Adventure Island - Session 4
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor

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.


Varestan Air-Mobile Infantry
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor
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:

"We've run into scorpions the size of battle tanks, three men died from Eyerot last week. I've sweat enough to fill a lake, my boots got sucked into a sink-swamp and the trees are so thick in places, you can't squeeze between them. Emperor help me, I love this place! It's just like home!"

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

My History of Playing WH40K
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor
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”.

-----

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

Adventure Island - Sessions 1, 2, and 3
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor

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


Dungeons and Dragons and the Temple of Sleep Deprivation (7/15/2009)
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor

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.

------

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


Dungeons and Dragons: And the Room with a Statue In It
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor
The following post was originally made on Monday, June 22nd, 2009.

----

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


The Adventure Island (6/19/2009)
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor
The following was originally posted on June, Friday the 19th, 2009. I was considering leaving out all but the synopsis, but I kind of like what I originally posted, and it flows in to the synopsis. I hadn't updated my old livejournal account in more than a year, except for a vlog entry, so I gave a less detailed version of the events I described in A History of (My) Gaming: Parts 1 and 2, plus a few other details taking place after those posts, so I decided to keep them in..

-----------

Yeah, I haven't updated in more than half a year. I'd say I'm sorry, but I apologize for that every time I update.

Anyways, greetings. I don't think anyone actually reads this journal anymore, but I felt like updating it anyway.

After my last journal (but not because of it, because he doesn't read this journal), where I mentioned that Greg was an idiot and threw a hissy-fit that resulted in me leaving the D&D group, he wouldn't stop sending me text messages trying to get me to talk to him again. I did, after several months of his prodding. He proceeded to blow it again in one night when I visited him in January. He went on to make accusations and demands that were quite frankly insulting and demeaning. The lightest of these insults was the (extremely heavily-implied) threat that if we were to play another D&D campaign and I went with a female character, he would have her raped. I say that was the lightest of the insults. I won't go into detail about the rest of the things he said/threatened/accused/demanded.

Urgh.

Anyways, after that fell through the first time, back in November, I was talking online to one of my friends (who incidentally lives in the Central time zone) and asked, jokingly, if she would take part in a D&D campaign if I were to act as the Dungeon Master. To my surprise, she said yes. After I asked a similar question to a few other people I knew (all of them online), they all said yes and I found myself a willing agent of the Anti-Christ now in the position to corrupt and defile their souls and go about condemning them to Hades for now and all the rest of time ... erm... with putting together a campaign and all the things that go with it. I'd been trying to get into a game of Dungeons and Dragons for the last four and a half years, played less than ten sessions, and was now given the task of taking charge of a group.

Oh boy.

Still, that experience was more than anyone else had. Miranda had played D&D many times before, but it was only 3.5E. Four other girls who wanted to play in the campaign had played various video game RPGs in the past, but I don't think they ever considered working on a paper-and-pencil RPG before. One of the girls dropped out due to a lack of interest and chaotic scheduling, and when I mentioned the campaign to Sam (Elijah Sight of Knights of Absolute Nonsense fame), he hinted that he wanted in on D&D, as he'd been wanting to give it a try for years as well. He'd had a lot of experience with paper-and-pencil RPGs in the past (Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars, JLA, and a few others that I don't remember right now), but getting in on a D&D game had always something he wanted to do but never could. So, the lineup was as follows: Sam from California; Antonella, Fio, and Gaby (three sisters) from Texas; and Miranda from Missouri*.

After several months of other potential members getting the shaft, a few deceptions of soap-operatic nature, a bunch of rewrites, and other kinds of things getting in the way, we finally got the game underway. We played the game over Skype, a voice-conference program that allows you to talk in real-time with a number of people with a microphone and a speaker. I made the maps and used dungeon tiles to represent the room, and based on what the players told me, I moved miniatures around on the map and relayed what happened when they did, and where they were in relation to the others. It's kind of clunky, but when D&D first came out, there were no maps at all, even for the DM, and it was entirely vocal, so there's precedent in the fact that it can and has been done in the past.

This afternoon was the first session, and getting everyone's schedules organized over three time zones was a logistical nightmare. We did eventually manage to get the time right, and after an hour and a half of delays and technical difficulties, the dungeon got underway. I have to admit that despite most of the players not being familiar with the rules, a lot of the problem with today's session was my fault. I decided to make a practice dungeon for the group to play through rather than drop everyone into the beginning of the campaign without some experience first. Because I was anticipating the dungeon to be an exercise in combat, I didn't spare much thought for descriptions or plan the narration out beforehand. As a result, when the players actually started role-playing (role-playing in a role-playing game?! Unthinkable!), I was unprepared, and there were many exchanges along the likes of this one:

"It is fairly dark in this room. Who has low-light vision?"
"I do. What does my low-light vision tell me?"
"Your low-light vision... um... tells you... there's low light, and... um..."
"Heh heh, my low-light vision tells me there's low light in here. Heh heh heh."

HIT
HEAD
On
KEYBOARD

As time went on, though, and narrating the minutia of the room gave way to telling the players how their characters were killing rats the size of people and how those rats were trying to eat their characters, I got more in tune with being the moderator. It was kind of clunky, because I had to keep three books open on my lap (Player's Handbook, Player's Handbook 2, and Monster Manual) to help the players understand how to use their attacks and abilities and then control the actions of the monsters while leaning over sidways to move the miniatures on the map on a tray table next to my computer desk, looking all the time like a juggler from Hell, but I managed.

