lord_timor

          So.  I've had a Word document sitting on my hard drive for more than three-quarters of a year.  It told the story of Commissar Dani, who led the 1315th Varestan Air-Mobile Infantry I blogged about a while ago.  Things change, though.  I showed VividWings on DeviantART an old version of this file, and she was pretty much stunned into silence by how much information I screwed up, canon I'd sodomized, and overpowered I'd made the titular commissar.  Okay, it wasn't that bad, but it was far, far from perfect.  As far from perfect as you can get when a cadet-commissar has a sword-fight with a greater daemon of Khorne and comes out victorious and unscathed, and years later, inexplicably founds regiments and drives them into the ground against Tyranids so she can test combined-arms tactics.

          Is it better now?  Yes, but it's still far from perfect.  Then again, most fan creations are.  I went back and edited out certain parts of the backstory and expanded on others.  I pretty much threw out most of the original premise of the 1315th (the only thing remaining is that they come from a planet originally settled by Catachans, and they mix up their units) and started over, working with something closer to the official material and giving Dani a reason to order a regiment around instead of enforcing discipline, like, what a commissar is supposed to do.  Her history has been intertwined with that of her regiment, so you can pretty much just ignore the original blog entry I made about it, because its origin has been altered to incorporate her into it.

          Anyways, that about does it, here.  Below is the heavily-edited version of the Word document I only picked back up tonight, and hopefully, it won't make you retch in horror.

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          First thing’s first; a while ago, I filled out a meme by Mako85 on DeviantART, asking about what you would be like if you were a character in Warhammer Fantasy Battles or WH40K. At the time, I was concentrating on Space Marines, so I drew myself as the Chapter Master of my own group of Space Marines, the Purpled Hands. The third question in asked what you’d look like if you were given a gender-swap, so I drew a female Space Marine.

          Back when it was still updating, I was a fan of The Wotch. I still am, but it’s on an indefinite hiatus and hasn’t updated since last August. Anyways, as a result of that, I noticed that the meme didn’t say that you were returned to normal in the aftermath – it was probably obvious enough, but since they didn’t mention it, I decided to continue the gag. On several more occasions, the meme told you to draw what you’d look like if you belonged to another faction, so I first drew “Dani” as a female commissar dual-wielding a lasgun and a bolt pistol restoring the morale of the soldiers by merely being there, and then as a long-haired, female Imperial soldier from WFB with the appropriately gender-specific breastplate.  In the end, when asked to tag three people, I drew Dani back as the female commissar, threatening to tag my avatar, Daniel the Bearhead, with her bolt pistol if he didn’t change her back.

          Daniel the Bearhead is now in retirement and I’ve eliminated the Purpled Hands, so I got an idea. Daniel the Bearhead is gone, so he can’t change Commissar Dani her back to Chapter Master Daniel, and the Purpled Hands are no longer there to return to. Chapter Master Daniel, then, would be stuck as Commissar Dani. Hey, I think I’ve gotten more views and favorites on the meme because of her than on anything else I’ve done, so why not?

          I worked on a bunch of explanations for how Daniel became Dani, usually revolving around Daniel being a Space Marine that died in battle, the God-Emperor wasn’t finished with him, and reincarnated him as Dani, who has to serve some mysterious purpose while maintaining all the memories (and most importantly, the training) of her past life, she somehow makes it through the Commissariat (which, at the time, I thought was officially an all-boys institution), and saves the day somewhere, possibly avenging her original death as Daniel.

          Yeah, it sucked.

          I had the idea of the female commissar, I had the name Dani, and I decided to just start over from there. No relation to the old Space Marine, no reincarnation, nothing like that. Instead, I came up with a much more plausible idea, and it has more or less crystallized as the following:

          Lady Colonel-Commissar Dani El was originally born as the daughter of a Planetary Governor somewhere in the north of Ultima Segmentum.  The Planetary Governor was once a Cadian general in the Amerigo Crusade, and upon its conclusion and the disbanding of the battle-weary divisions, he was given command of one of the recently-liberated worlds. He eventually married one of the native aristocrats on the planet, and Dani was the result.  Eight years after she was born, an ork Waaagh! fell upon the sector, and her homeworld was razed in the ensuing chaos.  She was shipped off-world before the greenskins descended on the planet, but her parents died before the Crimson Fists and PDF could drive the orks away.  As the daughter of a Planetary Governor and former general, the young orphan was eligible for the Schola Progenium.  Originally slated for service in the Adeptus Sororitas due to her aggression, the officials in the school came to recognize that she was also deceptively disciplined and analytical, and surprisingly charismatic.  These traits marked her out as a promising commissar, and upon becoming old enough to begin specialized training, she was put under the command of the Commissariat.

          Spared the fate of training in mindless, fanatical bloodletting for the Adeptus Sororitas, she learned such valuable skills as learning how to inspire discipline in men and shooting everyone that didn’t. When she hit her teenage years, she received an unfair advantage in this skill over her classmates by the underhanded tactic of leaving the top three buttons of her tunic undone. This unfair advantage was eventually lost when she decided to wear carapace armor into battle, but for a time, it worked marvels.  At the conclusion of her training, she was attached to the storm troopers of the 118th Valhallan to undergo field testing.

          Despite being merely an adjunct and not part of the chain of command, she earned the honorary rank of Brevet Captain for taking control of the situation when the chain of command broke down during the assault against the World Eaters-held Mag Krug Hive on the planet Daedelus VI.  The company commander dead and the lieutenants in disarray, she led the disorganized company in a drive towards the enemy headquarters, surprising them with her audacity and swiftly eliminating the leader of the warband and cultists.  Without a leader to guide them, the Khornate worshippers lashed out in wanton violence at anything, including each other.  Caught in the middle of the fray, the cadet-commissar’s company was set upon on all sides by heretics and warp-spawn. As the company fought for its survival, a stray lasbolt from a heretic’s lasgun caught her a glancing blow to the head, sending her into a coma.

          The young cadet awoke from the coma several months later to find that, with the enemy command structure gone and the enemy fighting itself more than the Imperials, the rest of the division had pushed into the hive and eliminated the enemy force, relieving her company.  She had been prematurely graduated at the top of her class for her gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds and displaying the hallmarks of leadership, seizing control of a situation, instilling order when chaos set in, and striking at the most opportune moment.

          She served with the 827th Gudrunite Riflemen for five years, taking part in the failed invasion of the Ork-held world of Vaspucci that saw the loss of a hundred thousand soldiers in the first hour, and the repulsion of the invading force within a week. The 827th Gudrunite took 50-percent casualties in the battle, and in the wake of the invasion, was merged with the similarly-undermanned 73rd Elysian to form the 827/73rd Gudrunite/Elysian, or 900th Vaspucci Regiment. It was here with the melding of traditional ground tactics of the Gudrunites and the rapid deployment of the Elysians that Commissar Dani saw how deadly two regiments of vastly-different backgrounds could be on the battlefield when merged into one unit: observations what would impact her years later.

          Serving as a Field Commissar in the 900th for nearly a decade, she was eventually promoted to Regimental Command as Lady Commissar.  She continued serving with the 900th for nearly 20 years, through various mergers with other regiments, before the regiment was finally disbanded and the troopers discharged.  Her travels with the regiment saw her progressing further and further westward across the galaxy, passing from Segmentum Obscurus to Segmentum Pacificus, and she found her regiment disbanded not far away from the Varestan system, which had been rendered compliant by the Catachans some thousand years earlier.  Not having done enough for the Emperor, she put a request with the Commissariat to be transferred to one of the newly-formed regiments in-training on the planet, as there was a major crusade being launched into the Nikan Sector, and Varestus Prime was going to contribute huge numbers of soldiers to the endeavor.  In this way, she found herself serving on the command-staff of Gerheart Nahog, .colonel of the Varestan 27th.

          Six years into the crusade, the regiment was attached to a taskforce to reclaim the Substructio System, a system that had been taken from the Imperium by the Dark Eldar.  This system was home to a major forge world and numerous smaller refinery and mining worlds, and it was vital for the crusade to take it.  Along with many scores of other regiments, including nine Varestan regiments, the 27th was deployed to the moon of Substructio Tertiary, a satellite around a gas giant on which various gas processing plants were based, while the rest of the force sought to reclaim Substructio Primaris and Secondary and the other moons of the system.

          In the early stages, the Imperial forces seemed to be making progress, and indeed, secured many of their objectives.  However, during a critical stage of the reclamation, disaster struck: mandrakes infiltrated the Imperial positions and assassinated most of the regimental commanders and the general staff, effectively eliminating the command structure and leaving the troops in disarray.  At this moment, the Dark Eldar began a fierce counterattack, outright crushing or routing numerous Imperial positions.  It seemed that the Imperial force would be destroyed.

          Of the 27th’s regimental staff, only Lady Commissar Dani and Color Sergeant Tatnop survived the attack, the commissar taking down the assassin with point-blank bolter fire and Tatnop killing it with repeated blows with the spiked butt of the regimental banner’s flagpole.  Finding the Imperial forces in disarray, she assumed command of the reclamation force on the moon and rallied the troops, reinstating discipline and holding the lines.  Tirelessly, she conducted the war effort from the confines of a Valkyrie Assault Carrier, which she converted into a makeshift command center and dubbed Bullet Magnet, flying all over the face of the moon.  In addition to being everywhere and personally overseeing the whole of the battle, she never stayed in one place long enough for the Dark Eldar to pin her down for another assassination attempt: her life was all that stood between victory and defeat.  Along with the brevetted officers of the other regiments, the Lady Commissar managed to hold her ground long enough for the rest of the fleet and other reclamation forces to secure the rest of the system and send relief her way.

          The battle for Substructio Tertiary’s moon lasted for thirty-eight weeks before reinforcements arrived.  By the forty-third week, the Dark Eldar were driven from the planet.  Though victory was achieved, the Imperial regiments on the moon, including the Varestans, were devastated, being reduced to a mere fraction of their original strength.  Of the original nine Varestan regiments sent to the moon, two of them were wiped out in their entirety, and the other seven sustained heavy losses.  The remaining seven – the 27th, 256th, and 95th Infantry, 261st and 159th Armored Fist, and the 378th and 139th Air Cavalry regiments were merged together into the 1315th Varestan.  Normally, these varied regiments would be attached to regiments of their own type (ie, the infantry with other infantry, armored fists with other armored fists, and air cavalry with other air cavalry), but keeping in mind her experience with the 900th Vaspucci, Lady Commissar Dani managed to convince the Munitorum officials to place them all together and under her control.  Until the end of the Crusade, or when a suitable replacement could be found, the Commissar was awarded regimental command, becoming Colonel-Commissar of the 1315th.

          This was close to a decade ago, and the “Drab Guardians” or “The Lady-Commissar’s Own,” as they have come to be known, has seen many engagements since then, and the proportion and number of troops has never been constant in that time.  Given the Crusade’s distance from its homeworld of Varestus Prime, new recruits and reinforcements are few and far between.  To that end, other Varestan regiments that have become too small to remain viable have been merged into the 1315th time and time again, and very few soldiers remain from the Substructia Campaign.  Not even Color Sergeant Tatnop has survived this long.  It seems that only a few NCOs, captains, veteran squads, and Bullet Magnet remain from the merging.  So long as Lady Colonel-Commissar Dani survives, though, the 1315th promises to remain a viable regiment, and serves at the forefront of the Nikan Crusade.

Valedictions and the like

Well, the D&D campaign was a bust. One of the things I stressed to the players was that we had to meet regularly, and everyone had to show up on time. In the end, two or more people would routinely miss sessions, everyone would be late, and we were going more than a month between gaming sessions. Enough was enough, and I pulled the plug. I thought of a way to end everything in one game session, as convoluted as it was. However, I've pretty much dropped doing anything further. One of the players has no access to Skype or Gametable, and nobody else's schedule would work out. So... yeah.

I like Dungeons and Dragons, but I think my days of playing it are done. I actually acted as Dungeon Master for a game at this year's Ka-Vention (Real-life get-together of 910CMX forum-goers), I plan on running another game at next year's event, and I've expressed interest in taking part in games when they've been mentioned on the forums, but none of them ever materialized. I only have one friend offline anymore, and he's not interested. Not knowing many customers at my local game store (Flights of Fantasy), I don't have the nerve to put up an advertisement in the store looking for players. Internet games don't work, frankly. This is the second time an online game I've run has crashed and burned, and I've no intention of seeing if the third time's a charm or if I strike out. So... yeah. I think my days of playing it are done.

