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.

Retrospective 26 - Last Orders Before Lockdown

It has come to my attention that people actually read these things!

Subsequently I have discovered that the last Retrospective I ever did started with the following ominous message...

How young we were. How foolish.

As I start to write this it is 29th August 2024. Thus begins the great work of dredging. I must once more delve into the past and remember what was, burdened with accursed foresight.

On Retrospectives in General

Something that keeps striking me on restarting the retrospectives is how insane and unique an experience this is. Most people don't have this.

Even if you're in that slim sliver of humanity who plays tabletop RPGs, most people don't have a decades-long ongoing campaign where I can read about what happened in the past and see how the effects of those decisions are still relevant in the imaginary game-world milieu of today.

There's a time in the next few years where I'll have been running this game for over half of my lifespan. Wild!

On the Novel Coronavirus

Looking back it's interesting to see these recaps coming out while there must have been that building sense of dread during the start of 2020, culminating in the first of many online D&D sessions in Session 260.

It's darkly funny that almost exactly a year after my campaign reached the post-apocalypse, the real world had an apocalypse of its own.

I know we've all undergone the Great Forgetting and now rarely talk about the pandemic, but it was a hell of a thing in those early days approaching the first Lockdown.

This is very evident in the 3 week gap between Session 258 and 259 - I'd gone to Venice for my Stag Do during the time when Italy was ground zero for the spread of Covid in the EU, and subsequently been forced to isolate!
Great time to go though. Next time there's a global disaster do consider hitting a tourist hotspot so you can see the sights with no queues.
(Do not do this).

I imagine there will be more to ruminate on regarding the lockdown experience in the next Retrospective, so for now I will leave it there!

On the Difficulties of Playing PCs as NPCs

There was a whole arc here where our heroes had to fight and destroy Styx (a former PC) who had taken over Fortress-City Fate in an earlier era.

The trouble is that I've never quite worked out how to do it when the former PC is important in the game world now, not to mention an adversary.
What if I get them wrong? What if the player thinks I'm mocking them personally by the way I'm playing their character? A character is a private thing in some ways, and my taking control of them must be crossing some sort of inchoate boundary.

In this case it was kind of fine. The character kind of got corrupted by their power and so their actions are kind of justifiably under my control. The same way reading a spooky book made it kind of fine for Wanda to discard all her character growth and become obsessed with her imaginary children in that one Dr Strange movie.

It still doesn't quite sit right, but that did lead to me making up the Mentor mechanic so that people's retired characters can be largely off-screen and played by them if necessary!

This may become an issue in the current (Aug-Sep 2024) era because there is now a new God made of PCs... but I foreshadow too much.

On Neo-Spacedin

Weirdly I'd forgotten about the insane story of how Neo-Spacedin came to be!

Built around a crashed UFO whose replicator is stuck on the Undercooked Hawaiian Pizza setting, populated by Mod Cons (sentient modern home appliances) and Indomes (human minds from the Matrix sleeved into real bodies who use the world as a survival video game).

Any time I try to pretend that I'm running a grim and gritty hardcore version of D&D, remind me that Neo Spacedin was founded after the players had an orgy with a bunch of whisks.

I also love the running joke that every newly formed town is some variation on Moondin.
Fun fact - it's called Moondin as a play on "Mundane" because the original joke was that the forest it's in is the only non-magical forest ever found in a fantasy setting.

On the Birth of the Dharga

Wow I didn't realise that this was the time period when the Dharga was formed!
Session 256 sees Dargo, a character whose entire vibe was getting bigger and more horrible as an Inheritor, ascending to a sort of Godhood as a giant flesh-tree.

Wait... how many PCs get retired as a result of some sort of apotheosis? I should look at the stats. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become God.

I remember this being one of those dramatic "rules don't matter, let's see how it lands" moments.

The great adversary was the Styxmind - the core Styx that controls Fortress-City Fate - a multifaceted being who wanted to impose his Law while being ontologically Neutral.
Opposing him was Sir Robyn, a lawyer wizard thereby containing the conceptuality of Law while being a wielder of Chaos.
Consuming both was Dargo, a being of Chaos invoking the world-consuming yet nonetheless Neutral Shub-Niggurath to become enormous and kaiju-formed, growing to encompass both in a horrific fleshy Yggdrassil. Chaos and Law united!

Russell, Dargo's player, has not returned since the pandemic. Kind of a perfect end to a player run honestly.

This was also eventually be the origin of JONATHON TOAST. An airship! Made of flesh!
I will talk more on Jonathon Toast as he becomes a gameplay concern, then a running joke, then a joke that's too existentially terrifying to be funny any more.

Wait a sec this was also the first session involving Jeremy Wizard! Charles' characters are famously all just Charles in a wig, so I think a lot of Jeremy's vibes get mixed up with the later iteration Celebus in the group's collective imaginary.

On the Best Death

Oh wait I also didn't realise that this run involved what must be in the running for the best ever character death!

After the horrors of the Dharga's emergence, the fleeing players in their wagon were assaulted by a dragon! How could I forget that Andromeda was riding a skeletal motorbike at the time??

During the dragon's assault Tom's character is thrown out of the wagon by a mis-thrown grenade, flies through the air, casts Dig Grave, thumps into said grave, and instantly dies.
Honestly it brings a tear to my eye.
Technically Rivière is still alive because this was a Necromancer Chaos Burst that caused temporary death, but since he never returned one must imagine that he died in that self-dug grave.

On Evicting Styx

The last act before the Lockdown truly took hold and the Moon Era began was the gang -

WAIT WHAT

I peeked ahead to the first session we had back after lockdown and saw the following -

At time of writing that has only just been resolved!

