Thursday 2 April 2015

Retrospective 4 - Barely Holding On

Returning from Australia to a couple of newcomers, everything looked good!
At first...

Dominic arrived in February, who would go on to become a stalwart for the next couple of years. These days he tends to play in a Star Wars game and only turns up occasionally, we never regained the intimacy of those weeks where only 2-3 people showed up to the session.
His character runs a business called Tomb Busters, and his schtick was to keep hiding his business cards in my dnd stuff. They keep showing up to this day!

After a few weeks of good player numbers everything crashed. No idea why, and I was of course super worried that it was something I'd done.
Renzo, ever dependable, continued to keep the game going.
In March, after several near-misses in regards to player numbers, I bit the bullet and decided to move the game to the London DnD Meetup proper. They'd been struggling to find games for newbies, so they were grateful when I said I'd take literally anybody.
After the lean times, having so many players was sweet nectar.

Plus I had a couple of mates from Australia staying with us during their big tour of Europe. Ej had played in the original 4e game which really took it full circle.
They even stayed an extra week so that they could come to one last session, which did even more to salve my DM's soul which had grown worried and weak due to lack of players.

Kyle showed up on that newbie night, and he's still around. He became the third Rune Guy, since Michael aka Mist Urman aka the Second Rune Guy mentioned here never returned.

Also notable was Mariana whose Cleric's god was, strangely enough, just God. This obliquely inspired my new religion system a year or so later, allowing people to literally just believe in regular God if they want to.





Hey wow, looks like this was the first period of time in which I barely used any LotFP material! I must have been getting more confident!

Mini Reviews:

Mould Cathedral
Just one of my things, one of those times you doodle a dungeon on graph paper and realise you've got to stock it all now.
Stocked a ton of rooms but the party only explored it for a couple of sessions. Oh well!

Demonspore - Throne of the Toad King
Reskinned to be mould men instead of frogs, this was pretty good. Lots of strange stuff going on down there. I don't remember this much at all other than that! I forgot that someone had actually met Mould leader Moldus Vane in the campaign.

Oh yea I totally forgot about this too! One terrible day we only had Dominic show up, but serendipitously enough there were a group of people at a nearby pub table whose DM hadn't shown up. It wasn't even organised as a D&D night!
Anyway, Stargazer's good, only thing that lets it down is lack of random encounters (so no urgency) and that it teaches new players that touching suspicious objects is always a bad idea (I want them to touch things).

The Grotto of Corruption
From Santicore 2014 and fit the mould theme perfectly, so I had to use it!
I can't remember if the whistling fungal zombies are by-the-book or not, but basically these crusty blind zombies with mould all over their eyes were walking around whistling. Thinking them blind, Renzo's elf went to go smash them up but discovered it was echolocation!!!
Great moment, and got a literal forehead slap when they realised how obvious that was in hindsight.

Gonzo as fuck, and perfectly timed for our new larger group who totally got into talking to everything and also trying out crazy shit (because that usually works in my game).
I reskinned a bunch of this to reduce the crazy a little, and to tie it in with the mould theme I'd got going elsewhere.
Tons of fond memories of this one, which I'll say more about in the next retrospective...

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