a window leaving a sheepish Crystal Troll, looking quite guilty. Recognizing his ‘friend’ F’ing Genius Troll, Nogard (1/2 Dragon Barbarian) stepped forward and greeted him by asking “what the hell are you doing here?” while at the same time giving him a bunch of Rat tails (One of the city’s rumors had been that the invincible Troll terrorizing low level adventurers in the Undercity had vanished).
The troll perked instantly up by seeing his buddy with a happy ‘Pay or Die!’ . It then surprised them with a laborious “Me… here… safe… no Black ‘Pay and not Dies’!” It so happens that the furtive shadow was teaching the troll to speak common. The players had some fun discussing with the troll, with Nogard taking a sadistic pleasure of using words with more than 3-syllables and watching me deal with these linguistic curveballs.
It confirmed what the characters were suspecting, F.G.Troll had been displaced from his sweet spot by a bunch of drow.
When asked who the fleeing one was, the troll made a fist sign (meaning one of the many organization or religion in Ptolus with hands as signs) and said “He help me find job! Only 10 and 5 per…cent!” (Must be the Longfingers thieves guild) 
So the PC’s decided to go back into the sewers, much to the ‘delight’ of Lillie (Pixie Shaper). On the way, they met a Drow patrol made of 2 fighters riding Giant Lizard, which were rapidly dispatched.
Dark elves are a lot easier to kill than Fiends and their Spell Resisitance is much lower.
When fishing for loot (Drow have a lot of that), they stumbled on a tattoo…. the same Skull pattern found on the destroyed cathedrals. Nogard took out his dagger and took a ’sample…. (Yuck!)
The PCs then came up to the troll’s toll bridge (the D&D battlemap Drow Outpost) and our Pixie scout spotted a pair of Drow noticing the PC’s light approaching. They relayed the info to ‘her Highness’ so she could send her Ogre Zombies. (One of them was shambling just under Lillie, oblivious).
The fight was a massacre, mostly because the monsters were too spread out on the map. The Ogres and Dark Elves Barbarians fell under the onslaught of 1/2 Dragon breath weapon, the Crusader’s sword chop, the Arcane Archer arrows and the Shaper’s spells. The priestess was invisible but was eventually found when she cast invisibility purge, to root Lillie out, and a failed Confusion spell on Aravar. She was rapidly killed, curising them for the glory of her Queen, Lotlh! (I hate playing cleric NPCs!)…
While pilling the sizable loot of the encounter, they found a set of orders and a map. The orders showed various points to raid on Ptolus and people to kill (the high level priests weren’t on the list). While all target were relatively close to the spot where the drow were stationed, one assassination target was much farther… Rule of Three, Githyanki Portal Scholar found at the Styx’s Oarsman.
The map traced a path between the current location of the drow and a portal deeper in the city’s vast dungeons.
Faced with multiple choices, the PC decided to return to the surface and inform their various contacts of their findings. After that they decided to pay Rule of Three a visit and warn him of the threat on his life.
I think the players are warming up to this quirky NPC that always ends his sentences in triple comments that say the same thing, have similar meaning, share a common theme… He brushed aside the threat on his life and indicated that increased Drow raids are usually a sign that the Spider Queen has fiendish plans for this region.
He proposed that the players could drop by the Temple of the Celestial Eye and get a prophecy about what awaits them and the city. There an eye-shaped oracle construct is known to deliver prophecies provided some can convince the rather conservative Angelic keepers. Alternatively, he suggested they investigate the portal from whence the Drow came and ‘clear’ it so he could go and study it for them to see if it could be deactivated.
The players chose the prophecy and made their way to the Temple District. Oddly enough, the Temple of the Celestial eye sits just beside Nogard’s newly appointed, Dragon Shrine! (backed by House Dallimothan, a Noble house affiliated with dragons). What a Coincidence!
After a bit of wrangling with the distrustful angels, who reacted rather negatively to the mention of Rule-of Three, they got a 2 Stanza prophecy about slaying demons, gates to cross, keys to find and a queen to run away from. They discussed its possible meaning at length (much to my pleasure… it was a good sign that the adventure was taking root) but by that time Stef was falling asleep at the table and we adjourned for the night.