Hands on hearts, bow to George, for resolving the Four Year Dwimmermount Plan.
18 August 2020 - 20 August 2024

Truly incredible.

On Evicting Styx

Ok for real this time.

Their last act as Lockdown drew in is, in retrospect, a real Scouring of the Shire capstone to this era.
They capture the Styxmind in a giant flesh tree. They claim a wagonful of Iron Rations to take back to New Moondin. They escape a dragon attack.

They return home... and find that an iteration of Styx has taken over the place in a Seraphim previously occupied by The Lady!

I remember expecting this to be a whole cool subterfuge-centred segment of the campaign.
Uniting factions, scraping together the remnants of the old order, feints and direct targeted strikes to restore New Moondin to its former glory.

Alas, the Lockdown came slamming in! The New Moondin plot was resolved via a concordance of allies and shenanigans (which to be fair is a very satisfactory way for a plot to be resolved), and we had to retreat behind our laptops for MONTHS!

Retrospective 25 - Enter the Dino-Dome!

2020! A whole new decade!

Crazily enough this marks nine years in the campaign world (considering the first characters to make landfall were in Australia back in December 2011) and almost six years since I started running in the UK (Feb 2014). Where's all that time gone?!
I suppose next year I'll have to do a decade in review. Don't hold me to it!

Anyway, these retrospectives are in 10-session chunks, so let's look back at what's been going on more recently as we come into this fresh new wartorn fire-stricken decade.

This segment of the campaign dealt with one main new area - the Dino-Dome!
A reskinned and retrofitted World of the Lost, this massive dome of diamond keeps the terrible apocalyptic weather off and enables the high-oxygen world inside it to exist!
The whole place is controlled by the quasi-deity Styx, a Goblin and former PC who got uploaded to Fortress-City Fate close to the climax of the End War.

Lore aside, this dome is basically a high-level high-danger area full of dinosaurs and vampires and a suspiciously reasonable God-King who likes to give his subjects complete freedom... up to a point.

One of the most powerful sessions we've had hinged not on danger or dinosaurs, but on the philosophical question of "what is real"...



On a Simulated Reality Inside a Simulated Reality Inside Our Heads

Long story short - after overcoming many dangers, they got to the centre of the Dino-Dome where they got uploaded to the Real World.

There they met Styx who told them in no uncertain terms that their world, the game world we've been playing in since the post-apoc reboot, is a lie.
They've been living in a simulation, the Real World is a paradise! After the world ended everyone in Fate was uploaded to the Matrix and liquefied. A bajillion years later, when the world recovered, Styx re-downloaded everyone into identical clone bodies and set them free into this new paradise. Simple!
Some people enjoy downloading themselves into simulations, like the Poison World sim they'd been living in, and now that they're out won't they please stay?

This sounded far too good to be true, kicking off a whole session that was mostly intense philosophical discussion about the value of living forever in a world without struggle, and whether this alleged "Real World" was itself the simulation, and whether it truly mattered either way.
Which is even more interesting because both "worlds" are equally fake and equally real since they both occur in our collective heads as we make up bullshit around a table with dice.

Great times!

In the end they chose their original world of suffering over the new world of perfection, which is pretty much what happened to the first iteration of the Matrix if I remember right. People just can't bear paradise.
Plus you only get exp through hardship, and what's the point of playing this game if you're not getting exp?

On Untrustworthy NPCs

I only just realised this, but there's been a bit of a theme of powerful NPCs with an agenda fucking things up whenever they're called upon to fix things.
The Lady took control of the Seraphim and marched it on Fate, rather than properly help the party.
Styx is a far-sighted and petty God with unreliable goals, making him an unpredictable nightmare.
Bertha is beset by a living embodiment of her grief which makes her hard to deal with.
And Gifflewim is an arbitrarily powerful Elf, and lo and behold he fucked things up right good instead of solving things properly.

Maybe the lesson is to never trust authority??



On Fighters Being OP

Gambits have gone too far, man!
Our resident Fighter, Red, has thoroughly been rinsing the Gambit rules. With a Fighter's beastly attack stat and the +8 Aim Bonus from aiming a rifle and the armour penetration of said rifle, she's been easily wiping the floor with any enemies by declaring stuff like "I want to shoot them all in the head in one shot".

The trouble is I'm torn. A Fighter is good at fighting! That's the whole point! Plus it's really fun!
But it's getting boring when one person can just one-shot any enemy with a high likelihood of success, especially with the massive array of different options you can get from a Gambit.

The key mechanical trouble is that gambits are based on AC, not HD, which means that a creature with 20 HD and 12 AC is more easily defeated in one blow than a 0-level dude in plate armour.
Not that armour matters when you've got a gun, compounding the issue.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do about it yet, other than maybe just disallow "kill" as a viable gambit attempt and rely on players not taking the piss! Gambits are otherwise pretty much a perfect blend of fun and simple, so I don't want to mess things up with a heavy-handed mechanical change.

On PvP

After the frankly exhausting saga of Grumpy and Snels which started fun, got tense, got shit, and basically stayed shit forever since, I've thoroughly been disabused of my previous position that "PvP can be fun and interesting!"

On balance it's been a good thing for me to learn from.
Warning signs. Recognising when it's no longer fun. How supporting ongoing intra-party conflict is a bad fucking look. Why putting a foot down is actually important.
Most importantly, realising when my high-minded "open world means you can do anything!" ideals have slipped into "open world means you can ruin other people's fun!"

Hopefully there won't be a next time, but if there is I hope I'll be better at dealing with it.

On Burnout

I feel like burnout is something you can only recognise in retrospect, like the thing with the frog in the boiling water.
I don't want to recount the whole saga and old wounds again. Suffice to say that this tiresome feud technically started in May, came to a head in early October, and never stopped. Eight fucking months. What was I thinking?
Weird how this lines up with that big content gap at the end of last year on the main blog. Almost like I should have noticed sooner.

