Retrospective 5 - An Embarrassment of Riches

Players! So many of them!
After running a game involving TEN players, it became obvious that my greed in soaking up players had gone too far... something had to be done.

It was during this period that reliable, wonderful Renzo bowed out of the game due to numbers. Luckily a new arrival said he'd run a game and split the group for us, which was incredibly helpful.

Group splitting would become the go-to solution to large groups in future, usually after several weeks of  dithering on my part.
Boom and bust, really.

Play-wise, we almost had a TPK! A yellow mould bomb, crafted by the players to absolutely murder every motherfucker in the room, worked perfectly. Unfortunately everyone was in said room, leading to an intense few minutes of working through the consequences bit by bit. 

I remember it in vignettes.

Session 50 saw the first session of Lulu the Barbarian! Still in the game to this day (January 2017, but I don't want to jinx it) and current longest-running character, played by the indomitable Ollie. His original Cleric jumped off a cliff voluntarily, and Lulu's survived since.

Kyle begins his tradition of playing the relative of his dead Dwarfs around now too, which I've always enjoyed.

Also various rulesy things got used for the first time, like encounters per terrain (changed as a result) and various new shopkeeper things for the Fortress City.

Things get way easier from here on out, more confident about the game's prospects and waaay less worried about whether it would all fall apart. Looking back, it seems crazy that it took this long to go from the game's beginnings to a feeling of stability.
Should have joined the meetup earlier!

The relief I feel even looking back to this point in time is really fucking tangible. Man, catharsis.

Mini Reviews

Fortress-City Fate
My thing. Worked good. I flesh out the city any time players spend time there.

Mould Cathedral
Hey, they went back apparently! I used Raggi's Esoteric Creature Generator for a bunch of the monsters and it works very well. I actually kind of forgot about that, I should use it more often!

Stonehell
Extensively reskinned to "Brasshell" beneath the capital city of my campaign map, easy to use and generally really quite good. Enough has been said about this one really! A good classic-style megadungeon.

Stone Cyst of the Shroom Priests
They went back here too! Continued where they left off... then everyone in the expedition died due to a yellow mould bomb they'd created. Awesome.
Strimmer ants may be an extrapolation on whatever was there already... large ants with whirring grassy blades between each section of them anyway.

Dwimmermount
Megadungeons seem to be the theme of this time period! Probably as a way of dealing with so many players - it's just easier. They dwimmermount-kobold forces that previous delvers spent so long making peace with were all killed. So sad. This is why the demon spider rules the first level of Dwimmermount now, and a black sun rises in the blood red skies above.

Deep Carbon Observatory - Review here.
Loved it so much. So many good memories of this module. Read it a heap of times, it's more for reading even though if/when I run it again I'll be prepared to parse a lot of complexity in play.