Bottom line, a great game that was satisfying for all. I’m looking forward to the next one.
Lessons Learned.
- Giving more liberty to players can be rewarding and lead to games where players feel more in control of the flow of the story. While my players are very railroad friendly (for which I’m thankful, given my natural director style), I think the change of pace was a much needed boon for the game.
- I like this type of DMing where I need to improvise scenes out of thin air (Troll scene, Drow patrol) backed on ideas I plan for.
- My Mark of Evil approach pays off and allows me to link events thematically.
What Players liked:
- Getting to decide what to investigate and what to do without having the DM scramble to use plot-driven doors.
- Having the unidentified loot pre-written on cue cards and item cards for easy distribution. Well worth the effort.
- Revisiting known NPCs and locales
What players dislike:
- Yan doesn’t like his Fireball alternative spell (A ball of shrapnel that takes a full round to conjure), we’ll need to shop for a better non-fire based Spread spell.
What’s next:
- The Drow Portal and deciphering the Prophecy.
Review: "Races and Classes" / "Worlds and Monsters"
To all the DMs out there: how many of you have ever made a house rule? How many of you have changed some piece of description because you felt it didn’t make sense or didn’t fit with what you needed?
Probably all of you.
Wizards of the Coast is undertaking a huge experiment in both of these, and they’re calling it Fourth Edition. While they do this, they want to give you a look at what their thought process was at each change, and some parts of the final product of their experiments. Of course, designing a game system is a bit bigger of an undertaking than just designing for your home campaign.
That’s what these 4e preview books (Races and Classes and Worlds and Monsters) are: the design process of fourth edition, from identifying what they viewed as a problem, how they worked on addressing the problem, and what the results are.
This is a review from that perspective, looking at the way that the Wizards staffers explain their process and about the game design that has gone into the new edition. If you want to find out about specific elements or if your favorite race/class is talked about, I recommend one of the numerous threads on ENWorld (though be prepared for a lot of threadcrapping.) If the design process interests you, read on…
Chatty's Out of the Box #000.1
I’m currently fooling around with the idea of creating a Photo webcomic… not seriously, I have no time for that… but the idea is slowly eating whatever’s left of my brain.
So I downloaded the Comic Book Creator demo and started playing with it.
Here’s what I came up with… I had to go through Screenshot rips as the demo does not allow publishing…
(Don’t sue me yet, I’ll buy a license if this goes somewhere)…. in the meantime, you can download this excellent software here!
Chatty DM’s Out of the Box. #0.1
Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat…
Sooooo, a few days ago Vanir puts up a post about what his Epic Level Heavy-Metal Bard called Bat Loaf did when he was riding the Tarrasque with his pals.
My brain broke down somewhere down the line but now that my memory matrix has been reconstructed, it seems that Bat Loaf got his metal S.O. into attempting to procreate on top of said tame Tarrasque.
Sex….on a Tarrasque…
Freud would have a field day! 
One of the inescapable social realities of having a bunch of geeks playing make-believe around a table is that sooner or later, one way or another, the subject of Sex is going to come up (pun intended).
I broached this in an older post here. I’d like to explore it some more.
In younger (and often not so young), exclusively male groups, the subject will often be broached as crude jokes, homo-erotic double-entendre or description of character actions that would be, at the very least, severely frowned upon by someone’s Grandma.
I’m also told it happens in mixed groups too. I’d love to hear about it more.
In other, probably more established groups, the subject will be broached in an hilarious ways (as Vanir describes) or actively explored by story tellers and psychodramatists.
While we have had more than our shares of out-of game jokes and leery comments throughout the years, our group started tackling sexual in-game issues in a less adolescent way in recent years.
At first, it was nothing particularly mature, like spending loot on Ale & Whores and ‘scoring’ in the Tavern. Yan’s CN fighter thief Drake had an occasional fling with a recurring Red-haired mercenary chick, but that was about it. Oh yeah I remeber Eric’s character marrying a Nymph priestess too
Later it got, more ‘interesting’. I don’t know if was the gritty Sword and Steel, no alignment world of Iron Heroes, but players started developing deeper (snicker) backstories and weirder backgrounds.