I've got nearly a thousand dollars-worth of Dungeons and Dragons books (every 4e book ever published), and frankly, they're just collecting dust on my shelf. If I start another game, through some impossible odds, I won't need all of them. I'm going to talk to Flights of Fantasy about the possibility of buying most of them back for credit. The rest are going to Miranda, who's running her own game, or will stay with me. I'm going to keep at least the three original core rulebooks, probably Open Grave and the two Draconomicons, but the rest I have no real excuse.

That money will probably towards feeding my other hobby, Warhammer 40000. Since I'm not planning any games or buying material for D&D,I've got the occasional spare penny to buy miniatures.  To that end, I've been rethinking my Imperial Guard regiment's composition and the backstory for it, and I'm collecting miniatures to back it up.  Expect another post sometime concerning the revised history of the regiment and its commanding officer, Colonel-Commissar Dani.

On that topic, I've joined a WH40K club at Flights of Fantasy.  They're still looking for members, and walk-ins are sporadic, but I'm actually getting to play again.  It's closing in on a year since I played the tabletop game last, so it's a good opportunity.  I lost my first game, and my second will be taking place on Tuesday.  I'll have a game summary (though, admittedly, not a very detailed one) up shortly, along with my proposed army list.

Eh, I think I'll call it there for now.  Assuming I don't leave this blog in the dark for another few months, as I'm wont to do, there'll be those updates to post later.  Good fight, good night.

Valedictions and the like

Long time no see, hasn’t it?

Even though I haven’t updated, I’ve been keeping busy. No Warhammer 40K, sadly – I’ve been reading the books, but I haven’t played since my last game update on that. My miniatures sit, half-forgotten, on a desk beside my computer.

What I have kept busy with, though, is Dungeons and Dragons. Not too long after I ended the Adventure Island campaign, I began brainstorming a new setting. Well, technically, I began designing two. My first idea actually involved twisting the Legend of Zelda to become D&D-compatible, but further down the line, it became unfeasible. I’ll get to that shortly.

I don’t know if I talked about it before, but if not, I’ll talk about it here. I’m a member of the 910CMX forums, which are nominally devoted to webcomics. Originally, it was just based around the webcomic The Wotch, but since it’s not really updating anymore, the focus has shifted to the webcomic community that sprouted around it. Well, nowadays, that’s not true as much anymore, because the majority of the forumers either congregate to the El Goonish Shive sub-forum – which moved from Keenspot to 910CMX last year – or the roleplaying section. Now, when I say replaying, I don’t mean things like Dungeons and Dragons – I mean play-by-post games. Some of them are straight-up fights, while some are epic fantasy/science fiction.

Well, back in September, we actually got our own section to talk about tabletop and other traditional roleplaying, board, and card games. I posted links to this journal there on occasion, and through this subforum, I got in contact with people who liked D&D. Well, I found out about their likes in other sections of the forums, or off the forums entirely. Daracaex, who you might remember from the Adventure Island entries (he played Bion the razorclaw shifter of Melora), plays a character in the Arena who’s heavily inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. When I mentioned D&D to my friend Sam, he asked if he could join. I’m currently in an arena match with a forumer named Slum, whose profile instantly shouted out, “HELMED HORROR!”. And so on and so forth. The point is that a lot of people on the forums play D&D, and if you’re planning on starting a campaign, it’s an easy place to find them, should you have the means to play a game over the internet.

The first thing to figure out, then, was how to run the game. As you might recall from my previous entries, my system for D&D was a mess. I had the map in person, moved the miniatures around, and then told everybody where they were and where the monsters were. It was awkward, and it was confusing, and people didn’t know where they were, since I was the only one who could actually see the figurines. Well, as luck would have it, I found an alternate method of running a game. There’s a program called Gametable that acts as a conferencing program – as many people as can join the host server can sign in, and they can each manipulate virtual “pogs” on a map. This is as close as you can get to having a bunch of people sitting around a table with the actual miniatures, because this means everybody in the game can see the same thing as everyone else, and they can move their own character around and not have to tell you, “Move Caleb from C6 to B2.” Better yet, you don’t need to tell them, “Uh... Caleb’s on F12, not C6.”

Now then. We had the means. Now we needed the players. Right off the bat, there were three people who I knew were going to take part. Miranda, Sam, and Fiorella were the keepers from the last game. I couldn’t use Fio’s sisters, though: Antonella lost interest, and while I don’t doubt Gaby’s involvement, her internet access was spotty and I wasn’t sure about her schedule, and in a game like this, reliability is half the battle. So, I began looking for Party Members 4 and 5. When I mentioned that I was getting the band group back together, Dara voiced his interest. I still felt guilty about only letting him play in one session last time, and one where nothing really even happened, so I accepted him right away.

The next member to sign up was Alex, known on the 910CMX forums as Frozen Chicken. Things went awry right away – Alex lives in Australia. My last campaign had a hard time scheduling things over three time zones, but this was a whole other category. I made a joke about trying to coordinate a campaign over Russia, with at least 8 time zones. Alex lives 16 time zones ahead of me, so this would have been even more ridiculous. I figured, though, with my cardinal rule of “you show up on time or we start without you”, we could avoid this problem. I just had to figure out a time when everyone would be available, and stick to it. When I asked everyone in the group, I found out that the only viable time was midnight, New York Time, on Sundays. If you read my previous journal entries, you know how problematic that is – I work on Saturdays, and if I came home just to start a game, I’d be dead on my feet from exhaustion. So would the other players, because Dara and our prospective reserve member, Luminaire, had a game in another forumer’s (Zemro’s) campaign right before that. Dara would get two games in a row, but it would have been immensely tiring and tedious. Zemro probably runs a better game than me anyways (he certainly knows his material and puts more thought into it, from what I’ve gleaned from talking to him), and it would be an insult to go from one well-run game with a bunch of engaged, active gamers to one with a bunch of novices too tired to do their addition in their heads.

So, with those factors in mind, I told Alex that I had to remove him from the lineup. I wished it wasn’t so, but in order for the game to go on, that was the way it had to be. So, in his place, we brought in the aforementioned reserve member, Luminaire. I don’t know if I mentioned this in a previous journal entry, but back in July of last year, I went to a get-together for forumers in Philadelphia. I’d heard that Lumi was going to run a game session in-person on one of the days, and I bugged him and a few of his prospective players to see if I could join in on it. I probably came off sounding like an idiot and an annoyance, but I hadn’t gamed in person since November of 2008, so if the chance was there, I figured it was worth a shot. Due to technical difficulties, though, Lumi wasn’t able to run the game that day. Eh, oh well.

Anyways, Lumi read in my gaming thread on the forums that I was planning a game, and that I only had plans to allow 5 people into the party. He expressed his regret at this, because Alex was still on board at the time, and that meant the party was already full. I sent him a message saying that if anything happened, he’d be the first person on my reserves list. This opened a can of worms, because I then told him what I had in mind for the game:

This would be a sequel to the original Legend of Zelda, taking place instead of The Adventure of Link. This was perfectly doable – without too much alteration, you can make a D&D game that fits any setting, even if it’s based on a video game series. The problem was that I was trying to force the players to play it like the game. The idea I was going with was that everyone would play a half-elf, since that was the closest I could think of to the hylians of the games, and they’d all choose a martial class. As time went on, they’d gradually accumulate magic gear, just like they would in the video games, which would solve the whole “nobody can use magic” problem. As it turns out, this was a colossal mistake on my part.

Half-elves aren’t really geared towards the martial classes, of which there are only four – Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, and Warlord. Sure, they can be good at it, but they can’t excel like an elf, a dragonborn, goliath, or even a human could. None of their racial bonuses really leant themselves to running an effective martial character, which I hadn’t even thought of. In addition, in 4th Edition D&D, there are three “roles”, and every class fits into one of these roles. Strikers have poor defenses, but they have tremendously powerful attacks. They specialize in moving around the battlefield, isolating opponents, and then waling upon them until they die for good. Controllers stay behind the lines, in the back, and hit the enemy with area-of-effect attacks. They’re there for mob control, and they hit a number of enemies at once. Leaders can either remain behind the lines or get mired in the fighting itself; their job is to heal the party or use effects that can lower an enemy’s defenses or otherwise incapacitate them. Defenders are the heavily-armed and –armored warriors that wade into the middle of the fray and soak up damage, keeping the enemies occupied while the other classes do what they’re designed for.

The problem is that none of the martial classes fit the controller bill. Fighters wade into the middle of the fight, all in scale or plate armor, and they soak up damage with their innate toughness, being too much of a threat for enemies to ignore. Rogues and Rangers flit in and out of the melee, selecting targets and beating them to a pulp without mercy. Warlords can either reposition their allies at will or bolster their resolve, using non-magic healing abilities. None of these classes really have area-of-effect attacks unless I give them magic items that allow them to, so for a long time, the party would be at a severe disadvantage. Every turn, the party would only be able to attack however many enemies as they have party members. The enemy, meanwhile, would have more numbers on their side, and would also have magic abilities.

Lumi brought this to my attention, and commented that he was not happy with having his race chosen for him nor his class options so limited, especially when it put him at such a disadvantage. The other party members had said that they were alright with the rules, but now that I had a complaint on my hands, I asked them for their opinion. With the exception of Miranda, who I think was so engrossed with the chance to play a Zelda RPG that she didn't care, they all admitted that I was being too restrictive, and that they chafed under the rules I put in place. Well, things had to change, then. The Dungeon Master’s first priority is to make sure that the party has fun, and if four of your five players hate what you’re doing, then you’ve broken their enthusiasm. So, to counter this, I relented and let the party choose whichever classes or races they wanted, so long as they could justify it in the Zelda setting. This didn’t last too long, though. My original idea was broken – they’d be playing in the Zelda setting, but they wouldn’t be emulating the feel of the games. They were, unbelievably, trying to play it like Dungeons and Dragons. Unfathomable!

If somebody tries to run a tabletop Legend of Zelda campaign, they’re going to have to either design the whole thing from scratch, from the rules on up, or they’re going to have to enter the game without any illusions that it’s going to be run like the video games. When you use a game system, expect the party to treat it like the game system it’s based on, not the video game you plan on. I decided to shelve the campaign for another day – we wouldn’t be adventuring in Hyrule anytime soon.

This is not to say that the game was over, though. I’d had two campaign settings in mind this whole time. While I was planning the Zelda campaign, I had another idea on the backburner. Indeed, when I was enticing the party members, I told them that I had a few campaign ideas in mind. There was the Zelda one, but there was also one based on Norse Mythology, with the Aesir switched out in favor of the default D&D pantheon, but still retaining the feel of the myths. This campaign, set in the vast land of Great Nordland, would be based in part on content gleaned from legends out of the Prose Edda and information detailed in the Divine Power supplement. The sun-god, Pelor, has gone missing, and the winter is going overly long. The party must find Pelor before Great Nordland and everything within it freezes to death.

Dara loved the concept in general, and Miranda, who’s a Norse Mythology fan, loved the fact that I was bringing actual Vikings into D&D. When I asked if the group would like to use this adventure, I got an enthusiastic yes out of everybody. They loved the concept and the freedom it allowed, and with my new, “try to say yes to whatever the party has in mind” approach, they could choose whichever class or race they wanted, so long as they talked about it with me first and I told them how I thought it could fit in with the setting. So ended the ire that my previous campaign idea had stirred up.

Before I begin, I need to get something out of the way. This place is huge. My previous adventure, the Adventure Island, took place on an island about a hundred miles wide and a hundred miles long. That’s not really big – the party could cover the whole island in a few days on foot. On horseback, that would be halved again. It was especially so when you consider that you’re likely not going to be scouring the entire area – you’re confined to an area the size of a small county by today’s standards. I could have probably mapped out the island between game sessions and had them traverse the entire thing without needing to say, “you travel for two days along the king’s highway”. That would have been alright, but it would have been wrong for this campaign. I wanted to go for a Points of Light feel here – there are a few small, dim lights of civilization scattered across a dark, dangerous wilderness. The lights should feel like they’re being drowned by the darkness. To that effect, I took the population of Rhode Island and spread it out over an area larger than the continental United States. The population density is less than one person per 9-square-mile area, and since most people cluster together in small villages or towns, you can go for hundreds of miles without seeing a single humanoid absolutely nobody in them. Also factor in that a good chunk of that population – dwarves, drow, trolls, gloamings, and so on – is subterranean. Stretched between the surface, Underdark, and artificial dwellings carved into the mountains, you have a place with very, very little activity.

