Eldritch Ætherium III

"To Moon and Stars: Heart of the Lord of the Undermountain of Gilead & Ashkeeper"

[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.]

Oftentimes volume II of a mix is just a continuation of volume I, and so volume III tends to go off in new directions.  However, you may recall that, with this mix, last volume was the departure, and so in many ways volume III is closely following the model of volume II.  Last time, I noted that

... 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.

Sooo ... we have the same number of Midnight Syndicate, Nox Arcana, and zero-project tracks, not to mention tracks from Shards of Eberron; V Shane is back, and there’s a return to the Dungeons & Dragons album for MS; and I’ve doubled down on the Dead Can Dance: not only a Renn-Faire-sounding bridge-esque track, but also a longer one that’s ... well, also a bit Renn-Faire-sounding, if I’m honest.  Not to mention all the things that weren’t on volume I but are repeated here: another slow Colm McGuinness track for the back third, another track that Ian Fisher Peter rebranded to tie into Critical Role, more tracks from Loreena McKennitt, Faith and the Muse, Epic Soul Factory, and the Game of Thrones soundtrack ... and, yet ... and yet I still feel there’s enough new stuff going on to make it worth your while.  So strap in and let’s see what we’ve got.

First, let’s talk about why it took me so long to get around to Jeremy Soule.  Soule is rapidly emerging as the pre-eminent composer for fantasy videogaming: he’s done the last 3 Elder Scrolls games (including the big one: Skyrim), Guild Wars, and many D&D games such as Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and one of the Baldur’s Gate games.  I’m not entirely sure why it took me so long to get there, although I still think that Skyrim, which he appears to be best known for, is not really the pinnacle of his work.  For his first appearance on this mix, we’ll be sticking to Neverwinter Nights, with just a touch of Icewind Dale, and we’ll get our Baldur’s Gate infusion from composer Michael Hoenig (late of Tangerine Dream) and his score for Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn.  Of course the other favorite gaming soundtrack of fantasy music YouTubers everywhere is the Witcher 3 soundtrack, composed by a variety of mostly Polish musicians; we’re going to just barely dip our toe into that with one my favorite of its mellower tracks.  The other videogame source I’m drawing from is the World of Warcraft soundtrack, with two tracks from composer Jason Hayes.  This soundtrack has a few stand-out songs on it, and I thought these two (especially our opener “Legends of Azeroth”) were among the best.

I also mentioned that composing music specifically for roleplaying games is getting to be much more popular: we’ve come a long way since David P. Davidson and V Shane, and I wanted to put some of the newer fare up against the old classics.  So, yes, there’s a track from Shards of Eberron, and a particularly meandering electronic piece from V Shane, but we also look at the soundtrack for 13th Age, a TTRPG by the designers of D&D’s 3rd and 4th editions.  Coming just 2 years after the release of the game itself, a soundtrack for a TTRPG was still considered somewhat unusual, and this was in 2015 (just seven years ago as I write this).  Nowadays, while I doubt anyone would consider it common, I’m sure no one would be particularly surprised by it either.  The soundtrack for 13th Age brings together 5 different composers, of which I feature 2 here: a short bridge from Tristan Noon, and a longer piece by Marie-Anne Fischer.

And, yes, once again there’s a long, silly title cobbled together from bits of the track names.  Who are Gilead & Ashkeeper, and why do they have an undermountain?  And why aren’t either of them the lord of it?  Yeah, I got nothin’.  Sounds cool though.

This time our journey bursts into a darker tone; the “Legends of Azeroth” are a bit creepier and tenser than last volume’s opener, so they plunge us into immediate danger.  From there, we journey “To Vaes Dothrak,” a quiet but exotic trip which brings us to the “Sun, Moon and Stars” of another Balkan/Bedouin/Gaelic campfire, though this one is bit mellower than last outing’s.  Which flows nicely into the “Radharc” (Irish for “vision”), itself containing some Middle Eastern strains, which of course leads naturally to “Waukeen’s Promenade,” which seems like it would be right at home in a Moroccan bazaar.

Then we slow it down to ponder our “Journey’s Thoughts,” meditate a bit on the “Harai” (a Shinto religious ceremony), and finally come to “The Heart of the Forest,” where it seems that fairies and other mystical creatures abound.  This wood is apparently “Elwynn Forest,” a contemplative place which is perhaps located on the island of “Spikeroog” (also a place for meditation and thought).  But that’s just a brief stopover, because the anticipation of the “Startup Screen” is leading us to an “Escalation,” which pays off in the lovely medieval-style ballad “As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins.” But it’s a brief respite, as we’re soon off on a “Ride to Destiny” where we’ll “Clash with the Lord of Blades,” a dark and suspenseful chapter of our journey indeed.  After that, it’s more “Exploration,” where danger seems to be around every corner, and that’s where we meet the “Knights of the Darkness,” with their awesome military might.  Then, after a tense trek across “The Wastes of Xhorhas,” we arrive at the “Secret Chamber,” where magic seems imminent, but perhaps not the good kind.  We’re soon lost in the “Tunnels of the Undermountain,” which leaves us “Exploring Xen’drik” and hoping nothing too scary jumps out and tries to eat us.

Bad news though: at the “Black Spires,” something is definitely looking to consume us, which just leads to “Unrest in the East Wing” and a flight for our lives.  In “Upper Dorn’s Deep Interior,” all seems lost; indeed, “The Fall of Gilead” is inevitable, as dramatic as it may be.  Which is why there must be “Battle & Aftermath,” leaving only the “Ashkeeper” to take us back to our homeland, where perhaps a bit of wistful “Romance” can provide some closure.

Eldritch Ætherium III
[ To Moon and Stars: Heart of the Lord of the Undermountain of Gilead & Ashkeeper ]

“Legends of Azeroth” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“To Vaes Dothrak” by Ramin Djawadi, off Game of Thrones: Music from the HBO Series [Soundtrack]
“Sun, Moon and Stars” by Loreena McKennitt, off Lost Souls
“Radharc” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Waukeen's Promenade” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Journey's Thoughts” by V Shane [Single]
“Harai” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“Heart of the Forest” by Jeremy Soule, off Neverwinter Nights [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Elwynn Forest” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Spikeroog” by Mikolai Stroinski, off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Startup Screen” by Jeremy Soule, off Neverwinter Nights [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Escalation 1” by Tristan Noon, off The 13th Age Suite [RPG Soundtrack]
“As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Ride to Destiny” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Clash with the Lord of Blades” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Exploration” by Marie-Anne Fischer, off The 13th Age Suite [RPG Soundtrack]
“Knights of the Darkness” by zero-project, off Fairytale
“The Wastes of Xhorhas” by Ian Peter Fisher [Single]
“Secret Chamber” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Tunnels of the Undermountain” by Jeremy Soule, off Neverwinter Nights [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Exploring Xen'drik” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Black Spires” by Nox Arcana, off Grimm Tales
“Unrest in the East Wing” by Midnight Syndicate, off Gates of Delirium
“Upper Dorn's Deep Interior” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“The Fall of Gilead” by Epic Soul Factory, off Volume One [EP]
“Battle & Aftermath” by Jocelyn Montgomery with David Lynch, off Lux Vivens
“Ashkeeper” by Colm McGuinness [Single]
“Romance I” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]

Total:  28 tracks,  80:17

(Just like last time, there a number of links to YouTube videos; still a number of tracks here where that’s the only place you can find them.)

In the unexpected category, I suppose we shouldn’t consider Loreena McKennitt too unexpected—I did after all say last time that we’d likely see a tune of hers on every volume from here on out—but I’m still pleased at how well an artist that Wikipedia describes as worldmusic, folk, and even new age(!) can slot so beautifully into a fantasy-gaming-inspired mix.  Faith and the Muse deliver us another great meditative bridge that is pretty far off their normal gothic fare, backed by birdsong and the subtle sounds of a stream flowing by.  And Dead Can Dance are still here, pulling two tracks this time, still both from Aion, which I’ve always felt had a particularly D&D-adjacent feel to it.