The moral of the story was that I couldn't slack off just because I was taking the players on a practice run. Thankfully, four of the five players want to move on to the next room of the dungeon either because they either want the loot or more practice before moving on to the official start of the campaign, and because the fifth player is part of the group, he's tagging along for the rest of the dungeon. This gives me the chance for redemption! I planned out the rest of the dungeon's monsters, but the other rooms were as nondescript as the one I'd just done earlier. I currently have Microsoft Word open, and I'm filling in the details I overlooked with the previous room, writing out the script for the rest of the dungeon, which I intend to finish before the campaign starts. I'll make the dungeon worth their while (loot and XP will do that for you), and if I've done my job right, they'll know which dice to roll when they want to make a melee basic attack against a Dire Rat. If things go according to plan, the next game session will begin on Sunday, 18:00 for me, 17:00 for the girls, and 15:00 for Sam.

Unless I forget or get too lazy to update the journal after we finish the next gaming session, I will update the journal to chronicle my success or failure.

Tune in next time for DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS... AND THE ROOM WITH A STATUE IN IT!

Best/Dan

Miranda: Razorclaw Shifter Ranger
Sam: Half-Ork Paladin
Anto: Half-Elf Cleric
Fio: Human Druid
Gaby: Half-Elf Paladin
Dan: Thy Dungeon Master

A History of (My) Gaming: Part 3
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor

Well, last Saturday night (August 8th) Greg decided to start trying to renew contact again. I was working, and for twenty minutes straight, my cell phone was ringing non-stop. He left a message asking me how I was doing, what I had been up to, if we could meet up again, etc, etc. Let him eat static.

Anyways, his unwelcome attempt to break back into my life again reminded me that I had a blog to update. I’m too ticked-off right now to continue on the D&D subject because that will bring Mr. Alcoholic @$$hole back in focus, so I’m not going to do it. Instead, I’m going to talk about my experiences with this other tabletop game with little plastic miniatures I’m a fan of: Warhammer 40000 (shortened hereon after as WH40K).

Now, let’s back up a little bit. Back to the backstory, if you will.

The only anime/manga I really have any interest in today is Lucky Star (KONATA-CHAAAAAN!), but there was once a time that I was an obsessive anime fan. I got better, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, but back in the early part of this decade, I was watching two hours of anime a day (your mix of Gundam Wing/G Gundam/Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragonball Z, Rurouni Kenshin, and/or Yu Yu Hakusho.). I watched Pokémon back when it came out in the 90s, but back then, I didn’t know that Pokémon was Japanese. The first time I saw an anime and knew that it came from this island nation with curved swords and chopsticks was in 1999 or 2000, when good-old Adam DeFruscio introduced me to Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz. I still have never seen Gundam Wing all the way through: I’ve caught manga issues, random episodes on television, plot synopses on the internet, word of mouth from a girl I knew from high school (Amanda Charlebois), numerous fan-made music videos, and the information picked up from Endless Waltz, but I’ve never actually seen it all the way through. Still, it was my first anime (Pokémon will always be a cartoon and a video game on a red Game Boy Pocket to me), and it got me hooked.

Going into high school in the fall of 2002, that same Adam DeFruscio was probably the only friend I had to start out with, so I hung out with him and his sphere of friends fairly consistently. Soon after school started, he told me that he was planning on starting an online Dragonball Z RPG. It was an RPG in name only, but there was no role-playing to be found. The rules were (incompletely and messily) ripped from another, much-more successful game, and in the end, none of us really knew what we were doing; any semblance of an RPG was ditched, and whenever two people felt like it and were online at the same time, they’d try to kill each other off. We’d play it in chats in AIM, and the only move anyone really attempted was to decapitate someone else, because nobody understood how to do the damage calculation. Chopping someone else’s head off with the Z-Sword was the quickest way to win, so why bother with Rocky-style body-blows? Anyways, I joined and rose through the ranks faster than I had a right to (Par for the course, I guess), and in the process, I met Adam’s co-conspirator and fellow sitemaster, Joe Duffy.

I’d never met Joe before. He’d just moved up north to Cohoes from Kingston in the early summer, and from what I gather, Adam and Joe met each other in English class when, ignoring what the teacher was saying, the two of them got to talking about DBZ and Star Wars in the back of the classroom. To make a long story short, Adam was pretty much the untouchable leader of the game, Joe was the Starscream, and I was the one trying to maintain balance on the site and keep the power levels from getting out of control. This being DBZ-related, it did not work out.

The RPG went on for a while and eventually floundered, and I eventually ended up talking to Joe more than I did to Adam. We had a lot more in common, were both darker and edgier, wanted to take over the world, loved Star Wars and rooted for Darth Vader (agreeing, I think, that the original trilogy is better than the prequels), and were both history and sci-fi buffs. So it happened that, one day as either Juniors or Seniors, Joe was reading over a book during the lunch period. I was still trying to get a game started with Greg and we were probably too busy discussing the backstory for a campaign involving Bane screwing with the force of gravity for me to pay attention to the book, so it went unnoticed for a while. Anyways, he was reading over the book on quite a few occasions that we were in the same room, and one of those times, I happened to look over and get a glimpse of one of these pages.

