My original D&D campaign is now in its fourth year, though scheduling conflicts, among other things, have made it far less of a weekly thing.
I do play in a (more regular) weekly D&D campaign, as well as weekly Adventurer's League games (often run by the friend who runs that campaign.)
I created a group in order to run one-shot games, the idea being that I could set a date and then build the adventure around whoever was able to come, of which I've run two (actually the same adventure with different players) but I do have such grand ambitions.
So, right now: my main campaign is an ongoing epic, with characters gradually uncovering dangers that will, over time, relate more and more to their own backstories.
I have two major D&D campaign concepts that I want to run.
One is set within the same world (my homebrew world of Sarkon) and would be set after the events of the first campaign. In fact, there's a particular move that I want the players to make that will set up the events of that campaign. While the current one is very Cosmic-Horror themed, the next would, ideally, be more of a Lord of the Rings-style epic war campaign in which the... um, spoilers if you're in my D&D group... Angel of Death is released from his 60,000 year imprisonment and raises and army of the dead to kill everyone (he'd probably have reskinned stats for Orcus, changing his creature type from Demon to either Celestial or Undead and alignment from Chaotic Evil to Lawful Evil - maybe futzing with a few under-the-hood things as well.)
The other campaign would be a Ravnica campaign. While I did do a one-shot (which has a second chapter if we ever want to make it a two-shot) for level 18 characters, I'd really like to also run a game starting at low levels (probably 2 or 3) and have the players work their way up. My concept here would borrow a lot from Magic lore, perhaps bending a few rules. Basically, it would start with Squee, the immortal goblin, finding himself on Ravnica and the guilds fighting over control of him. We'd have some guild-based villains to reckon with but then probably have the Phyrexians as the big bads, because I am old-school.
Then, on top of that, I'd like to run a Call of Cthulhu game - right now with the Starter Set I think it's really geared around running the pre-fab adventures, but if we decide we like it I'll probably get the actual books and try to build a game set within my own Massachusetts hometown, because even if it was a super-safe suburb, when you're a little kid you populate the spaces you inhabit with all manner of terrifying monsters. I'd like to share them!
Oh, and back to D&D!
My longterm ambition is to one day do a Chrono Trigger-style time-travel campaign. My homebrew world has a lot of different eras that we could use, and even though that would probably be incredibly freaking difficult to pull off, I fucking want to.
Oh, and also I kind of want to homebrew all the WoW races (and maybe classes...?) for D&D 5e and run a campaign set in Azeroth (though that would probably be more of a one-shot deal.)
The problem, however, is that getting a group of adults in their 20s and 30s to come together regularly to play D&D, especially when most of them work in the performing arts and have wildly irregular schedules, is a pain. in. the. ass. But that's my friends!
If I manage to check each of these off my list at some point, I'll be very happy.
Showing posts with label Sarkon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sarkon. Show all posts
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Thursday, November 5, 2015
D&D - Sarkon, Day One
Well, yesterday I had my very first experience DM'ing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I'd played another tabletop RPG based on A Song of Ice and Fire, but this is my first foray into the granddaddy of the genre. We're using 5th edition (I haven't really looked much into the earlier ones.)
The story of my campaign is set on a world called Sarkon. The largest continent, Karsiya, has been under the control of the Lupinian Empire for about three hundred years. It's divided into three cultural subcontinents: Volpon, which is the home territory of the Empire, is the sort of classic Western European fantasy setting, but where dark magic is tolerated and there are necromancers and Liches who are prominent and respected leaders (and many among them are of a good alignment.) Gesenas is a large peninsula with several smaller peninsulas branching off of it and has a kind of Mediterranean feel. Gesenas is largely autonomous while still technically being part of the Empire, and is dominated by powerful trading companies. Sedsalaki, the southeastern, arid region, has a sort of Middle-Eastern, North-African feel. The city-states there are united by the Church of Yad.
Things had been pretty stable for a long time, but in recent years, people have begun to discover ruins from the legendary Parthalian civilization - and advanced society with technology that is far more sophisticated than that found in modern Sarkon. The result has been a rapid industrial revolution as people re-purposed and reverse-engineer these relics. Tension over the control of this technology led to an incident in Sedsalaki that precipitated a war - the Church has united almost all of the City-States in a rebellion against the Empire.
The city of Camrada, a place of debauchery and corruption that nevertheless was fighting on the side of the Church, was recently captured by the Imperial Legion. The "Sand Prince," the ostensible leader of the city but in truth a puppet of the various crime families that actually control it, was holding one of his weekly 6-day long bacchanalian parties. It's here that our heroes arrive.
They are a high elf Wizard named Haldrion, who is a member of a powerful family from Karkistos, one of the major cities in Gesenas, Liorenth, a gold dragonborn Paladin whose desert village in Sedsalaki was destroyed by orcish raiders when he was a child, and was rescued by the Imperial Legion and raised in the Volpic region known as Hymora, and Breakridge, a mountain dwarf Fighter who came down to Camrada basically to get in fights and party with the Sand Prince.