On top of this, World of the Lost is cool but needs some love to make it usable. It also needed to be reskinned to fit my world and travel rules. Already getting burnt out on the internecine strife (not to mention Brexit, the UK election, and all that shit) I sort of coasted to a finish at the end of last year.

Coming back fresh in January felt fucking wonderful. So fresh! So vibrant! So prepped! An encouraging optimism for the year ahead!
Pity about the real world, but at least I've got an imaginary one to escape to with my mates.



On Vampires

They've been dealing with vampires a bit lately, considering they're one of the major factions in the Dino-Dome.
And dealing with vampires means dealing with that most menacing of vampire threats - level drain!
Yes, level drain is here in its pure form. At least they get a save.

They know the risks to fighting vampires, and since most vampires seem to be fairly friendly (despite their outrageous and ubiquitous Transylvanian accents) there hasn't been so much need for conflict with these guys.

Spoiler for later blog posts - a made a couple of vampire PC classes!

One intended for those level-drained to death: Vampire Class.
One for the extremely niche case of a Cleric suddenly becoming a Vampire due to a magic mirror: Vampire Cleric Class.

I was considering having a template Vampire that just slots over existing classes, but surely having gimmicky niche vampire types is better... right?

Oh and I also LOVED the ongoing joke that some vampires just have on big central tooth!

On the Thing

Boy has one of my players taken the concept of the Inheritor and absolutely run with it!
Originally intended as a kind of body-horror-themed monster ability stealer, he's taken that lore and become something between the Thing and a Dr Frankenstein.
Currently he has plots to experiment with brain-swapping and rat mutations, and he's already helped create abominable dino-human baby hybrids.

It's one of those classic situations where I'm pulled between "nuh-uh, the mechanics say..." and "fucking hell this is amazing" so I'm sure I'll break soon. Allowing all this mad experimentation means having so many opportunities for things to go so bad in such a fun way!

A Mad Science system with partial successes might be the way forward...

Mini-Reviews

World of the Lost

You know what's cool about a sandbox map where like half the hexes aren't keyed? Me neither. It's like getting halfway through cooking a meal and realising you forgot an ingredient.
Still, thematically it's cool. It's hard to fuck up dinosaurs and robots and slime monsters, and those hexes that are keyed are often interrelated.
I basically just slapped this down on my current campaign map and wiggled it around until it fit.
Also reduced the hexes to 1 mile instead of 6 miles because 6 mile hexes are for losers.

Basically it's got good things in it but treat it as building blocks instead of a finished house.


Gimmick Sessions:

The end of the year always inevitably has a couple of gimmick sessions around Halloween and Christmas.

This time I ran Mothership for Halloween, with the players living through an extremely lightly reskinned Pitch Black. That was a good time! A good mix of exploration and action and mystery solving. Loved the char gen flowchart, absolutely did not utilise the Fear rules as much as I should have. Real good!

On Christmas I ran a real silly gimmick session of a real silly gimmick RPG: Motherfuckin' Crab Truckers. I never wrote it up, but it was a real fun time! Allegedly set a bajillion years in the future where our campaign world is overrun by intelligent crabs, they faced off against cops, traffic jams, and a crab-dragon in their quest to deliver a truckful of toys to needy crab children.

I made kustom kharacter kheets for Crab Truckers and I love them all so please behold them:

Retrospective 24 - Angels and Fascists

What convenient timing for a Retrospective, just after the party's weeks-long quest to clear out a crashed angel dropship was resolved and a new frontier awaits!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Really this long arc kicked off with the rise of fascism in the hub town of New Moondin, causing major interpersonal issues down the line...

On a Fascist Uprising

Oh, how innocent I was. Thinking that the post-disaster cohesion of the last of humanity would enable a utopian paradise where the Goblins farmed food for all, the Undead would work the fields, the various factions would live in harmony, and we could get all fully automated gay space communism up in here.

It turns out that in the absence of a government, someone can impose a government.
That person was Damnation Snels, a Cleric and leader of the Snelsman faith, whose highly motivated religious minions were able to neatly take control of the town in a bloodless coup under the pretext of security.

Since this was a neat parallel to present politics in the real world, I thought this was a grand old time.
As it turns out, not everyone was comfortable with fascism...


On Being a Bad DM

I was so caught up in the spicy melange of political intrigue that I ignored and downplayed the growing rift that had opened up at the table.
In the red corner, Damnation Snels. Played by a player who enjoys having a significant impact on the game world and playing morally suspect characters.
In the blue corner, Grumpy. Played by a player who refuses to support a villain campaign where the party ruins the world "for funsies" and rarely accepts compromise.

The net effect of this was a simmering undercurrent of tension. They agreed to disagree and played in the same party for the sake of group cohesion, but that tension was never resolved.

At its heart my failure was in trying to resolve a player-level issue in the fiction. This was a clash between playstyles, not a mere in-character rivalry, and treating it as such led to some extremely poor DMing and nearly lost me a very good player.

My in-fiction solution was to essentially make it a political clash. My assumption being that if one of the two rival characters won the support of the town, that would be the matter resolved.
In the end Damnation Snels won by a landslide. Problem solved, I thought!
I was wrong.

As of time of writing, this all came to a head in a massive breach of the social contract in Session 241. That's outside the scope of this Retrospective though, and while I think the situation is on its way to being resolved I don't want to write about it in case it's not!


On Travel

Travel is hard. Hard in a way that I don't think the players have fully grasped yet.

There's always talk of "lets quickly pop back to town with the loot", and said quick trip takes up a whole session. This is especially true when they're all fully armoured and thus extremely slow.
Recent additions of special Steed and Wagon rules will hopefully help with this, allowing players to hoon down the ruined roads of this dead planet, but on foot it's slow as hell.