If you are a WH40K fan, then I do not even need to tell you what picture it was, because when someone mentions a picture of WH40K, exactly one picture, painted by Adrian Smith, should come to mind. The following is posted for the uninitiated, and as an eternal shrine to the most awesome thing I have ever seen:



Holy $#!%!

At the time, I had never seen anything like it. Mobile Suit Gundam and Star Wars had their fantastic elements mixed in with their science fiction, but that picture was the most wholesome, most jaw-dropping mixture of the two genres I’d ever seen. I was shown a few other pictures, and from then on, I was hooked. I found out that the book he was reading was the core rulebook to the fourth edition of WH40K, and the whole thing was filled with such detailed, over-the-top and ludicrously absurd pictures and accompanied with flavor text more appropriate for the Iliad or Beowulf than space ships that my disbelief was suspended instantly.

 WH40K is a tabletop strategy game. Back in the 70s, you had wargames, and the creation of Dungeons and Dragons split the wargaming community into two groups. On one side, Gygax and Arneson chose to focus on storytelling and put each player in charge of a single character. This became the RPG crowd. On the other side, wargames continued, focusing on large-scale engagements involving platoons, companies, and occasionally whole regiments. Somewhere in the early 80s, the British company Games Workshop decided to mix together fantasy, horror, and occult literature with your traditional strategy wargame, and they got Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Where you control a single dwarf, human, elf, orc, minotaur, or what-have-you in an RPG like D&D, you control a military force of said creatures in WFB. You would buy plastic and pewter miniatures of barbarous green-skinned orks to represent your army, assemble and paint them, put them on bases, and then send them out to do battle with the fantastic analogue to the Holy Roman Empire.

 In 1987, Games Workshop got the random idea to make a new game. It would keep the fantasy elements and take the same game mechanics as WFB, but move it out into outer space and give it a sci-fi sheen. This eventually became known as Warhammer 40000, and as time went on, the two games diverged down their separate paths, and WH40K has become the more popular of the two franchises. Ordinarily, adding space ships can ruin the fantasy feel of a genre. In WH40K, they pull off the cross-pollination masterfully. If you want a synopsis of what the story is behind that picture I linked to, go to the Warhammer 40000 Lexicanum and do a search for the Horus Heresy, or just go to Yahoo! and search for it.

The game borrows elements from everything from Star Wars, HP Lovecraft, Doctor Who, Michael Moorcock, the Bible, Greco-Roman mythology, John Milton and more, and rolls them into one. It’s so vast that Games Workshop is publishing a book series just to detail all the things that happened during the Horus Heresy alone – they have at least eleven novels in the series out so far, and the story technically hasn’t moved forward since the fifth book because they have to go back to fill in the backstory before it can proceed. That’s just one book series: if you go to a book store, you can find literally hundreds of WH40K novels describing the history of the game setting, some of them in series numbering upwards of five or ten novels.

In Dungeons and Dragons, there’s a little bit of flavor text that the DM can choose to follow or not; he or she can create an entirely new world for their players to take part in. I’m creating my Adventure Island setting from scrap, with a little bit stolen from other settings because they look cool. The story of WH40K is inseparable from the miniatures that Games Workshop puts out, but the whole thing is so vast that the players still can go wild with making up their own histories. They can create regiments, planets, star systems, and sector-spanning wars, and it wouldn’t conflict with anything in the established canon. With so much official canon, you’d expect it to restrict what you come up with. In fact, the more novels or backstory you read up on, the more you can use it to develop your own stories and add depth to it. That’s where the appeal lies for me; I actually like the worldbuilding and novels more than I do the game itself: I’ve collected a sizable force of Space Marines and Imperial Guardsmen, and with everything I buy, I like to come up with a story for it. The stories behind my armies will have to come at another time, though. This blog entry is just about the game itself and my experience with it, not the disposition of my troops.

 I’m of the opinion that Stalin, not Hitler, was the most evil man in history; Hitler’s claim to infamy is the way in which he conducted the Holocaust, where he utilized technology to accomplish an incredibly barbaric deed in a relatively short amount of time. I don’t deny that Hitler was a force of evil that needed to be stopped, but while the Holocaust was bad, Stalin oversaw the extermination of even more of his countrymen than Hitler did. If I recall, Stalin executed more than 40 million Soviets as the leader of the USSR. Because he did it slower, scattered all over 11 time zones, and with good, old-fashioned bullets, starvation, and exposure instead of nerve gas, the impact is somewhat less shocking. Kind of like how we killed as many people in Europe with conventional bombing during WWII as we did with the atomic bombs in Japan, but we pay more attention to Hiroshima and Nagasaki than Berlin and Munich because we did it in the blink of an eye. Now that I think of it, Julius Caesar stabbed about a million French people to death with short swords, yet we (and the French) view him as one of the founding fathers of Western civilization. Huh.