The really new kids on the block this time out are Jocelyn Montgomery (one of the founding members of Miranda Sex Garden) with David Lynch producing an album of songs by Hildegard of Bingen, a.k.a. Saint Hildegard, who Wikipedia describes as “a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages,” as well as “one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history.” Lux Vivens is a very interesting album, and this track doesn’t necessarily showcase it very well, but it sure fits in with the theme of this mix.  “Battle & Aftermath” is just what it says on the tin.

Next time, we return to the ambient autumnal mix, possibly just in time for fall.

⇐ Eldritch Ætherium II

Eldritch Ætherium IV ⇒

D&D Story #2: Birthday Bedlam

For a few blog posts now, I’ve been dropping hints about the special one-shot D&D adventure that I’d planned for my middle child’s 16th birthday.  Now it’s time for a full explanation.

First of all, understand that this kid (whom I used to refer to as the Smaller Animal, but now is taller than everyone else in the house) enjoys playing D&D, and really enjoys playing a fantasy character who can change shapes.  That’s just his thing.  In D&D (as you may recall from my story of his first ever D&D session), that typically means druid, so my kid has played a lot of druids.  Like, a lot.  A metric shit-ton, even.  And there’s certainly nothing wrong with playing the same class all the time, if that’s your jam, but it’s also good to step out of your comfort zone every once in a while.  So I (and my eldest child) have long been working on convincing the Smaller Animal to try other things.  And, while we’ve had a few minor successes here and there, he’s mostly stuck with the druids.

So, for this birthday, either The Mother or I (or maybe we did it together) had an idea to have a “D&D paty,” where his friends could come over (which they haven’t been able to do for the past two birthdays in a row) and we’d all sit around and play D&D all day.  Something self-contained, I thought: a one-shot adventure, designed to be completed in a single session.  And I hit upon the brilliant idea to invent a new ancestry (which D&D often refers to as “race,” which is not only a word charged with real-world baggage, but also just a terrible term for it—“species” would be closer) ... a society where everyone is a shapeshifter.  No need to be a druid, you see: you can just change your shape.  All the time.  To (mostly) whatever you like.

Now, no one’s ever done this in D&D before because it would be difficult to come up with an ancestry that’s (roughly) balanced¹  against the core ones: human, halfling, elf, dwarf, etc.  But I had the advantage of being able to say: look, you’re all going to have this ancestry—it’s part of the conceit of the game.  So they were all on equal footing, so balance didn’t really matter.  Plus they could all choose to look like any crazy thing they wanted to.  (If you’re interested to see the stats I came up with, feel free to check them out.²)

And this seemed to work: given the freedom to be able to change shape whenever they liked, they seemed not to need to actually do it in the game—even my shapeshifting-obsessed child never changed into anything the entire session.  So I think I was successful.

Next, I needed a short, self-contained adventure which could be adapted for teenagers.³  I ended up picking a short adventure called Bedlam at the Benefit.  This adventure was short (and inexpensive), and it had a number of advantages:

• It has a social interaction phase, an exploration phase, and a combat phase, thus giving equal weight to D&D’s “three pillars of play.”
• How well you do on each phase has an actual impact: the social encounter determines monetary rewards, and “succeeding” on the exploration challenges makes the combat easier.
• The vast majority of the bad guys are not human—not even remotely humanoid.  There’s no question about whether or not they need to be eliminated.
• The device of a children’s hospital is going to engage the players immediately: you’ve got to be pretty stony-hearted to not want to help a children’s hospital succeed.
• It’s very self-contained: you can present this is a mission the characters have been given, they go do the mission, and everything wraps up neatly at the end.

Still, the adventure isn’t perfect.  It had a number of things that I felt needed adjusting:

• It’s too hard. You’ll notice that this was the one aspect the reviewer I linked to above dinged it for: while it’s ostensibly designed for 5 3rd level characters, it’s likely to wipe out such a party.  Given I was working with younger people, who were not inexperienced, but also not as fully tactical in combat as experienced adults might be, it was probably even more likely.  This one was simple to fix: I just doubled the levels and told everyone to make 6th level characters instead.  Besides, 6th level characters get a lot more cool features to play with than 3rd level characters do, and that’s important for a game where you’re not likely to play those characters again.
• The monsters are too samey. Basically, other than the mad wizard, you’ve got neogi and gibbering mouthers.  Now, a gibbering mouther is an awesome monster, with a whole bevy of flavorful abilities, and I absolutely adore the neogi, just for the utter insanity of its existence: it’s a spider the size of a large dog with an eel for a head.  But I wanted more variety.  Plus this gave me the opportunity to make sure I could tweak the difficulty of the combat just so: having a bunch of monsters with different toughnesses makes it easier to dial in the exact level of menace you want to portray.
• Innocent people get killed, by design. This adventure is designed to raise the stakes for you by starting to off the innocent bystanders.  Maybe that’s fine for a group of adult players, but it seemed unnecessarily grim for a group of kids.  This was easy enough to fix as well: I made it so the innocent bystanders would just disappear instead, and then they could all come back at the end (see? everyone’s okay after all).
• Neogi in D&D are historically slavers. That is, a neogi has a power that it can use to take over someone’s mind and make them do things against their will.  They’re hardly the only D&D monsters that can do this—vampires have a “dominate” power, for instance—but neogi are specifically portrayed as going around enslaving other creatures and using them to boost their own status in their society.  Which is a bit ... icky.  But, above and beyond that, it’s absolutely no fun for your character to get taken over.  In some ways, it’s worse than dying.  And kids hate it even more than adults, I think.  So I took that off the table by reducing the number of neogi to one, and giving it a big creature that it had already dominated (which itself was a pretty horrible monster), so it had no need to try that on any of the characters.
• Monetary rewards are fairly meaningless for a one-shot. That is, once the adventure is done, handing out a bunch of treasure doesn’t do your character any good, because you’ll (probably) never play that character again.  So essentially you get a bunch of gold you’ll never get to spend.  I handled this by just converting the monetary rewards to bonuses on future rolls, and handed them out right before the big combat at the end so everyone had a chance to use them.

Next, I wanted some cool shapeshifting music.  That just involved scouring YouTube for music inspired by shapeshifting creatures such as werewolves, rakshasas, kitsune, and selkies.  Then I had to arrange the songs into the proper order.⁴  Then I had a playlist, which you too can enjoy if you’re so inclined.

Next, I wanted some pictures to throw up on the screen to give everyone a the proper atmosphere.  Since this was a children’s hospital that had been converted out of a spooky sanitorium, and they would be arriving close to nightfall, I went with this pic I found on the Internet:

Next, the arrival of the mad warlock and his twisted minions.  For this one, I had to find a bunch of different pics and glue them together with the GIMP.⁵  My picture editing skills are not great, but I get by.  Here’s what I came up with:

Finally, I needed a map.  I don’t use maps and minis for all my D&D games, but this one was special, and I felt like it really needed that extra oomph.  I employed both the two younger kids to help me put it together—that was a bit spoilery for the birthday boy, but he loves building maps so much that I felt it was better to let him help design the thing than try to keep a surprise.  Here’s what we came up with, as seen in game with minis deployed:

You can see the mad warlock in the center, towards the back of the main entrance; cells with prisoners in them in the back; a few miscellaneous walls for cover; and various statues and other bits of flavor throughout.  Our heroes are towards the front (which is on the left in the picture), either waiting to come in, or already charged in for battle.

Next was trying to get everyone to come up with their characters.  This is a bit like pulling teeth at this age: between indecision and procrastination, it was close to impossible ... in fact, my ten-year-old was the only one who got done early.⁶  The birthday boy went with an artificer.  There are different flavors of artificer in D&D, but his was sort of a fantasy mad scientist, sporting a “boomstick” (magical version of a musket), a shrink ray, an invisibility suit, and a portal gun (reflavored spells).  My youngest was a college of spirits bard, who communed with ghosts for information and magic.  My eldest was an earth sorcerer/monk, calling upon the stones themselves to help out in combat.  My middle child’s two best friends were, respectively, an owlin (looking) warlock who wielded a giant pen like a spear, and a bard who appeared to look so much like an ordinary human man that it was unnerving.  And that’s pretty much all the prep.

