Eldritch Ætherium II

"Welcome to the Lost Road across the Empire of the Daggers of the Dead"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One thing I mentioned back on volume I of this mix was that most of the music there came from just a few sources: those first albums I discovered which were specifically designed for D&D or other TTRPG gaming.  Another thing I mentioned was that gaming music is much easier to find these days, primarily due to the explosion of actual play D&D shows.  I still have a great fondness for the journey I put together on volume I, but in many ways volume II is the better set just because I had so much more variety to draw from.

Of course, many things are the same: Midnight Syndicate and the Shards of Eberron album are back, as are zero-project and Nox Arcana, and there’s a Renn-Faire-sounding bridge from Dead Can Dance.  Still nothing with any real vocals to speak of, so we’ve got another volume title cobbled together out of song titles, and once again I’ve tried to arrange the tracks so as to suggest an adventurous journey.  But there are differences as well: we stray from Midnight Syndicate’s Dungeons & Dragons album for the firs time, for instance, and Shards and zero-project give us one fewer track each.  And no V Shane this time around: oh, I’m sure we’ll see him again eventually, but there were just many better options this time around.

Part of that is because I discovered shows like The Adventure Zone and Critical Role.  The former mostly features music composed by Griffin McElroy, a lot of which is synthy and yet still works in a fantasy setting.  However, it is Australian musician (and also a fan of the show) Rachel Rose Mitchell who provides our TAZ track here: it’s the iconic “Voidfish (Plural),” where she takes a relatively simple tune from Griffin and elevates it to something ethereal and wondrous.  But it was really CR that gave me the biggest push musically: “Welcome to Wildemount,” an utterly amazing track by Irish PhD student (in music composition) Colm McGuinness is the song they play during their breaks, and “Elmshore” (from the videogame Pillars of Eternity) is one of Matt Mercer’s favorite tracks to play during quiet moments of the game.  And, once I started searching for music related to Critical Role, I found more tracks by Colm McGuinness, as well as some by Ian Peter Fisher.  McGuinness is one of those artists who plays all the instruments himself and then mixes them all together to form tracks that sound like they were produced by a full orchestra.  Fisher is a bit of a traditional electronic composer, and I suspect that he’s merely renamed some of his compositions to use Critial Role placenames,¹ which no doubt increased his visibility; still, that doesn’t mean the tracks aren’t fantastic.  The explosion of popularity for D&D also means that even more people are explicitly writing music to game to, such as Adrian von Ziegler, whose Bandcamp page contains hundreds of such tracks.  V Shane has a lot of competition these days.

I was also inspired to branch out into other cinematic music.  I’ve included here selections from The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and the televison show Grimm.  Howard Shore’s score for the first of these has a tendency to slide into the operatic,² but there are some good choices; the score for the last of these (by moderately well known composer Richard Marvin³) has just a very few gems among a plethora of decidedly average television background pieces.  On the other hand, the problem with Ramin Djawadi’s excellent Game of Thrones music is just that it’s too iconic: I’m taking a risk here with the main GoT theme (as I’m doing with the main Grimm theme, and the well-known-to-CR-fans “Welcome to Wildemount”) that listeners will be jarred out of this journey and into other worlds, if they’re at all familiar with the originating shows.  But I’m hoping that I’ve managed to recontextualize the tracks, at least partially; you, the listener, will have to be the judge.

For other cinematic choices, I’ve picked a track from Epic Soul Factory as well as another pick from the orchestral remix of Legend of Zelda songs.  We last saw ESF on Mystical Memoriam, where I discussed their cinematic music as possibly being a portfolio for soundtrack composing; this track (“The Lost World”) is an obvious nod to Jurassic Park.  As for the 25th anniversay Legend of Zelda CD, there’s something about giving the full orchestral treatment to a Ninentendo soundtrack that just gives it a depth that is nearly breathtaking.

The journey here is titled in a similarly whimsical fashion to our first volume; this title didn’t come out to be quite as long, but you can expect future volumes to get longer and longer to the point of silliness.  Or even more sillierness, as the case may be.  I’ve always loved the way “Welcome to Wildemount” just explodes into being, so it was the natural choice for an opener, unrolling the promise of fantastical vistas before our eyes.  From there, we begin traveling to “The Lost World,” perhaps camping overnight where friendly natives play us the local folk tune “Kecharitomene.” Then, early in the predawn light, we set off on “The Road to Zadash,” arriving finally on the quiet and mystical “Elmshore,” where something wondrous seems just around the corner.  After another fiddle-laced interlude (“Mephisto”), we cautiously enter into an expedition “Across the Talenta Plains,” a tense and exotic affair where danger seems imminent even as we marvel at outposts with many strange wares.

Then we get to our first real battle, providing us with some “Alternative Therapy.” Then a quiet, restful moment (“Kamimukae”) bridges the conflict with the arrival at “The Age of the Empire,” which seeks to impress us with its military might.  But we move on from there to “The Blooming Grove,” an enchanted place which is merely a “Prelude” to the barren, wintry “Structure.” But this is where we learn “How to Kill an Ogre,” which starts out soft and slow and eventually builds to a confrontation with the “Orc Hunters of the Shadow Marches.” Of course, that just leads to a stealthy flight and explosive encounter “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony.” But then, from the darkness, a light appears: the kaleidoscopic pulsing of “Voidfish (Plural)” that lead us “Aboard the Stormcrow,” where the dark, echoey strains signal an uncomfortable journey into more danger, which is brief but explosive (Grimm’s “Main Title”).

The cello-fueled calm “Before the Storm” is dramatic and uplifting, but then the celloes turn dark and take us across more sweeping vistas (Game of Throne’s “Main Title).  But it’s the martial march across “The Devil’s Daggers” to fight an “Army of the Dead” that is the true climax of our adventure.  After some quiet reflection on “The Final Battle,” the “Ballad of the Goddess” provides an uplifting and emotional release, until our next adventure.

Eldritch Ætherium II
[ Welcome to the Lost Road across the Empire of the Daggers of the Dead ]

“Welcome to Wildemount” by Colm McGuinness [Single]
“The Lost World” by Epic Soul Factory, off Xpansion Edition
“Kecharitomene” by Loreena McKennitt, off An Ancient Muse
“The Road to Zadash” by Ian Peter Fisher [Single]
“Elmshore” by Justin Bell, off Pillars of Eternity [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Mephisto” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Across the Talenta Plains” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Alternative Therapy” by Midnight Syndicate, off Gates of Delirium
“Kamimukae” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“The Age of the Empire” by zero-project, off Fairytale 2
“The Blooming Grove” by Ian Peter Fisher [Single]
“Prelude” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Structure” by Love Is Colder Than Death, off Teignmouth
“Game Ogre: How to Kill an Ogre” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Orc Hunters of the Shadow Marches” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” by Howard Shore, off The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Soundtrack]
“Voidfish (Plural)” by Rachel Rose Mitchell [Single]
“Aboard the Stormcrow” by Adrian von Ziegler, off Fable
“GRIMM: Main Title (Season 2)” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Before the Storm” by Colm McGuinness [Single]
“Main Title” by Ramin Djawadi, off Game of Thrones: Music from the HBO Series [Soundtrack]
“The Devil's Daggers” by Nox Arcana, off Carnival of Lost Souls
“Army of the Dead” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“The Final Battle” by Dark Sanctuary, off Royaume Mélancolique
“Ballad of the Goddess from Skyward Sword” by Koji Kondo [Single]

Total:  25 tracks,  79:31

(Note that there a number of links to YouTube videos this time around; there’s just several tracks here where that’s the only place you can find them.)