You may be wondering what this has to do with WH40K. The answer is that in WH40K, the two good factions, the Imperium and the Tau, make Stalin, Hitler, and Caesar look like humanitarians. Even the most sympathetic groups are arch-xenophobes and engage in acts of genocide so severe that they’d make the Nazis look bad for want of trying. The Imperium burns planets to a cinder because of rounding errors, and the Tau round up billions of people of a conquered world that resist occupation, put them in concentration camps, sterilize them all, and let them all die by various means while the Tau and the compliant conquered reconstruct the rest of the planet and act like nothing happened whilst the populace is reeducated and brainwashed.

The game is that dark.

It’s hard to explain why we should root for these people if they do such horrible things, but in the end, I think it’s because of one thing: refuge in audacity. If a white supremacist were to burn down a church in a black community, it would cause an outrage. In a world where there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods (actual quote from the preface to every single WH40K novel), you can understand why common decency and morality have been abandoned, and why people feel it’s necessary to nuke the site from orbit; because it's the only way to be sure. This is a world so dark and so devoid of hope that you want to grab onto anything even remotely good, and in the end, you might end up choosing the mass-murdering, genocidal, religiously-fanatic, cowardly, undeserving, atrophied, slowly-dying fascists rather than The Other, the alien, the mutant, or the heretic.

Maybe it’s because it dispenses with the subtlety and gets down to the knit and gritty. It doesn’t make any excuses for itself: WH40K is the game of killing as many people as you can as violently and efficiently as you can. You are a general, colonel, Chapter Master, death priest to a dark god, shaman-seer, semi-sentient death machine, or a Xenomorph Queen, and those people across from the table need to die, and they need to die now. None of the flourishes and intricacies of the “fluff” are there to paint a pretty picture over top of the violence: they glorify it. It makes no secret that everyone is trying to kill everything, and the skulls and swords and blood and teeth and wolves and axes are there to set a mood.

When we invaded Iraq, soldiers blasted Drowning Pool over the stereos of their tanks to get their blood pumping and to get ready to blast the a troop formation into the stone age. When the Crimson Fists are attacking Waaagh! Urshkabez, you (that is to say me) blast the Dropkick Murphys’s “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye” on your car’s stereo and chant, “REDEEM THEM WITH SWORD AND FIRE!” and “For the Emperor! LEAVE NONE ALIVE!” while driving to the place you’re going to have the match. It’s so over-the-top and unrealistic that in the end, it’s hard to take offense to it.

Anyways, back on topic: Joe got me hooked on the game, and I’ve slowly been building my forces up. I doubt I’m ever going to be able to get all my models assembled, and whenever I bring my army to Joe’s house, he responds by pulling out his bigger, better army. I’ve only played a total of three times, and in my third match, I knew he was going to pull out a couple of his tanks. So, I brought as many anti-tank weapons as I could. Incidentally, it wasn’t enough – he fielded five tanks, a couple anti-infantry armored vehicles, and three armored personnel carriers. My focus as of late has been to rectify this situation and match him with armored vehicles of my own, and to that end, I’ve got three tanks and an APC assembled,  I’ve got another two tanks in boxes right now, and I’m going to give my infantry more anti-armor capabilities. As time goes on, I’m going to get more tanks, artillery, and other vehicles: I want to leave his army a smoking wreck for once, like he’s left mine each of the three times I’ve gone against him.

And now, as I am wont to do, we get to the topic of Greg.

Ungh. Greg is of the opinion that WH40K is inferior to Dungeons and Dragons, and while we were still talking, that I should concentrate solely on D&D. He was also aware of my disposable income, and knowing that WH40K costs money, began urging me to spend the money more on D&D materials for use when he actually started his campaign, because he couldn’t shell out the money to buy all the materials himself. “Campaign contributions,” he called them. The nagging would continue until we stopped talking, and if I were to start talking to him again, I can pretty much guarantee that it would resume.

Enough about Greg.

Anyways, I play D&D as much as I enjoy WH40K, so I don’t plan on giving it up anytime soon, and in the future, you’re likely to see updates here concerning the history and battle reports of my army as you are updates concerning my D&D campaign. Incidentally, I don’t think that there will be any more updates concerning the History of (My) Gaming, so that will be all for these history lessons, and all future updates will be the chronicles of the Adventure Island. The first few sessions about the practice dungeon are over on my old account, and I’ll work on moving those over here over the next few days. After that, I’m going to give a post summing up what’s happened in the campaign thus far, because though we’ve had three campaign sessions, each one was relatively short, and I can sum them up in one post.

See you hopefully sooner.

Best/Dan


A History of (my) Gaming: Part 2
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor
Ah, Greg, one of the great mistakes of my life. How you screwed everything up so magnificently...

A little bit of history, first.

When I was either 11 or 12 and still doing baseball, right before a game, I saw this kid my age walking around with black clothes, his hair gelled up into a spiky mohawk, and a spiked dog collar on. I knew the kid's name was Greg, but he went to another school, and we never met. So, then the game started, and I came up to bat. He had chanced to sit in front of my mother in the stands, and proceeded to loudly yell a more colorful, vulgar version of "You suck!" at me. My mother, sitting right behind him, smacked him upside the head and yelled, "That's my son!"

Should have been a lifetime warning to never come within 50 feet of him, but really, when's the last time anyone gave two thoughts to yelling "YOU SUCK!" to the opposing team even if they're winning? Nobody. So, I didn't so much take it personally as I did writing him off as just another vile-mannered sports fan.