For the session itself, they were given their mission, went undercover as adventurers who were being called upon to impress rich donors and convince them to give more money to the children’s hospital (still under construction, though mostly completed), and actually raised a bit of money for the director (for which I rewarded them with some bonus dice to be used later).  Then, in the midst of the fundraiser, the mad warlock appears on the lawn with his minions and kidnaps a bunch of the rich donors.  They managed to kill both the gibbering mouthers (which made the final fight easier), but the rest of the monsters got away with some captives, as they were designed to do.

Next, they had to explore the creepy basement and sub-basement of the new hospital, which had been sealed up and forgotten about.  It was full of vermin and ghosts, and they had to figure out how to learn as much information about their foe as possible.  This was a skill challenge where each character could pick whatever skill they liked, as long as they could think of a way to describe what they were doing.  So, you could say “persuasion,” and then describe how you talked a ghost into giving you info, or you could say “athletics” and describe how you kicked down a door or moved some rubble to find some clues, or you could say “religion” to recognize some of the mystic symbols scratched into the walls ... whatever you liked.  If you get a certain number of successes before you get half as many failures, you “win” the challenge and the bad guy’s powers are reduced (because his evil, Lovecraftian overlords are disappointed in him, I suppose).  His powers are also reduced if you don’t get all the successes, but you do get at least half of them.  So there’s actually four different versions of the warlock you can face.  Our party didn’t quite cross the finish line before hitting that last failure, but certainly enough to pass the halway mark, so they got a middling version of the warlock to fight.

Then it was time to run the final combat.  This drug out forever, partially because I had probably overestimated how many monsters they could handle, partially because it’s difficult to get kids to focus on the battle and keep things moving sometimes, and partially because I didn’t have the chance to review everyone’s character ahead of time and familiarize myself with exactly what people could and couldn’t do.  But we got through it in the end.  Here’s my battle highlights:

• The winged pen-wielder did the most damage to the warlock directly, taking out over half his hit points.
• The artificer killed most of the smaller monsters with a single shot each, and did the majority of the damage to the medium monsters.
• A well-placed shatter spell from the disturbingly normal-looking bard did exactly enough damage to finish off the medium monsters.
• The earth sorcerer/monk took on the biggest monster solo and took it down to 2 hit points before it fled and eventually got taken out by the artificer.
• The ghost bard mainly concentrated on keeping everyone else alive, and ended up healing enough total hit points to constitute a whole ’nother party member.

In the end, almost all the monsters were destroyed outright, the warlock was killed, sending the few remaining monsters back to their other plane of existence, and releasing the trapped prisoners (even the ones who had disappeared).  The director thanked them all, the ancient evil was vanquished permanently, and the hospital was able to open in safety.

So I think everyone had a great time, despite us running close to twice as long as we originally planned, and I think they were satisfied with their characters and their success.  My two youngest (that is, the birthday boy and his little sister) are already talking about bringing their characters back for more stories, so I take that as a positive sign that it was a good time.  It was a bunch of work on my part, and it sucked up a lot of my time over the past few weeks, but I think it was all worthwhile to hear everyone cheer when the bad guys were defeated at last.

Hopefully we get to do it again sometime.

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1 Personally, I don’t believe things have to be precisely balanced in D&D.  Just not grossly unbalanced, if you see what I’m saying.

2 As always, credit for layout primarily goes to GM Binder.

3 Technically, my youngest is not a teenager yet, but she was probably the most mature child at the table, so I wasn’t worried about her.

4 See my series on music mixes for why I’m so obsessed with the order songs play in.

5 The GIMP—GNU Image Manipulation Program—is the open-source alternative to PhotoShop.

6 And possibly the only one who was truly and completely done with their character before we actually started playing.

The Shape of Things to Come

This week I’ve been concentrating on my middle child’s much-delayed birthday celebration: a one-shot D&D campaign that celebrates his love of shapeshifting.  Since it’s a special occasion, I’ve been trying to get really prepared and make it very special.  Perhaps after it’s done I’ll report on how it went.  Stay tuned!

The Qyxling: A new familiar for your 5e warlock

You may recall that I mentioned last week that my youngest had started a new D&D campaign.  And, if you’ve been reading for a very long time, you may recall that I mentioned, upon the occasion of said youngest child’s first real D&D game (a little over two years ago), that she had actually joined us for a game a few years before that, when she was 5 or 6.  I was playing a Pact of the Chain warlock (in 5e slang, we call that a “chainlock”), and the Pact of the Chain grants your character a “improved familiar”—that is, more than just your standard cat or raven or toad.  One option is an imp, which is a type of devil, and one option is a quasit, which is a type of demon.  The other two options are more fey-oriented: a sprite, and a type of small dragon called a pseudodragon.  Now, warlocks have patrons, and you can have different types of patrons as well.  Your patron might be a fiend, in which case a demon or devil is an appropriate familiar; or your patron might be an archfey, in which case a small fey creature is an excellent choice.  Or, your patron might be a Great Old One (a legacy of D&D’s very early days, when stealing from the Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos was quite common).  In that case, there aren’t any great options ... at least not among those default options in the Player’s Handbook.  There have been a few more added in the years since 5e first came out, but of course the awesome thing about D&D is that, if you don’t like any of the options, you can just make one up.

So, for this game 4 or 5 years ago, when I chose a warlock who had made a pact with a Great Old One, I just took some of the bits of the imp, some of the bits of the quasit, gave it a bit of a tentacle-face, and tweaked a few things for flavor.  I named the resulting creature Anjeliss, and decided she was a cheeky, indpendent creature who was my companion more than my servant.  So, when my little girl wanted to join us, too young to really understand the rules, and not focussed enough to do much with the mechanics, I said to my other two kids, no problem: she can just be Anjeliss.  She didn’t actually do much, of course (I actually made all the decisions about what actions to take), but she provided a little extra personality: basically, she was just roleplaying.  Which is kind of the perfect way to start.

Now, I never imagined that she got much out of that session.  She basically just sat in my lap and delivered a couple of lines here and there—maybe I let her roll a die every now and again—but nothing earth-shattering.  I didn’t even really think she’d remembered the whole experience.  But, when it came time to start this new campaign, she suggested that I play my same warlock character from that game, and she would use Anjeliss as her GMPC.  She couldn’t remember the name, but she remembered quite a few of the other details, so it was easy enough to resurrect that character ... at least for me.  (He was a dhampir named Nicto, and a bit of a crazy person—inspired by the Joker, or any given Malkavian character from Vampire: The Masquerade—but a skilled investigator, which is what the original one-shot campaign had called for.)  For Anjeliss, there wasn’t much to go on.  But now my girl wanted to play her again, so I felt inspired to create a little something more.

Now, my faux-Photoshop¹ skills aren’t amazing, by any stretch, but I get by.  So I found a quasit with wings similar to an imp’s (I believe it’s a Pathfinder quasit rather than a D&D quasit, actually), and I swapped out its head for the closest thing that matched the picture in my mind’s eye that I could come up with by doing a Google image search for “cute Cthulhu.” Then I color-corrected things as best I could to make the colors mostly match, and you can see the results at the top of this page.

I also did a monster write-up, including a standard 5e statblock,² threw in some background flavor, and finally tossed in another image of the creature surrounded by all its alternate forms.  I struggled for a long time with the naming of it: I wanted someting that started with a “Q,” since the quasit was its biggest inspiration; I wanted something that sounded Cthulhu-esque, since that was the vibe I was going for; and I needed something that wasn’t already used for some other monster in D&D (which is very hard to come by).  And, as we all know, the Cthulhu naming convention is basically to use too many “X"s and not enough vowels, so I eventually went with a prefix of “qyx” and I tacked on a suffix of “ling” to imply that it was a little guy.  The name isn’t set in stone, so it might change,³ but it’s what we’ve got for now.

So I took all that info, formatted it like a proper monster entry from the Monster Manual,⁴ and here it is in case you were interested in using it for your own games.

Enjoy.

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1 I actually use a Linux program called the GIMP.