I did this for a few reasons. In my previous campaign, everybody knew everything. Things were so close together that about five minutes of asking around a Locksley Farpoint or some random tribal village in Daracoshia would find you somebody who has a cousin in Londoroth, and they know what the price of fresh-caught salmon on the streets of Naivara is as of two hours ago. In spreading the settlements out, you have people so isolated from each other that you can’t get information on the world as readily. People don’t know anything. The world is a huge, mysterious place, and that makes it much scarier. It also forces them to dig into their trail rations, because they’re going to go for weeks without resupplying.

Well, I’m rambling, and I’ve lost the idea I was trying to pursue. The group made up some new characters, since they weren’t forced to play half-elf martial class characters, and did their best to make them fit in with the Nordic feel of the campaign. The campaign started from a small group of five villages in a valley, called the Svogr, and none of the party members have met each other before. Each character comes from one of these villages, and they were free to come up with details concerning their village as they saw fit. I don’t know if I stressed that idea enough, because only Miranda really gave her village any defining characteristics. Anyways, here’s the party layout:

Aslaug – Though nominally a human, she’s actually a modified Kalashtar from the Ebberon campaign setting. She serves Pelor, the god of the sun, as a cleric. She is dedicated primarily to healing, and just about all her abilities either heal directly, or give back health or protective bonuses to a party member as a side effect to one of her attacks. She is played by Luminaire.
Beatrice - A deva druid, she was raised by dragonborns and spends most of her time in the wilderness. Played by Fiorella, she’s unaligned, and actually uses her beast form now.
Nuadha – A half-elf paladin of the Raven Queen, this stoic, armored warrior goes along with the journey to restore the natural balance of summer and winter. He’s unaligned and played by Daracaex.
Talicia and Magne – A gloaming ranger, Talicia has spent most of her life underground or in caves and caverns. She adopted the alcoholic hawk Magne, and together, the two of them tag-team their opponents. Talicia and Magne are unaligned, and played by Miranda.
Vargọld – The petty concerns of morality and sanity are of no concern to the cold Star Wolves, and so their loyal follower Vargọld pays them no mind. He is mysterious and reclusive, and ventures forth on this duty because he believes that the sun’s disappearance is a sign from his baleful gods. Unaligned, and played with misogyny by Sam.

There’s only one thing left to talk about, now. The primary reason that the previous campaign failed was how irregular the schedule was. People were missing from almost every session, and we couldn’t agree on times that could include everybody. I made being available on Sundays a requirement for taking part in this campaign If people miss too many sessions without a good excuse, then they’re going to be excluded from the campaign, and somebody else brought in to replace them. The date and time are also available several weeks beforehand, so they know when the game is supposed to start, and they have plenty of time to tell me if something pops up.

I’m going to conclude the journal entry on this note. When I post again next, it’s going to be about the setting itself, because I glossed over a lot of it here, and it should probably be talked about in greater detail, So, keep watching this space, and I’ll fill you in on that, and a summary of the four gaming sessions we’ve had so far.

Valedictions and the like

Well, after only seven gaming sessions, the Adventure Island campaign is cancelled. I should have seen it coming from a mile away. Here are the contributing factors in retrospect:

1 – With her work schedule, we were unable to consistently come up with dates and times that would include Miranda in most of the gaming sessions. Not having a reliable schedule, like “Every other Sunday at 1:00 PM New York Time,” was a liability.

2 – Internal politics. As alluded to in my previous journal entry, some members of the group were unhappy with other members of the group. The house divided couldn’t stand.

3 – Scattering. Last week, Fio decided to live with her parents in their new home in Missouri. She didn’t cause this point, but it serves to illustrate it – we’re scattered too far over the country. I’m in New York, Gaby and Antonella are in Texas, Fio is now in St. Louis, Miranda is in Kansas City, and Sam is in southern California. Without having a place we can all congregate to or see each other regularly, we miss each other a lot and can’t communicate. The more scattered we are, the less we have to hold us together.

4 – Availability. As I started to say above, being scattered makes it more difficult to get in contact with everyone. Between three or four different Instant Messaging programs and three time zones, we miss each other when we’re online, and there’s a chance important messages will arrive late.

5 – Speed. Let’s face it. If we were sitting around a table with a map and a bunch of miniatures on top, we would kill the kobold minion in about twenty seconds. Compare to twenty minutes online. The game progresses far to slowly.

6 – Apathy. Anto gave up.

I don’t have anything else to say.

Valedictions and the like.

The last gaming session, September the 20th, was not a good one, and I am reminded of why being a Dungeon Master can be a pain in the @$$. Unless otherwise noted, all times are New York time.

 

We scheduled the game for 7:30 PM. We would have had it earlier, but Miranda was working until 6:00 PM. So, we gave her an hour and a half to get home and get ready for the game.

Complications arose. She was scheduled to work from about 6:00 PM until closing, but she switched her hours. Apparently, her sister Corina told her that she needed to study, and she would take the closing shift if Miranda could take over her daytime shift, giving Corina time to study for an exam, and allowing Miranda to play the game in the evening. We based the gaming schedule around this. That morning, Miranda got up to go to work, only to learn that her sister had changed her mind and took her original hours back. She forgot to call me to tell me about these circumstances, and at 7:30, exactly two of us were online; Sam and I.

I texted Miranda asking her where she was, and she eventually responded that she was still at work. I asked when she would be home, and she told me no idea. She didn’t give me the whole story until the next day. Anyways, Fio and Gaby signed on ten to fifteen minutes later, and upon hearing that Miranda was late, unleashed a list of grievances and requested that I kick Miranda out of the game. The argument being that they didn’t like her character and she’s constantly holding us up. Long story short, Miranda was not kicked out of the game, she was not happy to hear about it the next day, and I had that hanging over my head the whole time.

Interestingly, Antonella didn’t take part in the game. She didn’t feel like playing, for some reason, and went off to do something else. Fio and Gaby controlled her character for her in the same way Fio and Anto controlled Gaby’s character last time.

 

Politics and technical difficulties aside:

 

Caleb awakened from his vision to find everything either dead or on fire around him. Acacia was off somewhere, doing something, for some reason, and we haven’t come up with an explanation yet. Maybe she’s the lookout. Intrigued by the fact that he was dazing off in the middle of a ray of sunlight, the other party members asked what he had seen. Paraphrasing, he told them that he had a dream, and they all were there, and they were in a dungeon, and first they fought some giant rats, then they killed some skeletons and slew a zombie, then there was a little guy that told them to stop some guy, and then they went underground and stopped the guy, and there were a bunch of dragon people and they killed them all.

I am a sneaky bastard.

Apparently, the practice dungeon actually did happen, but only Caleb remembers it. How? I'm not telling yet. Fio and Gaby had no idea how to react to that, and they started asking questions on whether it was a vision from a god, what else happened, was he just dreaming, did this happen in an alternate reality, did it happen in the future, and various questions that he didn’t have the answer to. Confused and perplexed, they decided to enter the dungeon.

Right away, I’m going to say that I lifted the dungeon from the first adventure in Dungeon Delves, Copperknight Hold. Dungeon Delves includes thirty miniature adventures, each one for one level of play, and each only lasting three rooms. They’re easily able to be slipped into any campaign setting with little-to-no modification. I saw the adventure prompt, about the PCs being sent to a dwarven outpost to see what the holdup on construction is, only to find it overrun by kobolds and a dragon, and I instantly knew how to include it in my campaign. I raised the difficulty a little bit, since it was a Level One dungeon and they’ve cruised through Level Seven encounters, altered the story and appearance a little bit, and in it went.

The party entered a room with rubble at the bottom of a set of stairs, a statue in the entrance of a hallway, and beyond that, a group of about six kobolds. I cursed inwardly after I told them this; it was supposed to be dark in there, so they wouldn’t be able to see. I couldn’t take it all back and tell them, “Oh, nevermind, you can’t see any of that. Ignore the man hiding behind the curtains.”  I’d have to deal with what I’d already said and roll with it. Improvisation would shortly take care of it.

The kobolds held back to start out with and launched projectile weapons and energy orbs at the party from afar. The party eventually got in close, and using the statue as a kind of barricade, the melee combatants held the heroes back while a Wyrmpriest hit them with energy attacks, and minions threw javelins at them.

The party eventually managed to form a breach in the line, and they rushed on to attack the ranged combatants. It was at this point that I realized that the encounter was pretty much over; there wasn’t much that the kobolds could do as-is, because they were completely outclassed at this point. Some guards they turned out to be. I got two ideas, then. The Wyrmpriest was in the back of the room, and the party hadn’t gotten to him yet. I hadn’t said where all the light was coming from. So, the Wyrmpriest quickly snuffed out the torch illuminating the entire dungeon despite the blind corners and sheer size of the place (just roll with it, alright? You’re buying into a world where mooning a skeleton is a viable military tactic, I don’t think the torch’s magical lighting abilities should be much of a stretch.), and since none of the party members had darkvision, the kobolds slipped away beyond a corner and into a narrow hallway leading to the next room of the dungeon.

Ameranthia lit up a sunrod, which she held in her teeth, and peeked around the corner. She failed her stealth check, and immediately she took a lightning ball to the face. This is where they learned about “holding your action,” because he was waiting for someone to try that. She didn’t see anything, but one of the other characters – I think either Caleb or Viera – succeeded in not getting shot in the face by lightning, while Solerisa (I think) held up the sunrod and saw that the kobolds were hunched around a wooden cage. Something rust-colored was inside.

A short while later, the cage was opened, and out rushed a man-sized bug, a rust monster. Rust monsters live by consuming metals, and they go after whoever has the most metal on them. Caleb, having a great big axe and an XL-sized scale hauberk, was the target. Usually the rust monster will go for the armor, but in this case, it went for the axe (need I remind you that this is a great axe?). The rust monster was originally meant to be in the next room, but I changed my plans. I sincerely doubted that they would make it to the next room this gaming session, I needed something to make this encounter more challenging and exciting, and it would provide the setup for a much better end-note than the one suggested in the book.

So, Caleb’s axe became rusty, and the rust monster tried to eat it. It failed when Caleb put the axe away, and Ameranthia lent him her longsword (Yah, I’m kind of broke at the moment). The rust monster failed in its attempts at rusting and eating Caleb’s armor or newfangled sword, but at least we had a higher-level monster that posed an actual threat to the party – what would you do if you suddenly found yourself faced with a kobold horde and didn’t have a weapon at hand? – and kept them away from the ranged opponents, who posed more of a threat to the party with the big bug and a skirmisher or two in the way.

The rust monster went down in good order, and the party killed all the kobolds they could get their hands on. In a change of pace where the party doesn’t kill everything that moves, though, the last remaining kobold decided that his life was worth more than his dignity, and he surrendered.

In a sequence that is being paraphrased because I played him up to the point of farce and is being retconned to something less ludicrous, the kobold informed the party that he and his comrades killed the dwarves, he was serving “the granddaughter of God,” and he was willing to serve the party if only he had something to eat, because he and his comrades had been starving. The party wouldn’t be finding any of the dwarves remains; at least, not at-least partially digested, anyways.

The party learned that the kobolds are working for Skazarthros, a blue dragon wyrmling descended from Taranis, an elder blue dragon so powerful and large for his age (looking like an ancient) that some have claimed that he is a living god. Skazarthros is the daughter of Brontes, Taranis’s son, who is also large for his age, only being an adult blue dragon (yet looking like an elder), and that Skazarthros is on a mission from Brontes. What that mission is, he doesn’t know; maybe if the party hadn’t killed his boss, the Wyrmpriest, they would have gotten the information.