What do you mean cities in Europe are burned to the ground by rioting sports fans and Central American countries declare war on each other because their team lost the soccer championship? You lie!

So, moving from zany world history to gaming history, it chanced that when I was a sophemore in the fall of 2003, in September, Greg and I went to the same high school. He was going to put together a LARP (Live Action Role Play. To get an idea for the kinds of people who play it, go to Youtube and look up "lightning bolt" and see what you come up with. We have no lives.). My mother, convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was the path to the Devil, scared me out of running around a park with a bokken while dressed like a ninja by printing out some statistics by a Christian Mother's Group that stated that teenagers playing fantasy role playing games have a high chance of commiting suicide, joining gangs, doing drugs, and so on and so forth.

I wasn't the kind of person to check sources at the time, so I didn't know that the statement "8% of Americans are Satanists" was a figure arrived at by one concerned mother (Patricia Pulling) whose son commited suicide and decided to move the blame from bad parenting to a single book she found in his bedroom. Had I actually checked my mother's sources, I would have discovered that the 8% of Americans Worship the Devil statement was arrived at by estimating (ie, pulling the number out of her @$$) that 4% of adults are Satanists, 4% of children are Satanists, and then adding the numbers together to get 8%. You don't just fail math forever, lady, you fail life forever. When you're young enough like me, you get to take the class over, but you? You fail life for life. This isn't a condemnation of my mother. After all, the media doesn't check its own sources anymore, so it's more of a cultural problem than anything I can heap on my mother, she was just concerned. She also passed math, unlike THAT OTHER LADY. And the whole Christian movement trying to slap orange stickers on biology text books saying that God created the universe and the book the State is telling them to read is going to currupt their souls, but I degress.

Long story short, I didn't do the LARP, but I did eventually start talking to Greg, as we both had the same lunch period and we were both in Mrs. Geer's Creative Writing.class. When you grew up reading and watching Tolkien and gained a lifelong interest in fantasy and Medieval Europe when the Scout Masters brought a guy in to a Cub Scout meeting of ours with full plate armor and a sword, what do you want to write about?

After you pry yourself away from the anime craze gripping America at the time?

You want to write about guys with broadswords carving up orcs, of course. So, while everyone else was writing about what the teacher was asking them to write about, I was trying to find as many ways of bringing a dragon and a ballista into the assignment. I got called to the Principal's Office when I was 12 for doing exactly that. The 9/11 attacks didn't happen until the next year, and as I said before, I was stupid. How was I supposed to know that the teacher would interpret a comment about wanting to see a dragon incinerate the school as a bomb threat and then relay it to the principal?

Common sense? What in the Hell is that and why should I want any?

To be fair, after the dragon incident, I learned half my lesson. I kept the targets of fantastic acts of arson to fantastic places of incineration and non-school related.fantasies. How does all this tie back in to the character assassination of Greg? He was also doing fantasy stories for his homework assignments, so naturally, we started talking about fantasy. He then revealed that he had once played Dungeons and Dragons, and wondered if I was interested in playing.

Hey, he'd played before, so it obviously would mean I'd soon be able to actually play it. How long could it possibly take to get a game started?

Four and a half years.


Let me gloss over the series of events, will you?

First, we spent the better part of a year coming up with a campaign setting to use. Then we threw that out and came up with another one. And another. And so on. Due to events that I am not at liberty to discuss, Greg waived his right to go to college. In response, his mother and step-father kicked him out of their house. He proceeded to move in with one of his friends, someone named Dave, and after they had a fallout, moved in with his girlfriend. He wasted no time in getting her pregnant, they got married on September 1st, 2007, and their son Travis was born January 23rd, 2008.

...

I'm not even going to make a joke about it, the kid is not to blame for any of this. Instead, I'm going to just state for the record WHAT THE F***?! Remember the end of the last entry where I said it's one of those things you realize you've been involved in a $#!%storm when you're either right in the middle of it or in retrospect?  It was about the point that his wife got pregnant that I realized Greg had no control over his life, he had no means of supporting himself and two dependants, and was pretty much self-destructing. Hey, I was his friend, so I had to stick with him through it. Dungeons and Dragons comes second, helping a friend comes first. D&D isn't going to destroy a friendship, right?

Wrong. I'll get to that in a little.

So, overall by being a friend, driving him to and from work, and keeping his spirits up, we stayed in contact long enough to find out that we'd waited so long in playing the then-new 3.5E from when it first came out that Wizards of the Coast was coming out with 4E. We completely missed out on 3.5E, but hey - after waiting so long, we decided that we'd buy the books as they came out every month and learn the rules pretty much as they were being written. Rather, I'd buy the books, Greg would read them. He'd played before, so he would presumably have a better understanding of the core mechanics, he'd help me understand the rules and answer any questions I had, and I wouldn't look at the DMG or Monster Manual for a while because they contained information that a regular player shouldn't know. Like what's at the bottom of the Kobold Hall. So, Greg would be the Dungeon Master, and once he got a party together, we'd delve into a campaign after four years of waiting.

Tack on another few months to the waiting list...