2 For which most of the credit has to go to a fellow on the Internet named Tetracube, who has a mad-easy statblock generator that I use for all my monster statblocks.

3 And my daughter has already pointed out to me that it sounds an awful lot like “quicking” when pronounced out loud, which is an entirely different monster.

4 For which I used my pro subscription to GM Binder, the absolute best way to to D&D homebrew write-ups.

Witchlight Wild Launch

This week my youngest (not quite yet 10 years old) officially started her first D&D campaign (the Witchlight campaign, which I alluded to in a previous post).  She’s very excited about it.  And, so far, she’s doing a great job, youth and limited familiarity with the voluminous rules notwithstanding.

As I mentioned previously, I’m going with my dinosaur-person.  Our middle child (who I still sometimes refer to as “the Smaller Animal,” even though he’s now a good bit taller than me) is being a sort of a blob-like creature called a plasmoid.  Meanwhile, the youngest is running a character to help us out who is a small mouse-person called a jerbeen.  So our party looks something like this:

So far, we’ve met each other (which was fairly entertaining), and then we found the Witchlight Carnival and met its proprietors, Mr. Witch and Mr. Light (naturally).  Our first mission is to find a missing pink unicorn.  Should be a piece of cake.

I’m pretty excited for the adventure, and I’m excited to see what modifications the girl will make to the published adventure.  Changing things up to suit yourself or your players is pretty standard for experienced DMs, but newbies often try to run the adventure exactly as written.  But our girl has already thrown in several of her own touches (I know this because she proudly announces it whenever she does so).  So I’m excited to see where things go from here.

A more extensive post next week, and more news from the Witchlight trail as I have it.

Dark and Dreamful Daughter

After the cessation of “free Fridays” last month, my $work is kindly tailing us off slowly by offering us one “free day” per month for a few months, to be taken whenever we like.  I took my October free day this past Friday, so this weekend I’ve been enjoying the break.  I’ve only a couple of things to tell you about.

Tonight, all the family except my youngest and I went to a homeschool association teen event, leaving us two to have a father-daughter night.  I took her out to Taco Bell (which for some reason she finds quite exciting), then we came back and she suggested we watch a movie.

Now, the background you must understand is that, a few months back, I quoted something from The Crow to her.  Of those movies which I consider my all-time favorites—I sometimes refer to these as my “top X movies,” since the number only ever increases—one of my main criteria is quotability.  A good movie should provide lots of great quotes that you can bring up in everyday life, such as “buck up, little camper!” or “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” or “screws fall out all the time: the world’s an imperfect place.” I forget exactly which of The Crow’s great quotes I used in this instance (probably “this is the really real world—there ain’t no comin’ back”), but, the point is, my daughter didn’t recognize it: at not quite 10 years old, she’d never seen the movie, of course.  So I suggested we watch it, and, for some reason I can’t recall right now, we were alone at home that night as well.  Now, if you’re going to watch The Crow, you absolutely must watch it at night, with all the lights off.  It’s a very dark movie with a very creepy vibe, so you have to establish the proper atmosphere.  So we fired it up on the big TV, with the sound turned way up, and every possible light extinguished.  And I suppose she was really enamored of this, because, tonight, she requested another “dark movie” night.

So my choice for tonight was Dark City (the director’s cut, natch).  She seemed to enjoy it (as she did the previous choice), and she’s already picked out the next one (The Matrix).  So I suppose it’s become a tradition at this point, and I’ll have to start thinking of even more dark movies for her and I to watch.

The other thing I’ve been working on this weekend is my character for my youngest’s upcoming Witchlight campaign.  My inspiration for this character has been a race from a moderately obscure RPG that I bought but never played (primarily because the mechanics are super-wonky, in my opinion): Earthdawn.  Earthdawn, supposedly set in the same universe as the fantasy post-apocalyptic (and far better known) Shadowrun, had a lot of great fluff ... just not so great on the crunch.  While many of the races are the same in both games, Earthdawn does add a few new options, including a species of swashbuckling dinosaur people: the t’skrang.  This pic should tell you all you need to know about them:

So I had to make up a custom D&D race for them, which I’ve named the tsaagan.  “Tsaagan” is a genus of dinosuars in the raptor family—although it certainly sounds like a fantasy name—and these guys look a lot like raptors.  Plus the “ts” at the beginning is a nice homage to their inspiration.  So far I’ve written up the mechanics (the “crunch”), but not yet the lore (the “fluff”).  But that’s sufficient to get started, I think.  Next up I have to nail down the class, but I’m leaning towards fey wanderer, which seem particularly apropos given the setting.

And that’s all I’ve got for this week’s mostly non-post.  Next time I’ll work on something with a bit more substance.

The Wild Beyond the Daughter

Well, the Free Fridays are over, but I’m still only posting full posts once every other week.  Ya read this blog against my explicit advice, ya gets what ya gets.

This week my youngest has been starting her deep dive into the newest D&D release, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.  She’s decided it’s going to be her first actual D&D campaign that she will actually run—thus far, she’s only run a Dungeon World campaign^* of her own devising.  But I ordered the book for myself, and she fell in love with it, and now she has her own copy ... she even got the bundle with all the cool extras in it.  She’s very serious about it: she’s asked my advice on which section to read first to prepare, and she got some sticky tabs from Christy to mark the pages.

So that’s what our nine-year-old teenager is up to.  We’ll see if she carries through with it, but she’s thus far been very determined in her goals.  So I think it will happen, sooner or later.  That’s my girl.

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* If you don’t recall, Dungeon Word is a sort of D&D-lite game based on the Powered by the Apocalypse rules.

Improv at the (D&D) Table

Sometimes, when people try to explain what D&D is (or any TTRPG, for that matter ... despite the title, this post applies to all roleplaying games), they try to describe it as basically fantasy improv.  Which, in some ways, it is.  But also, it’s not, which is why I started pondering this post many moons ago, and now it’s percolated long enough.

See, I think that the big problem with thinking of RPGs as improv is the whole concept of “yes and.” As almost everyone knows nowadays, the number one rule of improv is that you always go along with whatever reality your scene partners want to create.  No matter what they say, you respond with “yes, and ...” Meaning that, you must never contradict what they’ve established; you can only add on to it.  For improv, this is a brilliant rule, which leads to some great comedy.  I personally think improv is almost entirely suited for comedy above all other forms of entertainment, and I think it’s because “yes and” leads inevitably to surrealism, and it’s difficult to take that seriously.  Because when anyone is allowed to say that anything is now real, and everyone else just has to roll with it, sooner or later shit is going to get strange.  So improv works for comedy.  Does it also work for RPGs?

Well, sort of.  Many TTRPGs—and D&D in particular—have a foundation in fantasy, so they don’t mind a little surrealism.  But, at the same time, while it might be fun to play in a game where literally anything can happen for a short time, it’s difficult to sustain over the course of a campaign.  Remember: roleplaying is storytelling.  And, in the best stories, even ones of highly fantastical worlds, there are rules.  There’s an internal logic: a sort of fantasy physics.  It’s not our physics, of course, but there is a system and magic or whatever has to follow the rules of that system.  Besides, what kind of hero’s journey are you going to get if the hero has no limitations?  If the hero can just wave their arms and achieve their goals instantaneously, there’s no tension in the story, no obstacles to overcome.  Gets boring after a while, and defeats character growth.  So, RPGs can’t work solely on the impetus of “yes and.”

But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw analogues.  If you already understand how improv works, this is how I would describe the differences between improv and D&D.  As a player in a TTRPG, you have relationships with 3 primary different classes of participants:

Other Players

As a player, your relationship with other players is absolutely “yes and.” The only caveat here is that you must always remember to make a distinction between you (the player) and your character.  Your character is certainly not obliged to “yes and” the other characters.  In fact, sometimes it can be fun for your characters to have conflicts ... but only if you remember that you are not obstructing your fellow player’s desires.  In the short run, it’s perfectly fine for your character to object—even to strenuously object—to another character’s plan.  In the long run, you the player are obliged to find a way for your character to get on board with what the rest of the group wants to do.

