Retrospective 27 - In the Midsts

Thus begins the first episode of the Lockdown era.

Nobody really talks about the then-novel coronavirus any more.
We all experienced it. Kind of shit for everyone. Nobody's experience was particularly unique. High chance that you knew someone who died of it.
A depressing time really, but we endured.

On Keeping the Dream Alive

I am so glad that we kept having D&D sessions throughout the dead times of the lockdowns.
We probably would have reconvened eventually, but the fact that we tried (and succeeded) in keeping the group going is a testament to everyone in the group. Thank you everyone!

To the Moon

On reflection I think the Moon Era was probably the first time I really committed to just letting the group's memes apply directly to the game world. Shrub Nigeria was an autocorrected mispelling of Shub-Niggurath that gained a life of its own largely because Charles insisted that it was true that there was a living anthropomorphic banana who smoke weed erry day on the moon. Why a banana? Why the moon? Why the rastacap when he doesn't have dreads or even hair? These questions are lost to time.

The moon itself was intended as a sort of safe zone where canon wouldn't be affected too much as our minds fell into lockdown madness, influenced by Kitty's stories of the Iceland Madness she experienced as a youth on a trip to that frozen isle. 

Sure there are robots on the moon. Sure there's a chocolate factory. Sure there are horrible moon ant people. But worst comes to worst they can return to Earth without impacting the vague sense of pseudo-reality we've been building up over the past half-decade or so.

On Audience and the Abnegation Thereof

There's the ever-present threat, once you've started playing on video, to make it into a podcast.
After all we're having a great time, why not put it out to the wider world? Surely they'd have as much fun as us?

We had a brief discussion on this topic during a pre-game preamble, and an equally brief "yea nah" from all involved.

There's something to this. On how the players are the audience AND the player, on how this creates an endless "you had to be there", on how describing the events of the game is like describing a dream you had.
Occasionally someone hears about our game at a house party or some other social event and asks whether they can come and watch. This is never allowed, you've got to come play, you know? Be part of the thing. An observer changes what it observes, and that's as true for DnD as it is for photons.

On Treating the Moon as a Real and Present Danger

I have to confess, I love anything that messes with the moon.
If you haven't got a fantasy world with a weird moon/too many moons/not enough moons/a corpse moon, what's the point?

Trouble is, my players now have experience in messing back. POWERLAD turned into a dragon God and chucked an impossibly ancient dragon at the moon. The Red Moon foregrounded as a threat in this current sequence of recaps has (at time of writing) been de-fanged by shooting an additional god up into orbit, and even that has affected the moon by forcing the Red Elves to land their little Martian moon up there and make do behind the blockade.

Why the moon? It might be a deeper philosophical question than I give it credit for. It's up there in the sky, a permanent fixture that everyone everywhere in the world can often see, yet always changing.
If something happened to the Moon we'd all know about it.
Plus it's a real issue for Elf characters. For me it's just kind of a cool thing to be cycling home, look up at the full moon in the night sky, and think "hey cool, the Elves in my game are weak now".

Today I've got a gimmick where the moon rotates over the course of the month, with global effects depending on which face is currently facing the Earth. I though this would be a cool justification for making runes more powerful in certain sessions, but my players have felt VERY perturbed that the moon has started affected the game mechanics. Love it!

On Safe Zones

Something I've been thinking about at time of writing is how the "safe zone" of a city is very important to gameplay.

The platonic ideal of a campaign has a (relatively safe) home town with a (dangerous) adventure locale nearby. Could be a city built on or near a megadungeon. Could be a West Marches setup where the town is at the edge of the unknown wilds. Could be a Darkest Dungeon thing where you upgrade the safe zone before heading out. Could be a Gloomhaven thing where you return back to the main city even if you "die".
Chill place vs danger place. Price list vs action economy. Buy stuff here vs survive stuff there. The core experience.

On the moon, this was of course Shrub Nigeria's nan's granny flat. Get hurt hunting robots and you can retreat to the old-person-smelling embrace of the banana man's nan (who is not a banana).

On Books and Lore

Since playing over the internet is a diminished experience, I tried to make up the difference with sweet sweet lore.
It worked ok I think? That's the whole point of this specific spreadsheet and I absolutely ADORE that a full quarter of the results are now a bevy of in-canon romance novels. 

On the Anomalous Subsurface Environment

Gonzo megadungeon with laser guns and robots? Perfect for the moon!

I've not got much to say about it other than it's good and worked very well when run over the internet. Megadungeons just work. You've got bounded choices, loads of opportunity for shenanigans, and everything becomes that rich soup of intention and consequence we all love.

Five stars, no notes. Send your players into space fantasy today!

On Constrained Possibilities

 Session 264 had me start up a vaguely West Marches thing where the players could choose where they go next! I gave them a full THREE choices! This is great as a DM because you can prep some stuff and your players will go to at least one of those things.

The lesson to learn is that this is true for a "real" game. Prepare some things and your players, because they like you and because they like the game they're in, will choose one of the options set before them or at the very least tell you where and why they want to go elsewhere.
When I was new to all this I assumed that every player would want to look in every part of the game world. Wanting to know every mushroom at the foot of every tree, wanting to gallop off the map on horseback, wanting to know what was in every nook and cranny of every cave.

I used to think that I had to have all the answers, but it's ok to say "I have no idea, let me think for a sec" or even "I have nothing for that! What do you think?" and use your fellow players to massage the world into being.

On Blood in the Chocolate

Not great, not terrible. We're years out from Kiel's big controversy moment so I can say that this module is just ok. Cool to have a chocolate factory that creates real chocolate via a real industrial process, but it doesn't hang together easily. It recontextualises the OG Roald Dahl colonialism and turns it into the horror show it deserves.
It's hard to run over Zoom though. The unrelenting horror of colonial oppression didn't translate particularly well when we were all in our own little disease-ridden universe. Plus I ran it as written and a bunch of oompa-loompas abusing a blueberry person still sucks shit.

Basically, it's ok, but nix the obvious worst bits.

- I still wish I'd run the boss as an "OH HO HO HOOOOOO!" jumping bouncing anime ball of an enemy.