And in August, we finally started the campaign. I played a dwarf warlord named Metallus, his friend John played a dragonborn paladin (who was eventually remade into a fighter) named Bharash, and lacking more people to make a full party, Greg played 2 GMPCs (Game Master's Player Characters). The first dungeon could have probably gone better, but we were all new to 4E, and two of us to D&D in general. Over the next few gaming sessions (where we came up with a new origin for how our characters met in the first place each time), we got a better handle on the rules, got into the hang of roleplaying, and managed to pick up several more players.

So, what went wrong?

Well, for starters, I mentioned that I wanted to DM a game sometime in the future. Apparently, "the future" means "I want to undermine you at every possible chance I can get, and I am going to take over your campaign and subjugate you. Now." It was apparently taken as a threat, and from then on, Greg began acting paranoid. I'd been along for the ride for the last four and a half years, and now that we were finally playing and I knew how to play the game, I was going to attempt a coup and steal away his players and leave him behind. That son of a...! This cannot be allowed! PUNISH THIS OFFENDER OF THE STATUS QUO!

So, my comment was apparently an act of war, because he began dictating times for the gaming group to meet rather than ask when would be convenient for everyone. Naturally, the days and hours he chose were times when I was unavailable. On one occassion, I got food poisoning and couldn't come to a gaming session. He proceded to text my phone and leave voice messages every hour or so for the entire day until I caved in and made it to the gaming session. Then came insults and insinuations which will remain private for the time being, and to top it all off, when merely inconveniencing me wasn't enough, he began actively harassing me in-game. Any comment I made was twisted into a direct challenge to his authority, and all the monsters in the room (plus whatever GMPC he was playing) would attack my character Metallus. I almost walked out on the gaming session that night, but after a private talk, he agreed to stop harassing me.

That agreement lasted all of a week. The following dates and times are accurate, because I kept all the text messages.

For those of you who don't know, Walt Simonson is my mentor. He's a comic book artist known for his runs on Thor, X-Factor, Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, and a plethora of other titles by Marvel and DC. My father had been promising to take me to meet him (they're friends) for as long as I can remember, and if you think waiting 4 and a half years to play a game is a long time, try waiting fifteen years to meet your idol. When I was 15, my father and I visited him and his wife Weezie downstate, and in the subsequent years, we've made it a tradition to visit annually. On Saturday, October 18th, 2008, we went down to visit them. Greg made a habit of scheduling impromptu gaming sessions about two hours before he wanted them to begin, and assumed everyone would be able to make it. He sent me a text message telling (not asking) me to come over that night for a game. Being 150 miles away, that was, quite frankly, physically impossible. I told him I was away, and I was visiting the Simonsons for the night.

When you call someone a liar, you do not do yourself a favor.

He proceeded without me that night, scheduled another gaming session Sunday night, and the next morning, I came home from visiting Walt and Weezie. Later that day, his wife sent me a text message saying that Greg had gotten himself drunk and was in no shape to run a gaming session that night, so the session was cancelled. This was 8:44 PM. Not wanting to let my mother know that Greg was a drunk, I told her that I wasn't going over because Greg had gotten sick. Not a lie, technically. So, I wasn't going out that night.

Until 9:54, when Greg sent me a message saying that he was good again. The gaming session, then, would begin as originally scheduled. 11:00 PM. I didn't want to go out, I'd settled in for the night, I told my parents I was staying in, and my mother was not too happy about Greg suddenly getting "better." So, I sent him a text message saying I was not going to make the session that night. He called me up and began threatening my character. Apparently, he had become deluded enough by this time to assume that I confused myself with my character and was undergoing an identity crisis, and that making a threat against two pieces of paper (which I had on my possession) and a plastic miniature (which I also had a copy of) would convince me to drop what I was doing, butt heads with my parents, and come over and allow myself to be demeaned to my face for the next five hours. I told him no. I hung up the phone.

Then, at 10:20 PM, he sent another text message. "Miss one more session and ur character is dead!"

Alright.

10:30 PM. "Dnd @ 11."

He meant that night.

I am, by nature, a spiteful person. When someone issues an ultimatum, I give them exactly what they are not asking for. When last I was at a gaming session, we were playing Forgotten Realms, and my character, Metallus, had gotten separated from his comrades and was in the custody of the guards at Baldur's Gate. He gave them information on the activities of the Cult to Zehir, which included a war to take Loudwater and the surrounding region, and having told the authorities where the rest of the party was, was content in knowing that the guardsmen would rescue his compatriots from being holed up in a crypt surrounded by zombies. Metallus was lawful good, so he complied with the authorities. The party members were all either good or unaligned, so they didn't respect the law the same way Metallus did, and when the guards told them that they were now under the custody of Baldur's Gate, they killed all the guards. Seemed to me like a good way to end the story, because Metallus would be blamed for sending the guards to their death. Greg accused me of trying to undermine him for months and of trying to dictate how the game would go. This, I concluded, would be the perfect opportunity for some irony and do exactly what he had been pushing me towards: what he had been accusing me of. I replied with the text message, "at 10:59 PM, the guards of Baldur's Gate executed Metallus for sending their comrades to their deaths."