This is on purpose, partially because slow travel limits how many hexes I need to key at a time (laziness is key!) and partially because travel is intended to be a Big Deal now.

So it works, but travel difficulty is always underestimated! Such as the time when their quick jaunt back to sell some angel corpses resulted in fighting a dragon!


On Dragons

Oh fuck yea, they fought an actual dragon!
I have these things on the overland encounter table because my game has a ton of dungeons and no dragons.
This particular beastie was an Explosion Dragon. Breath like a mortar, explosive teleportation, all sorts! In the end they managed to kill it through the power of bullshit and a powerful gambit. Good times!
Only one casualty, but that was down to luck rather than skill, and one of the survivors had their skin burnt off in the creature's death throes which was particularly horrifying!


On Crabs

A surprisingly common foe during their travels has been Stoneshell Crabs. Massive hermit crabs who use big rocks as a shell and hunker down under it during Gas Fronts when the hyper-poisonous fog blows in.
Each time they've met them the crabs have been a little more prepared, leading to a running joke where they gain a little more sentience every time they show up.
I dig this, so it's probably going to happen now!

On Hexes

I eventually caved on my idea of pretending my hex map was not, in fact, a hex map and have started describing things in terms of hexes rather than being intentionally loose and obfuscatey.
Hence the very pretty map that Carter has been filling in as they explore!

On Angels

The last few sessions were focused on clearing out a crashed Seraphim - a huge dropship that once hung in the sky and deployed spherical angels for mysterious apocalypse reasons.
While angels are powerful foes, the fact that there were a finite number of angels within meant that the party started a tactic of going in, killing a few, then dragging their bodies out.

This did, unfortunately, reveal the weakness of such a strategy. It's a little boring! Combat is fun and all, but if all you do is combat then not much else occurs in a session!

Thankfully they eventually heeded a rumour they'd once heard and waited until Sunday when the robotic beings started glitching out. With the angels on the fritz they strolled in, used their map of the place to find their way to the centre of the dropship, and... downloaded a God into the mainframe.
Now in control of the Seraphim, said deity then proceeded to start marching off to the north so she could complete goals of her own. Handy!
At least they got the exp!

Mini-Reviews:

Crashed Seraphim
A reskinned version of a rotating one-page dungeon (which I would appreciate my players not looking at too hard), the rotating ring structure made this Fun for me, but hard to map for the players!
Good times, I really enjoyed the gimmick. Plus I can reuse it for many other crashed Seraphim in the future!

Retrospective 23 - Into the Wastes

This past few months of the game has been, for me, a process of settling into new mechanics and really trying to get into that hexcrawl mindset.

It's kinda working! The essential ingredients were to add in some more rigorous overland travel mechanics, more detailed hexes, and some extra bits around weather and foraging.
Now overland travel is Interesting in itself.

As of right now I'm pretty happy with the refocus! Limiting the party to an expedition per month means that we're already into campaign Winter and the timeline's skipping along. I really wanted to push the timeline forward so we can see civilisation regrow, and that's been working out pretty well!

On the Rebuild:

I feel like the Rebuild mechanics are going well and the hub town of New Moondin has grown nicely. They're sustaining the population through winter at least!

I'll post this up on the blog at some point. Long story short it's an extremely simple worker-placement game. Choices made on the Rebuild map affect the players' purchasing power in the town for the whole season. It seems to work!

My only worry is that it's not table-inclusive enough. This might change if everyone has a pet town to manage, but at the moment there's a smaller core of people interested in doing Rebuild stuff while everyone else buys gear or whatever. I might be overthinking it, but it's a potential issue!

On Weather:

The other fun thing about pushing the timeline forward is the march of the seasons. More specifically - I've been able to try out my many weather charts!
Last session we finally had a death due to weather when someone got caught out in a Gas Front, so hopefully that's put the fear of weather in them.

I'm thinking of weather as the main travel challenge these days. Pre-apocalypse I had encounters with creatures as the main travel issue, but these days almost everything is dead!
They've had very occasional confrontations with weird post-apoc creatures and some random human scavengers, but in the main the real risk has been about the weather and the terrain and what people are going to eat.

My only issue is needing to find a way to fast-forward the weather when they spend a few weeks resting up, but that's no big deal really.


On Encumbrance:

It turns out travelling overland on a very limited hex-by-hex basis means encumbrance is a big damn deal!
The classic trade-off between speed and protection is exacerbated because armour now also weather protection. If your armour breaks, you're exposed to the elements and start taking worse damage.
Plus there's acid rain now which eats away at your gear when you travel in it.
What's an adventurer to do?

They've reacted in two ways.
The most fun one for me is the rise of the Skeleton Porter. Have a Necromancer program a skeleton butler for you and you're off to the races! You can't order them around unless you're a Necromancer, so most have to make do with a simple if/then/else order.
The other solution is quite interesting mechanically. Barrett, played by Tom, has bought an elaborate wagon pulled by skeleton horse and blown by wind. Fun fluff aside, having a wagon as a limited fast-travel option along roads is very cool! As settlements are founded and roads are built, they'll increase their ability to travel around protected from the weather.



On Cooking:

The Cooking Subsystem has been getting a hell of a workout over the past few months!

I really enjoy how cooking a nice meal has become a standard thing to do when they set up camp at night, and the fact that they've been carrying around oils and spices and all the other cooking accoutrements despite the aforementioned encumbrance limitations is a delight.

Part of the fun of it has been the randomised basic ingredients available in the hub town. Each month we roll to see what they've got available, and if they're lucky there'll be stuff available to cook a favoured meal.
If the town ingredients were guaranteed every month I'm sure we'd see the party go back to the same meals for consistent bonuses, so randomising heads this off a little bit.