Aside from the ludicrous way I played out the scene, where I crossed Gollum with a scolded puppy and a gretchin from Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War, the retcon is going to serve another purpose. I had gone over Ameranthia’s history with Fio, and she agreed to have Brontes be the dragon that led the attack on Daracoshia that scattered her clan. She forgot the name, so when she was confronted with the name of the murderer of almost her entire adopted extended family, she didn’t catch the reference. In-character, she would have no reason to not know, and in fact, Ameranthia should have gotten very serious and angry at that point, because she could be on the doorway to vengeance at last.

The name I came up with for the kobold is similarly inane, so I’m not even going to mention it. Fio, Gaby, Sam, if you remember, don’t post it. We’re pretending it never happened.

Anyways, after he finished telling the party this, the door at the end of the hallway burst open, and a blue dragon wyrmling came rushing out at the party. Unlike the normal wyrmling, though, this wasn’t a medium-sized creature – Skazarthros is a large creature, so visually, she’s keeping up the tradition of her ancestors, because she’s four times more massive than a wyrmling should be. The original adventure called for the party going into the last room of the dungeon to find her (a white dragon wyrmling of normal) sitting on a chair waiting for them, sending a horde of smaller yet stronger kobolds after the party. This wasn’t satisfying or dramatic enough, so the Level One Medium Blue Dragon Wyrmling is replaced with a Level 4 Large Blue Dragon Wyrmling with enough stat boosts to qualify as a solo creature bursting through the door and preparing to visit bodily harm against the party and the treacherous kobold they’d questioned.

That’s it for this journal entry. I’m now up to date on all the entries, so there won’t be any more campaign updates until we play again. Next article will probably be me actually going back and writing about Commissar Dani, which I promised I would do at the end of the Varestan Mobile-Air Infantry entry.

 

Best/Dan.

It all started with a quote by a Catachan officer in the Imperial Guard codex. I don't like playing as a mainstream faction: I always like the underdogs or secondary organizations that never see the light of day. With the Space Marines, I made my own series of chapters up called the Nikan Marines, and they were eventually converted to Crimson Fists. The Crimson Fists are an established chapter, but next to groups like the Ultramarines, Black Templars, and Blood Ravens, they're still underappreciated. When you think of the Imperial Guard, you think of the Cadian Shock Troops, the meter to which all other regiments are held: highly-trained on a fortified world where the birth-rate is synonimous with the recruiting rate, most Planetary Defense Forces and off-world regiments base their battle dress, demeaner, and training on the Cadian model.

The Catachans are the next-most-common regiment; jungle fighters on a planet where everything from tank-sized scorpions to carniverous trees themselves actively fight the human settlers. Yes, the trees try to eat people. They're unorthodox, and visually, they're based on US Marines from the Vietnam-era. I'm not sure exactly why it is, but I love the Catachans. However, they're too-well established for me, so I can't play as them. That quote from the codex, though, gave me an idea:


This quote was by an officer named Captain Rock, commenting on the planet Varestus Prime. Regiments, after performing exemplary service and taking significant casualties, are given control over a planet, settling down and colonizing/ruling the planet. I wagered that more Catchan regiments than just Captain Rock's regiment had taken part in conquering the planet, so I decided to have one of them gain control of the planet and oversee the settlement. Right at home there, the Catachans would be the most likely ones to do anything productive with the planet, because short of virus-bombing it, there isn't much that can be done against flora and fauna of that voraciousness.

Small settlements were established over the planet because large cities were impossible to maintain. The flora grows so quickly and is so inimical to construction that, if left alone for a week, roads and buildings would be ripped apart by roots, vines, shoots. A city would cover such a large area that the presumed-dead roots of plants would tear away the foundations of buildings and sewage structures on such a wide scale that fighting it would be impossible. Instead, small yet tightly-populated settlements would be constructed, and armies of workers would actively fight the plant-life as it sprouted up with blades and flamers and meltas. Roads between settlements are nonexistant: constructing paths through the jungle is as futile as plowing the ocean. The settlers have learned their lesson in futility centuries ago, and instead traverse the land either on foot or with sentinels, or roughly-equivicable civilian walkers. In this respect, the Varestans are very much like their Catachan ancestors.

The main difference, though, comes in the shape of the planet itself. Unlike Catachan, most of Varestus Prime cannot be accessed by land alone. The land-masses have been broken up into dozens of small continents, each separated by hundreds or thousands of miles of water, also festering with ungodly kinds of sea-monsters and plant-life that would snap an ocean transport in half if it could get its vines around it. Any travel between continents relies on a vast fleet of air transports, and Varestus has become a prime recruiting ground for the Imperial Navy due to the sheer number of aviators birthed there. It is common practice for the Navy to send prospective pilots to the planet for wilderness survival training - if you can survive an encounter with a Varestan Devil, you can make it anywhere.

When the planet's population became numerous enough to contribute to the Imperial Tithe, the Imperial High Command allowed the Varestans to provide their own air-cover and aerial transport under the Phantine Precedent. They are seen as a halfway point between the Phantine Air Corps and the Elysian Drop Troops, as they provide their own air cover like the Phantines do, and rely extensively on drop troops and deep-striking through Vendetta and Valkyrie Transports/Gunships. like the Elysians do The planetary governor is currently in negotiation with nearby forge worlds for the purchase of Elysian-pattern Drop Sentinels, in order to make the marriage of air superiority and mobile infantry complete.

I'm focusing on the 1315th Air-Mobile Infantry "Drab Guardian" Regiment, and their most iconic member, Commissar Dani, will be the focus of the next journal entry. Now, though, I'm going to have to go to sleep.

Best/Dan

No real update on the campaign: I can’t find the sheet where I talked about the different currencies in the Adventure Island (and their histories), and there hasn’t been any talk of another gaming session yet. So, I’m going to talk about the specifics of my WH40K army, the 1315th Varestan Air-Mobile Infantry “Drab Guardians”.

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When I first started playing WH40K, I naturally started with the Space Marines. First of all, my first actual experience playing the game involved the computer game Dawn of War and its first two expansion packs, Winter Assault and Dark Crusade. So, as a result of the first game and second expansion pack (I could never get far enough in Winter Assault for the Guard to grow on me), I had a lot of experience with the Space Marines. My friend Joe showed me his Black Templar miniatures before rolling the Guard out and curb-stomping me with them. The Space Marines are recommended for beginning players because they’re universally good at everything (though not great at any one thing). They looked cool. Yadda yadda yadda, any of these things in combination made me start out with the Space Marines.

The exact in-game history for my Space Marines is complex, and I’ll probably go into detail on them at a later date in an article called Nikan Marines, but all you really need to know about here is my experience playing as them.

Against a seasoned opponent with a wide selection of models, they are completely useless.

Joe is pretty much the only opponent I have a chance of playing against. I don’t know any of the customers at the local gaming store (even though I’m one of the store’s spendingest buyers), so I’d feel like a fish out of water bringing my army to the shop (Flights of Fantasy – expect a write-up of them soon) and challenging a random customer to die for the glory of the Imperium. And if they played an Imperial force, then to die for not having a copy of the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer on them, as is punishable by law. I’d be watching them as I asked so they would not be able to go up to the book shelf and pluck one off to show me. Not unless I also witnessed them buying it.

So, when he got me into playing WH40K, Joe only showed me his Black Templars Space Marines, and a few squads of his loyalist Emperor’s Children (“The Third”) led by a time-traveling Saul Tarvitz. That aside, he primarily plays as the Imperial Guard, Armageddon Steal Legionnaires. In my first game, where he was just showing me the basics, he sent a 6-man squad of The Third, a Black Templars Emperor’s Champion, and a pre-Heresy Horus the Arch-Traitor (It was an Abaddon the Despoiler miniature with all the Chaos markings and ponytail machined off with a power tool, using rules adapted from Marneus Calgar and a couple other miniatures in the 4th Edition Space Marine codex) against my five-man-Tactical Marine squad and Land Speeder Typhoon. I didn’t have a codex of my own at the time and he hadn’t bothered to tell me about “points values” yet, so I had no way of knowing that he was using about five times as many points as I was, and that my Land Speeder did not make up for an extra tactical marine, an Emperor’s Champion, and a fething primarch.

Predictably, he slaughtered everything except the Land Speeder (I lost three marines in the opening volley alone – he won the roll-off), and I only managed to take out his Emperor’s Champion because I had all my soldiers and the Land Speeder aim at it for four turns before it finally went down. The only reason the Land Speeder survived was because I could make a convincing claim that, capable of moving 24 inches flat-out, it could damn well leave the engagement if the pilot thought it was prudent.

Next battle, my army had grown, even though I still didn’t have a codex or know about the points value thing. I fielded a tactical marine squad, a 5-man Assault Marine squad, a five-man Scout squad, a Dreadnought, and the Land Speeder Typhoon. He fielded an entire full-strength platoon of Imperial Guardsmen, including four or five Infantry squads, two or three Heavy Weapons squads (one with mortars, one with a lascannon, and if there was a third, I don’t remember what it had), at least one Special Weapons squad with sniper rifles, a command squad (it might have contained Lord Solar Macharius and Commissar Yarrick, but I don’t remember now), and a Sentinel with lascannons. I’m trying to remember if he fielded the Hellhound in that battle, but I can’t remember that. His argument was that Space Marines cost a ton of points, so it was balanced. Without the codex, I had no reason to doubt it. After all, in the fluff and backstories, single Space Marines are shown bludgeoning their way through regiment upon regiment of Guardsmen.

This was not the fluff. Despite what the fluff says, the Space Marines cannot wade through hostile troops while humming La Marseillaise in the game. If they did, then why would you bother playing as anyone else when one Space Marine Combat squad could take out an armored battalion? I began to suspect the truth of the matter when the standard-issue Imperial Flashlight shredded my infantry to pieces, and when two shots of the lascannon destroyed my Dreadnought (first went the heavy flamer, then the Dreadnought itself).

It was about a year before I had my next match. In those twelve months, my army grew from a couple squads to a full-size army with three full Tactical Marine squads, an Assault Marine squad, Terminator Squad, Terminator Chaplain, Scout Squad, Drop Pod, Pedro Kantor, Techmarine with a Thunderfire Cannon, Dreadnought, Librarian, Jump-Pack Chaplain, Land Speeder Typhoon, and a few incomplete bikers, Tactical and Assault squads. I had asked for a 1500 point battle, so I had to leave a few units behind, but I was confident in the force I’d amassed for my long-awaited rematch. I had the codex now, there was no way I would get cheated on points values this time! Joe told me he’d only need 1300 points, from which I surmised he was going to field a few of his tanks. To that end, I made sure to include every model with rocket launchers and lascannons I could manage. I didn’t have many, but I was confident I would be able to pull it off. The Emperor’s Finest should be able to hold their own; right?

No.

Five Leman Russ tank variants, three chimeras, one hellhound, a sentinel or two, three squads of Guardsmen, and a partridge in a pear tree beat the living snot out of my Space Marines, his ordnance being able to shoot over all the barriers erected while my Space Marines had to advance through a maze of impassable walls in order to hit with their line-of-sight weapons.

He'd been waiting years for the chance to unleash the blitzkrieg.

My dreadnought with twin-linked lascannons died under concentrated Battle and Demolisher Cannon fire, my Scout with a rocket launcher was unable to score a penetrating hit against the Hellhound before he died a fiery death, Pedro Kantor’s Orbital Bombardment hit three of Joe’s tanks and all of his snipers but failed to so much as scratch any of them (damned unlucky dice), and the Thunderfire Cannon did little more than mildly concuss a sniper lying down in the wrong place at the wrong time. The carnage only ended because we agreed to go for 5 rounds, and after bravely running away or hiding behind a shoe box standing in for a building the whole time, my Space Marines high-tailed it out of there. He only managed to fully destroy one unit (the Dreadnought), but he maimed just about every other unit on the field, while I scored exactly one casualty (that one concussion was enough to take the sniper out of the game) and knocked out the multi-laser on a Chimera. The only reason more of my men didn’t die was because he also had to move through the barrier maze to hit with most of his weapons, so he was reduced to taking pot-shots with demolisher cannons and the main tank guns on the Leman Russes. I shudder to think how things would have went if he had been able to bring all his heavy bolters and flamers to bare, or if he’d actually tried to flank me with his chimeras and the squads inside from the beginning of the game instead of holding them back.

