Writeups

Let’s look at some ephemera! We’ll start with the character and crew sheets. This first chunk is the crew in its current configuration, with Crowl possessing Helena and a Hawkers crew sheet. If I had to guess I’d say we played around sixteen sessions. Now the original versions of – OK, it’s complicated. Sal was playing Cassilda, who was possessed by Crowl. When Sal decided to switch characters, she decided that Crowl was now the main character and they’d be possessing someone else’s body. In the end the host was Helena, mistress of an extensive information network. ...

“They were four total strangers, with nothing in common, meeting for the first time. An orphaned cultist, a disgraced sailor, a fallen noble, and a demon. Before the day was over, they broke the rules. Bared their souls and touched each other in a way they never dreamed possible.” Last night we wrapped up a Blades in the Dark campaign that had started on July 3rd, 2018. Sixteen months is not forever by some standards, but it’s a solidly impressive run compared to my usual track record, and it goes into the books as one of the three best campaigns I’ve ever run. (Huey Long’s Men of Action and Orlando Trash.)

I just sent my Blades in the Dark players a summary of one PC’s research, since he finished up a long-term project clock during the latest downtime. Useful knowledge: Setarra is Dock’s chosen friend from character creation, and his long-term demonic patron. Last session, Dock performed a ritual which shows him the history of an item in order to break into a safe. As a perhaps fortunate consequence of the ritual, he learned that the a powerful set of demonic relics woven through the story to date was originally Setarra’s, and she wants them back. ...

After a bit of searching about, I finally found the Blades in the Dark game I’ve been looking for. I dug up two people on Reddit, of all places, and we had our first session last week. It’s a cool group of PCs, sort of occult-leaning novices to the criminal world. Dock is a kid who was raised in a cult and has no idea how the world works (but lots of occult knowledge); Crucible is an alchemist and sailor from the Dagger Isles who got kicked off her ship for stealing things and now has to figure out how to live well in Doskvol; and Loretta (aka Etty) is the child of a noble family who lost all their money and status, so she’s stuck living on the streets with the ghost of her childhood pet for company. This game sparked my documentation obsession, so we have a wiki (original). For the click-adverse, the record of the first session follows.

So what now? Not as much LFR. I feel less cranky about the campaign than I did when Susan and I talked it over before Christmas, which is when we made the initial decision to cut back. On the other hand, I’d bet that part of my good cheer is that decision itself, so revisiting it doesn’t seem either wise or necessary. I’m glad to be stepping back in a good mood rather than a pissy one. ...

There are some experience point spoilers in what follows; pray be careful, if this might offend. Reed and Faral would like to play the three upcoming Year 3 Waterdeep modules and SPEC 2-2 P3 before hitting epic. Reed is slightly ahead of Faral on experience; he has 137,495 experience and it takes 175,000 to hit level 21. This gives him 37,505 experience points to play with. SPEC 2-2 P3 will chew up 11,200 of those, leaving him and Faral with 26,305 experience points to epic. High tier experience for P3 modules is 8,840. Three of those would be 26,520 experience, which would just push them over. But Faral’s a bit lower. Note made: try to play at least one of the Waterdeep modules or SPEC 2-2 on a lower tier, to open up room for another adventure in there somewhere. Sadly it can’t be a double-length one unless it’s the last one they play. ...

LFR Mods I played everything new for LFR at DDXP except the epic. Brief, non-spoilery thoughts: The BI had a slightly less interesting story, but I thought it was better structurally. They had one special mission per encounter slot, which only one table could take; when more than one table wanted a given mission, they let the rest of the BI decide who should get it based on a brief speech. The special missions were level-band limited. Also, at the end of the the BI, the Coronal of Myth Drannor awarded unique items to randomly selected players. One of my friends got a special banner, and one got a pumped up version of the Bowstring of Accuracy that allows him to use any bow as a divine or arcane implement. You can give these items away to other players, but you can’t ever get them back. ...

So there you go. 120 games in 365 days, which maths out to a game every three and a half days. That seems about right. Something like 28 of them were at cons, not counting the game days we ran at our place, which still leaves me at a pace of one game every four days. This may not have been entirely wise, since I’m a bit burned out, but it was fun. I regret very few of those sessions. ...

Susan and I went down to Games & Stuff the day after Christmas to play Ripples in the Stream of Souls with Faral and Reed. Jimmy ran; Mark B., Jason B., Amanda, and Terrence were our fellow players. I liked the moral choices in this module a lot. There was a lot to mull over, there was stuff to investigate without the risk of getting stuck without enough clues, and so on. For the last adventure of the year, I’d say this was pretty good. It was also pleasantly apt that we’d meet a fun new local player in the last game of the year, since that’s always been a big part of the LFR experience for me.

I ran this down at Games & Stuff for Alan, Hudson, Mark B., Jason B., and Evil Tony. Like most Akanul region mods, it’s a straightforward linear mission. The story is a bit weak for paragon tier PCs, but the opposition is fun and it’s a very tunable module. You can make it deadly dangerous or you can dial down the difficulty as appropriate. It’s also got some interesting monsters. ...