This ties in with a common objection of RPG players: the obstructive player who ruins the game because “that’s what my character would do!” You, the player, knows what your character wants, what they’re willing to tolerate, and where they draw the lines.  But you the player also know that you’re all trying to tell a story together, and you’re playing the game to have fun.  So “yes and” your fellow players, and then figure out why your character is, in the end, going to do what everyone wants to do.  Maybe they’re succumbing to peer pressure.  Maybe they’re being blackmailed.  Maybe they decide to play the long game and acquiesce now to get something they want later.  Doesn’t matter.  Have your character bitch and moan now, if you feel that’s appropriate, but figure out how to fall in line, because you need to “yes and.” The time will come when your fellow players will reciprocate your largesse.

The GM

However, your relationship as a player with me, your GM, is entirely different.  As far as I’m concerned, my job is not to “yes and”: it’s more like “yes, but.” The most common “but” involves rolling dice: you say your character is going to jump up and use the chandelier to swing across the room; I say “yes, but you’re going to have to roll an Acrobatics check, and it’s going to be a high difficulty.” Other times it might relate to how much you can do at a time.  For instance, you say your character jumps up on the table, kicks away the centerpiece in your way, grabs the chandelier, swings across to the person attacking your ally, lands right beside them, then stabs them.  I respond “yes, but doing all is going to take you two turns—you just don’t have enough actions to do it all in one turn.” During character creation, a “yes but” is most likely to take the form of notifying you that you’re going to have to work harder at your backstory.  For instance, I once ran a game in a world of my own devising where all dwarves were afraid of water.  Not cups of water, of course, but any body of water larger than a stream, they avoided like the plague.  If you were playing in that world and you wanted to play a dwarven pirate, I would say “yes, but dwarves don’t get on ships, so how did you get to be a pirate?”

The most important thing to remember about “yes but” is that it’s still a “yes” ... no matter how much it sounds like a “no.” In the dwarven pirate example, I’m not telling you you can’t play the character you want.  I’m just telling you you’ve got to come up with a reason to explain where it comes from.  Maybe your dwarf was raised by elves and never learned that fear of water.  Maybe someone put them under a spell once and it somehow erased their aquaphobia.  Maybe there’s some water elemental in your family bloodline somewhere far back in antiquity.  Be creative: the awesome thing about a fantasy game is that you can come up with just about anything and it can sound reasonable.  So I’m not saying “no,” I’m just asking you to respect my worldbuilding by coming up with a reason why your character doesn’t conform to my rules.

When I (the GM) say “yes but” to you (the player), you have basically 3 options for a response: “never mind,” “fuck you,” and “yes but” in return.

The first option is just to change your mind about what you wanted to do.  This is not a game like chess; you’re not committed to a course of action just because you said it out loud, thus taking your virtual finger off your virtual piece.  If I tell you that what you want to do is going to take two turns, you’re perfectly justified to say “well, no, I don’t want to take that long before I get to attack.” This just represents your chacter considering, and then rejecting, a course of action.

The “fuck you” option is you telling me that you don’t care what the downsides are, you’re going to do it anyway.  You’ll accept the difficult roll, you’ll take the extra turn to complete the action, you’ll figure out how to work something extra into your backstory.  When you tell me you want to jump off the cliff, and I respond with “yes, but it’s 100 feet down: you’re going to die if you do that,” you’re perfectly within your rights to say “fuck you, I can jump off the cliff if I want to.” And you can.  My job as your friendly neighborhood GM ends at the point where I’ve advised you of the consequences of your actions; if you want to damn the consequences and full speed ahead, who am I to stand in your way?

But just like I can “yes but” you, you can “yes but” me in return.  I can’t possibly know everything that’s on your character sheet.  You may have to tell me: “yes, but I have a class feature called ‘chandelier swing’ that lets me swing on chandeliers without needing to make an Acrobatics check.” Or “yes, but I cast the fly spell as I’m jumping off the cliff, so I’m not going to die after all.” Now, I can “yes but” you a second time—perhaps “yes, but you’re out of spell slots, remember?”—and then you can “yes but” me back again, and so on until we finally come to an agreement.

Just like when you’re interacting with other players, the main thing to remember when interacting with your GM is that you’re telling a story together.  There’s a certain amount of back-and-forth that may be necessary to get you where you want to be, but at the end of the day I’m on your side: I want you succeed, if you can.  But, like we said up at the top, I don’t want to make it too easy.  Overcoming the obstacles is what allows your character to be heroic.

The Dice

The dice are actually the only participants in the game that should ever say, just flat out, “no.” If you listen to folks talk about playing D&D and other RPGs online, you’ll often hear them talk about “failing forward,” or saying “it’s fun to fail.” What they mean is, when you roll the dice (often in response to your GM’s “yes but”) and your roll comes up short, suddenly you’ve got to figure out what to do.  How do you recover from the failure?  Have things gone from bad to worse as a result?  That often happens in fantasy stories, and sometimes those are the best parts of the story.  Do your friends have to change their plans to help out now?  There are all sorts of storytelling opportunities that derive from a failure to achieve a goal on the first attempt.

One important thing to remember is that when we talk about “failure,” we mean that your character has failed to accomplish a thing.  That’s not the same thing as saying your character had a personal failure.  Often, it doesn’t make any sense for your (possibly very accomplished) character to fail to do something they do all the time, like pick a lock, or hit someone with a sword.  But it’s not always about your character’s ability: a good GM will sometimes describe a failure as fate intervening in a way that’s entirely outside your character’s control.  Perhaps a sudden gust of wind blows some dust into your eyes at just the wrong time; perhaps someone accidentally jostles your arm; perhaps that god you offended last adventure now has it in for you and is taking a personal hand in things just to mess with you.  The dice are telling a story with you just like the GM and the other players.  Sometimes the dice tells you that do an amazing thing; sometimes they tell you you fall on your face.  Your failure isn’t the story; how you deal with the failure may well be.

So the tenets of improv have something to teach us about how to play TTRPGs, but we have to be cognizant of the differences as well.  All the participants have different roles to play, but they all work together to weave the tale.  And, at the end of the day, an awesome story is what makes it fun for everyone.

5e vs Pathfinder: A Dance of D&Ds

On this blog, I’ve talked about leaving D&D for Pathfinder, and even a bit about leaving Pathfinder for D&D 5e.  The truth is, my feelings on these two actually mirror my feelings on my two favorite programming languages: C++ and Perl.  I learned C++ first, and I loved it.  Mostly.  But then I learned Perl and it was so much better than C++.  Except there were still parts of C++ that I missed.  And then sometimes I would go back to C++ and I would remember all the reasons I loved it ... and all the reasons I left it.  Back and forth, always missing whichever one I wasn’t using, always nostalgic for the other one.

Remember when I talked about game rotation?  Well, as I mentioned, most of our games are 5e (or variants thereof), but occasionally we dabble in other games.  And, recently, we finally decided to play a Pathfinder campaign, spurred by my eldest’s love of the Kingmaker adventure path.  And I was quite excited to get back to Pathfinder, because there were lots of things I missed about it.  Except now that I’m deep in it ...

You see, as I explained a bit when I originally talked about Pathfinder, it made a number of improvements on D&D 3e.  You may also remember from my discussion of multiclassing in 3e that 3e (and even moreso Pathfinder) has my favorite implementation of multiclassing, and that’s just one of the many ways that Pathfinder makes character creation a joy.  You have so many options ... many people would say too many.

But allow me a brief digression: I will always maintain that you can never have too many choices.  Now, people will inevitably respond with “but ... analysis paralysis!” Yes, indeed: analysis paralysis is all too real, and it can be very problematic, especially when people need to make a series of choices in a row.  And that’s all a roleplaying character is, you know—a series of choices.  Some big, most small, but just choice after choice after choice.  So analysis paralysis can really screw you over when you try to build a character.  But here’s my potentially—hell, probably—contentious opinion: analysis paralysis isn’t caused by having too many choices.  It’s caused by having those choices shittily organized.  Think of it this way:  If I asked you pick from a list of 256 options, there’s no way you could do it.  The analysis paralysis would be crippling.  On the other hand, if I asked you pick from a list of 4 options, that would be trivial.  If I asked you to pick from a list of 4 options 4 times ... still pretty easy.  But, see, 4 to the power of 4 is 256.  To make 1 choice from 256 options is next to impossible (without spending an inordinate amount of time, in any event); to make 4 choices from 4 options each still gives you 256 total options, but they’ve been organized in such a fashion that the chioces are pretty easy.