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I've been reading some novels about the Imperial Guard (Gaunt's Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!)), and I've slowly been converted into a Guardsman fan. The battle in which my Space Marines were ground down into a fine powder under the tracks of his tanks convinced me to make the switch. Always a fan of the unorthodox, I am currently building up on Catachan miniatures, painted in olive drab and dubbed the "Drab Guardians", hailing from the planet Varestus Prime. Unlike the normal Catachans, the Drab Guardians are an air-mobile, anti-tank unit: the 1315th Varestan Air-Mobile Infantry. Joe is probably the only opponent I'm going to face for a while, so while the Varestans may be over-specialized, they're over-specialized Joe-Killers. I originally planned on including a Steel Fury Baneblade Company (and even bought two Baneblades and assembled one), but I decided against fielding them due to the new army focus:

2 Vendetta Gunship Squadrons - 780 points
1 Lord (Lady) Commissar with Carapace Armor - 80 points
1 Company Command Squad with Regimental Standard and Vox-caster - 70 points
2 Veteran Squads with Meltas and Vox-casters - 210 points
3 Scout Sentinels with Lascannons - 150 points

Total - 1290 points.

A Baneblade costs 500 points. For 495 points, I can field a full vendetta squadron and a veteran squad. In addition, the Vendettas (and the troops riding inside of them) can deep-strike, allowing them to appear right in the enemy's flanks, allowing them to disgorge the troops they're carrying behind enemy lines and hit the enemy armor in the side or rear, where it's the most vulnerable. It's hard to argue with nine twin-linked lascannons and three meltas (Or, if I want to be mean, have all the Vendettas and Veterans gang up and hit with 18 twin-linked lascannons, six meltas, and the kitchen sink). Sadly, I can't drop a sentinel behind enemy lines.

Oh yeah! I'll need to get a couple of those.

I'm still assembling the army. As of right now, I only have one Vendetta and one Veteran squad complete. I have the boxes for another Vendetta and a Company Command Squad, and as the months go on, I'll buy the miniatures as I'm ready to start on them. I need to also set up an eBay account so I can buy a female commissar model: I started out making a joke in a meme on DeviantART about a female commissar, but I've retconned her history and plan on incorporating her into the regiment. The story of the Varestan Air-Mobile Infantry, will be featured in the next.journal entry. That will hopefully go up in a few hours.

Best/Dan

Alright, after I finished transferring those entries over one-at-a-time, I’ve gotten to the point where it’s time to get into new material. Be it laziness or preoccupation, I hadn’t actually written anything for the next three sessions. Going back and writing three full-length articles, one for each entry, is simply not going to happen because I don’t have all the dates written down and Skype Call Recorder didn’t record the second game session.

Rather than do that, then, I’m going to write one article talking about all three of the sessions and the things that happened between them. It’s not as fresh in my mind as the events that happened in the practice dungeon were when I wrote them, but here we go:

First of all, Miranda’s friend David joined us on the first gaming session of the campaign. Miranda had told him about the game right before the second gaming session of the practice dungeon, but he couldn’t join us for the third gaming session because of his work schedule. He chose to play an eladrin wizard named Palias. Dave, I think, would have made for a better gamer if he was familiar with anyone in the group. On the first gaming session, Miranda couldn’t make it due to work, so Dave was stuck talking to five other people whose names he didn’t know, and really knew nothing about. Understandably, he was withdrawn for the most part, and he talked very quietly.

So. We had a new member that wasn’t talking much, and we were missing one of the original five members. I told Miranda that I’d think of an in-story reason for her to join the party, but neither of us were really pleased with the excuse I came up with. I’ll get to that later.

Before I continue, it’s probably best for me to provide a dramatis personae for the late-comers to the blog and anyone who has the same kind of trouble I do with names:

Miranda – A razorclaw shifter ranger named Acacia.
Anto – A half-elf cleric of Moradin named Solerisa.
Fio – A human druid (elementalist) named Ameranthia.
Gaby – A half-elf paladin of Pelor named Viera.
Sam – A half-orc paladin of Pelor named Caleb
Dave – An eladrin wizard named Palias.
Dara – A razorclaw shifter avenger of Melora named Bion.
Dan – GOD!

Though most of the members of the group had played together already, the practice dungeon, as I told them before, was non-canonical, so even though Acacia, Solerisa, Ameranthia, Viera, and Caleb had fought together before, this was their first in-story meeting, and with the exception of Solerisa and Viera, who were sisters in-game, they knew each other about as well as Palias did.

The game started off with Viera, Ameranthia, Solerisa, and Palias sleeping on a boat, sailing for the town of Portstown, for their individual reasons. Viera and Solerisa (sisters both in-game and out of game) were heading there in search of a way to lift a curse afflicting Viera, Ameranthia was going in order to find the remnants of the dragonborn clan that adopted her and was scattered during a dragon raid, and Palias was searching for a mage of much-renown to study under. Caleb, meanwhile, was not on the boat: he had been asked by the mayor of the province’s capital, Locksley Farpoint (he held a dual role as Count of the province, Locksley), to spend the night in some ruins south of the city exorcising ghosts reputed to be haunting the ruins.

The party on the boat awoke to the loud sound of wood shattering, and after feeling the boat lurching underneath them, the hull snapped open, and they were flung into the water. Most of them managed to avoid getting hit in the head by jetsam and taking damage, but two – I think it was Solerisa and Palias – took damage and were dazed. They washed up on shore to find a confused Caleb, who, being right next to the shore, had seen the ship breaking up from afar. On the beach, they made their introductions and began to contemplate what happened. The two who had been hit by the debris succeeded in their saving throws to shake off the daze during this time.

The conversation eventually turned to why Caleb had been on the shore when the ship crashed (everyone but Caleb drawing the conclusion that the Count had tricked Caleb into the ruins either to keep him away from the city and out of trouble for the night, or in the hopes that something would make a nice soufflé out of him.), why the ship had crashed (strong, storm-force winds likely pushed it off course and into the shallows, where it ran aground and was ripped apart), and for some reason not wondering if something worse would happen.

I didn’t say anything for a while, and when I did, I was either ignored or not heard, because the players didn’t acknowledge anything I said. At one point, I was tempted to start humming “Never Smile at a Crocodile,” because as they were talking, I was looking at my watch and counting down. Right in the middle of their conversation, I hit them with a big-lipped alligator moment

It was also a big-toothed alligator moment..

This whole time, the party was standing in or right next to the water, oblivious to their surroundings, when a crocodile jumped out of the waves, completely surprising them, and lunged at Solerisa. It missed its initial bite attack, a lot of screaming ensued, and Dave rolled highest on the initiative roll. Palias stepped back out of range and began to fire magic missiles at it. Hearing that Caleb was a paladin of Pelor, Viera had gone to ambush him with a truckload of questions due to also being a paladin of Pelor. When the crocodile attacked, then, the two of them were right next to each other, and since they rolled numbers that were close to each other, they both ran up to the side of the crocodile and began to assault it with axe and sword. Solerisa either rolled higher or lower than both of them, but she didn’t roll last. Her first action was to get out of range of the crocodile’s shiny teeth and hit it with a ranged attack. Ameranthia, not wanting to hit her allies with an area-of-effect attack like she was wont to do in the practice dungeon, decided to Storm Spike the croc.

It was a noble sentiment.

Flame Seed is an area of effect attack filling a 3x3 area with fire. She refrained from using it again because she accidentally hit one or two allies with it in the practice dungeon, and she walked away with some valuable experience regarding friendly fire. Storm Spike is just a ranged attack that deals lightning damage. Normally, Storm Spike only hits one target, but there were extraordinary factors in play here. See, Storm Spike does lightning damage. The crocodile had just jumped out of the surf, and as a result, the whole area was drenched in salt water, an excellent conductor of electricity. Viera and Caleb were in close slicing and dicing the crocodile as best they could, so when she hit it with a Storm Spike, not only did I have her roll damage for the crocodile, I also rolled damage for Caleb and Viera. They all also took extra damage for being wet.

Lessons learned: water conducts electricity, and the DM is sadistic.

That little jolt was sufficient to attract its attention, and the crocodile switched its attention to Ameranthia. It caught her in its jaws, and on her turn, she managed to escape, but it gave her a kiss to remember it by and left her in considerably worse shape than it found her in. After a few rounds, the party finally managed to inflict enough damage to the crocodile to hack off one of its legs and then stab it to death. I’m sad that nobody thought of using the leg as an improvised weapon; wouldn’t have done any extra damage, but Fio is planning on drawing the adventure as a comic, and it would have made for a funny image.

EDIT: She informs me that I've given her an evil idea.

The party spent the next hour discussing how they would cut up and divide the remains of the crocodile, what they would do with their pieces, and how they would store the body parts they all took away. Everyone was covered in blood by this point, either from the crocodile thrashing around and getting blood all over the place from its stump or from everyone who wasn’t too squeamish pulling out one of those copious numbers of daggers they accumulated in the practice dungeon and skinning it, carving up some of its meat for dinner, plucking out its teeth as trophies, or whatever insidious things they did to the remains. By the end of it, Viera, the animal-lover, was the most bloody. Oh how things would not go her way…

I made an oath to keep this game PG-13, but we have this tendency to slip into Quentin Taurentino territory with the gore.

The party decided against bathing in the water, both because the water was bloody from the crocodile dying in it and they didn’t know if there was going to be another crocodile jumping out at them while they were unarmed. Instead, they went a little farther inland, into the middle of the supposedly-haunted ruins, to make camp. They crossed a rope bridge, only to discover that the commotion of the fight and the shipwreck had awakened some of the local fauna. An Ochre Ooze (slime creature) had been trying to get up some fallen rocks at something just out of sight, but once it detected the party, it instead came at them. After fighting it for a while and “bloodying” (read: reduced to half HP) it, the Ochre Ooze split into two pieces and attacked different opponents. At the same moment, sensing the tide had turned, three Fire Beetles, man-sized insects that could shoot fire, emerged at the top of the rubble the Ooze had been barking up, and opened fire both on the party and the Ooze.

Now. Viera was positioned in a not-so envious position, in the middle of the melee, with the Ocre Ooze halves behind her and the insects in front of her. As the party behind her killed the oozes, they exploded violently, sending orange marmalade-tasting jelly flying in Viera’s direction, coating all of her back-side in a gelatinous mess. The beetles, which propelled the fire by some kind of sphincter explosion, also detonated upon death, either by her Terror Bastard Sword or the other party members’ ballistic weapons. They pretty much all exploded in her face, coating her in bug guts.

It was decided to end the session there for the night. They went a couple dozen feet to the north, out of the ruins and within spitting distance of a small shrine, and made camp for the night, with Viera crying her eyes out due to being covered in the bodily fluids of animals.

Now, immediately following the gaming session, I signed on to Yahoo! Instant Messenger. I’m an active member of the Wotch forum (they may have changed it to the 910CMX forums, but to me, it will always be the Wotch forum), and there’s just about always a chat active for Wotchers. Not long after I signed on, someone (probably Trip) invited me to it. Not too long afterwards, we got to talking about Dungeons and Dragons, and I mentioned that I had just finished DMing a gaming session. I also put up the links to the journal entries about D&D that had been completed at the time, and it got kicks out of some of them. One of them dubbed Gaby’s action at the end of the second gaming section a “Critical Moon.”

This all attracted the attention of one Daracaex (pronounced dare-uh-cay-ex by him, pronounced dare-uh-cay by me, and pronounced dare-uh-cakes by pretty much everyone else), who had been out of a game for a while and was currently looking for one. After I told him that Sam (known as Elijah Sight on the Wotch forums) and my Sith apprentice Miranda (not a Wotcher, but informally known to some of the Wotchers as Fluffles due to a few pictures I drew of her avatar) were participants, and that it was being played over Skype, he asked if he could join. I said yes – hey, the more the merrier.

So, some time passed before we started our next gaming session, and in that time, he made up his character. Bion, a razorclaw shifter, was an Avenger of Melora, and carried a fullblade. I’m not too sure of how he looked: it never really came up beyond a beastly humanoid with “cloth” armor and a giant sword.