The other side of the coin is that foraged food is set per hex. That is - find a certain food there one time and you'll always be able to find it again. That way if they really need Ferfect Chicken for a dish, they can take a trip out to the Ferfect Chicken area and forage for it!
This kind of means that foraging is more difficult but more consistent, while hub town ingredients are easy to get but unreliable. I think that strikes a nice balance!

On Parry:

We've got a proper Fighter for the first time in a while in Red, and we're seeing the true power of the Fighter Parry!
Basically they get +4 to AC and if missed by a melee attack, the Fighter gets a free counterattack against the target. The end result is that our resident Fighter gets a bunch of attacks per round when surrounded, which is pretty cool!
It certainly feels swashbuckly, and it's super effective against swarms of weak enemies which is exactly where the Fighter is meant to sit vs the Barbarian. Success!


On the Wild Hunt:

Something real cool that happened was I finally had an opportunity to unleash the Wild Hunt on someone.
The idea that the Wild Hunt comes for you if you eat an Elf heart has been in the game for over half a decade, and it finally happened!

There was an unexpected interaction with the "one Expedition per month" thing, since the Wild Hunt was originally to be a looming nightly threat and that doesn't play well with rolling the timeline forward rapidly.

It kinda worked out in the end with a bit of handwaving.
Essentially the Wild Hunt is an "Elves fall, everyone dies" deal, and so poor old Jasmine found herself alone and outclassed fleeing not one but two flavours of Wild Hunt.

Each species of Elf has a different way of hunting. For instance the Flitting Gads (Featherfall Elves) try to spook you into the open where they can send razor-sharp butterflies to tear you to pieces, and Brackenfrau (Charm Person Elves) charm ordinary folk against you and watch them hunt you like dangerous game.
Jasmine was being hunted by both, so it was quite the spectacle!

This just so happened to coincide with some Carousing consequences, so we had a "The Hangover" session where the main party was trying to piece together just what happened the night before, while occasionally flashing back to Jasmine's desperate struggle against the Elves.

She didn't make it, despite giving it a jolly good go.
Part of the gimmick was that you can't use the same hiding spot twice - the Elves will find you if you try the same trick again - and that's what happened to Jasmine.
It didn't help that she'd filled her extra-dimensional hidey hole with razor butterflies either...

Mini-Reviews

I did a fair bit of reskinning for most of these, so these reviews aren't entirely reflective!

Modnar's Cellar
I reskinned this from a relatively generic wizard's tower into some sort of non-euclidean space that Elves broke into a decade or so ago and killed the main guy.
Somewhat explored, it's a fairly generic dungeon but solid.

Stonehell

Say whaaat? Yea I broke out the Stonehell again because I needed a valley with caves and the opening bit of Stonehell was just the ticket.
Extensive reworking meant I pretty much just used the map... but whatever Stonehell's great. If you somehow don't have it yet, worth a purchase.

Crashed Seraphim
I won't link this because I don't trust my players enough! Cool gimmick, I'll link one day.

Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos
How did this forest of living trees come to grow in the post-apocalypse? Weird pregnancy shit, that's what!
Short dungeon accessed via a forest of sad zombies who cry at you. It would have been harder to find said short dungeon, but player bullshit (tm) solved that little issue!
Exacerbated the general sadness and loneliness by having all the treasure turn to stone when you kill the main boss, because that sucks and life sucks and everything sucks.
Banger of a module though. Led directly to a character having their cock turned to stone and indirectly to him having a coin-operated cock that needs to be paid to pee like it's a London tube station loo. Good times!

Kink
A thing I made up myself for once. Go me!

Flesh for the Witch Queen
Linked even though I don't trust my players enough (pls don't read!), I vaguely remember using this in an earlier age. Anyway, reskinned and double-reskinned in the time since.
Cool but relatively linear dungeon, fun serial killer baddies, and a lot of room to add extra bullshit.
Good times for a one page dungeon!

Retrospective 22 - And We're Back!

It's only been five sessions since the last Retrospective and it already feels like a lot has happened!
Buckle up, I've got a lot of thoughts.


Cold Winter:

We bridged the thirteen-year gap between the End War and the start of the post-apocalypse with a minigame - the lengthily named Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Of This Cold Winter.
Reskinned from a harrowing winter season to a harrowing decade or so of apocalypse survival, it worked really well!
I'll say a little more in the mini-review at the end, but it was very good. Lots of nail-biting decision making, visible despair, and whoops of triumph when something went right for once.
The surviving groups made up the demographics of the final town, which was good groundwork for me to build off.


Quick off the Mark:

My visions of a few sessions of scrabbling for cash in the post-apocalypse were quickly overruled by a hell of a good first session back!
A rumour of treasure and a little exploration led them to a buried prepper cache, full of riches and ripe for the taking!
Loaded up with guns and valuables, they were soon able to equip themselves in a manner befitting explorers of a dangerous new land. Probably for the best, really.

One of my favourite things to happen was the rise of the loader-porter skeleton. It was quickly discovered that Encumbrance is super important in the exploration stakes, so Andromeda purchased herself a skeleton that would follow her around, carry her stuff, and reload her muskets for her.
Others soon followed suit. Great fun!


The First Death:

Alas, Sophia.

Carter had such plans for her, and they were all dashed in a single string of foolish mistakes.
They investigated rumours of mysterious flying creatures, which the party quickly insisted were "seagulls". On discovering that they were flying Elves, Sophia decided to climb down into their protected gorge and start yelling insults at them so that they'd attack her.
It was a complete success... and Sophia's corpse tumbled into the ravine riddled with Magic Missile fire.