Liorenth's order has not been called up to fight in the war, as the Emperor is trying to prevent this from becoming a full-fledge religious conflict, and so has taken work as Haldrion's bodyguard. Breakridge and Liorenth know each other from their time in the Legion. Liorenth left it to join his paladin order while Breakridge was honorably discharged and decided he'd rather get drunk than be a career soldier.
All three know Ralak Al-Jalad, an NPC who has recruited them to start an archaeological exploration company - essentially to dig up Parthalian artifacts and sell them for great profit. He wants them to pitch their company to the Sand Prince to get him as an investor.
After having some interactions with various people, including having Haldrion get screwed both literally and physically by a Wood Elf who walks off with his coinpurse, they encounter a strange fakir named Mok-Cor, who gives them strange enigmatic prophecies.
They approach the Sand Prince, and he seems excited about the prospect of getting in on this company, but right after them, Mok-Cor approaches the Prince. The Sand Prince asks how long his great palace will stand, and Mok-Cor answers "No more than an hour."
In the stunned silence that follows, Mok-Cor chants out a ritual incantation, and a massive Tarrasque emerges from the desert and starts to destroy the city.
Ralak tells the party that he has a ship, but it won't run without his friend Jasmal. So the party goes to the bar where they've heard she's paying off some debt. Along the way, they find a guy looting a store. Liorenth chases him off, but Breakridge and Haldrion take what he had looted - a little gem (non magical) and a bag of holding. Inside, they find a pair of kobolds with a pet octopus in a jar. The kobolds tell them to go away. Ultimately, it comes to a fight, and before either kobold can do a thing, Liorenth and Breakridge kill the two reptilian gangsters. The octopus climbs back in its jar and screws its lid back on, so Haldrion stuffs it in his bag of holding.
They search the room and find a little trap door, which leads them down to a basement room. It's here that they hear Vadraz, a red dragonborn thug, who is telling Jasmal that they'll leave only when "Henrik" gets there.
Haldrion disguises himself as one of the kobolds and walks in, trying to convince Vadraz that Henrik wants him to take the half-elf with them. Vadraz refuses to budge, but not suspecting an attack, they all very quickly kill the thug before he can react. (It's at this point that I figure I need to maybe bump up the difficulty of the enemies I'm using - though they did get a whole surprise round.)
They find the key to the cage as well as a dirty shotgun on Vadraz' corpse, the latter of which comes as a bit of a surprise.
With Jasmal in tow, they run through the city toward Smuggler's Wharf, only to take a turn down Acid Alley and for Breakridge to run headlong into a gelatinous cube (I halved its health and reduced some of the damage it dealt, but I think they might have been able to take it out either way, given how easily they dispatched it.) As they killed the cube, the spire of the Camrada Cathedral crashed down, smashing the cube along with Breakridge's axe. They got to the boat the Ralak and Jasmal had fixed up and left the harbor, watching the Tarrasque throw another chunk of the cathedral at Vinderum Palace and watching it collapse in a cloud of smoke and dust.
So: a couple things I've learned:
1: Combat is way easier to run than NPC interactions. That's perhaps unsurprising, given that it's more automatic (though with more complicated monsters it might involve greater decision-making on my part.) Might avoid the kinds of NPC crowds that I had at the party.
2: You're going to have way more skill-checks than you plan for, so being able to improvise a DC is important.
3: It's not hard to communicate the basic direction you want players to go.
4: Kobolds don't last long. Thugs might last longer if they don't get surprised.
The story of my campaign is set on a world called Sarkon. The largest continent, Karsiya, has been under the control of the Lupinian Empire for about three hundred years. It's divided into three cultural subcontinents: Volpon, which is the home territory of the Empire, is the sort of classic Western European fantasy setting, but where dark magic is tolerated and there are necromancers and Liches who are prominent and respected leaders (and many among them are of a good alignment.) Gesenas is a large peninsula with several smaller peninsulas branching off of it and has a kind of Mediterranean feel. Gesenas is largely autonomous while still technically being part of the Empire, and is dominated by powerful trading companies. Sedsalaki, the southeastern, arid region, has a sort of Middle-Eastern, North-African feel. The city-states there are united by the Church of Yad.
Things had been pretty stable for a long time, but in recent years, people have begun to discover ruins from the legendary Parthalian civilization - and advanced society with technology that is far more sophisticated than that found in modern Sarkon. The result has been a rapid industrial revolution as people re-purposed and reverse-engineer these relics. Tension over the control of this technology led to an incident in Sedsalaki that precipitated a war - the Church has united almost all of the City-States in a rebellion against the Empire.