So, the next gaming session, Miranda was able to make it. Everyone else was also there, so we had 7 player characters, which we would come to realize later would cause some problems, but at the time actually proved beneficial, because it gave me the opportunity to rework some things story-wise. Originally, to explain how Acacia joined the party, I was going to end the gaming session by having the party sleeping in the inn, and then have them roll a perception check. If they failed, then they wouldn’t wake up, and in the morning, they would find Acacia waiting for them in the tavern downstairs from the inn, and she would ask to join them in their travels, wherever they may be going. If they passed the perception check, they would wake up to find Acacia going through their belongings in the middle of the night and stealing things. A scene would have ensued where they interrogated her and found out that the Count asked her to “inspect” the party to find out some miscellaneous information on their activities, because he had suspicions that they might have some ulterior motives for being there. After all, they brought Caleb back, and the ship they were on was missing. She would then somehow convince them to let her join their party, and on to the next adventure they would go.

There were a few problems with this scenario. First of all, Miranda didn’t like it. Acacia would not go around stealing other people’s belongings in the middle of the night, and Miranda didn’t think she would do it just because the Count asked her to. Second, the party didn’t go to sleep in the inn. I had thought that the party would go on to the city and that’s what I based the scenario on, but I underestimated how long the two fights would go on for. We ended the gaming session before they could reach the city. Instead, they camped just outside of the ruins, a couple hundred feet south of the city walls. This meant that the Count didn’t know where they were sleeping and couldn’t send Acacia to “inspect” their belongings and “confiscate” some of them. Third, it cast the Count in an unsavory light. I want his alignment to be mysterious for the time being, and sending a thief in the night to look through and steal some of their belongings automatically makes him unaligned at best.

So, the premature ending to the gaming session and the addition of a new character gave me a problem to address and a way to deal with it. Instead of the previous idea, the ship that was carrying Palias, Ameranthia, Viera and Solerisa didn’t show up in Portstown, and none of the goods arrived via the main road to Locksley Farpoint by 6:00 AM. He began to grow concerned, and the Count sent out anyone willing to search the coastline for signs or news of the ship. Bion and Acacia were two of the people requisitioned for the job, and they were sent south of the city, the same way the Count had sent Caleb the previous day, incidentally. This meant that, at 8:00 AM, Bion and Acacia arrived at the entrance of the ruins and stumbled upon the party’s campsite.

Ameranthia was on watch duty at the time, so she was the only one awake when they arrived. Having fought for their lives a couple times the previous night, she was naturally wary and was ready for a fight. The hostilities didn’t go far, though, and after some hails and greetings and somesuches, Ameranthia woke the party up and the two shifters learned that everyone except Caleb had been on the boat when it sank. Viera, as a character quirk, has a deep love of animals, and seeing the fluffies (she called them furries, but... um... no), had to be forcibly restrained by Solerisa to keep from tackle-glomping them. Acacia and Bion told the party that the Count had asked them (and others) to look for signs of the ship, the others confirmed that the ship would definitely not be arriving in port anytime soon (that is to say, unless the forces of Chaos were to reanimate the bodies of drowned sailors and have them man the ships at the end of the world and tilt the balance of Law and Disorder in favor of Disorder. Anyone who gets the reference gets a cookie.), and they decided to take the others back to the city to give word of the accident to the Count.

Everyone headed for the city together, and after arriving at the south gate, they talked to the gatekeeper, a dragonborn soldier in plate armor, through an eye-hole in the gate. When the gatekeeper realized that Caleb was in the party, he closed the eye-hole in the gate, and everyone with a sufficiently-high perception check heard him yell something along the lines of, “Aton-bay own-day the atches-hay, boys! akKrug-May is ack-bay!” None of the party members got it, but after they contemplated what the heck he said (partly because I was trying to effect the accent of an Australian pirate) for ten minutes, I told them that it was imperfect Pig Latin for “Baton down the hatches, boys! Mak Krug (Caleb’s last name) is back!” A few moments of commotion on the other side of the gate later, and the gatekeeper returned, sorry about the wait. They talked some more, and the party told him that the ship had sunk and that there were survivors of the incident in the group. He then opened the gate and let them in.

First off, Ameranthia inquired if the gatekeeper was a part of her old tribe. As per of her backstory, she’s trying to seek out the remnants of the tribe that-adopted her, and she asks that of pretty much all the dragonborns she comes across. The answer came back no. This might have been obvious in retrospect, because people tend to have the accents of the people who raise them, and Ameranthia did not grow up talking like an Australian pirate, but I digress. After that, the gatekeeper told them to either wait there or go in the tavern, The Prancing Chocobo, and get something to eat while he fetched Count Smackal.

One of the good things about this blog is that it gives me as much space as I need to talk about things like how come I named someone “Count Smackal” and why he has a tavern/inn called The Prancing Chocobo in his city. Everyone who’s interested, read on. Anyone who would roll your eyes, skip the next few paragraphs.

Caleb can't swim. Back when I was coming up with a reason for Caleb to not be on the boat when it sank and deposited the party on the beach, I was talking to Sam about if Caleb would go along with what the Count told him about spending the night in the ruins and exorcising them in the name of Pelor. When informed that the ruler of the region was a count, he asked if his name was Count Dracula. I didn’t have a name for him at the time, but I told him no; he’s decidedly less vampiric than that. Moments later, he asked, “Count Smackula?” It was too good not to use, so I told him that I would have to find some way to include it in the campaign. An adjustment or two later in Microsoft Word, and it became Count Smackal.

The Prancing Chocobo, the Prancing Chocobo, the Prancing Chocobo. This should be obvious. If not, go read or watch The Lord of the Rings and then play any Final Fantasy game for more than two minutes. If you don’t want to, or you did and still don’t get it, here’s the drift: in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf told Frodo to meet him at a specific date at an inn in the nearby town of Bree. The inn was called The Prancing Pony, and they would proceed from there together to Rivendell to talk about how they would deal with the One Ring of Power. Gandalf was forcibly detained by Saruman, and Strider showed up in his stead to take the hobbits instead. Since then, The Prancing Pony has been the inspiration for how parties get together in pretty much every fantasy RPG ever made. When I was thinking about how to start the campaign, right off the bat, the first option I nixed was, “You all meet at the inn.”  I intentionally held off on it until the second gaming session (fifth, when you think of it) and started out with the ship breaking apart under most of the party, because I’ve never seen it done before, and it would provide a better excuse for the party to stick together in the beginning.

Still, there had to be an inn scene somewhere, and I had half the name already in mind. I didn’t want to use the name The Prancing Pony verbatim, but it had to be The Prancing something. Thus we come to the topic of chocobos. In the Final Fantasy games, you’ll occasionally come across a horse, but they’re largely superseded in the roles of mount and beast of burden by the chocobo. A chocobo is an ostrich-sized, flightless bird that looks like an overgrown, yellow chicken. It’s big and strong enough that it can handle most of the same duties as a horse, and some others beside, and it’s one of the icons of the series. Hey, that sounds roughly cognate to a pony!

So, what does one do when he wants to make an in-joke involving two franchises he and most of the people in the campaign have undoubtedly enjoyed? You make a pun at both franchises expenses, and then you apologize profusely for it. Self-flagellation is optional, but it helps with the atonement. At least there isn’t a permanent, unnatural storm just off the coast harboring monsters and demonic creatures, making travel through the region impossible, otherwise the self-flagellation would have to be enforced by angry WH40K fans.

So, after the gatekeeper left, Viera grabbed both the furries (FLUFFIES, DAMN IT! WE DON’T TALK ABOUT FURRIES AROUND HERE!) and dragged them into The Prancing Chocobo with all the energy of a hyperactive six-year-old, and with time, everyone else went inside, not seeing much point in waiting around (though Solerisa decided to go in only after the Count got there.). They ordered breakfast and started to eat when Count Smackal showed up.

He took an unoccupied chair and ordered a small breakfast, and the whole group talked for a while. The whole time, I tried my best at doing an English accent, and I failed miserably. At one point, Sam asked something to the effect of, “Is this town populated by pirates?” and at other times, everyone else commented, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” I finally gave up and talked normally, because I needed to actually have the party understand what I was saying.

The gist of it went that after they told him about the ship sinking, he told them how business in the city and surrounding area had been drying up because the weather has been growing rougher over the course of many weeks or months, and ships can’t dock at Portstown as easily as they used to. The fact that the ship Solerisa, Viera, Palias, and Ameranthia were travelling on sank the previous night is evidence of that. What ships try to make the journey have instead opted to sail around the peninsula, adding as much as a day or two to the journey, to dock in Fords, to the north, inside of a fjord. A lot of the city is closed off due to the lack of business a drop in imports causes. A caravan is also shortly going to be leaving the city for the 12-mile journey to Fords, and they’re due to leave in the next few days to catch a boat out of the province of Locksley for various destinations on the other side of the island. The caravan is waiting for members of the militia to return from border patrol, because the caravan is essentially carrying the collective material wealth of the province and there have been muggings and even some killings along the roads recently.

Because the militia is out on border patrol, there aren’t any state troops for the Count to send out on an errand he needs done, and offers the party some money if they’ll do the job. The mention of a hundred decis (1 gold piece = 1 deci) perks up some of their ears, literally in the case of everyone with oversized ears. Some weeks ago, Count Smackal commissioned dwarven contractors to begin construction on an outpost about seven miles east-northeast of the city, and their report is a day overdue. He wants the party to head up to the site and make some inquiries related to how the project is going and find out why they haven’t reported back yet. They agree, and then the following exchange occurred between Caleb and Count Smackal:

“I’z beginning ta think dat yooz don’ like me very much.”
“No, no, whatever would give you that idea?”
“Yooz always trying ta get rid of me!” 

Also at about this time, a successful perception check revealed that what patrons were eating at the tavern had begun to slip out of the bar as inconspicuously as possible. After asking what their problem was, the Count (somewhat shakily) told them that the lack of business has everyone antsy, so they’re all high strung. I tried to give everyone the impression by the way the Count was talking was that he was lying about the patrons being high-strung, but nobody called him out on it. The real reason involves Caleb’s reputation as a humanoid typhoon preceding him, and the patrons wanting to not be there when the trouble begins. Not much else came up over the course of the discussion, and the Count stood up to leave once he finished his breakfast. 

I have no idea why she did it, but on a whim, Fio felt like trying to make Ameranthia a few decis richer. Maybe she didn't like him. As Count Smackal stood up and turned to leave, Ameranthia also stood up and snuck up behind him. She proceeded to try pick-pocketing him. She rolled high on the thievery check, but the Count wasn’t a Level 0 NPC. I rolled a little lower than her for his perception check, but his skill modifier was sufficient to beat her thievery check, and he noticed as she reached her hand into his pocket. He smacked the hand away and pointed a finger at her, and (rather calmly, all things considered) informed her that she was not going to be getting the same payment as everyone else. Fio is assumedly going to be drawing a comic based on the adventure, and she’s decided that she’s going to rewrite that incident so she has an excuse for Count Smackal not paying her as much as the others that doesn’t involve clumsily trying to steal from the commander in chief of the militia and protector of the realm.

After the party finished eating breakfast, they took off on their new mission. The trek to the excavation site took about two and a half hours, and once there, they saw rubble, mounds of dirt, and other signs of a construction project. Most of the site was enclosed by a wooden fence, and the areas not covered by the fence were difficult terrain. When they got close enough to look through the fence, they saw that the whole site was swarming with kobolds. The game session ended as the kobolds screeched out and prepared to attack the party. I would have gone on to the next encounter, but the game session had already lasted for a good number of hours, and we called it there.

From that session and the weeks that followed it, we learned three of the major problems in having seven people in a party online. First, because there were so many people in the group, it took longer for combat to be resolved. It would have been less of a problem over a table, but on the internet, with everyone having to ask where everyone else is, where the monsters are, where they are, and a dozen other questions that could be solved by looking at a map with miniatures on it and then to tell me which square they were going to move to and then have me do it for them on my own map, it took far too long. All of it could have been done with a glance and one move of the hand in real life.

The second problem wasn’t so much with the group as it was with me as the dungeon master. The Dungeon Master’s Guide tells you how to set up encounters and what your XP budget should be, but the book is assuming that you’re playing with 5 party members. You can bend some rules for 6 players, but it doesn’t contain any information for what to do with 7 players. I would have to adjust all the charts for XP rewards, quest rewards, treasure quotas, and a slew of other things just to get a balanced encounter, otherwise there would be little challenge and little payoff.