This is important in the context of TTRPG character creation because, as I said above: character building is just choosing a bunch of options.  Now, I’m not saying that Pathfinder is immune to crappy organization which can cause analysis paralysis.  For instance, the number of feats available in the game is ... overwhelming.  But, they’re all tagged with various tags.  For this campaign, I built a witch character.  We started at 4th level, so I needed to choose 2 feats.  There are (quite literally) hundreds of feats to choose from.  Except a lot of them (like, a whole lot of them) are combat feats.  My witch is not going to be doing a lot of melee combat: she’ll be casting spells, and using hexes (which are like special magic tricks only available to witches).  So I don’t need any of those combat-oriented feats.  A bunch more are “teamwork” feats, which are only useful if two or more characters take them, so I eliminated those as well.  “Metamagic” feats can change the way you cast spells; some of them might be useful for a witch character, but they’re far more useful for what’s called a “spontaneous caster” (as opposed to a “prepared caster,” which a witch is).  So I’ll skip those.  And so on, and so forth, until I’ve narrowed down the list of potential feats from hundreds to a dozen or two.  Still more options than I’d like, and Pathfinder could still stand to add a few more layers of organization for their feats, but it was doable.  And I did it.

So, now I’m playing a witch named Wilhemina Osterdale Bexxancourt—but please call her “Bexx,” everbody does—and she’s a custom race, which is another thing Pathfinder makes it very easy to do via its race builder rules, and she has an “archetype,” which is another thing Pathfinder has over 5e (although, to be fair, 5e has started dabbling in this arena lately: they refer to Pathfinder archetypes as “variants” and use “archetypes” to mean subclasses, which is very confusing for those of us who have to go back and forth).  My race and archetype are based on comic characters, actually: the talokka are based on the Legion of Superheroes’ Shadow Lass,¹ who hails from a planet called Talok VIII, and, while I can’t be sure that the creators of the “tatterdemalion” archetype specifically had Ragman in mind when they wrote it, the fact that he’s often referred to as “the Tattered Tatterdemalion” in the comics is surely suggestive.  So I’m a blue-skinned spellcaster who can manipulate shadows and whose clothes can reach out grab people, who talks to the stars, which grant her her powers, and also to her indigo and lavender fox, which is her companion and mentor.  Also, I’m traveling with a clone of Vexx and a little boy whose stuffed toy shaped like a demon can turn into an actual demon.  In Pathfinder, none of this was particularly difficult to build.  In 5e ... well, let’s just say there would have been a lot of reskinning, refluffing, and handwaving, and it still wouldn’t have been as satisfying as what we have currently.  In my humble opinion.

So, you may say to yourself, sounds like you’re happy to be playing Pathfinder then!  Yeah, you’d think that ...

See, the problem is that the character creation is only one part at the beginning at the campaign.  It’s a huge part, don’t get me wrong ... but still only one part, and it’s over before you even start playing.  Then you get to the actual gameplay, and that’s where 5e really shines.  Simple example: as a prepared spellcaster, I know a certain number of spells, and, out of the ones I know, I can “prepare” a certain number of those spells to have on hand on any given day.²  Now, in 5e, I would be able to prepare, let’s say, the spell cure wounds.  Once it was prepared, I could cast it as many times as I liked.  I could also cast it at either 1st level, or at 2nd level³ ... whichever the situation called for (i.e. depending on how bad the wounds I wished to cure actually were).  In Pathfinder, I have to have two entirely different spells: cure light wounds, and cure moderate wounds.  I need to know both of those, and, if I want to cast both of them, I need to prepare them both.  Worse, if I think I may need to cure some moderately severe wounds more than once, I have to prepare cure moderate more than once.  This felt perfectly normal back in the days when I played Pathfinder exclusively and 5e was just a rumour known as “D&D Next.” But, now that I’ve been playing 5e for, at this point, years—maybe even longer than I played Pathfinder, now that I think about it—this seems utterly insane.  And limiting.  And just ... annoying.

Of course, the obvious thing to do is to play some hybrid Frankenstein system where you would build your characters using Pathfinder rules and then play them using 5e rules.  Except that you can’t really do that, because everything is so intertwined.  Take my example of cure wounds above: that works in 5e because they revamped the entire magic system, collapsing similar spells into one, and adding “upcasting” effects for when you cast a lower level spell in a higher level spell slot.  That was a lot of work.  Pathfinder characters are all built on the assumption that you’re using Pathfinder spells; if you suddenly said, no, we’re using 5e spells instead, what would that do to the power levels? the spell slot progressions? the tables of spells known? class spell lists? what about domain spells for clerics and patron spells for witches? some of those are Pathfinder-only spells—what do we do then?

And the magic system is just one place where character creation and character play intersect: what about the alignment system? the skill system? the feat system? the differing methods of increasing ability scores, both as a racial feature and during level progression?  There are just two damn many moving parts here to successfully combine the two into any semblance of something that would actually work.  Well, without putting massive effort into it, and it seems foolish to devote that much time into something that you have no idea what the chance of success is, or how useful it would be even if you do succeed.  So I kind of feel like I’m stuck wishing I was using Pathfinder when I’m building characters for 5e, and wishing I was using 5e when I’m actually playing Pathfinder.  And it’s a bummer.

I don’t know if this tension will ever get resolved.  You may recall my talking about looking forward to Pathfinder 2nd edition (a.k.a. “P2”), but that turned out to be a bust.  They really blew it, in my opinion.  Not only did it devolve into each class being a huge list of powers like D&D 4e tried to do,⁴ but they also completely removed multiclassing (again, like 4e tried to do).  You know, for all the hate that 4e got (and I’m guilty of quite a lot of it myself), 4e did a lot of things right.  But it screwed up in (at least) two fundamental areas; the idea that Paizo (the makers of Pathfinder) would look at 4e and go “let’s only take the parts that really failed!” is just incomprehensible to me.  If I wanted something entirely different from the D&D lineage, I certainly have lots of great choices.  My eldest is particularly fond of the “Powered by the Apocalypse” sytem.⁵  But I don’t want something entirely different.  I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.  I love the D&D system and mythology and even some of its little weirdsies,⁶ like saving throws, or high-level characters being able to survive falls from orbit.⁷  I just want the thing I love to be better, not to abandon it entirely.  I’m not sure if there will ever be an answer here.  P2 didn’t do it, and, while “6e” is mere conjecture at this point, it seems a safe bet that, even if it does arrive one day, the amazing success of 5e taught its creators that “simpler is better.” Of course, I don’t believe that.  But simpler gets more people to try out the game, and (strictly from a business perspective) having a steady stream of new customers is way more important than catering to those few customers who have grown sophisticated enough to want more options.  So a future hypothetical 6e probably won’t address it either.  It may just be an insoluable problem.

And that makes me sad.  Not completely depressed, of course, but just a bit bummed out.  Maybe one day someone will solve this dilemma.  Until then, I’ll keep playing the one and missing the other, and swapping back and forth just to keep myself appreciating whichever one I’m not playing at the moment.  It’s still a lot of fun either way.

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1 Shadow Lass was later renamed “Umbra” when the naming convention of “So-and-So Boy” and “Such-and-Such Girl” fell out of style, but that was well after my time reading comics.

2 Yes, I know that, as a witch, I’m not constrained to a limited number of spells known, as a bard or sorcerer would be.  That’s not really relevant to my point here though.

