Rolling over the body of the blog

Oh wow. Just realized how long this poor thing has gone neglected...not by desire or design, of course, but that's how life goes sometimes. There are many things I've wanted to shout on the rooftops, but life gets in the way.

To parallel this, I've not run DCC RPG (or any other games) since Gary Con in early March due to an auto accident within a week of our return home...but I'm not here to dole out medical updates or whine for sympathy. Instead, I give you a list of seemingly disjointed thoughts:

...I noticed that Friday was a very popular day on this page. Is Wayne Con to blame?

...Gary Con was another first: I ran 4 sessions at a convention. It's nothing compared to +Brendan LaSalle's nine sessions, for a total of 36 hours... That man is a friggin' MACHINE. I avoided the brunt of the resultant con crud; he did not. I'm sensing a correlation.

...Dark Trails is something that must be experienced. (Who the hell dug this Baity guy up and brought him into the DCC community? He's top-notch.)

...I must admit deep sadness that I do not get to convert the printer's proof of the 4th printing leather cover into the Acolyte's Hymnal or Acolyte's Screen of Awesomeness.

...Gary Con currently holds my heart, but we're venturing out to NTRPG Con this year to check it out. I'll be running two slots, continuing the playtesting for one of +Harley Stroh's upcoming DCC projects, The Music of the Spheres (Is Chaos).

...The Dark Master has me editing some upcoming releases that I'm dying to run and/or put into use at my table. I'm stupidly excited to see the public response!

...I'll be running on Free RPG Day at the FLGS aka home base, Dungeon Games in Estero, FL. I haven't decided which module(s) or if I'll do a double-header or not, but tables start at 12:30pm and 6:00pm. If nobody shows up, I'll just grab one of each of the *5* (!!) covers of this year's Goodman Games release as a consolation prize. (I'm not even joking.)

  

 

...Our performing group has been confirmed by Gen Con, so we will be there! Yay! As per usual, our hotel and performance schedule have not yet been dispersed. Boo. Learning from prior years, we didn't even bother with event registration this time around, so we're banking on after-hours shenanigans. I've been toying with the idea of running Against the Atomic Overlord over a series of 3 nights...but not knowing if I'll be out of costume by 8pm makes planning difficult.

...We'll be performing in Peoria, Illinois, again this June - this time it'll be the weekend after Free RPG Day, thankfully! But I rarely travel out of state without my DCC tome, so if anyone's in the area that weekend and interested, I could perhaps be persuaded... For that matter, I may open this up to folks in the Chicago suburbs...say, Tuesday evening? I doubt we'll have the chance to swing through Cincinnati this time around (sorry, guys!) since we're looking at being home for a grand total of 9 days in the month of June. [Note to self: Revisit this. ASAP.]


To address a couple inquiries floating around the aether:

...Spellburn is not dead. It's just taking some time to recover from all the stat loss. (Remember, fellow casters: you can't recover stat points each day unless you refrain from spellburning that day.)

...Sanctum Secorum has scaled back to once a month for the foreseeable future. Prior to real life "getting in the way," we all decided it was unrealistic to continue the breakneck pace of every two weeks, considering the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to produce clean audio + a full companion PDF for every episode, after the reading assignment homework. So we're sticking with the first Friday of each month -- even if that coincides with conventions.

And last, but certainly and NEVER least ~~

Happy birfday to our very own Bacon Wizard, +David Baity!

Beyond the Black Gate did NOT go as planned.

Dear DCC RPG Community,

I never thought it would happen to me...

One of the PCs in my long-running campaign has become a patron--or at least taken the mantle (or horns) of one.

To be fair, he was simply taking the Horned King's crown. His new cohort (new PC, long-time player with us) didn't understand the mission fully, wasn't familiar with the legend of the Wild Hunt, and twisted the meaning of the word "king" and immediately killed the poor guy without consulting anyone else in the party. All this, despite my repeated warnings that they may not get the prime/desired outcome if they simply murder-hoboed their way through this one (Beyond the Black Gate).

To continue, in all fairness: It's Bob's PC. He's copacetic with retiring the dwarf as soon as this scenario [module] is wrapped up. While bittersweet, it's wholly fitting, thematically, that the "Ooh, I've never killed one of these before!" guy is now the master of the Wild Hunt. And, because this is Bob we're talking about, he's totally willing to rewrite the patron taint & invocation tables to reflect his personality, and even his current newness to the job.