The last problem, and undoubtedly the most imposing one, was scheduling. It’s hard enough to find out the free times of five other people and then sync them up with your own free time, especially when you’re scattered over three time zones. It would be worse if we were Russian, because if I were in Moscow and Miranda was in Siberia, we’re talking about a difference of 11 time zones. With the numbers we had, it might as well have been, because the windows of opportunity dropped exponentially with the addition of two other players. Scheduling for 6 people is difficult, 8 is nearly impossible.

The first and third reasons were noticed by pretty much everybody, so when I eventually broke the news to Daracaex and David that I had to drop them from the campaign, nobody was too surprised, and nobody was too upset by it. David is in the middle of moving out of town for college, and Dara informed me that he’d been contemplating a campaign of his own, so he likely won't be without a game for too much longer. Hopefully that will take off. He’s thinking of also doing it online and involving some Wotchers. So if you’re reading this and you’re a Wotcher, and you want in on a game, quick! Spam his PM box for all you’ve got!

I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to explain Bion and Palias’s disappearances. Fio wants to have them suffer redshirt deaths in the comic, but I’m resistant to the idea, because even though I had to let them go, they’re on the waiting list. If someone drops out of the campaign, then I’m going to invite David back first (since he asked to join first) and then Dara, so if they do return and they want to use their old characters, then they won’t have been rashly and unceremoniously killed off.

Moving on.

I scheduled a gaming session for a few weeks ago, and it was just going to be Miranda, Gaby, Fio, Anto, and Sam again, back to the core group. We hit three problems right off the bat. First, forgetting about the game, Gaby had gone on a trip to visit her parents in Missouri, so she would be away from home when we were supposed to be playing. Second, Miranda was going to Illinois to visit her mother and grandmother, so we had to have the game before she left, or we wouldn’t be able to play for at least a month after that due to the chaos of school starting up for everyone. Third, the night before the game was set to start, I reminded Sam that the game would start at 10:00 Pacific time. What I had forgotten to do was attach AM to the time. So, he assumed we were starting at 10:00 PM, which was reasonable because we’ve started that late before, albeit we were dead tired in the aftermath.

So. We were down two players, which meant only Fio, Anto, and Miranda alone would make up the party. I stalled for more than an hour hoping that Sam would sign on early enough, but he didn’t make it. This is the part where being the DM sucks, because I had to make a decision. Cancel the game and not play again for more than a month, or go ahead and leave Sam and Gaby out of the loop? In the end, I determined that the show would go on.

Gaby hadn’t brought her character sheet with her, so all of her statistics were there with Anto and Fio back in Texas. The two sisters considered talking to her over the phone and then relaying everything she said to me, but that would have been horrendously unwieldy and probably exceedingly expensive, so the idea was scratched. Instead, after getting permission from her over the phone, Anto and Fio jointly controlled her character and rolled for her. I’ve mentioned Mark the Red from the movie “The Gamers,” and how they dealt with his absence from the playing group. His character would be standing there, but he wouldn’t do anything, and nobody would attack him. We decided to do something similar for Caleb. Seeing as his god was Pelor, the god of the sun, a shaft of sunlight came down and struck him in the face, and he entered a kind of dream while the battle went on around him. I pulled off his accent a few times to indicate that he was still there and just removed from the fight, at one point commenting that he saw a flower that he’d never seen before, and decided to name it after himself. Not sure if that will remain an official part of the game, or if we’ll just say it was me trying to think of what he’d say if he was there.

On the other side of the wooden fence was a pit, and in the middle of the pit was a shaft leading down into darkness. There were a total of 11 kobolds on the other side of the fence, some with javelins, some with swords, and some with slings. When I told them of everyone’s positions, something clicked in everyone else’s head. I’ve never played Fire Emblem before, but something about the way the place was laid out made them all start talking about tactics they used in Fire Emblem, and eventually, they decided to go for a “plug” tactic. I’m not sure exactly what that meant, but the gist of it involved having Viera break a hole in the fence and then stand there to block the kobolds from passing through, plugging it. Being the defender in the group, she would soak up the damage (if the kobolds could get past her armor) while Ameranthia, Acacia, and Solerisa hit those kobolds with ranged attacks behind the safety of the fence. It was so simple and rehearsed that nothing could go wrong, right?

Ah, my lovely little arsonist...

Ameranthia used a Flame Seed on two kobolds standing off in the distance, enveloping them in flames and killing them pretty much instantly. However, the kobolds had been standing right next to the wooden fence, and it just so happened to lie within the area of effect. It caught fire, and the fire began to move towards the party at a speed of 3 squares a round. Everything in the squares touching the fence would receive fire damage.

So, sadly, they couldn’t utilize the plug tactic for as long as they would have liked, and after killing a good chunk of the enemies, ran in through the gap before they could set themselves on fire. One of the kobold slingers jumped down into the shaft before the party could close in for melee combat. The fighting after this point is fairly unremarkable, because a lot of the enemies went down in one hit, and there weren’t too many actions of the Critical Mooning caliber. Eventually, the party fought its way down into the pit and discovered that the kobolds had lain mines down in random spots, which hit Viera for a good chunk of damage and knocked her prone. This didn’t aid the kobolds much, though, because by the time they activated the mine, there was only one or two kobolds left, and a few ranged attacks finished them off in short order.

So, that’s pretty much where we left the game. I didn't continue for two reasons. One, I didn't want Sam to miss out on more of the dungeon, and two, it was starting to thunder and lightning in Missouri, so Miranda had to sign off then and there. When we resume, whenever it is, Caleb will emerge from his vision from Pelor to find the fence on fire, the bodies of 10 kobolds strewn all around, the other party members looting the corpses, and wondering where that eladrin wizard and shifter avenger disappeared to. I’m not sure when the next gaming session is going to be due to the chaos inherent in school starting up again, but I’m hoping it’ll start up sooner rather than later. Given that I don’t know when the next game will be, there won’t be a gaming report for another while. Until then, I’ll probably make posts concerning the history, geography, and political disposition of the Adventure Island. I’ll probably also make a special post when I actually think of an official name to give it, because Adventure Island sounds like the kind of name you give a theme park.

Next journal entry – probably talking about the monetary systems used on the island. Let’s just say that my take on the elf-dwarf conflict is probably at least a little different from other fantasy writers out there.

Best/Dan

The following was written on July 15th, talking about a gaming session that took place on the 4th of July. This is the last of the articles from my previous account, and from here on out, it's going to be new material all about the campaign itself.

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So. The third gaming session and the last of the Practice Dungeon took place at midnight on the Fourth of July, New York time. We have learned a valuable lesson from this gaming session: Never start a game that late at night. It was like one of Greg’s gaming sessions all over again, neglecting the fact that I wasn’t forcing anyone to inhale cigarette smoke and deal with drunken behavior. By the end of the session past 4 in the morning in my time zone, everyone was tired and not in much of a mood to stick around long after the session ended.

To start out with, Miranda’s friend Dave was supposed to show up, but due to a hectic working schedule, he didn’t get home until late, and we were halfway through the encounter when he made it online. Bringing him in during the middle of a fight didn’t make much sense and would have ground everything to a halt; we’d have to introduce ourselves, our characters, familiarize him with the house rules, and then bring him up to speed over what the party had been through thus far. Then he would have been mobbed by kobolds. I think he understood, and we finished the dungeon without him. He would, though, make it for the start of the campaign, and that was a much better starting point for him.

Back to the start of the game session, the party went down a set of stairs they discovered in the last room of the first level of the dungeon. They went down a hundred feet underground, saw the rocks change from reddish-granite to colorless sandstone. At the bottom, they came across an old set of wooden doors with a pair of statues on either side and some bright light visible under the door. I wanted to have the characters’ actions have repercussions, so the tactical situation would have went one of three ways based on how they entered the next room. They went for the absolute worst tactical situation, and I’ll explain how that was so when I actually talk about the encounter.

The party argued over who was going to do what for several minutes. Ameranthia (Fio) wanted to listen through the door. Viera (Gaby) wanted to kick the door down. Solerisa (Anto) and Caleb (Sam) debated what should be done. Acacia (Miranda) hung back and drew her bow and let the group argue it over.

“What should we do?”
“I think we should do X.”
“No, I think Y.”
“Why Y?”
“Because Q.”
“I want to do Q too. R. Are you with me?”
“I’m not so sure of R. Are you?”
“Not really.”
“I’m going to X.”
“No! Not X! I think Y!”
“Why Y?”
“Beca- ...!"

Ten minutes of that, and I was kind of getting annoyed. It was already 12:30 AM by that point, and I wanted to get the show on the road. Talking is a free action, and in the book, it says you can take as many free actions a turn as you want. It also says the Dungeon Master can put a limit on it. After the conversation went through its fifth rerun, I interrupted them and said, “Okay! Roll for initiative!”

Gaby rolled the highest, so she had Viera yell something to the effect of, “Lucy! I’m home!” and then kicked the door down. There went the element of surprise. They found themselves in a room with four pillars and a rug in front of a set of stairs leading down into darkness. They entered from a door in the upper-right-hand corner. After some more arguing about what to do in the absence of a clear enemy to carve up, we had some confusion over which square everyone was standing on (I resolved to number the squares in the next gaming session), and eventually, someone noticed the stairs to the left (west) and that there were some wires coming out from under the rug and leading up to the wall. Rather than lift the rug up, someone else threw a dagger onto the rug, and they heard the sound of liquids mixing in the wall. Caleb, fearing the room was going to blow, grabbed Solerisa and Ameranthia and carried them out of the room. After the room failed to explode in a big, fiery ball that was visible from space, Ameranthia ran back into the room, jumped over the rug, and landed on the stairs.

At which point she was napalmed.

What was eventually realized was that the dagger had activated the trap in the first place, and Ameranthia stepping on a pressure plate of some kind on the stairs let loose a jet of flames from the wall. Acacia had a sufficiently-high-enough thievery check to disable the trap from immolating anyone else, Viera grabbed Ameranthia and threw her to the ground to pat the flames out.

The party went down the stairs to find a stone chair sized to fit a goliath blocking the middle of the entrance, allowing only people to enter through one side or the other, isolated from each other. After some debating over who’d go in the room in what order, Solerisa went in first, and her sunrod exposed the details of the room just as a crossbow turret opened fire and a swarm of dragonborns and kobolds rushed the party as they tried to enter the room. When the party members in the back (Ameranthia and Acacia) tried to go through the other entrance, they found a dragonborn sellsword waiting for them with a nice breath full of necrotic fire.

This is where we hearken back to the point made at the beginning, concerning the actions taken affecting how the final battle went. If the party had gotten through the door silently, not made any loud noises, and not triggered the flame trap, they would have made it to the bottom of the stairs and found the kobolds and dragonborns performing some kind of ceremony. The torches would have been lit, and the party could have gained a surprise round against them. If the party had gotten past the door without making a noise but activated the flame trap, the draconians would have been aware of the party before the party became aware of them, doused the lights, and took up ready positions to ambush the party when they came in. If they couldn’t even make it through the door without making a noise, not only would the draconians have been aware of their presence, they would have had enough time to douse the lights, position themselves for the ambush, and set up the crossbow turrets. Things would either be easier or harder for them depending on how much thought they put into remaining stealthy, and they blew it in the first action of the gaming session.

The first encounter had been a level one encounter. The second encounter had been a level two encounter. The third level had been a level three encounter. The fourth encounter would, predictably, then, be a level four encounter. Right? Right?

No.

Though they had told me that the first three encounters had been challenging and threatening, as the DM, I knew that they had cruised through whatever I’d thrown at them. Things seem a lot more menacing when you only know your own HP and not the HP of the monster across the room. The way they were going, they’d break my planned level 4 encounter to pieces, and would do much the same for a level 5 encounter. That’s why I replaced all but three of the minions with kobold dragonshields, did away with the slingers in lieu of dragonborn sellswords, and threw in a pair of crossbow turrets. This would be no wimpy level four encounter. This would be a level seven, the upper limit of the difficulty the Dungeon Master’s Guide says you should throw at a Level 1 party.

Since this was a practice dungeon and not the actual campaign, killing off the characters wouldn’t have hindered anybody much, but in the end, I decided to go a little easy on them. That’s not to say I dumbed it down. Sam and Gaby’s characters were next to death probably a half-dozen times each, Fiorella was dying once or twice, and things weren’t much easier for Miranda and Antonella. I just didn’t press the advantage as much as I could have. All the times the party members were unconscious or prone, I could have been mean and delivered coup-de-graces on them, but as mentioned, that would just be mean.