As far as the unlikely candidates go, I was very pleased to find quite a few tracks that, while not designed for use in gaming or as cinematic backdrops at all, they just seemed to work perfectly here.  The dark neoclassical songs of Dark Sanctuary⁴ are a natural fit, and “The Final Battle” provides just enough Renaissance feel to work well here.  Goth masters Faith and the Muse often provide useful little bridges, such as the one I used on Fulminant Cadenza I,⁵ and “Kamimukae” is no exception: it’s a contemplative, string-driven piece that abuts perfectly up against the more expansive selection from zero-project.  Love Is Colder Than Death is a German darkwave band (named after a German film) who, just as their name suggests, produce wintry, goth-infused ambient and ethereal; “Structure” is one of the tunes that most epitomizes their sound.

But the real find here was realizing that when Canadian dreampop virtuoso Loreena McKennitt produces an instrumental track, it inevitably sounds like it belongs on the soundtrack of a fantasy film.  My first pick of hers, “Kecharitomene” is a mostly string-based track (Discogs tells me that it’s actually not a fiddle, but rather a hurdy-gurdy), with some tablas for percussion, and some sort of piping.  The combination is half Romany, half Arabic, and half Celtic.  Best yet, it starts out very sedately, but each round gets a bit louder and more dramatic, until the penultimate one, which easily conjures images of frenzied dancing around a campfire, and then slides effortlessly back into the original slow burn, which are now the dying embers.  It’s a beautfiul track that fits gorgeously between the opening dramatics of “Welcome to Wildemount” and “The Lost World” and the mystical beauty of “The Road to Zadash” and “Elmshore.” I suspect we’ll see a selection from McKennitt on every volume of this mix from here on out.

Next time, it’s time to get to back that upbeat brass that kicks so much ass.

⇐ Eldritch Ætherium I

Eldritch Ætherium III ⇒

__________

1 For instance, you might find the same song of his with two different names, one of which contains the CR reference, and the other of which has a generic name such as “Fantasty Travel Theme.”

2 Specifically, that Carmina Burana/The Da Vinci Code territory that we talked about last time.

3 Marvin also scored Six Feet Under, one of the early triumphs of showrunner Alan Ball.

4 First encountered on Shadowfall Equinox II.

5 For a full-length demonstration of their prowess, see Penumbral Phosphorescence.

D&D and Me: Part 8 (Resurgence of the Game)

[This is the eighth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about playing with my children in the long years between D&D 3e and its newest edition: 5e.]

Dungeons and Dragons is currently undergoing an explosion of popularity that, to many of us old-school D&D nerds, is nigh on incomprehensible.  There are many competing theories on why that is, but (as befits a believer in balance and paradox) I naturally believe that they’re all true at once.  That is, it’s not any one reason, but rather the confluence of all the factors that are fortuitously aligning right now.  And there’s a whole of reasons that people are putting out there, but I think we can discard some of the minor ones, and group all the rest into 3 broad categories.

When D&D was fresh and new, parents didn’t understand it, so they did what parents do with everything that their children start to become obsessed with: they blamed it for all their kids’ troubles.  Before it was D&D, it was heavy metal music, and before that it was television, and before that it was rock-and-roll, and before that it was comic books, and before that it was cars and motorcycles, and before that it was books.  After D&D’s time under the magnifying glass was done, parents moved on to blaming videogames and then just screens in general.  Of course most of us are smart enough to know that eventually there will come a time when parents will beg their kids to spend time with screens, just like we now beg our children to spend more time with the same books that our however-many-great-grandparents were told to “put that down and get your butt outside to play!” Much is made of the period of D&D history that, in retrospect, we refer to as “the Satanic Panic,” but honestly it was no different from anything else kids get obsessed with.

But the main thing to note here is that, while the parents were decrying the game and claiming it was a gateway to real witchcraft and demon worship, their kids were loving it, and finding that it opened the doorways into more imaginative worlds than anything else they’d experienced before.  And while perhaps only a small percentage of those children would grow up to become authors, and movie makers, and television show creators, enough kids were playing D&D that even a small percentage was significant.  Big reason #1 why D&D is enjoying this amazing resurgence of popularity right now is simply that right now is when the generation raised on D&D is hitting its creative peak.  They are producing The Big Bang Theory and Community and The Dresden Files and, most significantly, Stranger Things.  Even in shows where D&D just gets a casual mention (say, iZombie, where one episode has detective Babineaux going undercover into a D&D group to solve a murder, hating every second of being immersed in “this nerd shit”), these days that mention is almost always positive (e.g. Babineaux eventually finds himself addicted to the game and ends up playing it in several later episodes).  Major celebrities (like Vin Diesel and Stephen Colbert) have come out as fans, while some slightly lesser known folks (like Deborah Ann Woll and Matthew Lillard) are out-and-out starting to refocus their careers onto D&D playing and/or merchandising.  And this happened fairly quickly: less than 20 years ago, “playing D&D” was included on lists in women’s magazines of things to watch out for in a prospective mate.  But, over the past decade, D&D has begun to instill a measure of nerd cred that is hard to come by otherwise, and being a nerd—of any gender—is suddenly cool.  Why?  Primarily because the media portrayals of nerd-dom have changed, and that’s primarily because the nerds are now in charge of those media portrayals.

But let’s not overlook the impact of D&D 5e either.  4e was a failure: although neither Wizards of the Coast (owners of D&D) nor their parent company Hasbro, nor Paizo (publishers of Pathfinder) ever officially released sales numbers, it was an open secret, going by sales numbers that could be tracked (e.g. on Amazon) that Pathfinder was eating 4e’s lunch.  For the first time, even if only briefly, D&D was not the best selling TTRPG.  And Wizards knew it, and they knew they had to fix it, and they were not shy about it.  They completely stole Paizo’s idea of having a public playtest, and they set out to research what were the best parts of all the previous editions so they could Frankenstein them into one game.  Critics will say they succeeded, producing what many refer to “everyone’s second favorite edition of D&D.” But fans, on the other hand, will say they succeeded: D&D 5e is “just the best bits” from all the other editions (yes, even 4e), with all the annoying crap left behind.

Now, mostly when people talk about this, they’re talking about the rules.  And, sure: every edition has had some good rules, and plenty of stinkers, and having a ruleset that is only the best bits is pretty frigging awesome.  But there’s way more than just rules going on here.  First off, 4e was the first time that anyone producing a new D&D had tried to appeal to non-RPG players.  See, 2e was for all the people who liked 1e but thought it could be better, and 3e was for all the people who liked 2e but thought it could be better.  But producing a product that appeals only that subsegment of your market that thinks your product could use some improvement will, by defintion, produce a smaller and smaller market segment for each edition.  At some point you gotta figure out how to bring in new players.  3e tried to do that, a little, by using the Open Gaming License to get all the former competitors to D&D to make content for D&D, and that worked, a bit.  4e tried to do it by incorporating many of the lessons that MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft—who, let’s be honest, pretty much owed their existence to D&D in the first place—were innovating on, such as roles within the party (tank, striker, controller, leader), balancing factors such as DPS¹ and healing, etc.  This was far bolder, but it had significant downsides: the existing players who didn’t care for MMORPGs certainly weren’t attracted, and D&D was never going to be a better MMORPG than an actual MMORPG, so even the MMORPG fans were limited in their enthusiasm.  But 5e took a different approach: stop trying to make D&D something different ... just make it friggin’ easier to learn.  The biggest barrier to starting to play D&D is not what the game is: what the game is is a fantasy world where you are the hero and you can do (or at least attempt) any action you can imagine.  That pretty much sells itself.  No, the barrier to starting to play D&D is the baroque ruleset.  Oh, sure: it’s complex for very good reasons—it’s attempting to model all of a reality, and it’s a reality that has to include magic and dragons and all sorts of stuff physics can just ignore—but the D&D newbie doesn’t care about all that.  They just care that trying to figure out how to play this stupid game involves reading hundreds of pages of rules and more math than they’ve had to deal with since high school.  5e made all that much simpler.  Now, don’t get me wrong: 5e is not a simple game, by any means ... compared to sitting down to learn the rules of Sorry! or even Monopoly, D&D requires way more mental load.  But it’s much simpler than ever before, and that’s significant.