Math developed a relationship with a low-power Succubus (i.e. she was supposed to not have her level drain powers) and while the actual action was, thankfully, off screen, his Supercoolness player trait was rewarded when he could high five the rest of the group whenever he scored with that epitome of Demonic lust.
Aside: It so happens that the Succubus leveled up during the relationship. However, since each characters reformed with partial amnesia after death on their prison world, Math only learned at the end of the campaign arc (i.e. the Prison break) that his character had in fact been drained to death in bed numerous times (still super cool if you ask me).
Eric, our butt-kicking psychodramatist went all out and actually created an adolescent male gay warrior. That challenge proved too much for us as a group and we never explored this farther than in/out-game comments. But it also never degenerated nor was Eric’s character ostracized by the rest of the party for it.
Heck, two players played female characters.
Franky’s Cixi trademark is that she’s Chaste and Pure and never gets down to that level. However, off camera and with people on whom she can exercise some influence, she’s a complete slut. All other character know it… but she justs ignores them when the subject is brought up… (tee hee!).
Even our then lurker Stef, created a psycho-B17c# that was all leather and spikes…
Hmm, yeah… I’m not so sure I should have written all that….
This current game is tamer, mostly because players have not yet formed clear ties (mostly my fault because the game has not been very story focused).
Of course I can’t hope that PCs will fall in love or such things, I mean we’re still a bunch of 30/40 something guys sitting around that table. I’m happy that we at least explored this aspect of RPGs and we came back with nothing broken.
I don’t want to thread again about when the line gets crossed in regards to sexual subjects both in-game and around the table (see my original post linked before, especially the examples ).
I’m more curious as to how such a subject is approached by various gaming group both in game and around the table.
Having never really played with women in my RPG groups (teenaged girlfriends excepted ) I’m especially interested about how the dynamic changes in groups with players of both gender present.
Feel free to share… if you dare 
Robin's Laws Revisited: Part 2, Player Types and Traits
This post is part of a new series that explores Robin Laws’ seminal work on GMing. This time I tackle the book’s fundamental subject of player types and what they seek in RPGs. Part one can be found here.
The second chapter of Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering brings up the subject that knowing what your players seek in a Role Playing game is a must to deliver a good game. The player types definitions he brings forward, based on Glen Blacow’s classic Aspect of Adventure Gaming, form the cornerstone of his book and he builds much of the rest of it on these.
Player type could be defined as the preferences a player has for certain elements of a RPG.
They can be summarized as follows
- The Power Gamer: Get more powers and use them often and efficiently.
- The Butt-Kicker: Enjoys combat and pwning NPCs!
- The Tactician: Likes to beat complex situations through thought and planning.
- The Specialist: The one who always plays a <insert character type>. Ninjas and Dritzz clones are popular.
- The Method Actor: Likes total immersion in a character’s assumed persona, whatever the costs!
- The Storyteller: Enjoys exploring a story unfold around a character’s actions and choices.
- The Casual Gamer: Shows up to be with friends and share the social energies of the group.
While very useful to help a GM determine what it is that his/her players seek in a game, many players seem to fit more than one types. For instance, none of my players are purely one type or the other. For example, Yan is definitively a Story Teller… but he’s also a tactician and shows features of the Power Gamer.
That’s probably why Robin changed his approach when he participated in writing the ‘Running the Game’ chapter of the more recent Dungeon Master Guide II (Copyright WotC, 2005) and instead listed ‘player traits’. (By the way, the DMG II is worth it just for this chapter in my opinion, the rest is gravy)
He defined those traits as “the particular emotional impulses that give your players a sense of reward”. That’s a definition I like!
The traits he defined, some of which are very similar to player types, were as follows:
- Accumulating Cool powers: Enjoying the acquisition of loot/powers, planning a character many levels in advance.
- Kicking Butt: Enjoying combat for the sake of inflicting mayhem and destruction on foes.
- Brilliant Planning: Enjoying combat for the sake of winning, beating foes with brains and tactics.
- Puzzle Solvers: Resolving riddles, short puzzles or longer investigation type puzzles.