3 For this campaign, our characters are starting at 3rd level, so I have access to 2nd level spells.

4 The fact that “powers” was spelled “feats” did nothing to alleviate that impression.

5 That’s the one that is used for Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Masks, etc etc etc.

6 To steal a phrase from Judge John Hodgman.

7 For those who didn’t realize that, the issue arises because there’s a maximum amount of falling damage one can take.  The reason there’s a maximum is to represent (sort of) the concept of terminal velocity.  The problem comes in because maximum falling damage is anything but terminal for most characters once they get up around 15th level or so.

D&D Story #1: The Demon Doll

You know, the great thing about having your gaming group be comprised of you and your children¹ is that all your D&D stories double as cute kid stories, so perhaps if you reader don’t care for the one aspect, you’ll enjoy the other.  Of course, if you don’t like either one ... well, see you next week, I suppose.

Now, as I explained in my post on game rotation, we’re actually doing a few different games—different campaigns, sometimes whole different systems—and occasionally we put aside one and start a new one.  Mostly this has to do with the sessions that my eldest child runs, because I just keep the two I have going and don’t experiment with new stuff.²  But that one is full of ideas, and every once in a while we just play something new and different for a while ... remember, one of the advantages that I talked about with the game rotation system is that you’re more open to experimental stuff.  Anyhow, the latest experiment is try to play a Pathfinder game.

If you don’t know what Pathfinder is, the short answer is that it’s an offshoot of an older version of D&D.³  The components of roleplaying games (TTRPGs, in any event) typically get divided into two categories: the nitty-gritty, mechanical bits, and the more abstract roleplaying bits like the setting and advice on how to roleplay and that sort of stuff.  Or the crunch and the fluff, as we generally refer to it.  The current version of D&D tends to try to strike a balance of about half-and-half crunch vs fluff, but there are other games which lean hard on the fluff and are pretty crunch-lite⁴ ... and then there are games which are super-crunchy.  Pathfinder is one of those.  That’s mostly why we haven’t tried to play it yet: it’s a lot to take in for our younger players.  But my middle child is ready (mostly), and my youngest has been playing for over a year now, so despite her young age she’s got some real experience under her belt.  So we thought we’d give it a shot.

I eventually came up with a character idea that I thought was pretty hip, and my middle child went with one of their first-ever⁵ non-shapeshifter-centric characters, basing him on the old videogame character Vexx.  But I promised you a cute kid story, so let’s focus on what my youngest came up with.

She’s going to play a young child: specifically, the long-lost brother of her character in the Freak Campaign,⁶ Rose Redd.  His name is Levi,⁷ and he’s 11.  At first, my eldest was none too keen on this plan, not wanting to run a game where they regularly had to put a young child into dangerous situations.  But my youngest persisted, and she explained further.  See, this young boy doesn’t actually fight when there’s trouble.  Instead, he lugs around a stuffed toy that he found (who knows where) on his long travels.⁸  This toy looks like a demon—a fluffy, lumpy, child’s toy version of a demon, granted, but a demon nonetheless.  Horns, red skin, pointy tail ... the whole kit and caboodle.  But it’s beat up: it’s threadbare, one of its eyes is missing, part of its stuffing has fallen out so it’s lopsided and parts of it are a bit flat, and so on.  It definitely doesn’t look menacing, but perhaps a bit creepy ... who thought this was going to make for an adorable children’s toy?  But here’s the dark secret: when Levi is put in danger, this demon doll actually morphs into a full-sized, very real demon, who goes rampaging off and attacks the enemies.  So the demon does all the fighting, while the kid very intelligently stays hidden and safe from danger.  Outside of combat, the kid can contribute in more roleplaying-focussed ways, like helping to solve puzzles or maybe some light scouting (the kid’s got to be very good at remaining unseen to have survived this long), and is probably decent at using his power of cute to make friends.  But, when the swords and spells come out ... so does the demon.

Now, this on its own is a pretty inventive concept.  (For those of you wondering how we plan to implement this mechanically, Pathfinder has a class called a “summoner.” It’s never been my favorite Pathfinder class,⁹ but this is actually one place where it can make sense.  The demon will not be an actual demon, but rather Levi’s “eidolon,” as a summoner’s pet creature is called in the game.)  Is the demon real?  Is it perhaps a protective spirit from some other plane that just somehow got stuck in this unsettling form?  Or maybe it’s a psychic projection of Levi himself, hinting at potential power that might be unlocked someday.  But that’s not even the point of the story.

See, in addition to being wildly inventive, my youngest child is also very crafty.  Like, as in arts-and-crafty.  She’s a maker, is what I’m saying.  And, at some point while we were coming up with all these ideas about Levi’s demon doll and how it would work in the game, she decided to draw it, for reference.  And then she decided she’d just make one.  So she did.

To be clear, she drew that picture all by herself, then (with minimal help from her mother) cut out some fabric pieces, put them together with hot glue, stuffed it with stuffing, then hot-glued all the pieces together, including the button for an eye.  What was once just a vague idea in her head is now an actual, tangible thing in the real world that she can hold on to at the gaming table.  It just blows my mind.

Did I mention she’s only just turned nine?

Anyhow, that’s my D&D story for today.  Or my cute kid story, if you prefer.  Tune in next week for what will probably be a more normal-sized post.

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1 For more details, see my post on the Family Campaign.

2 There’s also the game that my youngest—just barely 9 at this point!—runs, but that’s pretty sporadic.

3 And the long answer is: read this.

4 Pretty much any Powered by the Apocalypse game, like Dungeon World, for instance.

5 Outside of one-shots, anyway.

6 Again, see game rotation for (a few) details.

7 Currently.  He’s gone through a few name changes so far.

8 It is yet unclear whether Levi was kidnapped or ran away from home, and, if the former, who took him, or, if the latter, what possessed him to run away at 8 or 9 years old.

9 In fact, given that you summon a creature from a pocket dimension who can look like anyhting and evolves as you get to higher levels, I long ago pegged being a summoner as playing a Pokémon trainer in Pathfinder, and dismissed it outright.  I can tolerate a lot of atypical high fantasy in my D&D—monks, psionics, dinsosaurs ... even guns—but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

D&D and Me: Part 9 (All in the Family)

[This is the ninth 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 fifth edition D&D (5e) and how its popularity surprised and delighted long-time D&D fans, myself among them.]

So now there was a new edition, a new attitude towards the game, and, most of all, a whole new type of content: streaming D&D games.  I tried a bunch before I found Relics and Rarities, which is what really got me excited about D&D again.  Once I found that, I started obsessively checking out all of them.  Well, except for the obvious one: Critical Role.

There are a number of reasons I waited so long to give CR a chance.  Their first campaign (referred to either by the group name of the characters—Vox Machina—or simply as “C1”) has 115 episodes ... that’s over 447 hours of video to watch (thank you CritRoleStats).  Even if you skip over all the announcements and the breaks and whatnot, it would be over 373 hours: if I did nothing but eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and watch C1, it would still take me around 23 days to get through it all.  So that was one big reason.  But probably the bigger reason was just that it was the most popular (as I mentioned last time), and I have always resisted liking the most popular thing.  It’s a personal failing, I know.  But eventually I decided it was only fair to give it a chance, and I could start with their second campaign and not have nearly as much content to wade through.  After just a few episodes, I was hooked.  One thing I that I particularly loved was how Matt (CR’s DM) set up the story by running several “one-shot” adventures¹ for small groups of characters.  Though these happened off-screen, it was obvious what the ramifications were: each character got the chance to develop from their initial character sheet in a smaller, more controlled setting before joining together in a larger group.  It’s very common for a character to change somewhat, mostly personality-wise, from your initial concept once you start inhabiting them at the table, and it also generally takes a while before you become comfortable with all the features and powers on your sheet.  With these shorter, almost-solo adventures,²  all the awkward bits could be gotten out of the way.  The first episode of C2 shows this perfectly: a few relationships are established, all the players are comfortable in the skins of their characters, and rules-fumbling—the inevitable “wait, how does this work again?”—is kept to a minimum.  This was a big inspiration for what would eventually become the Family Campaign.