And one more really important thing about the new edition of D&D: for the first time, there was an openly gay man in the lead designer spot.  And, in my opinion, that’s the main reason that D&D has become so much more inclusive.  Gone are the chainmail bikinis and outright topless female monsters.  Gone are assumptions that all PCs will be male, or even either male or female.  NPCs are protrayed as male, female, non-binary, straight, gay, trans, bi, and asexual.  Racial representation has come a long way as well, although certainly there’s still more progress to be made there.  But for the first time a new edition of D&D didn’t just welcome in straight white dudes: it welcomed everyone.

The final big reason that D&D has become a cultural phenomenon in recent years—and many would argue the most important one—is the rise of Internet streaming.  YouTube, Twitch, podcasts ... suddenly it’s easier than ever for anyone to put out some sort of media of them doing things they like and other people with similar interests can find them.  More importantly, people can now discover new interests by watching or listening to things online.  This has led to an explosion of all sorts of things: my little girl doesn’t dig the idea of wearing make-up because anyone in her family taught her about make-up: she’s fascinated by it because she watches make-up tutorials on YouTube.  Do you want to watch videos of people making up weird dances?  You can do that.  Do you want to watch videos of people making bad “puppet” shows by just moving their stuffed animals around and making them talk?  No problem.  And, if you want to watch videos of people playing games, you have an amazing plethora of choices.

Now, I have to admit that I’ve always felt that watching other people have fun playing games was kind of stupid.  Why would I watch someone play a videogame, let’s say, when I could just play the damned game myself?  But of course, by that logic, the entire sports industry becomes meaningless: there’s literally a multi-billion-dollar business in having people play games so other people will watch them.  But I think the sports analogy is actually kind of instructive here: sure, watching an NBA game can be pretty damned exciting, but that doesn’t mean that watching any random game of people playing basketball will be fun.  There are many factors to consider: the talent of the players, the production value of the presentation, the knowledge of the commentators, and so on.  And so, eventually, I came to realize that I didn’t actually not like watching all people play videogames, I just didn’t like watching most people play videogames.  And the person who changed it all for me was Jacksepticeye.  I happened to wander through the room when one of my kids was watching him play ... hell, I don’t even remember what game it was, but the guy was hilarious.  He wasn’t trying to make me love the game, he wasn’t trying to make fun of the game, he wasn’t trying to do some artsy or clever commentary on the game: he was just playing the game, and having fun, and being damned entertaining while doing it.  Since then, I’ve found a few other “let’s play”² YouTubers who are pretty good, though I suspect Jacksepticeye may still be the best.

And, at some point, it naturally occurred to me that, if I could enjoy watching someone else play a videogame, when I don’t even like videogames all that much, surely I could enjoy watching someone play D&D, which I absolutely adore.  And, as it happens, there are a lot of choices out there, just like there are a lot of choices for the videogame genre.  In fact, the whole streaming thing (both for D&D and every other topic) has a major downside of making it so easy for people to create content that, at this point, it can very difficult to pick out the gems from all the dross.  But there really are some gems out there, let me tell you.  For best all around video production plus some amazing acting, I think the prize has to go to Relics and Rarities; if you prefer your streaming in podcast form, it’s really tough to beat the OG Adventure Zone.  But of course the elephant in the room is Critical Role.

If you’re not familiar with Crtical Role, it’s a bit difficult to describe just how big it is.  It’s natural for us to think that, if we’ve never heard of a thing before, it can’t be but so big ... right?  Let me see if I can illustrate why you’re wrong about that with 2 little anecdotes.

D&D has become so popular lately that it’s very common for the D&D Player’s Handbook³ to be Amazon’s #1 best seller in not only the “fantay roleplaying books” category, but even in the entire “fantasy books” category, at least for short stints.  And this has happened several times through the past few years.  Well, just before the pandemic really got under way this year, the D&D folks and the Critical Role folks got together to produce what’s called a “campaign setting” for the current season of Critical Role.⁴  For some period of time earlier this year, the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount was not the best selling book in fantasy roleplaying, nor even the best selling book in fantasy: it was the best selling book on all of Amazon.  Period.  Before it was even released.  How can that be, you wonder?  How can there be more people buying Critical Role D&D books than buying D&D itself?  Because Critial Role has gained an appeal far beyond just D&D players, and even far beyond just this country.  The CR cast members have done conventions, with or without live shows, in LA, New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Austin, San Diego, the UK, Australia, Sweden, and many more, and everywhere they go, they draw a huge crowd.

Okay, last little Critical Role story.  The first season of Critical Role ended when everyone’s character got all the way to 20th level; they’d been playing for about 5 years at that point (the last half of that online) and were ready to start over with new characters.  But they thought they still had more stories to tell about their original characters: after all, what about those first 2½ years before the stream started?  Surely fans would love to hear some of those stories.  Since the CR cast is composed entirely of professional voice actors, it only seemed natural to do it in animated form: they’d hire an animation studio, voice all their own characters, maybe hire some of their other voice actor friends to chip in too ... it would be amazing.  But no studio was interested in such a thing: make a show out of your home D&D game?  Crazy talk!  So CR did what all creators in that situation do these days: they went to Kickstarter.  Just to fund a one hour special, they figured they needed $750K—animation is expensive!—and they figured it was a big ask, but, hey: if things went well, maybe they could do a sequel.  So they notified all their fans to be ready and they put up a 45-day Kickstarter campaign to raise 3/4 of a million dollars.  They hit their goal in under 45 minutes.  They blew through every stretch goal they’d thought of ahead of time in the first 24 hours.  The one-shot special turned into a 12-episode series, which would eventually be picked up by Amazon and is already greenlit for season 2.  Because, you see, by the time the 45 days were over, they had raised over eleven million dollars, making them then (and still, I believe) the highest-grossing campgaign in Kickstarter history for the entertainment category.⁵  Suddenly this little D&D-based company was being interviewed not just by Wired and Syfy, but by Forbes and Fortune.  This is what streaming has done for the hobby.

And all these things helped reignite my personal spark as well: I was excited to try out the new edition, I was encouraged by all the new postive media portrayals, and I got really sucked in to a number of these streaming D&D shows, including all the ones I mentioned above, plus several others.  They’re not all great, by any means, but the ones that are great are just astounding.  I have always believed that roleplaying is storytelling, and here’s a huge crop of people playing a new edition of the game who all believe it too ... and better yet, are using the hobby as a brand new medium to tell some exciting new stories.

Next time we’ll examine the origins and inspirations of the Family Campaign, which will take us right up to the present day.

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1 That’s “damage per second,” if you don’t speak MMORPG.

2 For some reason, videos where you watch other people play games, especially videogames, are called “let’s play” videos.  Still not sure what the origin of this curious phrase is.

3 That’s the most important rulebook—the one that every player needs.  Most of the other books only the DM needs.

4 A campaign setting is a description of a fantasy world so that you can set your D&D games in that world.  Most D&D campaign settings are worlds original to D&D, but it’s not unheard of to take an existing property and turn it into a D&D setting.  For instance, Lankhmar.

5 Which record they took from the MST3K reboot, who in turn took it from the Veronica Mars movie.

Rotating Through the Gaming

[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play TTRPGs in general, and D&D in particular.  Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did.  If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog.  So, if you’re not a gamer, you might want to give this one a pass.]