Sophia was, of course, a holdover from the pre-apocalypse. An unaging Elf-child who kept making veiled hints that she was the child of POWERLAD and one of his lovers. We never did find out the truth of that.
Her designs on abusing the Summon spell to call forth meaty demons live on in Carter's next character, who at time of writing has devoured a couple of Elf hearts and has the Wild Hunt coming for her, whatever that means. That can't be good.

Clerics:

Dear Lord my new Cleric rules have been getting a workout! I'm really happy with them.
Clerics feel very powerful and it's been fun to see people grapple with and play into their gods' strictures.
Notable mighty feats include the time when two POWERLAD Clerics created overlapping lightning barriers to nuke a bunch of skeletons, and when the UFO Cleric used his Abduct ability to completely neuter an otherwise incredibly dangerous burrowing beast.

Theme Change:

After the crazy-epic apocalyptic showdown of the finale, it would feel a bit weird to me to just start over at first level and do the same old thing in a very different world.
The world is vastly changed, it's practically a new campaign, and so my goal was to change the theme enough to make it feel different.

Maybe eventually society will recover enough for us to go back to classic town-and-dungeon gameplay, but for now it's a hardscrabble fight for survival in a hostile world cloaked in poison.
As of right now, I'm happy with how it's going!

Scale:

One of the biggest differences is scale. I've divided every six-mile hex into one-mile sub-hexes, and so they've spent the last 5 sessions tooling around in a single six-mile hex.
Previously they were flying across a bunch of six-mile hexes in a single day, now they're struggling through a hostile landscape where the best they can manage is about twelve miles a day.
The world feels much bigger as a result - getting back to Dwimmermount will take them weeks, rather than days, if they ever make it there at all.


Weather:

My justification for this relative slowness is the toxic atmosphere.
Even on a clear day inside the protective Storm Shell you're breathing in noxious fumes, and in the usual hazy weather you quickly become exhausted.

To this end, I'm leaning heavily on a Weather system based on this one.
Basically weather changes at least twice a day - morning and evening - and potentially more often with Encounter rolls.
For the most part, weather is shit. It's exhausting, or equipment-eating, or painful, or straight up deadly.
I've got different weather charts for different Seasons which should be fun! Changeable bastard weather in Spring, long clear days and cloying heat in Summer, endless rains in Autumn, and swirling blizzards in Winter while the poison freezes into the soil.

There are different effects per Weather type, with more severe effects if you're not wearing protective gear.
The players are currently protected from the worst of the elements by the Storm-Shell, a vast shield of energy created by POWERLAD when he saved the town, so it's relatively safe to walk around without protective gear on.
If and when they eventually leave the Shell it'll be a different story.

Like legit check it out

Hexcrawl Procedure:

Having a much more detailed/procedural hexcrawl mechanic is the other key way that the post-apoc campaign feels different to what we had before.

Every day is divided into Watches, basically the hexcrawl equivalent of dungeon Turns.
Each Watch is 4 hours long, with specific things that you can do in each Watch like Travel, Explore, or Forage.

This makes each day more granular, and allows for various mechanical effects like gaining encumbering Exhaustion as you travel through Hazy weather.

New laminated sheets are of course needed as a result

Timescale and Expeditions:

I want the players be able to experience and steer humanity's recovery across the face of the poisoned Earth, which necessitates a real acceleration of the game's timeline.

Consider: It was about half a year in-game between the beginning of the apocalypse and the end of the world.
That took over two years of weekly session in real-time.
At that rate it'll be real life decades before the players see humanity start to recover!

So I'm flipping it on its head.
My goal is to have a month go past every session on average. This means the seasons can change, and we can have a "Rebuild Phase" every three months where players get to orchestrate the rebuild of the world.

To this end, every month players choose whether they're organising an Expedition or taking Downtime.
Expeditions take up a whole month, no matter how long you actually spend out in the wastes. The remaining time is presumed to be spent on organising the Expedition beforehand and recovering from the poisonous miasma afterwards.
Downtime is the other option, and includes all the classics like Carousing and Spell Research.
The idea is that Expeditions might stretch over a few sessions (like if it's an Expedition to a dungeon), but we'll make the time back with comparatively speedy Downtime months.

Hopefully I'll have more on the Rebuild Phase when we've had more time to try out the mechanics.


Mapping:

A last note on Mapping.
Since the world is trackless and uncharted and fundamentally changed from its pre-apocalyptic state, mapping the world is suddenly important again!

A fun part (as I said before) is that it's the same world the players have been inhabiting for years.
They can use the old maps to find where towns used to be, but they can't be sure of what's out there.

I've been a bit flip-floppy on how obvious I want the hexes to be.
Currently my ideal is that it's fairly naturalistic, less "let's explore this hex" and more "let's explore around this area".
The struggle is, of course, that the map is fundamentally hex-based. I might have highfalutin ideas about the players drawing freehand maps that are completely functional but fundamentally inaccurate, but hexes are the bones of the world.
To be fair we're already getting functional and pretty accurate maps so maybe I can't complain just yet!

Best so far as of time of writing!

Mini-Reviews

Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Of This Cold Winter

An absolute fucking banger.
It's a minigame originally intended to save a small village from a long cold winter, as the name implies.
I changed no mechanics and just scaled everything up, changing Fuel to Filter-Plants and rewriting the Occurrences to be on a year-by-year scale.
I didn't realise before we started, but there's an intrinsic self-balancing effect to losing people in this game. The more people die, the easier it is to feed and heal them. By the end they'd lost a ton of people, but the remainder had more than enough supplies to see them out to the end of the game.

Honestly amazing. 5/5 gnawed corpses.