The city of Camrada, a place of debauchery and corruption that nevertheless was fighting on the side of the Church, was recently captured by the Imperial Legion. The "Sand Prince," the ostensible leader of the city but in truth a puppet of the various crime families that actually control it, was holding one of his weekly 6-day long bacchanalian parties. It's here that our heroes arrive.
They are a high elf Wizard named Haldrion, who is a member of a powerful family from Karkistos, one of the major cities in Gesenas, Liorenth, a gold dragonborn Paladin whose desert village in Sedsalaki was destroyed by orcish raiders when he was a child, and was rescued by the Imperial Legion and raised in the Volpic region known as Hymora, and Breakridge, a mountain dwarf Fighter who came down to Camrada basically to get in fights and party with the Sand Prince.
Liorenth's order has not been called up to fight in the war, as the Emperor is trying to prevent this from becoming a full-fledge religious conflict, and so has taken work as Haldrion's bodyguard. Breakridge and Liorenth know each other from their time in the Legion. Liorenth left it to join his paladin order while Breakridge was honorably discharged and decided he'd rather get drunk than be a career soldier.
All three know Ralak Al-Jalad, an NPC who has recruited them to start an archaeological exploration company - essentially to dig up Parthalian artifacts and sell them for great profit. He wants them to pitch their company to the Sand Prince to get him as an investor.
After having some interactions with various people, including having Haldrion get screwed both literally and physically by a Wood Elf who walks off with his coinpurse, they encounter a strange fakir named Mok-Cor, who gives them strange enigmatic prophecies.
They approach the Sand Prince, and he seems excited about the prospect of getting in on this company, but right after them, Mok-Cor approaches the Prince. The Sand Prince asks how long his great palace will stand, and Mok-Cor answers "No more than an hour."
In the stunned silence that follows, Mok-Cor chants out a ritual incantation, and a massive Tarrasque emerges from the desert and starts to destroy the city.
Ralak tells the party that he has a ship, but it won't run without his friend Jasmal. So the party goes to the bar where they've heard she's paying off some debt. Along the way, they find a guy looting a store. Liorenth chases him off, but Breakridge and Haldrion take what he had looted - a little gem (non magical) and a bag of holding. Inside, they find a pair of kobolds with a pet octopus in a jar. The kobolds tell them to go away. Ultimately, it comes to a fight, and before either kobold can do a thing, Liorenth and Breakridge kill the two reptilian gangsters. The octopus climbs back in its jar and screws its lid back on, so Haldrion stuffs it in his bag of holding.
They search the room and find a little trap door, which leads them down to a basement room. It's here that they hear Vadraz, a red dragonborn thug, who is telling Jasmal that they'll leave only when "Henrik" gets there.
Haldrion disguises himself as one of the kobolds and walks in, trying to convince Vadraz that Henrik wants him to take the half-elf with them. Vadraz refuses to budge, but not suspecting an attack, they all very quickly kill the thug before he can react. (It's at this point that I figure I need to maybe bump up the difficulty of the enemies I'm using - though they did get a whole surprise round.)
They find the key to the cage as well as a dirty shotgun on Vadraz' corpse, the latter of which comes as a bit of a surprise.
With Jasmal in tow, they run through the city toward Smuggler's Wharf, only to take a turn down Acid Alley and for Breakridge to run headlong into a gelatinous cube (I halved its health and reduced some of the damage it dealt, but I think they might have been able to take it out either way, given how easily they dispatched it.) As they killed the cube, the spire of the Camrada Cathedral crashed down, smashing the cube along with Breakridge's axe. They got to the boat the Ralak and Jasmal had fixed up and left the harbor, watching the Tarrasque throw another chunk of the cathedral at Vinderum Palace and watching it collapse in a cloud of smoke and dust.
So: a couple things I've learned:
1: Combat is way easier to run than NPC interactions. That's perhaps unsurprising, given that it's more automatic (though with more complicated monsters it might involve greater decision-making on my part.) Might avoid the kinds of NPC crowds that I had at the party.
2: You're going to have way more skill-checks than you plan for, so being able to improvise a DC is important.
3: It's not hard to communicate the basic direction you want players to go.
4: Kobolds don't last long. Thugs might last longer if they don't get surprised.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Preparing to DM
I've been thinking a lot about the nature of the role-playing game, and lo and behold, Matthew Rossi at Blizzard Watch pretty much wrote the article that I was thinking of writing.
My experience with tabletop RPGs is limited. Somehow, I grew up without Dungeons and Dragons - instead, I played Magic: the Gathering, which is fantastic, but built far more around the mechanics than the narrative (also, like all other CCGs that it spawned, Magic has the problem that as soon as money gets involved, the game shrinks down into a few winning strategies.)