During the heyday of my old gaming group, there were always at least 3 or 4 of us who were willing to be GMs, but none of us who wanted to be the GM all the time.  For a while, we “solved” this apparent dilemma by just having one person GM until they got sick of it, then someone else would step up.  Everyone else would typically keep the same characters, even.  (The problem of what to do with the new GM’s old PC was, partially, what led to our policy on “GMPCs,” which will one day be its own blog post.)  But, eventually, we came up with a new idea: game rotation.

The idea was fairly simple: everyone who was willing to be a GM, and who had a good idea for a campaign, would go into the rotation, and we’d do a different campaign every week (we typically gamed once every week).  Being the nerds we were, we managed to complicate it a bit more than that by instituting a voting system.  Basically, at the end of each session, the GM for that session would say either “okay, that’s all I had prepared,” or they could say “I could go again, if you guys want to.” If they said the former, the next person in the rotation was up, the end.  If, however, they said the latter, then the other players would vote: were we actually interested in continuing this particular campaign for another week, or were we ready to move on?  Simple majority made the decision.  I would guess that maybe half the time that the GM indicated they were amenable to continuing, we voted to do so.  The other half, we would just move on, and that GM had a leg-up on their next turn at bat.  No one ever took offense, that I recall, for saying they could go on but being voted down to do so.  And I would guess that, over the nearly ten years we employed this system, the number of times we voted to play the same game a third week in a row could be counted in the fingers of one hand.

Short version: we switched campaigns a lot.

And I’ve been really excited to talk about this system for a while now, because there were a lot of great things about it.  Here are the primary reasons this was a fantastic system:

• No one ever got sick of being the GM: you were only doing it once a month or so.
• No one ever got sick of their characters: you were only playing that person once a month or so.  The rest of the time, you got be someone entirely different.
• Being exposed to different GMs with different styles is good for players, and in turn it makes them better GMs.
• It relieved a lot of the pressure for those who wanted to try being the GM for the first time.  You only had to worry about doing it for one week, and then, best case, you’d have 3 or 4 weeks to work up the courage to go again, and, worst case, you could say “man, I really didn’t like doing that!” and everyone had 3 or 4 other games to enjoy, so: no big deal.
• Assuming you were sticking with it, instead of having only a week to prepare some elaborate adventure, you basically had a month.  As we all got older and busier, this particular advantage cannot be overestimated.
• Since you did have the option of bowing out if things got too complex or too overwhelming, everyone felt more freedom to be experimental.  Try something new!  What the hell: worse come to worst, we can just toss out that campaign and you can come up with a better idea next time.
• Perhaps the best of all, we tried new things.  New settings for D&D, sure, but whole new systems.  We played Vampire (the Masquerade) and Mage (the Ascension), we played Star Wars (both the d6 and d20 versions), we played GURPS and Traveller and Call of Cthulhu.  We played weird shit, like the Wheel of Time RPG and In Nomine and homebrew shit we made up ourselves.  Because, again: why not try something new?  Could be fun for a while, you might discover a new love, and, as always, the worst case was we’d just fallback on our several other campaigns.

So it was an awesome system that we employed, as I say, for what I’m pretty sure was close to a decade.  But, you know, it wasn’t perfect.  There are a few downsides to this system:

• Even though you’re gaming every week, it’s often the case that it’s been a month since you played the character you’re picking up on any given night.  It’s sometimes hard to remember where you were in the story and sometimes even who your character actually is, especially for newer campaigns.
• Being experimental is awesome, but it does mean there are failed experiments.  I only got in a few sessions of my awesome gender-fluid Trinity character, only one of my Shadowrun character (who I can’t ever remember now), and none for my Hero or BESM characters.  I also don’t remember what I came up with for BESM, but my Hero character was a decently interesting Jekyll-and-Hyde type who I was kind of looking forward to.  (Hero is one of the few systems where that kind of character is actually buildable without jumping through a million hoops and bending a billion rules.)  Better that we tried and failed than never to have tried at all, I suppose, but they were bittersweet experiences, for sure.

These are all important considerations.  Still, I feel the good outweighed the bad, and I would definitely recommend this system to any gaming group looking to solve some of the same issues we had.  When I decided to make playing D&D with my kids a weekly thing—effectively replacing my old gaming group with one that I grew myself—I knew that I would have to institute game rotation again.  Primarily because being the sole GM in a serious, weekly game at this point in my life would probably kill me.  I already stress myself out constantly over how little time I have to do all the things I want to accomplish.  This should be a fun thing with my kids, not something that makes me feel like I’m failing to get shit done in my life.

Of course, my youngest 2 children aren’t ready to GM yet (okay, that’s what I thought ... originally).  So what we came up with was a system of 4 campaigns to rotate through:

• The Family Campaign, which I run, is our long-term, serious one where everyone has put the most work into their characters.  It’s the one where I spend the majority of my prep time.
• The Clown Campaign is another one I run, but this one we run straight “out of the book,” so to speak (that means that we use a pre-published adventure where most of the work is done for you).  For this one, we chose Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (which is, weirdly, neither about a dragon nor a heist), which is a fun, somewhat open but somewhat constrained, flexible adventure that I can have fun with at the same time that I don’t have to put too much effort into.  The campaign derives its name from the fact that the 3 characters are former clowns who came to Waterdeep with the circus and then wandered off to have other adventures.
• The Freak Campaign is being run by my eldest.  It’s also D&D, but it’s even less serious than the Clown Campaign: it’s specifically where a bunch of wacky characters (I play a unicorn, my middlest plays a nothic, and my youngest plays a homebrewed half-elf-half-changeling staff master) meet in Sigil and then get kidnapped by crazy lich who just wants to send them off on adventures while they watch, because they’re bored of having been alive for so long.  Our first mission was to raid a black dragon’s hoard (we started at 7th level for this one), and now we’re running through an updated version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
• The Lizard Campaign, also run by my eldest, is our primary non-D&D campaign.  It’s ostensibly a Shadowrun campaign (meaning it uses the standard Shadowrun setting), but we started out doing a Powered by the Apocalypse version called Sixth World.  Lately, the kid has been playing around with a homebrewed conversion to mostly-5e rules.  But, either way, it’s a very not-fantasy, cyberpunk-y sort of campaign where the 3 of us are all reptilian based mutant siblings: I play the oldest sibling, a crocodile man with some spirit powers, my middle child plays the middle sibiling, a chameleon ninja; and my youngest is the youngest, a lizard hacker.  Tone-wise, it’s somewhere slightly more serious than the Clown Campaign but less so than the Family Campaign.

Additionally, my youngest—remember, she’s still only 8 at the moment—has already jumped in to to try GMing, running a Dungeon World game (with my eldest as assistant GM) which we sometimes call the Red/Blue Campaign, due to its setting in a divided city where, on one side, everyone dresses in red, and, on the other ... well, you get the picture.  The city is ruled by a king and queen (one on each side), who have two twin daughters, tragically separated by their parents’ division.  I play a dhampir (that’s a half-vampire, for those unfamiliar with the term) and my middle child plays an otter-kin (that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like), and our goal seems to be to reunite the city.  Once we can figure out why it was spearated in the first place.  Did I mention that this kid is 8?  It’s a fairly complex plot, overall.  But she doesn’t always have the patience to be in charge.

My middle child has zero interest in being in charge of anything.

