In the last ten sessions we've gone from dinner parties with demons to battles with angels!
On the shape of the game:
I do enjoy how much the general focus and gameplay of the campaign change over time.
On the shape of the game:
I do enjoy how much the general focus and gameplay of the campaign change over time.
We've gone from tying off Moondin's complex and interweaving socially-focused multi-plot, to overland travel, to delving back into Dwimmermount for some traditional goal-focused dungeoneering.
There's almost a rhythm to it. Last time we had a bunch of sessions dealing with a complicated political situation, that also ended with some palette-cleansing megadungeon play.
That happened in Moondin too, I guess that's just what happened when the party gets a reputation somewhere!
On Moondin:
So by the time of the last Retrospective, the party was deeply enmeshed in the Moondin situation.
The Boat Festival was still going, Isen Heisenberg and Arach-Nacha were still researching the ultimate poison, and the Cult of Ninhursag was tearing itself apart.
By the time the party left, the Boat Festival was cancelled, Isen Heisenberg and Arach-Nacha were dead, and the Cult of Ninhursag was united once more.
Not bad for a few week's work!
They managed to solve the Boat Festival and the Demons who were running it by, essentially, inviting some power players to a nice sit-down dinner and hashing out a solution.
Sir Robyn, the party's wizard Lawyer, got to actually do some legal stuff by finding a breach in the contract that allowed the demons to organise the Boat Festival. More fun than it sounds!
And even better, they left enforcement of the legal consequences to a bigger and more capable organisation instead of going from Demon house to Demon house turfing them out!
Very social and political and exactly the opposite of how you normally sort out a situation in modern D&D.
Instead of murdering the source of the problem themselves, they found a legal solution and had the proper authorities sort it out! I was chuffed, especially since this is the sort of getting-people-to-work-together-in-the-face-of-disaster thing I was so enamoured by in my article last year on how my world is ending.
On Demons:
The demons in Moondin were real fun, based on the Flower Liches in the module I'll link below (and do a proper review of soon).
I've said this before, but I really like how demons have turned out. They're powerful enemies (and so players have never attacked them) but they're awfully chatty and, best of all, they've got recognisable desires.
Once you know what Sin the demon consumes (identified by the colour of their mask), you know what they want and generally how they're going to act. That's leverage! You can talk!
I don't know if anyone's twigged that demons embody the Virtue that's opposite the Sin they consume, but it makes demons generally very nice people to talk to.
I like them a lot, especially Japhet & Hirsch who were a two-headed demon I played like a very effete gay couple. They were a lot of fun, and still alive!
On Galaxy Johnson's Death:
Tragically, Galaxy Johnson the "Alien" Elf died, pursued by demons.
He was notably Charles' first character with a personality, even if that personality was based on being a meme alien.
Galaxy Johnson getting his shit wrecked by an old man was truly one of my favourite moments in the game to date. He will be missed.
Considering he died mostly because he decided to have a snack in the middle of a hot pursuit, rather than using the opportunity to activate Elf-boosted Spiderclimb and teleport through shadows to escape, his death is firmly on Charles rather than blind chance,
Still sad though
On heroism:
To my delight, POWERLAD's player has been playing him as a proper out-and-out heroic character.
Considering the general deadliness and moral grey of my game, choosing to be a hero is a legitimately risky decision. But then heroism without risk isn't really heroism at all, is it?
So there he goes, POWERLAD, the most purely good character I've had in the game in a long time... maybe ever.
On the other hand there does seem to be some lingering risk of adultery. POWERLAD's got a girl who's really into him right here, and his wife Bertha is so very far away in Moondin...
On flight:
The impact of flight on the game is interesting. POWERLAD has dragon wings, the casters have access to the classic Fly spell, and Styx the Goblin has been inventing some wild stuff with runes.
All of this together means that flight has become a fairly common thing in my game.
The biggest surprise to me was that it doesn't totally break everything. Overland travel is much easier, naturally, but dungeoncrawling isn't affected so much. Maybe some extra options are available in the case of large pits or multi-level holes, but other than that it's fine!
On angels:
I've said this before mainly, but angels are great.