My qualms... The crown was taken, no biggie. This other guy, and his actions based on misunderstanding, just screwed the rest of the party out of a few choice options, leaving them to follow Bjorn, the 6th-level murder-hobo-turned-badass-turned-nearly-NPC, to finish this chapter of the campaign.

On one hand, I'd been trying to figure a way to wrap up this particular game and its current set of characters without resorting to the "game got cancelled and we never reconvened" route, which sucks for everyone. I'd like to go about playtesting something different and have not been successful in carving out additional days/times, but I also hate loose ends.

On the flipside, this new development gives me a lot to play with...if I don't burn out on the current player/character combo at the table.

Anyone else run into such a major game-changer?

The Sanctum!

There's been new DCC happenings in the proverbial neighborhood. If you're reading this, you probably know about it already.

Part of me has been remiss over here; part of me has been waiting for the website to go mostly-fully-live. Then it was, and I was busy having my skull nommed on by life. (Really gotta stop using basting sauce as a perfume. Sorry 'bout that.) There's been a lot of prep for this thing, too. And more editing. All of this is cool, it's just a little brain-consuming.

So here she be. If you haven't already visited the hub to listen, check out the Sanctum Secorum podcast.* I adore the overall aesthetic quality; something about those woodcuts just gets me.

Hint: Explore the Dark Acquisitions to find the free show companions, free "for the community, by the community" offerings that accompany every show. And sometimes they hit the stacks independently...



*Caveats: Sanctum Secorum is neither affiliated with--nor in competition with--Spellburn, as it's all about spreading the love for the game. Nor are my loyalties divided. Et cetera. Ad nauseum.

Interludes

Between working, traveling, editing, reading up for future projects, and more working, I found myself seriously stressing about where my campaign was going (the party took a left at Albuquerque last game, ending things on an awkward note after 3 sessions of People of the Pit with a good 20% of the place untouched). There simply wasn't time for me to do the normal prep work this week, and I certainly haven't had the brain capacity to stew on it and come up with some awesome resolution. But I had an epiphany yesterday: Interludes!

When Bob's 1E sandbox campaign [please note, I'm specifically not tagging him yet] recently came to a point where he needed some time to pass in the game, he put together some "interludes," episodes in which the players were given pre-generated characters that pertained to a different part of the world. Maybe they're designed to tell some backstory, and the scene takes place in the past to give us a better understanding. In one, we played thieves who ended up thwarting an assassin's attempt on the Mayor's life. We don't know exactly when that particular scene takes place on the grand timeline, but he'll reveal the resulting mayhem to our regular characters when we resume the main story. We've also had a one-shot where we played characters that would've been NPCs or villains to be taken out in regular play. It offered a lot of insight to us as players, in regards to the underlying motives.

I've decided on the "meanwhile, in this other location" approach. They'll all be playing 2nd-level ...well, formerly NPCs, who have to deal with the aftermath of one of the party's recent raids. They'll witness a previously-dismissed enemy limping back home, and will have to shoulder the subsequent wrath of a boss for allowing the PC party to desecrate his territory. I'm willing to bet they'll also stumble into an area that's off-limits to lackeys like them, and discover how a particular plot-driving item has been manufactured.

The interludes have been really enjoyable to play, and break up the monotony a bit, so after a mere hour of work - and most of that was statting up these particular lackeys - I feel pretty good about it now.

XP is going to be awarded after the fact (in both our games) to the regular PCs for participating in these cut-scenes.

DCC RPG #68: The People of the Pit

I'll admit it; I'm one of those who didn't give this one enough credit when I first saw it. "Oh goodie, cultists summoning something with tentacles. I get enough of that in our two-year-long Call of Cthulhu campaigns..." 

NO. 

You know you've been thinking it too. "I'm sick of judging combats with tentacles!" 

Please hear me out.

I see very few people in the G+ communities talking about running this one, which leads me to believe that many others are judging books by covers and falling into the trap of viewing only the basic premise. 

Or, to be fair, it could be that it's not a new release. Or that you didn't find the cover art stunning at first glance. Or you might just not be into the "cultist" scene. 

Seriously, shed those reservations now. 