After a few seconds, he called back and began an argument. Walt Simonson is the inspiration for my artwork. Chuck Yeager is the inspiration for my demeaner. I try to act like him when the $#!% hits the fan. The reason I have never been in a car accident is that I can keep my wits about me and remain in control of myself, because panicking and getting emotionally distraught is the last thing you want to do when your car goes out of control. Similarly, when someone else raises their voice and starts yelling, I just keep talking normally. Greg was about a decibal short of  shouting, he was getting angry, and he was losing it. I, in my normal voice, told him that my character and the game meant nothing to me, and I was done playing. Rather than say something, he fumbled for something to yell, came up empty, and hung up. I told my mother I was done playing D&D with Greg.

Likely suffering from brain damage or memory loss from drinking, Greg sent me another text message at 1:25 PM the next day. "Dnd 2nite?" I didn't even bother answering. At 8:00 PM, "Hello?" I didn't answer. At 8:51 PM, "Dude, what the ----* is ur problem?" Then, on October 26, at 7:16 PM  "Wanna play?" That reminded me. he still had my copy of Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition, and planned to call him to tell him I was going to come over to pick them up. I put it off and even considered just letting him have it so I didn't have to put up with him again, and buying a new copy. I decided against that.

Dave was the friend he had spent a short time living with before they had a disagreement and Greg moved in with his girlfriend. In his desperation to get more players, he buried the hatchet with Dave and asked him to play in the campaign. Dave was less than enthused about playing Dungeons and Dragons and would very much have liked to do things other than Dungeons and Dragons. What they are, I will not mention here. For some reason, probably because Dave joined the group at about the same time Greg began making my life Hell, he came to believe that Dave, not him, was responsible for me leaving the group. Obviously, there was only one obstacle to me returning to the group. October 29th, 8:44 PM, a night I was working (I deliver for Dom's Pizza, Subs, and Wings [not to be confused with Dominoes] for a living), he sent me yet another text message. "Will u play if u kick dave out?" The second u is not a typo on my part. I don't know if he meant for me to kick him out personally, or if he made the typo, but it wasn't going to happen either way.

That message triggered the mental note I'd made. I still needed to get my DVD set back from him. Less than an hour later, he called to see if I was doing anything that night, and asked if I'd come back if Dave stopped coming. I told him no, and then said that I was going to come over after work to pick my DVD up. When I got there, he and his friend John were on the balcony on his apartment, and he'd left the DVD against his door. Without coming down to talk face-to-face, we talked for less than a minute, and then I left. I don't know why, but apparently, he became convinced that I wanted Dave gone and just wouldn't say it. So much so that on November 9th, at 10:21 AM, I got this message, "Wanna play? Daves gone!"

He had not listened to what I said. I reiterated in another text message, "Dave was never the problem."

10:34 PM, "Then what is? Now no body can play!"

Deciding that he couldn't wait for me to text out my answer, he called me after I'd written maybe a word down, and began another yelling spree. I told him that D&D wasn't fun anymore, I didn't want to play, and-

Click.

Couldn't let me finish a sentence, eh, Greg? So, if that wasn't enough, I was ready to burn my bridges so he would never talk to me again. He did it for me.

November 9th, 10:38 PM, "If i ever c u, im going 2 kick the living shit out of u!"

I almost laughed out loud at that. I'm a former varsity wrestler, five feet, eight inches tall, and 275 pounds. Greg is 5'7", and would be lucky to reach 150 pounds soaking wet in all his clothes. He could dream, but he could never try.

Of course, he has the attention span of a goldfish, because in the middle of December, I started getting text messages and voice mails from him. You know what? I've rambled on enough about him. I'm going to end this entry on this note - he tried to make up in January, and in one night, he failed spectacularly. Trying to talk you into taking part in another campaign and making up in the same conversation, and then threatening to rape that character ruins all chance of reconciliation, especially since in the past, he'd proven incapable of separating a character from the person playing them. Vocally, I agreed to what he said, changed my character like he wanted me to, and scheduled a start date for the next campaign. Incidentally, the date he wanted to start the campaign was the first day of the new semester of college, January 20th. So, I wrote a note telling him that he blew his one chance for forgiveness and to never to talk to me again, and on the way to school, I dropped the note in his apartment's mailbox. I got one text message hours later, about 8 in the evening, indicating that he hadn't seen the note yet. Some time later that night, my phone rang, and the caller ID said it was Greg. I ignored it. That was the last time he tried to contact me. I don't know what happened next, if he still lives in that apartment, if he got divorced, I don't know how he's been, and frankly, I don't care.

The entry started out humorous, but as you can see, it didn't stay that way. In the end, it went from planning on doing something fun and harmless to something dark and quite frankly scary. In the end, though, one good thing did come out of it. If Greg hadn't pretty much kicked me out of the group and ensured my never coming back, then I probably wouldn't be as active a gamer as I am today. I kept up with the original plan we'd made of buying all the books as they come out, and I've been reading them. With the exception of the adventure modules and miniatures, I own everything 4E-related, and I'm staying on top of things as they come out. I even know how to run a campaign better than Greg did - for starters, it's mentioned right in the Dungeon Master's Guide that you never penalize a character for something the player did, because it breaks trust and nothing but hard feelings come out of it.