Immune to magic, communicate through song, quasi-robotic entities with a hierarchical connection to God, all that stuff.
The most pressing thing is that they automatically target Chaotic entities and many in the party are Chaotic, so they have a much easier time treating with demons than they do with angels.
Very fitting.
On food shortage:
Since we're on the Third Trumpet of Revelation at the moment, we've got a third of all plants dead, a third of all the oceans turned to blood, and now a third of all drinking water is tainted.
This means, naturally, that there's going to be a struggle to get food!
At the moment the party's got a big stock of Iron Rations that they grabbed from the stockpiles of a dead town, but in the weeks to come this might become more difficult to do...
I've got a whole food subsystem ready building on Throne of Salt's Unified Food Theory post.
Should be fun I hope!
I talked about this last time, and now it's complete!
The events were impacted and interwoven with a bunch of other stuff and translated from Wuxia East to my setting so it wasn't a "pure" playthrough, but it was good content!
The lich house "dungeons" are poorly keyed in that they're just sort of described out of order in a long explanatory page-long ramble, but once they're expanded out the content is good.
Full review to come, but long story short it's worth a purchase!
Throne of the Toad King
Man, I've got a fuckload of use out of this dungeon. They're still going back occasionally, and now they've trapped a crystal dragon down there.
Real good, easily reskinned, used it a ton.
The Magma Lake of Ninhursag
Still going to write this up one day.
Big magma lake, crystal trees, vines, guards, the works.
Fuck For Satan
A fun little module despite the edgy name!
Raggi loves the player expectation inversion dungeon. In this case there's a generic dnd problem (kids gone missing) and a generic dnd solution (local dungeon).
Surprise! The dungeon doesn't solve the problem and is unrelated to literally everything else in the module. There is a note out the front that tells players as much though.
Only thing is I don't run generic dnd, so it wasn't quiiiite such a wacky expectation inversion for my group.
Anyway, this was fun.
I changed the kid-stealing problem from an intelligent child-eating bear to some campaign-specific child necromancer twins, which led to some craziness.
I kept the giant walking psychic alien cock monster though, and the resultant surrounding gay orgy.
Dwimmermount
I like Dwimmermount. Unfortunately I can't recommend buying it because it's published by Alexander Macris who is a fascist and/or supporter of fascists.
It's wordy and has fun impacts on my campaign's historical timeline, but don't give the man your money.
That happened in Moondin too, I guess that's just what happened when the party gets a reputation somewhere!
On Moondin:
So by the time of the last Retrospective, the party was deeply enmeshed in the Moondin situation.
The Boat Festival was still going, Isen Heisenberg and Arach-Nacha were still researching the ultimate poison, and the Cult of Ninhursag was tearing itself apart.
By the time the party left, the Boat Festival was cancelled, Isen Heisenberg and Arach-Nacha were dead, and the Cult of Ninhursag was united once more.
Not bad for a few week's work!
They managed to solve the Boat Festival and the Demons who were running it by, essentially, inviting some power players to a nice sit-down dinner and hashing out a solution.
Sir Robyn, the party's wizard Lawyer, got to actually do some legal stuff by finding a breach in the contract that allowed the demons to organise the Boat Festival. More fun than it sounds!
And even better, they left enforcement of the legal consequences to a bigger and more capable organisation instead of going from Demon house to Demon house turfing them out!
Very social and political and exactly the opposite of how you normally sort out a situation in modern D&D.
Instead of murdering the source of the problem themselves, they found a legal solution and had the proper authorities sort it out! I was chuffed, especially since this is the sort of getting-people-to-work-together-in-the-face-of-disaster thing I was so enamoured by in my article last year on how my world is ending.
On Demons:
The demons in Moondin were real fun, based on the Flower Liches in the module I'll link below (and do a proper review of soon).
I've said this before, but I really like how demons have turned out. They're powerful enemies (and so players have never attacked them) but they're awfully chatty and, best of all, they've got recognisable desires.
Once you know what Sin the demon consumes (identified by the colour of their mask), you know what they want and generally how they're going to act. That's leverage! You can talk!
I don't know if anyone's twigged that demons embody the Virtue that's opposite the Sin they consume, but it makes demons generally very nice people to talk to.