Now, we have a tendency to play these games 2 or 3 weeks in a row way more often than my old group did, but that’s partially due to my kids not having the stubbornness to stay up all night like we used to when I was young.  Many times after a few hours, they start to run out of steam, so we just call it and say “let’s play this again next week!” We’re about 2 months away from our one-year anniversary since we started this system, and this is what our rotation has worked out to so far:

• 12/11/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 12/18/19: Clown Campaign
• 12/26/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 1/8/20: Lizard Campaign
• 1/15/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/20/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/7/20: Clown Campaign
• 2/12/20: Lizard Campaign
• 2/19/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/22/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/26/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/4/20: Family Campaign
• 3/13/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/18/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/25/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/8/20: Family Campaign
• 4/15/20: Family Campaign
• 4/22/20: Family Campaign
• 4/29/20: Family Campaign (finish up), Freak Campaign (intro)
• 5/6/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/13/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/27/20: Clown Campaign
• 6/3/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 6/10/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/17/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/24/20: Family Campaign
• 7/1/20: Family Campaign
• 7/8/20: Family Campaign
• 7/15/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 8/6/20: Family Campaign
• 8/26/20: Family Campaign
• 9/9/20: Family Campaign
• 9/16/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/23/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/30/20: Freak Campaign
• 10/7/20: Clown Campaign (proposed)

There have been a few weeks when we skipped roleplaying (often on those nights we would play other games, like Munchkin or Stuffed Fables or whatnot), and that one night where we played half a session of one campaign and then half a session of the next one, but overall we’re not doing too badly keeping to the schedule, if with a lot more contiguous runs than we used to have in my old group.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if people are keeping interested and not getting bored.  Which so far seems to be the case.

Maybe this is a system that your gaming group wants to explore, especially if you have a “one person GMs all the time” style group currently.  Give your GM a chance to shine as a player for a change!  Let your players experiment in the GM’s chair without the pressure of “this is what we’re doing now” looming over them.  Try out some new games as a change of pace.  Variety is the spice of life, so they say.  Why not extend that metaphor to your tabletop gaming?

Minor Magic Items

[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play fifth edition D&D.  Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did.  If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog.  So, if you’re not a D&D player, you might want to give this one a pass.]

As part of my ongoing family campaign, the players have accepted a side quest to help out an important NPC in the city they happen to be staying in (temporarily; they’re passing through on a longer journey set for them by their “mysterious benefactor”).¹  Of course I expect them to complete this mission, and thus I have to be prepared to have the NPC reward them for their service.  I could just break out the hard currency, of course—no one ever turns their nose up at gold—but it seems boring.  The characters are not wanting for cash right now, and D&D 5e has a bit of a weird relationship with money anyhow: since the game discourages an active economy in magic items, once you get to a certain level of equipped-ness, you often can’t find much to spend your excess gold on.  But they’re still moderately low level (2nd through 4th, right now), so I also don’t want to drop a bunch of powerful items on them that will raise the overall power level and make me regret my decision later.  What to do?

Obviously the solution is minor magic items.  I’ve now spent a bunch of time combing my books and the Internet for the perfect items to gift my players with, so I thought it might be nice to share some of my findings with other folks: perhaps this info can help your game as well.

First of all, I gather from searching the Internet that there seems to be a some confusion as to what a minor magical item even is.  So perhaps we should start with what it isn’t.

• A minor magical item is not the same as a consumable magic item. A major effect is always a major effect.  Limited use of that effect does not magically (haha) make it a minor effect.
• A minor magical item is not the same as a wondrous item. “Wondrous item” is a term which here means “item we couldn’t fit into any other category.” While it’s true that sometimes a wondrous item may have a minor effect, many (many!) more of them have pretty major effects.  “Minor” does not mean “not a sword or a suit of armor or a staff or a ring or a ...”
• A minor magical item is not the same as a trinket. A trinket is a strange or unusual item which is designed to spark roleplaying opportunities.  It might not even be magical at all.

Let’s dispense with these in order of ease of dispensing.  Wondrous items are a category of magic items; it has absolutely nothing to do with whether it’s a minor item or not.  (To be fair, this is the term least often confused for “minor magical item,” so I think most people already get this.)  Consumable items are, again, a completely orthogonal concept.  A major magical item might be consumable, or it might not.  A minor item could also be consumable, but let’s be honest here: if the effect is already minor, it seems pretty mean to then limit the number of uses on top of that.  The question of trinkets is a bit harder, but not much.

First off, as mentioned above, some trinkets aren’t magical at all.  Here are some examples from the trinkets table (Player’s Handbook, pages 159 – 161):

• A mummified goblin hand
• The deed for a parcel of land in a realm unknown to you
• A small cloth doll skewered with needles
• A tiny silver bell without a clapper
• A l-inch cube, each side painted a different color
• An empty wine bottle bearing a pretty label that says, “The Wizard of Wines Winery, Red Dragon Crush, 331422-W”
• A black pirate flag adorned with a dragon’s skull and crossbones

These are all great, flavorful items, and they can all provide interesting story hooks for clever players.  But no magic.

On the other hand, here are some other examples from that same list:

• A shard of obsidian that always feels warm to the touch
• A small, weightless stone block
• A candle that can’t be lit
• A nightcap that, when worn, gives you pleasant dreams
• A silver teardrop earring made from a real teardrop
• A tiny mechanical crab or spider that moves about when it’s not being observed
• A wooden box with a ceramic bottom that holds a living worm with a head on each end of its body

Also great, flavorful items, but these are all definitely magical.  Not very magical, granted, but then we were looking for minor magic items ... right?

This gets us to the heart of what a minor magical item is.  A major magical item has a major effect.  Whether it’s wondrous or not doesn’t change that; neither does whether it’s consumable or not.  A minor magical item has a minor effect.  So why aren’t magical trinkets minor magic items?  Because a trinket has no effect.  Sure, the nightcap may give you pleasant dreams, and the block may not weigh anything even though it’s made of stone, but none of that actually has any effect on the game.

So what would be an example of an actual minor magic, item?  There are a few in the DMG, but not too many.  Happily, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything gives us a whole mess of ’em.  Here’s one:

• Boots of False Tracks (wondrous item, common): Only humanoids can wear these boots.  While wearing the boots, you can choose to have them leave tracks like those of another kind of humanoid of your size.

A very small effect, granted, but still something that could be useful in a game.  You might have to work pretty hard to come up with a way to use it, but that’s part of the joy of a minor magic item.  It’s real magic, it’s impressive to the common folk, it’s useful in the right situation, and it encourages creative play.  And what it doesn’t do is make the GM’s job harder.

See, as a GM you have be very careful with those major magic items.  Your players might be very excited to get a ring of invisibility, and you might feel quite magnanimous giving them one, but now you have to consider that you’ve got at least one character who’s never going to have to worry about sneaking past your sentries any more, or how to burgle that precious artifact that’s so closely guarded, or how to eavesdrop on crucial NPC conversations.  Oh, sure: you can demand stealth checks anyway, on the grounds that someone might hear them, or claim that your evil genius BBEG obviously would install “anti-invisibility preparations” (even if it’s only something as dirt simple as coating the floor with flour), but you can’t always ignore or override power that you specifically gave your players in the first place: it frustrates them, and why did you even give it to them if you didn’t expect them to use it?  So, every time you contemplate awarding some sort of major magic item, you have to think carefully about what impact it’s going to have on the game, and how it’s going to make your life harder: that is, how it’s going to make it more challenging for you to challenge your players.

But with minor magical items, you have none of these problems.  What plotline do you have planned that could possibly be upset by a pair of boots that can leave confusing tracks?  Or (to use a few more examples from Xanathar’s) a helmet that makes one’s eyes glow red? or a sword that gives off moonlight? or a tankard that allows one to drink as much as they like and never get drunk?  No, the minor magical item is awesome because the player gets to feel cool and special, and the GM never has to worry about being swept up in a magical powers arms race.