After Greg kicked me out of the group before contracting amnesia and trying to get me back in, I made a random quip to one of my friends - it was either Miranda or Fiorella - where I jokingly asked if they'd play a campaign with me if I were the Dungeon Master. To my surprise, she said yes. As did Miranda or Fiorella, whichever one it was I didn't ask in the first place. So did a couple other people, and out of my joking, rhetorical question, I suddenly had a full party to make a world for. Two, technically, because I threw the first idea out and started over. At the time of my writing this, we've had two gaming sessions, and the next one is going to be at midnight on the 4th of July (New York Time), and I'm enjoying the process. The last month or two of the campaign with Greg had sucked the fun out of the gaming experience for me, and I was expecting not to feel any excitement again for the game.

One thing was certain, though: everyone else needs to have fun. As the Dungeon Master, it's my job to entertain the party. As he got more paranoid, Greg failed in such a magnificent and violent way that I couldn't help but have him as an example of what never to do when running a campaign. Ironically, by doing a truckload of work trying to make things fun for everyone else, I've actually started to have fun myself again. Anyways, I'll go over that in more detail in the next entry. This post was supposed to just be about the catastrophe of Greg, and if I keep on going, I won't have enough material for the next segment.

Best/Dan

*This was originally an f-bomb.


A History of (my) Gaming, Part 1
Timor, Pertierra
[info]lord_timor
I have another livejournal account, but I had originally created it for personal updates and things like that. I kind of want to keep it for that purpose, so I decided to start this one.  I'll copy and paste the two D&D-related entries over here when I get the chance, but before I do that, I want to make a few introductory posts. These first few posts are going to be about how I got into gaming, the teen/adult politics that caused me to turn out to be the kind of gamer I am, and some of the lessons I've learned.

Let's start from the beginning, in my sick, twisted sense of humor:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,
Genesis 1:2 the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while-


Oh, God damn it! Not THAT far back!

Once upon a time, on a cold day in December of 1987-

Now that's just disgusting. I'm too old for an Adam Sandler reference. Instead of letting the sick, twisted sense of humor I am cursed with, I will tell the story from the beginning with just my twisted sense of humor. Here we go:

The first time I heard about a "tabletop RPG" was when I was probably 12-years-old and I was surfing the internet for reviews of Final Fantasy VII.  I didn't really want to see how many people liked it, I just wanted to see people who agreed with me on the subject of it being the greatest game in the history of mankind to validate my obsession with it.  Yes, I would grow up to be one of the fan-boys who, years later, bought Advent Children the day it came out in America.  I got better, haven't watched anime regularly since I graduated from high school, and haven't touched the PS2 in almost just as long.  That's beside the point, though.  When last I remained on topic, I was a 7th-grader trawling through some game review site, and this one off-hand comment caught me off hand.  Something about FFVII, and all video games by implication, not offering the same level of freedom as a pen and paper RPG.

What the Hell is a pen and paper RPG?


A quick search on the internet clued me in to the fact that before video games, there was first a kind of gamer that sat around a table instead of a television, along with a group of friends or associates, and they played a game.  A person playing games without a video game console?  And they have friends? Preposterous!  A man or extremely masculine woman (for a self-respecting, feminine girl cannot possibly enjoy such things as games. They must surely be too busy doing mature things, like... um... whatever girls do, I never had a girlfriend, so I'd be the last person to know) takes on the title of "game master", assumes the role of Alpha-Male, and tells everyone what to imagine is happening on the table and not on their television screen.  As this is all assumedly taking place in the Game Master's parents' basement, whatever happens on the table must be PG-13, because imagining anything more adult than hacking orcs apart with a broadsword happening on the table is just not the kind of thing one talks about or imagines is happening between a group of men, especially in their parents' basement.

Strip club?  What in the Hell is that?

Anyways, to spare whoever happens to be reading this the extremely stupid and vacuous things going through my mind at the time I may or may not have been friendless and impressionable (the world will kneel before the Bevelled Standard!), I learned about tabletop RPGs, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular.  What strange creatures, these tabletop gamers. It's too bad that the natural selection of the species means that they've all gone extinct in favor of their newer, console-based kin.

What?! They still exist?! Horrors!

The concept of Dungeons and Dragons remained in the back of my head for at least three years after that stumbling on the concept.  At one point, a friend of mine in either 8th or 9th grade (Adam DeFruscio) tried to start a campaign of the newly-released D&D 3.0. I went over to his house one day to try to make a character - a predictably emo 1/4-elf whose parents were killed in an orc raid and became a ranger to fend for himself in the wilderness and avenge his parents on all Orc-kind.  Adam's rulebook came with a CD that let you make the character on the computer and then print out the character sheet, but he had somehow lost the CD before I got there, and being just as clueless as I was, had no idea how to put together a character by actually reading the book. We never talked about trying to start a campaign again after that - if we couldn't understand the basics of ability scores, then we didn't have a chance of running a game.

Dungeon Master's GuideMonster ManualCore Rulebooks? What in the Hell are those?

So. a few years later, late 2003 and we get to Greg. I should probably have left well enough alone with that guy, but that's the kind of thing you only realize when you're in the midst of something going horribly wrong or in retrospect. Let's see here: I have the right not to incriminate myself, but anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of tennis, so I'll present the sanitized version.

In the next entry.

Best/Dan

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