As a kid, I played some of the Sierra Entertainment adventure games - primarily Space Quest, as its profoundly geeky humor meshed well with mine. Of these, only the Quest for Glory series really incorporated any of the real RPG game mechanics. These games had a pretty wide breadth of interactivity, but everything still had to be pre-programmed, and usually a unique action would simply function in that one unique situation it had been designed for.
I've been thinking a lot about Dungeons and Dragons, as I'm finally in a position where it looks like we're going to get my game going. My dream job is to be a (financially successful) fantasy writer, and so it was a joy for me to come up with a setting, with key figures and factions and histories. My friends are mostly actors (in fact, many of them belong to the same Shakespeare company,) so I have the advantage of playing with a lot of people who have a strong sense of character. I expect that this will be both challenging and entertaining from a DM's perspective.
I'm jumping into the deep end here, of course, having never actually played D&D as a PC. I have read the books cover to cover and I've watched probably all of the Acquisitions Incorporated games that they do at PAX. I'm hoping this will allow me to at least function until I get the hang of it.
My hope is that in the future, I'll be able to blog here about what happens in the game's story. The freedom of the tabletop RPG genre seems well-suited to converting it into a narrative. But I think the burden is on me to give each session an interesting hook.
For a few months (since buying the core books as a birthday present to myself in June) I've been constructing the setting, a world called Sarkon.
Most of the action takes place on a continent called Karsiya. Until about five years ago, the entire continent was ruled by the Lupinian Empire, from the far-northern capital of Wolfenholm. The continent is divided into three cultural and geographical regions - the spooky northern forests and mountains of Volpon, the hot deserts of Sedsalaki, and the hilly peninsulas of Gesenas. All throughout history, there have been legends of an advanced civilization that had been lost in some catastrophe whose people were known as the Parthalians. In recent years, Parthalian technology had been discovered, largely in the deserts of Sedsalaki. Sedsalaki, which is united under the Church of Yad, has attempted to break away from the Empire, claiming these artifacts for themselves, while the Empire sends its Legion and its elite "Reapers" to preserve the peace that their rule has established.
Anyway, I've written pages upon pages of backstory for the various cities and kingdoms within the Empire, and I'm chomping at the bit to see how it survives contact with my players. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I'll be able to post about who my friends will be playing and what they wind up doing in this world.
My experience with tabletop RPGs is limited. Somehow, I grew up without Dungeons and Dragons - instead, I played Magic: the Gathering, which is fantastic, but built far more around the mechanics than the narrative (also, like all other CCGs that it spawned, Magic has the problem that as soon as money gets involved, the game shrinks down into a few winning strategies.)
As a kid, I played some of the Sierra Entertainment adventure games - primarily Space Quest, as its profoundly geeky humor meshed well with mine. Of these, only the Quest for Glory series really incorporated any of the real RPG game mechanics. These games had a pretty wide breadth of interactivity, but everything still had to be pre-programmed, and usually a unique action would simply function in that one unique situation it had been designed for.
I've been thinking a lot about Dungeons and Dragons, as I'm finally in a position where it looks like we're going to get my game going. My dream job is to be a (financially successful) fantasy writer, and so it was a joy for me to come up with a setting, with key figures and factions and histories. My friends are mostly actors (in fact, many of them belong to the same Shakespeare company,) so I have the advantage of playing with a lot of people who have a strong sense of character. I expect that this will be both challenging and entertaining from a DM's perspective.
I'm jumping into the deep end here, of course, having never actually played D&D as a PC. I have read the books cover to cover and I've watched probably all of the Acquisitions Incorporated games that they do at PAX. I'm hoping this will allow me to at least function until I get the hang of it.
My hope is that in the future, I'll be able to blog here about what happens in the game's story. The freedom of the tabletop RPG genre seems well-suited to converting it into a narrative. But I think the burden is on me to give each session an interesting hook.
For a few months (since buying the core books as a birthday present to myself in June) I've been constructing the setting, a world called Sarkon.
Most of the action takes place on a continent called Karsiya. Until about five years ago, the entire continent was ruled by the Lupinian Empire, from the far-northern capital of Wolfenholm. The continent is divided into three cultural and geographical regions - the spooky northern forests and mountains of Volpon, the hot deserts of Sedsalaki, and the hilly peninsulas of Gesenas. All throughout history, there have been legends of an advanced civilization that had been lost in some catastrophe whose people were known as the Parthalians. In recent years, Parthalian technology had been discovered, largely in the deserts of Sedsalaki. Sedsalaki, which is united under the Church of Yad, has attempted to break away from the Empire, claiming these artifacts for themselves, while the Empire sends its Legion and its elite "Reapers" to preserve the peace that their rule has established.
Anyway, I've written pages upon pages of backstory for the various cities and kingdoms within the Empire, and I'm chomping at the bit to see how it survives contact with my players. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I'll be able to post about who my friends will be playing and what they wind up doing in this world.
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