As for the creative play aspect, the OSR² proponents are fond of touting old-school D&D as facilitating “item-based problem-solving.” The idea is that modern D&D is all dripping with magic items so no one bothers to come up with uses for simple things such as mirrors, or a box of silver pins, or a pouch of herbs and spices.  But of course this is silly.  You can still encourage your players to use their equipment lists to their full extent; you just have to figure out to make it a bit sexier.  In those old-school days, you wouldn’t dream of going into a dungeon without your ten-foot pole, but that was because your GM would gleefully drop you into a spike pit if you didn’t tap all the floors along the way.  Also, if you didn’t use some sort of ear horn to listen at all the doors, you would eventually acquire ear seekers.  And if you didn’t have a silver mirror, your GM would inevitably spring a medusa or a basilisk on you.  Wasn’t old-school D&D fun?  It taught you to develop complex and bizarre shopping lists if you wanted to live: not exactly sexy swashbuckling adventure.  But that’s how it rolled—there were buttloads of bean-counting built into the game, actually.  Most of it has largely fallen by the wayside in the 3 major rules revisions since then, because most people don’t find detailed resource management all that fun.

But the OSR fans have a point that you really had to get the most out of your equipment list if you wanted to survive.  Figuring out how to make do with limited resources can be fun, as long as it doesn’t devolve into the aforementioned shopping list exercise.  But we can have the best of both worlds: minor magic items give the players something that they really want to use, because it’s all magical and cool, but because it has very limited application, it forces them to work hard to come up with a situation where they can actually put it to good use.  See?  Item-based problem solving and cool magic items as a reward and nice, modern rules with no complex resource tracking.  All your bases are covered.

Now that we know what minor magic items are and why we want to use them, where can we get them from?  Well, as mentioned previously, Xanathar’s is a good place to start.  The section is actually called “common magic items,” and it starts on page 136, but “common” isn’t quite the same as “minor” either.  Oh, many common magic items are minor as well, true, but some are just consumable, and those (while very useful) aren’t the type of thing we’re exploring here.  Happily, the list of items in Xanathar’s are all minor as well as common.³  In fact, some of them border on trinkets: I’m a bit hard-pressed to come up with a creative use for, say, armor of gleaming that would have any actual effect on a game.  But in general it’s a great list.

The DMG is, sadly, slimmer pickings.  Note that page 135 of Xanathar’s gives you a vital clue: anything on tables A through E in the DMG is considered a minor item.  But, looking at those tables (pages 144 – 145 of your Dungeon Master’s Guide), what you see is almost exclusively consumable items.  Still there are a few proper minor magic items to be found:

• On table A, we have the bag of holding (which is right on the edge of tipping into a major item) and the driftglobe, which is a great minor item.
• On table B, the alchemy jug is a fun one, and the cap of water breathing, goggles of night, helm of comprehending languages, mithral armor, ring of swimming, and saddle of the cavalier all qualify.  The mariner’s armor is at the upper end (like the bag of holding), but still pretty safe.  The robe of useful items is, weirdly, consumable, and the lantern of revealing is semi-consumable in that you have to keep putting oil in it.  The two wands have major effects; they’re only considered minor items because of their limited charges.  I would also be cautious with the cloak of the manta ray, the immovable rod and the rope of climbing: they’re not as minor as they might first appear.
• Table C adds Quaal’s feather tokens, most of which are great minor items (watch out for the bird and whip ones though), and the decanter of endless water, eyes of minute seeing, folding boat, horseshoes of speed, periapt of health, and sending stones are all good choices.  Heward’s handy haversack is what you give your players when you feel like a bag of holding is going too far.  The chime of opening and the necklace of fireballs are more of those unexpectedly consumable ones.
• Table D doesn’t add much, but the horseshoes of a zephyr are fun.  Nolzur’s marvelous pigments are technically consumable, but a moderately thrifty player will probably never actually use them all.  Portable holes are another of those more-major-than-they-seem items.  Bag of devouring is a cursed item, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
• Table E is 100% composed of consumable items, although sovreign glue (like Nolzur’s marvelous pigments) is one that you’ll probably never actually use all of.

So, a few good things there, but not as much as we might hope for.  But don’t count the humble DMG out yet!  Look on page 143; see that table marked “What Minor Properties Does It Have”?  The concept here is supposed to be that you have some powerful magic item, and you want to give it a little extra flavor by assigning it an additional, magical effect.  But there’s nothing saying that you can’t just have a magic item that has one of these minor effects and nothing else ... voilà, minor magic item.  In fact, some of the pre-existing minor items seem cut directly from this cloth: a driftglobe is just an item that only has the “beacon” minor effect, while an orb of direction is just an item bearing only the “compass” property.

Another useful trick, if you decide to come up with your own items, is to look at cantrips.  Now, cantrips come in two distinct flavors; they don’t have technical designations, but they’re often referred to as “damage-dealing cantrips” vs “utility cantrips.” You probably don’t want to give your players even more ways to magically create damage.  Besides: it’s boring.  But those utility cantrips can be quite useful to draw inspiriation from.  Again, some of the existing minor items seem to follow this recipe: it seems obvious that clothes of mending are based on the mending cantrip, and an instrument of illusions is just a more flavorful way to cast minor illusion.

But perhaps you don’t want to mess around with creating your own.  Surely there must be someone out there in the big wide world wide web who has done it for you?  Feel free to search for yourself: now that you know to avoid lists that are just consumable items, or trinket lists, you should have better luck.  Here’s a few that I’ve found that I like:

• Goblin Punch has a list of 100
• S. A. Hunt has collected over 100 from around the Internet for you⁴
• Spouting Lore has smaller lists of items, one for rogues, one for rangers, and even one for magical swords that aren’t too overpowered
• Tales of Scheherazade has some introductory text which references the same “item-based problem solving” article that I linked to above—which itself contains a list of items that are very much trinkets, not minor magic items—but then goes on to provide 100 items, the majority of which fall safely into this category

It’s taken some analysis, and some research, and some creativity, but I’ve come up with what I think are some great minor magic items for my party.  Hopefully I’ve short-circuited some of that work so that you can do the same.

__________

1 By the way, I would be remiss for not giving credit for the bones of this side quest to Justice Arman and his team in their excellent Baldur’s Gate: City Encounters.  My characters are not actually in Baldur’s Gate, but that doesn’t keep many of the encounters from being very useful, including this one, which is #12 (“Little Calimshan”).  Transplanting Rilsa Rael (an NPC from Descent into Avernus) to my city—which happens to be Sammaresh, for the Forgotten-Realms-savvy—was trivial, and the idea that Sammaresh (just across the Shining Sea from Calimshan, and therefore much closer than Baldur’s Gate) would also have a Little Calimshan neighborhood seemed perfectly natural.

2 Remember: “OSR” stands for “old-school revival”; that is, modern offshoots of D&D based on the 1st and 2nd edition rulesets, but updated slightly to make them less confusing.

3 Even the consumable ones, such as beads of nourishment.  But, again, those are really a separate category.

4 Fans of The Adventure Zone will no doubt recognize a few of those.

D&D and Me: Part 7 (The Next Generation)

[This is the seventh post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about my longest-running character, a monk in D&D’s third edition.  This was also one of the last characters I played with my long-time gaming group.]

In 2005, I moved to Southern Maryland, and in 2007 I moved again, this time to Southern California.  I didn’t find a new gaming group in either location, so, after roughly 15 years of weekly gaming with very few breaks, I began a long hiatus away from TTRPGs.  From actually playing, in any event.  I still kept up with the news, and I would buy a book occasionally, just to read for myself.  In many ways, this period harkened back to my original experiences with D&D: just reading new rules, messing around with creating characters or storylines, but not really playing.

In 2008, D&D released its fourth edition (referred to, of course, as “4e”).  I was actually quite excited about this in all the hype leading up to the release, but once the product was in hand ... I was disappointed.  Not sure if it would have really made that much difference, seeing as how I had no one to play it with anyway, but for some reason I was really quite irked at how bad the new version was.  Luckily, that was about to change.