Retrospective 21.5 - Beyond the Apocalypse

They did it it! They stopped it! They saved the world!
My campaign's going to reformat now for a post-apocalyptic survival hexcrawl, which means it's time for a very special retrospective about a real climactic final war.




Power Levels:

Boy, for a game that's supposed to be set in a gritty low level world that sure got out of hand didn't it?
Dragon-Gods, walking cities, angels and demons, what a blast!

The thing I like the most out of this whole experience is how it didn't come from the standard epic-scale paradigm where heroes get to level 30 and stab God in the throat with their vorpal sword.
For the most part, the individual Player Characters weren't particularly strong.
Like POWERLAD himself was only level 8, and that took a couple of years of playing every week - he had like 38HP.

In every case the character's true power wasn't in their class abilities. It wasn't an intrinsic ability they'd gained on leveling up, tons of hit points or a fat BAB.
Their power was in the external, extrinsic, and in-world. They gained their power through play - allies, friends, and trickery.
I like it a lot.


Finality:

It really felt like a climax.
I think that's the first time it's happened in however many years this game's been going now.
If we had just ended the campaign here and started a new one in a completely new world, I think everyone would have been satisfied with that.
We'd had character arcs, and story arcs, that all somehow rounded off and felt complete.
The stakes had risen higher than they'd ever been. Stakes don't get much higher than the actual potential destruction of the planet!
It was epic, it was calamitous, it was triumphant. Good end.


Intent:

On story arcs, something I really dig is how the story seemed to have a life of its own.
My hands weren't on the steering wheel at all and yet we found ourselves with a proper story, told in retrospect, that was complete.
Sometimes you see people who say a sandbox game means nothing really happens and players just kind of aimlessly wander around with no real objective. Hopefully this campaign puts the lie to that!


Timelines:

Something that was pretty funny was as a result of a new player - George (or alternatively Jorje, Jawj or J'jj) -  reading my Apocalypse Timeline. He'd come in from Discord and had seen the sheet when I'd linked it there at some point.
As a result he became a sort of mad prophet who kept telling everyone about the terrible fates that would befall them when the world ended.

The Apocalypse Timeline was a great idea though.
It was my projected timeline of events if nothing (ie. the PCs) got in the way, and so I had to keep updating it as the players did stuff.
For instance, the projected religious revolution in Fate was forestalled by Styx taking over the city, and Ninhursag's rise got brought forward by several months due to POWERLAD's actions.
This meant that the mad prophet didn't exactly have an up-to-date prophetic vision, but since when has that stopped doomsayers?


The Future:

Considering the cataclysmic finality of this arc of the campaign, it's time to shift the flavour of the gameplay. Just going back to the rhythm of dungeon-town-dungeon-town would be lovely, but perhaps too comfy and familiar.
Instead we're going to be hexcrawling the post-apocalypse, and I'm pretty excited! The campaign has always taken place in a settled and civilised land with roads and villages dotted across the landscape.
Now it's all dead, and the last survivors are protected in a mere 6 mile hex.

A fun part is that players have been living in this world for years and years now.
They've got the old maps. They remember what's out there.
They've got exactly as much knowledge as their characters would have, a unique situation for a game's post-apocalypse! I don't have to explain how the world used to work, and how the world works now, because they already know it.

Expect a lot of bodged-together hexcrawl rules in the coming months. I know I'm pumped!

Retrospective 21 - That Time They Uploaded Jesus to the Moving City

To think that a few months ago I would never have imagined Maximum Godhead Hyper-Jesus being uploaded to Fortress-City Fate by one PC, taking it over, and setting off a mass uprising sparked by another PC.

And yet here we are.

We've got intrigue. We've got territory control. We've got intra-group rivalry. We've got life, death and rebirth.
My game's reaching peaks I never thought possible!


Dragons!

We've got an Apocalypse Dragon trying to pull the moon into the Earth and destroy it.

We've got another Apocalypse Dragon, directed by POWERLAD, about to dive into the core of the earth and destroy Shub-Niggurath with the omnipoison.

Fucking hell actually, speaking of dragons, we've had the first ever fight against a dragon in a whole damn decade of D&D.
The Explosion Dragon miraculously didn't kill anyone, but it took POWERLAD out of the game for a good month or so, it was nuts.

I'm pretty pleased with how the Elemental Dragons have turned out. They're powerful, deadly, and scary, but they're ultimately at a PC power-scale. This as opposed to the full size Apocalypse Dragons which have the raw power of a global extinction event.

Also, since a PC could conceivably become an Elemental Dragon, they've got an extra level of foreshadowing future power which I quite like.



Rebirth!

For the first time ever we've had a character return, resurrected but changed.
Yes, Galaxy Johnson is back!

The best part of the experience was finding out that, yet again, keeping my hands off the narrative wheel and just letting the game go wherever it wanted to go ended up with a far more compelling story than I could have planned in advance.

We'd had a whole session of a careless player gaining access to infinite but extremely literal cosmic power, ending with the player's despair at his inability to control the power he wielded and a very touching quantum suicide.
I had the weirdest feeling as the heart of the long-dead Galaxy Johnson was offered to the Entity Formerly Known as Zena, a strange tide of narrative inevitability.
I remember looking around at everyone at the table and going "fuck, he's back isn't he?", as if the world had a momentum beyond just some let's-pretend elfgame we play at a pub.

It was great.


Jesus!

The most significant campaign turnaround in recent memory, possibly the whole year, happened!
When they got back to the city of Fate, they managed to upload Hyper-Jesus to the city and allow him to take it over!
The short version is that POWERLAD had an earpiece that gave him a direct line to Terms Termax, aka Hyper-Jesus, who resides somewhere in Dwimmermount.
When they reached Fate they went to see the Queen who was jacked into the city, POWERLAD jammed the earpiece into her ear, and he took over the whole dang place.