One-shot vs. Campaign?
This has a lot of meat to it. A LOT. It's not going to play nicely as a one-shot unless you condense it to a few key encounters -- which, actually, could provide for some high-quality play. I might try that for our next game day and/or mini-con.

Conversely, if you're running a campaign and you read this module ahead of time, there are tons of hint you could start dropping. Or, if you're like me and hit a wall during the campaign, you could find yourself picking this mod up, gritting your teeth against the "trite" concept, and coming up for air a couple hours later armed with pages of notes and a maniacal grin that worries anyone you live with. 

As I mentioned previously, the most often-encountered foes harken strongly to the Hollow Ones found in the core rulebook, which I ran as part of a huge, multi-session, crescendoing scene in the sandboxed village, Port of the Black Pearl (formerly the small shanty town from which Tower of the Black Pearl kicks off). The party still isn't sure if the faceless men with things spawning from their midsections were creatures that had been summoned, or if they'd been working alongside a coven of witches, so it made perfect sense to play on that bit of mysteriousness: The eyeless acolytes in the Pit are now faceless, albeit wearing robes in a different method of color-coding. [Note to self: Do not allow faceless creatures to become a crutch just because a judge doesn't want NPCs to be able to answer interrogations.]

Summary: Even if you've only skimmed it, it's worth taking a good cover-to-cover look -- or at least check out the 3rd level, and the intricacies of travel within. There are still plenty of other monsters besides cultists, and I could see reworking a good portion of this place to be run by the mineral mining critters instead of humanoids...even with no huge threat in the pit itself.

Back to it!

The open-table campaign has been through a lot of sandboxing, including a few published pieces and parts slid together to culminate in a few original sessions. Most recently, I've modified a couple adventures to fit the story.

Man, that's intensive.

Today I went back to basics: I ran a module with some scaled-up monsters and just the barest storyline adjustments to the "how & why you're here".

Much better.

It was nice to take less than 3 hours to prep the day before. It was wonderful to not stress about it for the hour-long drive to the FLGS. It was nice to feel more secure in where things were going (and yes, I had pegged the group's route). It was even nice to run with the new screen, despite my ambivalence about screens. And it was nice - if a little bittersweet - to hear the surprise in players' voices when they expressed their enjoyment after the fact.

We all have our niches, right? I've suspected I'd been running off the rails when left to my own devices, and my players have been awesomely patient with me, but I think I've confirmed my sweet spot.

Let's do this thing! Game on!

...This week's choice, by the by, was to hearken back to the early line, via People of the Pit, with tweaks to the cultists' stats to stand up to a mixed party of 0-lvl to 5th. The cultists are strikingly similar to the Hollow Men, given to us in the core book -- and those similarities correlate nicely with the sandbox.

Worth every mile.

This past weekend, we were fortunate enough to attend an experimental mini-con with approx. 15 others, hosted in Richmond, VA by the illustrious Wayne Snyder.

The locale was an art studio in a historic post-industrial structure. As summer in the southeast U.S. is underway, the result was humid and at times too warm -- just the sort of thing I generally flee for the comfort of air conditioning at home. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't pretentious. It certainly wasn't posh.

And it was perfect.

This was the first time in over a decade in which we've been able to leave the state without a full itinerary of obligatory family visits. It was actually difficult for me to fully grasp this, and simply relax, until Sunday. But it was exactly what we needed, and far overdue.

Gaming (for me) included Swords and Magic (the Wayne & Lily production), Talisman, DCC (including a bit of a Lankhmar preview by Doug), Metamorphosis Alpha, and Thunder Road.

In between the games - the official excuse for gathering - were excited, happy discussions. So rarely are any of us able to get together in person for anything social; conventions tend to give us exchanges like, "Hey! Great to see you, now I have to run to my next game!" This was a chance to sit back with no real schedule...and get to know the people we'd all been following online and +1'ing for years, as well as some of Wayne's local friends who joined us for the festivities.

This weekend also served as a recharge to many of our creative batteries. Pooling ideas, watching others' judging styles and techniques, and sharing tales of our home games... It was the gaming equivalent of the diverse food offerings on the buffet line.

I thought about giving "notable mentions" to certain individuals who made a special impact on our experience, but there honestly wasn't a single attendee who didn't leave their mark on the event. Much love to all, and most to Wayne for his unending hospitality. {Okay, and to Taylor, David, and Doug for feeding me!} Until we all meet again...