I don’t need to go into a long explanation about what Pathfinder is, because I’ve already done that, if you care to read it.  The short version is, Pathfinder updates the D&D 3e ruleset with major improvements, but little structural change.  I’m not opposed to structural change, mind you: the jump from 2e to 3e was huge, and I loved it, because things got better.  But this change—from 3e to 4e, that is—felt different, and definintely not better.  Pathfinder, on the other hand, was somehow both amazing in how much was changed and in how much remained the same.  By the time it was officially released in 2009, I had already been avidly following the public playtest, and I was ready to try it out.  If only I had someone to play with ...

But, of course, by that time my eldest was 11 years old, and that’s plenty old enough to learn TTRPGs.  I was back to being solely a GM, of course, but that was okay.  In many ways, those early days of Pathfinder were eerily similar to my early days of D&D: after a long period of just reading rules, I had a young child to teach, I had to constantly invent new rules because you can’t stifle a kid’s creativity, and I was generating settings from scratch with way more emphasis on fun adventuring than rational worldbuilding.  That the young child was son instead of brother made little difference; that the game was Pathfinder instead of D&D pre-1e was only different in that it was much easier to teach.  The big contrast was that, now with about a decade of GM experience under my belt, I mostly knew what I was doing.  I also knew enough to play around with other games: we spent quite a bit of time experimenting with post-apocalyptic RPGs, for instance.  In Pathfinder, my kid played a half-wood-elf-half-drow named Krad Demonshield who started out as a custom class I made called “witchblade” (that ever-elusive search for the perfect blend of fighter and magic-user) and then multiclassed into another custom class I made which reused my favorite alt-classname “nightblade,”^* this time cast more as a shadow-magic-wielding assassin (but, you know, the good kind of assassin).  There was also another fantasy character, a minotaur named Foghnar, but I don’t believe we used Pathfinder for that one.

Pathfinder was really fun for me.  I spent a lot of time developing classes, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I also enjoyed a lot of the supplemental classes that were released for it.  Their witch was so good I abandoned my attempt at building one, and their oracle was so close to something I’d been working on (which I called a “hermit,” after the tarot card, which was its inspiration) that I completely reworked mine to be a slight tweak of it.  Their magus gave me major tips for reworking my witchblade, and their hybrid class the hunter may be a better ranger than the ranger.^**  I loved the rules, which were still way more complex than they should have been, but I was comparing to the previous editions of D&D, and in that light they look delightfully slim.  The combat was still a major pain, especially from the GM point of view, but character creation was a joy, with ever-so-many options, and fairly easy (at least for a long-time 3e player) to add even more of your own.

Eventually my child went off to teach Pathfinder to their friend group, and became a GM in their own right.  This led to less tabletop gaming for me, but that was okay.  I had other things to do, and GMing is a pretty big time commitment, so as long as the kid was having fun and carrying on the family traditions, I was fine.  The GMing I had done up to then was still pretty satisfying.

Of course, the only downside was that I didn’t really get to play a character.  I had NPCs, sure—Krad Demonshield, for instance, was almost always accompanied by his paladin friend Alcinor—but they weren’t really my characters in the same way that my PCs had been.  They were sort of GMPCs, although I didn’t really treat them as such.  But it’s a gray area when you’re playing one-on-one campaigns.

Of course, I had another child as well.  He was far too young to play with us during our Pathfinder heydey, but, then, children have a tendency of getting older.  By the time we’d burned out on Pathfinder, my middle child was now 11, and it was time for him to get in on the action.  He first played a Dungeon World one-shot^*** for the eldest’s sixteenth birthday, and we moved on from there to a new campaign where I got to create the first paladin character I actually enjoyed, Arkan Kupriveryx.  Because, you see, by that point, fifth edition was out.

Next time we’ll talk 5e and the rise of actual play D&D games.

__________

* See part 5 for further discussion on the origin of that term.

** Although probably still not as good as 3.5e’s scout.

*** For those not familiar, Dungeon World is sort of like D&D crossed with Apocalypse World, and if you don’t know what that is, probably just best to think of it as a “modern” TTRPG designed to focus more on narrative than rules.

Gaming Series

Lately I’ve started a bunch of series related to gaming, in particular my love of D&D and similar TTRPGs (tabletop roleplaying games—sometimes, in older posts, you may see me refer to them as PnP RPGs).

D&D and Me

My personal story about how I came to love the game and my formative experiences with it.

• Part 1: The Time Beforetimes
• Part 2: Mapping Out the Territory
• Part 3: Playing the Roles
• Part 4: If I Could Talk to the Animals
• Part 5: Multiple Personalities
• Part 6: The Contemplative Life ... of Punching the Crap of out People
• Part 7: The Next Generation
• Part 8: Resurgence of the Game
• Part 9: All in the Family

GM Philosophy

These are posts which outline my personal tenets as a GM (game master).  This is mainly to have a formal place to point players to if they want to know what to expect in my games.

• Roleplaying is Storytelling
• Character Is King
• I Don’t Kill Characters
• (the fine print)
• Playstyle Matters

Multiclassing

One D&D topic that’s near and dear to my heart is multiclassing: the ability for one character to advance in more than class.  I started a series exploring how this was handled in various editions of D&D, hopefully to culminate in some ideas about what the perfect multiclassing system might be.

• History of the Multiclasses (2nd edition)
• History of the Multiclasses (3rd edition)
• History of the Multiclasses (4th edition)
• History of the Multiclasses (5th edition)

General D&D 5e Musings

Occasionally I write something more general about fifth edition D&D in particular.  There’s not a lot of throughline for these.  It is, by its nature, an open-ended series.

• The Starting Level Dilemma
• Meet Arkan Kupriveryx (Concept)
• Meet Arkan Kupriveryx (Execution)
• Minor Magic Items
• Rotating Through the Gaming
• 5e vs Pathfinder: A Dance of D&Ds
• Perception, Investigation: a Perpetual Imbroglio
• We All Need a Little Guidance Sometimes

General Pathfinder Musings

Before D&D’s fifth edition (affectionately known as 5e) came out, I was pretty big into Pathfinder.  I have some musings on that too:

• The Path to Pathfinder (part 1 of 2)
• Destination: Pathfinder (part 2 of 2)
• Looking Forward to Pathfinder’s Next Iteration

General Heroscape Musings

Outside of TTRPGs, my other big gaming love is Heroscape.  Here are some thoughts about that game:

• Why Heroscape Is Cool
• Heroscape Forever
• Assault on the Ice Tower (posted on Heroscapers.com as “Xotli”)
• Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map (short)

General Fantasy Musings

Sometimes I just like to talk about fantasy gaming in general, storytelling through TTRPGs, etc.  Like these:

• The Expression of Tension
• Gaming the Grey
• Improv at the (D&D) Table

Gaming with my Family

Of course I sometimes game with my family, and I sometimes write about it.  Here are some samples:  (Note: Most of these are about D&D, but some are about Heroscape.)

• Roleplaying After the Fall
• A Game for a Younger Man
• War for Father’s Day
• Genethlian Cartography (quickie)
• Why I Play D&D
• Quiet week, just a few demons to deal with ... (short)
• Another proud father moment (quickie)
• No Time Like the First Time
• Kicking off the Family Campaign
• D&D Story #1: The Demon Doll

Heroscape tournament reports

Most years, I attend an annual Heroscaper tournament with a group of folks called the SoCal League.  Typically I take at least a human child or two along for the ride, so here’s a family subcategory consisting of those posts:

• Tourney the First (NHSD 2012)
• National Heroscape Day 2013 (short)
• Tourney prep (short)
• National Heroscape Day 2014 (short)
• National Heroscape Day 2015 (short)
• National Heroscape Day 2016
• NHSD 2017: Quick Results (short)
• SoCal ‘Scapers Summer Gameday, 2019 (short)

Kicking off the Family Campaign

[This is not exactly a series, but it’s a report about my ongoing D&D campaign with my kids.  This is the first proper report, but there was also a sort of prologue that you could read if you haven’t already.]