I like them a lot, especially Japhet & Hirsch who were a two-headed demon I played like a very effete gay couple. They were a lot of fun, and still alive!
On Galaxy Johnson's Death:
Tragically, Galaxy Johnson the "Alien" Elf died, pursued by demons.
He was notably Charles' first character with a personality, even if that personality was based on being a meme alien.
Galaxy Johnson getting his shit wrecked by an old man was truly one of my favourite moments in the game to date. He will be missed.
Considering he died mostly because he decided to have a snack in the middle of a hot pursuit, rather than using the opportunity to activate Elf-boosted Spiderclimb and teleport through shadows to escape, his death is firmly on Charles rather than blind chance,
Still sad though
On heroism:
To my delight, POWERLAD's player has been playing him as a proper out-and-out heroic character.
Considering the general deadliness and moral grey of my game, choosing to be a hero is a legitimately risky decision. But then heroism without risk isn't really heroism at all, is it?
So there he goes, POWERLAD, the most purely good character I've had in the game in a long time... maybe ever.
On the other hand there does seem to be some lingering risk of adultery. POWERLAD's got a girl who's really into him right here, and his wife Bertha is so very far away in Moondin...
On flight:
The impact of flight on the game is interesting. POWERLAD has dragon wings, the casters have access to the classic Fly spell, and Styx the Goblin has been inventing some wild stuff with runes.
All of this together means that flight has become a fairly common thing in my game.
The biggest surprise to me was that it doesn't totally break everything. Overland travel is much easier, naturally, but dungeoncrawling isn't affected so much. Maybe some extra options are available in the case of large pits or multi-level holes, but other than that it's fine!
On angels:
I've said this before mainly, but angels are great.
Immune to magic, communicate through song, quasi-robotic entities with a hierarchical connection to God, all that stuff.
The most pressing thing is that they automatically target Chaotic entities and many in the party are Chaotic, so they have a much easier time treating with demons than they do with angels.
Very fitting.
On food shortage:
Since we're on the Third Trumpet of Revelation at the moment, we've got a third of all plants dead, a third of all the oceans turned to blood, and now a third of all drinking water is tainted.
This means, naturally, that there's going to be a struggle to get food!
At the moment the party's got a big stock of Iron Rations that they grabbed from the stockpiles of a dead town, but in the weeks to come this might become more difficult to do...
I've got a whole food subsystem ready building on Throne of Salt's Unified Food Theory post.
Should be fun I hope!
Mini-Reviews
I talked about this last time, and now it's complete!
The events were impacted and interwoven with a bunch of other stuff and translated from Wuxia East to my setting so it wasn't a "pure" playthrough, but it was good content!
The lich house "dungeons" are poorly keyed in that they're just sort of described out of order in a long explanatory page-long ramble, but once they're expanded out the content is good.
Full review to come, but long story short it's worth a purchase!
Throne of the Toad King
Man, I've got a fuckload of use out of this dungeon. They're still going back occasionally, and now they've trapped a crystal dragon down there.
Real good, easily reskinned, used it a ton.
The Magma Lake of Ninhursag
Still going to write this up one day.
Big magma lake, crystal trees, vines, guards, the works.
Fuck For Satan
A fun little module despite the edgy name!
Raggi loves the player expectation inversion dungeon. In this case there's a generic dnd problem (kids gone missing) and a generic dnd solution (local dungeon).
Surprise! The dungeon doesn't solve the problem and is unrelated to literally everything else in the module. There is a note out the front that tells players as much though.
Only thing is I don't run generic dnd, so it wasn't quiiiite such a wacky expectation inversion for my group.
Anyway, this was fun.
I changed the kid-stealing problem from an intelligent child-eating bear to some campaign-specific child necromancer twins, which led to some craziness.
I kept the giant walking psychic alien cock monster though, and the resultant surrounding gay orgy.
Dwimmermount
I like Dwimmermount. Unfortunately I can't recommend buying it because it's published by Alexander Macris who is a fascist and/or supporter of fascists.
It's wordy and has fun impacts on my campaign's historical timeline, but don't give the man your money.
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