- Playing a favorite role: Seeking the same class/themes/roles campaign after campaign.
- Supercoolness: Being a badass and be able to show it often.
- Story: Seeking the range of emotions that comes from a game’s narrative and non-crunch achievements.
- Psychodrama: Seeking to explore and develop a character from an internal perspective.
- Irresponsibility: Being able to create trouble without having to deal with real-world consequence (ex: jumping off the rails and go wild!)
- Setting Exploration:Seeking new horizons in a setting and learning the lore of in-game objects, locales and events.
- The Outlier: Seeking the emotional kick of subverting a group’s dynamic by creating weird characters or actively seeking failure.
- Lurker: No clear goal or motivation except to show up at the game and participate.
I really like those definitions because you can usually pinpoint a player’s style by grouping a few traits.
Here’s my take on my player’s current profiles:
Yan: Story-driven Brilliant planner with a side of cool power accumulation and Setting Exploration. Lillee easily gives him the 1st and the last… but he’s suffering a bit from lack of Brilliant planing that he usually gets when he plays a martial character (his default). He’s looking forward to Planescape.
Math: Supercool Butt Kicking Power accumulator. Math has fun when his character is basked in the light of coolness. Critical Hits, cool use of spells and thrashing a mouthy NPCs makes his evening.
Franky: Story-driven Setting Explorer with a taste for Power accumulation. Give him apolitical intrigue, a weird world to explore and some bitchin’ powers and Franky thrives and becomes a god of role playing…
Eric (Cruguer): Butt Kicking psychodramatist. His characters are always a daring mix of dark emotions and inner conflicts with a side order of deviance that makes other characters a bit queasy. Give him demons to kill, inner or outer ones and he’ll happily engage them!
Stef: Ex-Lurker who’s coming out of his shell to explore Story telling and good old Butt kicking Power Accumulation.
PM: Definitively a Story-driven Psychdramatist somewhat stuck in a thicker than expected lurker shell.
In both documents, Robin urges GMs/DMs to create adventures in which each player sees one of his traits addressed at least once. This basically becomes a classic exercise of positive reinforcement (or negative reinforcement in the case of the Outlier…) that will reward your players.
But what about DM preferences? Where do they stand in regards to the player’s preferences? Robin’s Laws doesn’t spell it out all that clearly while DMG II takes a decent stab at it.
Instead of making this post longer than it already is, I’m turning the question over to you.
How do you define your personal DMing preference and how do you balance it with your player’s?
I’m not asking for the theory, but your personal feeling about it.
My stance on this is pretty much covered in that post, but I’ll probably chime in the comments tomorrow.
Character Genesis: New characters for Pathfinder #1.
A few months ago, I prepared a demo D&D game for PM, his friend Vince, and Franky’s brother Mike, all newbies to RPGs or D&D 3.5 in general. Franky had joined to even out the group and act as the expert on the players side.
Our game session, based on Paizo’s excellent Pathfinder #1 adventure, was marked by atrocious dice rolls by the players and is chronicled here.
After having read Graham’s account of his new Pathfinder campaign, I got the urge to re-visit that game and maybe get another session going in the upcoming weeks.
I polled the players and 3 of them agreed. I suggested that they could, if the chose to, create new characters. We would still pick up the adventure where we left off (after the goblin raid) but we’d RetCon it so that the new character would be the heroes.
Vince, while he seemed to have enjoyed his one foray in the world of RPGs, was not available, so I asked Yan to stand in.
Of course, 24 hours later, Yan had a character fleshed out for 20 levels.
He made himself a Warblade (from the Book of Nine Swords) loosely (read totally) based on Kurosawa’s Kuwabatake Sanjuro, a samurai character from a movie we saw over at PM’s a few weeks ago.
While I have yet to see the novel Yan will write on his new character, one cool flavour he borrows from Japanese legend will be that Jubei (his character) will always fight with a Bokken (A wooden Katana).
I have to hand it to him, Yan loves character creation and really pours himself into his characters.
Franky and Mike haven’t yet chimed in on thier choice to keep the old characters or make new ones.