Game changer!



Rebellion!


Possibly the coolest thing that's been going on as a result is the ongoing three-way civil war over Fortress-City Fate, aka Battlefortress Fate now that it's walking around.

In the red corner we have Hyper-Jesus, controller of the Battlefortress and commander of angels.
In the blue corner we have the Rebellion, a counter-revolutionary group opposed to Hyper-Jesus' sudden takeover, started by Styx who's always been suspicious of Hyper-Jesus' motives.
And above them both is the sudden invasion of the Black Drakencult who want nothing more than to fuck everything up in a way that benefits their Apocalypse Dragon.

It's ended up with a Cool Subsystem (tm) whereby the various districts in the city can be taken over by one of the three factions, with a little rock-paper-scissors of Resistance beats Loyalist beats Drakencult beats Resistance.
The Loyalists (Hyper-Jesus, and most of the players', faction) have an angel squad per day on-side that can take and hold any district, but they've prioritised quashing the Drakencult and thus let the Rebellion spread to take control of the whole city.
Now the Resistance has taken over the districts that let them stop the city moving, as well as the targeting array for the macrocannon, and shit's getting real bad.

At least the Drakencult's under control though.

Mini-Reviews

No Salvation for Witches

Holy shit I almost forgot this 10 session segment was kicked off with NSFW! I got it long ago when it was PWYW and finally got to use it!
Sorta reskinned it a little to fit the current campaign situation. Rather than just take down the patriarchy the plan was to also rewrite the world to be non-apocalyptic, via the imperfect knowledge of the witches.
Places they knew well were near-perfect copies, but as you get further out into places they don't know so intimately it gets less and less realistic. Towns full of generic townsfolk, other countries would have become stereotypical melanges if they existed at all, that sort of thing.

Good little module, although my players are too powerful to be stopped by a lot of the magic bullshit... which is great!

The Terpsichore entity at the centre of it all ended up being the reason that Galaxy Johnson returned so can't complain about that really!

Everything else was pretty much my own stuff! Maybe one day I'll get round to posting my Cool City Takeover Subsystem but we'll see!

Retrospective 20 - The Rise of the New Messiahs

What a wild turnaround!

Heading to Dwimmermount was meant to accomplish a relatively simple plan.

1. Find a source of Azoth.
2. Take Azoth to the Slaughtergrid, a giant megazord golem.
3. Power the Slaughtergrid.
4. Save the world.

Instead we've ended up with an alliance with gods!

On the Goblin Messiah:

When I first started dropping the modron-esque Angels onto the planet, I'd intended for them to be a sort of inscrutable and mysterious quasi-mechanical group of robots that could not be bargained with and would shoot Chaotic creatures on sight.
A powerful enemy to be avoided and worried about, certainly not allies.

At the centre of all this is Styx, who was forced to give up his beloved Rune Magic in order to become a new Messiah for the Nine High Gods.

Fittingly, and unwittingly, he now has exactly 12 disciples - 6 goblin buddies and 6 NPC adventurers.

I never expected Goblin Jesus! Especially not a Goblin Jesus in an angel mech-suit!

On the ultimate power of POWERLAD:

On the other end, diametrically opposed yet also on the side of Law, is POWERLAD's recent direct line to Maximum Godhead Hyper-Jesus.
Between this, the electric powers he got from his father, and his high-ranking Dragon Bond, our boy POWERLAD is rapidly becoming the character with the highest potential of going nova and erupting as an almighty combination of Law, Chaos, and Dragon.

This is gonna be gooooood!

On the spider-weeb:

With all this going on, it's easy to forget just how ridiculous RJ is as a character, and how he was such an organic development in the campaign.
To sum up:

• POWERLAD is impregnated with spider babies in exchange for resistance to poison.
• The spider babies are adopted by Sir Robyn, who raises them as his own.
• When they are big enough, the player of Sir Robyn decides to run a mob of Spider-Kids as an Extras class.
• The Extras reach 0HP, only the leader RJ (Robyn, Jr) survives.
• My campaign now has a giant spider Fighter who calls himself "Lonely Blade".

It all seemed so natural at the time. 

Just like how Guido went from being a talking skull to a huge skeleton warrior over the course of several months, this development was so gradual that it was truly earned!

On the corpse-eater:

Our next-to-newest player has truly put the Inheritor class through its paces, devouring any and all monsters she can get her hands on. It's a mess.

Currently she boasts, as Passive and Active abilities:

• "Ladymones" - +1 Charisma mod with males; Turn a male into a slave. 
• Centipede armour - +1 AC; +2 AC
• Mirror-clone - Morph face or body to copy a person; Become a clone of a humanoid you're facing with all abilities.
• Spore Drugs - Generate the Wave drug; create a Wave drug cloud
• Witch Dancer - Notably fantastic dance skills; make a group of dancers cast spells at random.

Whether she can be stopped is an open question.

On the worst demon hunter:

Zena's journey has been wonderful. She was on a quest to kill six million demons, kinda fucked it up, then decided to be a dungeon chef.

It's only been used twice so far but the Cooking subsystem is so much fun. Zena has seized upon it with gusto, and is now stopping after any fight to grab bits of monster to eat later. It's so great.

Spoiler warning: Ironically she's now a smoke monster woman with no stomach so we'll see how that works out for her. A chef who never eats, perhaps?

Mini-Reviews

Dwimmermount
What can I say that I haven't been said before?
If you click on Dwimmermount in that tag cloud on the right you'll see that there's heeaaps of sessions in this big beautiful mountain.
It's good, it's got some zany science-fantasy stuff in it which is way cool but takes way too long to reveal itself. It's become central in my campaign.
It's cool.
Ever-present reminder that Macris isn't.