But the biggest (if most abstract) impact of CR on my home games were to remind me of the joy of D&D as long-form storytelling.  A lot of streaming D&D out there consists of one-shots (like Lost Odyssey) or limited series (like Relics and Rarities), and many of those are fantastic.  But what CR (and also the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone) reminded me was just how awesome it is to have that open-ended, anything-can-happen storyling going on, where every character’s backstory somehow ties into the overall plot, but there’s also some world-threatening evil to be addressed, and quests to resovle, and intermediate character goals (like needed items or researching new spells or just becoming more financially self-sufficient) to achieve, and the DM’s job is to weave all these disparate threads together to form some unexpected coherent whole.  Matt Mercer (of CR) and Griffin McElroy (of TAZ) are two of the best in the business at this, and it reminded me of the times that I had tried to achieve such things ... always with less success than these guys, of course.  But one of the benefits of getting old is that you can often look back and see where you went wrong in the past, and, between that and just learning from the examples that CR and TAZ were providing, I started to get excited to try it again—this time using my children as guinea pigs.

Now, as I talked about two installments ago, I had been mainly running pre-published adventures for my kids up to this point.  Premade adventures can be short, or they can be long, but either way they’re quite different than the long-form stories I’m talking about now.  They’re not customized to the characters of my players, and though the best DMs will certainly extend a published adventure to include such things, it’s never the same as a story that’s been built from the ground up to be about your characters.  For years, I had been thinking that all the prep work and the frustration wasn’t worth it; now, listening to The Adventure Zone and watching Critical Role, I was changing my mind.  I was seeing the benefits being reaped before my eyes (and ears), and I knew I couldn’t deprive my kids of that joy.  So it was that, while streaming D&D didn’t ignite my love of D&D, it did rekindle it.

I’ve already talked about my youngest bringing me her first idea for a D&D character, so I won’t rehash it here.  Corva Ravenstone was extremely animal focussed—a tiger for a guardian and a monkey as a constant companion—and my middle child always plays druids, because they think that shapeshifting is just the coolest thing ever.  When my eldest proposed a custom barbarian subclass whose “rage” was actually an uncontrolled transformation to a werewolf form,³ I knew that this campaign needed to be all about animals.  Always fascinated with the concept of a beastmaster-style character,⁴ I decided to dust off my attempts to create a class that could do this without breaking the action economy; my beastmaster class would end up being the basis for my eventual GMPC,⁵ and also provide the basis for Corva’s monkey companion.⁶  This echoes my very first experience playing D&D:⁷ making new rules so I didn’t have to say “no” to any part of a kid’s character concept ... it just happened to be my daughter instead of my brother in this case.

My middle child wanted to play a changeling, which is a race which can change its appearance at will.  (Yes, a changeling druid is basically doubling-down on the shapeshifting power—that’s what’s attractive for that particular kid.)  And, to up the transmutation factor even more, I gave them a custom magic item that allows them access to many of the coolest shapeshifting-related spells.  The problem was that changelings are from a world known as Eberron, and this campaign was definitely not going to take place on Eberron.  How did this changeling (whose name is Zyx) get from Eberron to the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for 5e)?  For that matter, my child decided to complicate my life even more when they saw and fell in love with the amazing dinosaurs of Ixalan, and decided that that was where Zyx learned druiding, so that they could turn into dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts.  Now I had a whole third world to work into the backstory.  But I took that on too.

My eldest, of course, has been playing D&D (and other TTRPGS, like Pathfinder) for years at this point, and is a GM in their own right.  I didn’t need to do much besides taking their custom barbarian subclass and making it a bit more polished.  But they also had an entirely new deity in their backstory, and I had to work that into the plot.  No problem.

Stealing Matt Mercer’s idea of one-shot adventures for the individual characters before the main story starts, I came up with the idea of “flashbackstories,” which were “flashbacks” (in the sense they took place 2 – 5 years before the main storyline starts) and also “backstories,” because they set up the plot.  See, intead of “you all meet in a pub,” I decided that there would be a mysterious benefactor (more of a “I suppose you’re wondering why I called all of you here today” situation).  Each character owed a big debt to this person.  But how did they become indebted to him?  Well, instead of just writing it out as a story, let’s play it out ... as a flashbackstory.  I wanted to give each character a guide: an NPC to help them out and introduce them to the man who would perform some valuable service for them in exchange for “a service to be provided at a later date.” I hit upon the idea of using my old characters for this purpose.  My old druid Sillarin would be an excellent guide for new druid Zyx.  Bowmaster and nature cleric Ellspeth was a natural fit for the young jungle girl (and archer) Corva.  As for burgeoning werewolf Isabella, who better to help her achieve calmness of mind and body than a monk?  So she ran into Jin.  Exactly as planned, each character had a chance to explore both personality and mechanics and feel things out.  The time gap also provided a perfect excuse for changing or evolving personality traits: your character just “grew up” a bit in the intervening years.

For the role of mysterious benefactor, I wanted someone colorful (both figuratively and literally), who seemed really out of place but also really in control.  I achieved this by inventing Hervé, a Vedalken rogue with the mastermind specialization.  Vedalken are an almost scifi race, originally from D&D’s sister game Magic: The Gathering.  They’ve been imported into D&D in two versions,⁸ and they have a feel almost like a cross between Spock and Data from Star Trek: obssessed with discovering new things, and for the most part coldly logical about everything else.  The mastermind is of course a fantastic subclass for a villain, but in this case it works well for someone who is basically a “finder” character: rich people hire him to find or obtain things for them, and he always know exactly the right combination of people (adventurers, specifically) to put together a mission.  And he knows them because he’s “collected” them—basically, he wanders around bailing people with certain skills out of trouble so that they’ll owe him a favor when he finally runs across a job that could use their particular skills.  A character such as this is perfect for driving the “little” plot of a D&D campaign: he can be mysterious, and opaque with his motivations, or he can be open and offer lots of details to the characters, if he thinks it makes them more effective in doing jobs for him.  So he’s a mission generator and a font of information.  This is what you need to keep a campaign moving forward on a session-to-session basis.

For the bigger picture, though, you need a mystery to drive each character to search for something, and preferably a way to tie all the mysteries together into one big mystery.  Two of my characters (Corva and Zyx) gave me one of the best gifts you can give a DM: the gift of missing parents.  They might be dead ... or then again they might not.  Isabella’s story is more complicated: her father is the one who turned her into a werewolf in the first place, as part of some freaky cult thing.  Still, after reading a veritable shitload of old D&D lore, I came up with something that would satisfy all the backstories—even tying in the one for my own GMPC, Thurl—and also explain a bit of the world-hopping that Zyx apparently experienced at a young age into the bargain.  I won’t go into too much detail here (it’s rare that my kids read my blog, but better safe than sorry, I suppose), but it involves Planescape factions and secret societies (shades of both A Series of Unfortunate Events and Marvel’s Runaways) and, naturally, lots and lots of animals.  I call it the Family Campaign, both for the obvious reason, but also because there’s a deeper familial connection that will be revealed as time goes on.

And that brings us up to the present time.  Next time, in what may well be our last installment, I think I’ll talk about what D&D can mean in the context of learning, and of teaching.

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1 A one-shot is a very short adventure that’s designed to be run in a single session.  Although sometimes a one-shot might end up taking two sessions, in which case it’s really more of a two-shot.  But that’s more to do with the pace of the characters playing it than the adventure itself.

2 CR had 7 characters, so it was more practical to do them in groups of 2 or 3; for a more typical game of 3 or 4 characters, it would be perfectly fine to do proper solo adventures.

3 To be clear, this was before the Path of the Beast was a thing.  Although they’re quite similar, naturally.

4 You may remember that I went into some depth on that topic in part 4.

5 I still haven’t written my post on what this term means to me, but, for purposes of this discussion, let’s just say it’s a “full” member of the party—that is, not a henchman or a guide or a pet or a more experienced mentor type—who happens to be run by the GM instead of by a player.

6 If you remebered that Corva is a ranger, you may wonder why not just make her a beastmaster ranger and call it a day.  All I can tell you is, he’s not that sort of monkey.

7 Which we covered in part 2.

8 Specifically, in the Kaladesh Plane Shift supplement, and the official book Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, which represent the two different Magic worlds that feature them.