So, I previously described how my daughter decided to invent her first D&D characer at age 7, and how that spurred a whole campaign that we finally started to do what I called “flashbackstory” sessions for.  Well, this week was the first official session of the “Family Campaign,” where each of my children’s characters finally met each other for the first time.

Since I’m always a little irked by the standard cliché of “you all meet in a pub,” I went with an entirely different cliché: “you are all summoned by a mysterious benefactor who wishes to call in his favors.”  I mostly justified this by having inserted the initial favor into the flashbackstories, so that, instead of feeling like a tired plot device, it would feel like an organic outgrowth of the story-thus-far.  At least I hope I achieved that.  The kids seemed to enjoy it anyway.

I kicked it off with a short encounter that the benefactor figure, whose name is Hervé and who is sort of the fantasy equivalent of an alien-pretending-to-be-human, engineered as a sort of audition.  I wanted to throw them together fairly quickly and let them work out their group dynamic, plus I knew there was a butt-ton of exposition coming down the pike, and I didn’t want them to get bored by dumping it all on them before anything exciting happened.  I designed this encounter to be just a bit hard, but certainly not deadly, and it turned out to be way too easy, so obviously I’m going to have to up my game on the GM side.^*  They pulled a classic divide-and-conquer technique (which I wasn’t really expecting from a group so unused to working with each other), had a few good rolls, I had a few really bad ones, and at the end of the day those bad guys never really had a chance.  Interestingly, they decided against outright killing them, even applying some emergency first aid to one who seemed like he might slip away from his greivous wounds.

Then we did our long exposition, which I tried to make as entertaining as possible by framing it as a story, and also because I gave their mysterious benefactor an insane accent, which sort of migrates around from French (Monty Python and the Holy Grail style) to Eastern European (Vlad the Impaler style) to Spanish (Puss in Boots style).  I thought it would be an interesting way to emphasize that they couldn’t pin down the accent, and also it means that my accent can never really “slip,” because then I can just say I did it on purpose.  Plus I get to mangle English expressions just for fun (e.g. “Congratulations! You all have passed with the colors that fly!”).  Of course, besides my own desire to have a good time, it’s also designed to keep them entertained while I have to talk for long periods of time, which I think I mostly succeeded at.  I think perhaps my eldest was losing focus a bit by the end, but the younger two seemed to enjoy it pretty well.^**

So, other than that, we did a little journey planning and that was pretty much it.  I’ve never been the type of GM who likes to handwave away travel time (“oh, you’re gonna walk to this place halfway around the world? should take, let’s say, a couple days”) or even travel details (“you guys ready to depart? okay, you travel for three months; now you’re there”).  I mean, imagine if you removed the “travel details” from The Lord of the Rings ... you’d hardly have anything left!  Travel is where a lot of cool adventures happen, and where some of the most important character bonding takes place as well.  It matters to a story what method you travel by, and which route you choose, and how long it takes to get there ... at least, I believe it does.  So I let the kids plan out their route to get to the magic item they’ve been sent to retrieve (or “the MacGuffin,” as my eldest correctly identified it).  Of course, no matter which road they pick, whether they choose to walk or ride horses or swing through the forest like Tarzan (an actual option, given this particular group), something exciting is bound to come of it, so I’m happy to let them work it out for themselves.

Mainly it was a chance for each character to meet the others, and it went far better than I expected.  Let me give you a brief rundown of the characters my children have developed.

My youngest is Corva Ravenstone, who you may recall from last post.  She’s a classic “jungle princess” archetype, raised by a tiger and with a little blue monkey constantly chittering on her shoulder.  She doesn’t care for people, for civilization, for sleeping in beds, and she’s about 16 years old.  But, since she’s been looking out for herself since 5 or so—tigers don’t coddle their children, you know—she’s quite competent.  She’s a half-elf with blue armor, a big honkin’ bow, and the ability to speak to all animals.

My middlest is Zyx, a changeling from the world of Eberron, which is the only place in the D&D multiverse that changelings are found.  A changeling is a creature who can change their form to look like anything they like, within some broad size limitations.  They can’t be giants, and they can’t be halflings, but pretty much anything in between is fair game: human, elf, dwarf, half-orc, any hair color, any eye color, fat, thin, male, female ... anything.  As you can imagine, changelings don’t have the same concepts of gender, and identity in general, that other people do.  They have a tendency to develop certain forms that they favor, and they give each its own name and history.  There’s even a cool racial feature where you choose a particular identity and you are really good at some skill—but only while in that form.  Zyx’s parents moved them to a whole ‘nother world, Ixalan, when they were just a baby, where they also grew up in a jungle, but a very different one: instead of tigers and monkeys, Zyx grew up with merfolk and feathered dinosaurs.  There, they learned to be a druid, and was content enough with that life, until somehow both parents and druid mentor disappeared within a few weeks of each other.  Zyx doesn’t spend much time looking like themself though: he can be Jon Wood, a very non-descript human man in his mid-thirties, or they can be Moon, a fierce shifter with short white hair and yellow eyes, or she can be Xoc,^*** an orange-skinned merfolk teenager who’s really great at alchemy.

My eldest is Isabella, a human who was raised in a creepy cult that turned out be to riddled with lycanthropes.  Her father was the cult leader, who turned out to be a werewolf, and, when she came of age, he bit her, and now she’s a werewolf too.  She soon ran away and has spent the remainder of her life trying to control her condition, and has now reached a point where she can enter a battle rage, changing to her hybrid wolf form, and not rip her allies to shreds.  Mostly.  Interestingly, she’s the oldest (although all Zyx’s forms appear older, Zyx themself is only 15, a year younger than Corva), but also the most sheltered, since she was never on her own until she left home, which she did at a much older age than either of the other two.  She’s capable of handling herself, certainly, but there’s also an innocence about her that contrasts with her bestial nature.

So far, it’s too early to know for sure how the intra-party dynamics will shake out, but we see some early indications.  Isabella seems somewhat disconcerted that a “child” will be accompanying them, even though Corva is no younger than she was when she left home.  But perhaps she sees herself in the younger girl a bit.  Meanwhile no one even knows how old Zyx is, since they’ve only met Jon and Moon so far—for that matter, no one else even knows Zyx’s actual name!  Corva just seems excited to be a part of all this, and no one at all seems concerned that, within the first few hours of meeting, one of their new friends turned into a werewolf.  And they’ve still yet to meet the mysterious fourth member of their party ...

I’m feeling pretty excited about where the story is going.  There will be some secrets revealed, and some dangers faced, and some dangers handily circumvented, and some new abilities discovered.  Hopefully some friends will also be made along the way.

Perhaps I’ll drop in here to report the progress from time to time.  I think it’s a story worth sharing.

__________

* That means “game master,” if you’re still not a D&D person and you still didn’t read the prologue blog post, which contains a footnote nearly identical to this one.  In this particular case, though, the relevant part of being the GM is that I’m responsible for choosing all the enemies they’ll have to fight.
** Which is a bit backwards from how I thought it would go down, to be honest.  But probably it was because the younger two are more easily amused, while my eldest was looking for more substance.  Hopefully this situation will improve as time goes on.
*** Pronounced “shock,” if you care.  Due to a bit of linguistic nerdery, we decided that “X"s in Ixalan are pronounced as “sh,” meaning that instead of “ICKS-uh-lan,” which is how most people pronounce it, we say “EESH-ah-lahn.”  We’re weird that way.