Getting a character for PM was a bit more complicated. PM is definitively a casual player, he doesn’t want to tackle actually learning the game’s character creation process and I respect that.
He’s also showing clear signs of being a story telling/method Acting type of player. So we agreed that while I would shop for a character class, he would think about some fluff and we would tack the later on the former.
While looking for a really simple class to play, and knowing that the Fighter role was already ‘taken’ by Yan, I looked into alternatives that were easy to play from a crunch perspective.
Based on seeing him play World of Walking (he he), I surmised that PM does not dislike playing support characters. I therefore started looking into cleric alternatives in my numerous sourcebooks. Yan did too on his side.
That’s when I found the Favoured Soul. It’s basically a Divine spell-slinging sorcerer. There are no spells to prepare, a limited selection of spells and no undead turning complications. It might not be the most powerful character but it’s certainly one with little resource and rules management.
Yan came out with the Scout, a fast moving rogue that does bonus damage when he moves instead of when he flanks.
I proposed both concepts to PM through Gtalk and he agreed to mull it over.
Five minutes later he reverted with something like:
“Hmmm, it would probably to complex to pull off crunch-wise, but could I be a really powerful cleric/favoured soul that is losing his powers…”
Never being one to shy away from a challenge, I pondered this for a few minutes and proposed the following:
-Why not go the fluff way instead?
-Let’s make your character an Ex-Archbishop of a very large and powerful church. Somewhere in the character’s quest for power, he lost touch with his divine faith and became a bureaucrat.
-To teach him a lesson, an agent of your god cursed you to start aging backwards, losing the memories of prior days as you progress.
-Seeing what was happening to you, you started a journal of the memories you had on each day as you slowly regressed for many years, loosing your position in the church and slowly reverting to a lowly cleric.
-Many many years later, you finally lost your 1st level of cleric, becoming a commoner.
-That’s where you found a new, purer, stronger faith and the curse was broken.
-You became a Favoured Soul, the only memories of your past life is the journal you keep.
He loved it, especially the story potential of the journal! Old enemies, keys to enigmas, mystic secrets, it’s all there!
(For those who haven’t read it, I stole the idea from Dan Simmon’s Hyperion book, the Memento movie and the classic Second Chance trope).
Having done something similar before, I must say that I really love helping forge a background, personality or cool gimmick to make the character more interesting for the player.
What about the tricks you use to help your player build more satisfying characters?
YouTube of the Week: Are You Still There? Edition
A day in the life a Gun Turret from Portal. The longer it goes on, the funnier it gets.
Adventure Prep: Strapping it all together to get it going good!
This post is part of a series that covers the preparations I do for my current D&D campaign. You can follow it here and the various DM logs I wrote here.
Our next D&D game is Friday night. Weeee!
This time we’ll be missing our Archer as Franky will be working during the evening (he’s an environmental technician and takes reading of various samples such as medical gases in hospitals). I’ll need to adjust the difficulty of encounters accordingly.
The last game was mostly a harsh, session-long ambush between the PCs (with a missing tank, our 1/2 dragon Barbarian) and a group of Yugoloth Mercenaries.
It was clearly established that the Yugoloths are truly powerful bad guys that the characters are forced to consider as a significant threat to their survival.
The game also featured some hints that the Drow were on the move underneath the city and had started raiding Elven neighborhoods and Temples in Ptolus.
So this week, from a crunch perspective (encounters, treasures, possible locales for fights), everything is ready. I have several encounters ready and have enough to fill one and probably two session. I also have quite a few ideas as to where each encounter could be used, with alternates depending on player choices.
However, from a story perspective, I face quite a few challenges to make this week’s game more than a series of stringed fights:
The Adventure’s plot:
First, the adventure’s plot is flimsy as written and shows clear signs of railroading.
As is, the adventure uses the threat of Drow attacks on elven settlements to get players moving and enter a mysterious one-way portal (but that the players don’t know about) that strands them in Sigil, the core city of the Planescape campaign setting. Then the players must more or less deal with the proverbial devil to get back by performing various tasks.
Said tasks uncovers ‘something‘ that is pretty serious… for the Outer Planes.