They hadn’t really had a chance to see the results of their actions in the beginning of the session would affect them later on due to the fact that they had no clue what the draconians were doing until they were on them, and would have no idea of knowing what it would have been like had they been more careful. So, when Gaby had Viera yell at the enemies in Deep Speech, I decided to go for it. Every kobold and dragonborn in the room responded in Deep Speech, ganged up, and ganged up on Viera while chanting something about getting “The Accursed of Daragova!” This accounted for most of the times she was brought down to the brink of death, much to Solerisa the Cleric’s dismay.

Sam had Caleb go one-on-one with the biggest dragonborn in the room, who incidentally was four levels higher than him, and was brought down below zero HP before long. Acacia hung back and took pot-shots at kobolds from the entryway, using Ameranthia’s unconscious body as a barrier to keep the kobolds from attacking from more than one direction. Something about the purple hair must have turned them off, though, because they didn’t try to eat Ameranthia while she was unconscious all that time.

The encounter went on to the early hours of the morning. I could have dragged it out, put them in real danger, and brought the full weight of the encounter down on them (The wyrmpriest never opened the portal to the Shadowfell like I had planned, no demons came out, the wyrmpriest was not infused with the power of a blight dragon, and I stopped firing the crossbow turrets after only three rounds). Doing so would have been horrifying, though. We’d be going until noon. We needed sleep because we had work, relatives, or chores to do in the morning, and I began winding things down. I was going to have to go on an hour-long drive to my grandmother’s house by 1100.

The wyrmpriest had, incidentally, been the key to the whole battle. The whole time, he had been hanging back, the big dragonborn soldier had been keeping melee combatants from getting in close, and he was getting the most hits in of all the enemies. Eventually, the party realized that the wyrmpriest had to f***ing die, and everyone with a ranged ability or weapon began to concentrate fire on him. Being artillery, he wasn’t designed to take much damage, and soon thereafter, he fell to one of Solerisa’s Lances of Faith.. When the wyrmpriest fell, I had all the remaining kobolds and the last dragonborn try to escape. Doing so, however, meant getting through Acacia, Solerisa, and Ameranthia, who never moved far from the entryway. If you try to move through squares adjacent to an opponent and then try leaving while moving at a walk or faster, you just provoke an opportunity attack. Of the three kobolds and one dragonborn that tried escaping, only one of the kobolds made it out. Acacia hacked off the dragonborn’s leg and then stabbed it through the face.

I made a policy that we should try to keep the adventure PG-13, and that involved keeping the swearing down and cutting the violence down to the kind of bloodless butchery you see in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. We adhere to the swearing thing, but as the night went on and we became more and more tired, my descriptions got gorier. By the time Miranda took out the dragonborn soldier, we’d crossed into Quentin Taurentino territory. Blood gushing all over the place, limbs flying off, cruel and unusual methods of dismemberment, Sam – who was falling asleep – perked up a little as we heaped ruin upon the necrotic draconians.

By the time we were finished, everyone was dead tired. Didn’t have much energy to stick around afterwards, and we cut the session off without much in the way of goodbyes. The moral of the story: don’t start a gaming session at midnight.

Best/Dan

The following post was originally made on Monday, June 22nd, 2009.

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Tonight went markedly better than the last session, thankfully.

I made the script for the next three rooms of the dungeon, figuring that we wouldn't have enough time to move on to the final room of the dungeon, and I stuck to it fairly closely. I had to improvise a few times when I made a mistake or forgot to write down what monster had what equipment (there were an awful lot of daggers changing hands over the course of the night), but it wasn't like the first gaming session, where I couldn't describe what a room looked like.

From the beginning: the dungeon was due to start at 18:00 New York Time. At 15:10 NYT, though, I got a phone call from Miranda. She was driving at the time, doing some chores, and told me that she was going to be a little late, and either we'd have to start without her or delay the session until she got there. Seeing as the first gaming session took us more than an hour and a half to actually start the dungeon, I didn't figure this was going to be much of a problem. Irony happened.

I got a text message a little while before we were set to begin: Miranda had been suckered in to play a game of Risk, and she was starting right as we were about to start. She didn't know how long it would be, whether it would be an hour or five, so I did what came natural to me - I stalled. I managed to get Sam and the three sisters talking about cats, ice cream, and Transformers for over two hours. At one point, Antonella had to leave for about 45 minutes to an hour to bring her father to the airport, and Miranda hadn't finished her game by the time she got back, so we decided to move on with the dungeon without her. In the movie The Gamers, which is about a group of college students playing an RPG heavily-implied to be Dungeons and Dragons, there was a character named Mark who couldn't show up for the start of the gaming session. So, the DM had it so that his character was in the room, doing absolutely nothing but standing there, and both the other players and the enemies would ignore him until Mark showed up to take control of his character again. We did something similar with Miranda - I had it so that Acacia had gone out of the dungeon to get something from outside, and her untimeliness was the reason she wasn't shooting zombies with her longbow.

Anyways, when last we left off, the characters had killed eight rats the size of adult men and small children, and they had discovered that one of the walls was actually a large stone door disguised as a wall. In the previous session, Fiorella's character, Ameranthia, had uncovered a scroll in Draconic script, a language she knew. However, while she could read the letters, the words were foreign to her beyond one or two familiar terms that, lacking a context, she couldn't figure out a meaning to. When the player characters studied the door, they found that there was an inscription in Deep Speech engraved on the door. One of the characters, Viera, knew Deep Speech, but just like Ameranthia with the Draconic script, couldn't understand what the letters were saying. I'd write the words out here, but a clever internet user could easily place the words if they put their minds to it, and I don't want to risk my players realizing an otherwise fun secret. Unable to discern anything else, they opened the door and moved into the next room.

Once inside, they were attacked by a group of skeletons, which they realized had been in a fight recently. Next to them on the left was a well filled with blue light, which sucked up and devoured the light from the sunrod they were using to illuminate the room. In the middle-left-hand side of the room was a large toad-like statue, and around the statue was all kinds of rust-colored defilement. The players killed all the skeletons, but with every skeleton they killed, the well grew a little brighter. When the last skeleton died, a Rotwing Zombie appeared, carrying the Terror Bastard Sword, and attacked the party. They subdued it relatively quickly due to its lack of support/artillery, and Viera gained the Terror Bastard Sword.

There was a set of stairs leading down to another chamber, and inside, they found a heap of dead bodies (zombies, skeletons, and kobolds), and two kobolds on their last licks defending against three remaining enemies, two skeletons and a zombie. The party managed to kill the undead before they could overrun the two remaining kobolds and healed the critically-injured one before finding out that the Kobolds spoke a version of Draconic that was unfamiliar to Ameranthia. All that they could figure out was that the Kobolds were servants of Bahamut, and that they wanted the stop someone further into the dungeon. It was at exactly this time that Miranda finally showed up, around 22:00 EST. Her game hadn't finished, but it was put on hold until it could be finished on Tuesday. After she got a quick recap from the other players, the Kobold gave Ameranthia its magic quarterstaff (Feyswarm Staff) and Solerisa a magic mace that boosted her Healing Word's restorative properties. The kobold then picked up its unconscious comrade and ran out of the room.

This is where it gets freaky.

They entered the next room, which had a wight, two zombie hounds, and two skeletons. To their left was a large stone throne, behind which hid the wraith. To their right was a cauldron filled with boiling blood.Further down the room was a set of stairs leading down.into darkness. The wight, two hounds, and one of the skeletons died, and the last enemy alive was the second skeleton. It had been hanging back and shooting arrows at everyone the entire time, and when it was being rushed by the now-unhindered player characters, it grabbed the lid of the cauldron and tried to tip it over, presumably to fill the room with boiling blood and burn everyone. However, it failed in the attempt, and one of the characters - I forgot which one - cut off one of its legs. Actually, I think it was Miranda's character, Acacia, because it's actually in August while I'm editing this post and she's told me it was her, so who am I to argue? Gaby then asked whether the damaged leg would impair its AC, since it couldn't really dodge much with only one leg. I told her no, and then asked if she wanted to use any free or minor actions.

She decided to moon it.

And then fart on it.

I decided that such an action needs an appropriate .reaction, so I told her that the mooning provoked an opportunity attack. Since she had to remove part of her (scale) armor to moon the skeleton, I told her that her AC was reduced by 7, and the skeleton was going to stab her in the arse with its longsword.

I rolled a 1.

One of the house rules I put in place is the Critical Miss. Whereas a Critical Hit is what happens when you get a Natural 20 and do the most possible damage your attack lets you do, a Critical Miss is where you roll a 1, and something bad - I choose what that is - happens to you. In this case, the skeleton had been reduced to only a few hit-points anyway, and I decided that its swing went wild, and it decapitated itself. The head proceded to fall into the boiling cauldron, and it died.

Let me repeat that chain of events. Viera moons skeleton. Skeleton tries to stab Viera in the rear-end. Skeleton accidentally cuts its own head off.

This is the reason parents do not allow me near their small children. I think of such horrible and twisted things that they fear I will corrupt their children and cause them to turn into misanthropic psychopaths. I probably would, but if those parents need any proof, than that previous paragraph should give them all the justification and undeniable proof they need. And then they can think to themselves: it was we, we who produced this generation of degenerates, and this is the legacy of the Battle of Agincourt!

The Battle of Agincourt has no bearing on this blog, and will not be referenced again.

Anyways, we stopped there for the night. We could technically have gone on for the next two hours or so, but I hadn't scripted out the rest of the dungeon yet, I was tired, and I think we could all have used a break. The session ended there, with the characters finished looting the bodies and standing in front of the stairway leading down to the dungeon's final room. We concluded at ~1:15 NYT.

Overall, I think we did a lot better tonight than we did on the first gaming session. The players had all walked away with at least a little bit of experience (and experience points to boot) and player knowledge, so I didn't have to narrate and explain every one of their actions. The three sisters only had one copy of the Player's Handbook and Player's Handbook 2, so they had, in the first session, to share the book and flip back and forth and lose each others' places and take a lot of time to do that. Learning from the last time, they had made copies of their characters' attacks using a printer/scanner/copier, so they could all look at their abilities and class features simultaneously. This allowed them to actually plan their moves out beforehand rather than wait for their turn again before they could grab the book and look at their abilities. It sped the gameplay up considerably.

I got comments that everyone had enjoyed themselves more in this gaming session than the previous one, largely because they had more experience and confidence, they were better-prepared, know more about what to expect, and got more into actually role-playing. The height of role-playing last time had been "check the bodies" and "Do I notice what the rats are eating?" as well as Sam's superb Wh40K ork impression. This time, there was acting in-character all-around, and... um... I guess you can see how into it some of the player's got by re-reading the bit about unorthodox ways of getting skeletons to cut their own heads off. Fiorella had told me that she was unsure whether she was going to continue with the campaign after how things went the first time around, but I think she's convinced herself to stick around after this time. Unlike what happened with Greg, where entertainment was sacrificed in favor of asserting the DM's dominance and superiority over the players, I want to have everyone enjoy themselves, and I think I succeeded in that regard for this gaming session.

We're not sure exactly when the next dungeon is going to be. Everyone's schedule is kind of uncertain, to say the least, and while Sam and I can definitely say that we're free on certain days, the girls can't. Family matters and things like that for the sisters, and in Miranda's case, her bosses don't use the same schedule week-after-week, so she may not be free on any of the days the other players are. We'll see when the time comes.

On another topic, we may be getting a new player in the group. Miranda had been playing Risk, and one of the people she'd been playing against was a friend of her's named Dave. Dave had played D&D 3.5E before, but not 4E, and apparently, while they were playing Risk, she told him about the campaign I'm running. Dave has expressed interest, and he told Miranda to see if she could get me to let him join. I said yes, so he's going to be setting up a character probably on Tuesday when he goes back to Miranda's to finish playing Risk so she can help him with it. We'll see how that goes. The ratio of girl characters to boy characters will drop from 4:1 to 2:1 with Dave's involvement, much to Sam's probable relief.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I'll update more when I have something else to say. I'm going to wander around the internet like a zombie for another while before I cave in and actually go to sleep. It's past 3:30 EST here..
 

Have a good day

Best/Dan