All I can say is that it involves killing a lot of demons.
The adventure’s biggest failings, I think, is to make that ‘something‘ seem important enough to engage the players to want to stick around. I can assure you that if used as written, my players won’t.
I’ve already mentioned in a previous post how I intended to hack the adventure’s setting by having all the Sigil action moved to Ptolus.
At that point in time I still hadn’t given serious thoughts on how to make the players care about the adventure’s plot. I was also struggling on finding a way for my Campaign’s chosen bad guys (The Neutral Evil Yugoloths) to act like a more pervasive threath than through direct fights against the PCs.
Luckily, in the last few days, things have started to come together in the back of my fiendish DM mind and I think I might be able to pull something cool.
I’m making the Yugoloths a party of that ‘something‘ brewing in the Outer Planes. Furthermore, the PC’s game world will become a central part of the Yugo’s plans.
I’m going to take Planescape’s core philosophy of ‘Belief can shape Reality’ to heart and make the fate of the player’s world and its place in the metaverse depend on what the players achieve in the adventure. Since this is undoubtedly going to be my last D&D 3.x campaign, I have absolutely no qualms about doing the most horrible things to that homegrown game world I use since I have been 13 and which my players have shaped through countless cross-system campaigns (A D&D, Gurps and D&D 3.x).
The Mark of Evil
I also want to start impregnating the game with a creeping feeling of corruption and despair associated with the slow, but inexorable encroachment of a highly focused and and more resourceful force against a wounded, war-torn world.
- I’m going to start having key NPCs die (and strangely stay dead)
- I’m going to start the unraveling of the very weak social balance that resides on my world (think “The Crow”).
- I’m going to shake up Ptolus’ political landscape and have players take sides.
- I’m going to show clear signs that the Yugoloths are not just pulling shadowy strings but are in fact arriving in the world by the million!
The goal is to show that the solution to the campaign’s problem (i.e. the world’s survival) does not lie with direct action in the world!
This is going to be fun!
A Coincidence again? What a Coincidence!
It’s all well and good to annihilate the world (or threaten to do it) but for the players to care about it all, I need to establish as many links as possible between them and the surrounding world. As I have written numerous time, the best shortcuts to achieve this is to make use (and even abuse, if done in a cool enough way) coincidences.
I think this is becoming my favorite RGP trope.
For the next sessions I plan to bring into play:
- The Mysterious thief that tracked down the fleeing Yugoloth in the 2nd session.
- The F…ing genius Troll they met in the same session.
- The Elven temple where it all started
- The Spriggans that have pledged their souls to Lilliee by giving her each a finger.
All theses are elements that the players interacted with and around which some key choices were made. By bringing them back I hope to reinforce the player’s sense of belonging and relative comfort in the upcoming tumultuous times.
Bringing it all together
So practically speaking I’ll write a series of Plot Hooks and I’ll allow the players more freedom than they are used to to make them discover the adventure’s premises. This is a marked departure from my usual, very directive and linear style. But I want to try this at least once and see the player’s reaction. I’ll have one directive scene ready (‘the door bursts open and X pants and tells you you must follow him…’) in case we all flounder in Roleplaying Stupor.
I look forward to tell you about it.
Inq. of the Week: An Issue of Class
Apparently the thing most people want for Rock Band is to be able to have a Jam Mode where you can create, play, and share your own songs. “More Cowbell!” came in second, so I have no doubts there will be a cowbell mod for the microphone very soon (if there isn’t one already). We also asked people to list any songs they’d thought of that they’d like to see put into Rock Band, with some really good ones being mentioned that we all hope we’ll have the chance to play.
Now that it is getting into late January the clock is beginning to tick for me, I don’t know if I should be excited that D&D 4th Edition is coming out within 6 months or if I’m scared because that means the end of Dave’s campaign. Probably one of the big changes to the system that I’m looking at is what core classes will be presented in the PHB. I was thrilled when I first looked at 3rd Ed. and saw additions like the Barbarian, Monk, and Sorcerer, but these were all additions to what had already been established in 2nd Edition. Now, with the advent of 4th Ed, there are a lot of classes that are in danger of not being released for a while (if at all).
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