Dark Powers |
Site has been down for me since Sunday till now (an a brief period yesterday).
If it's up tonight, I'll update...
Storyteller Shadow |
Hopefully the boards are stable again (they have been this morning) and I can get out updates over the next two days.
Storyteller Shadow |
Just an FYI I will be taking 2 DM board breaks in the month of July:
1. July 2 through July 4 and
2. July 8 through July 11.
During this time I will be working on plot for some of the Campaigns as well as updating Campaign Information tabs for all Campaigns.
Dark Powers |
Sorry for the delay there folks, rough work week and busy weekend. I believe work is finally! under control.
Lucifer Graves |
Hey all, posting this in all my games to let people know I'll be away for a few days. My family is headed to camp later today, and I won't have Internet or my computer while I'm there. I should be back and posting Friday afternoon/evening (Eastern Time), but please push the game as needed, botting my character if you need to do so. Thanks!
Dark Powers |
Finally coming off of my hiatus. Posts up in a few minutes. I don't currently see a need to update the Campaign Info tab (except for Initiative and Perception stats for my own DM screen rolls.
Game ON!
Dark Powers |
I dropped the short rules and explanations for Fear and Horror in the Campaign Info tab for ease of reference. This should be an interesting encounter with a special Ravenloft Lycanthrope unique even from the experiences of the existing PCs ;-)
Dark Powers |
Again my apologies for the numerous delays the past few weeks. All is essentially up and running again so my updates will be coming with the frequency I generally prefer 2-4 times per week.
As we are in combat, I will push this one up the priority ladder and try and check in every day to speed that up.
Dark Powers |
Playing in 20+ games and running 26 (soon to be 27) is time consuming. Outside of the boards I have a fairly busy work schedule and of course a life!
Often I find that if I fall behind in updates, I need to make time to simply update a Discussion Thread to inform the PCs of a particular game that I am either going to be posting later in the day or week or will be on a break form the boards for one reason or another.
To save time updating so many damn threads I am going to open this thread and link all of my DM aliases (and PC aliases) to this thread to inform people as to status.
Of course if people feel the need to ask other questions outside of PbP feel free to do so but mainly this will be a thread dedicated to ensuring that my PCs know my status and to assure everyone that even though I may have some absences away from the boards (or particular games) that new thread will always be up to date with my status.
Dark Powers |
Did we lose Bannock?
I sent him a PM. For now if comes back great, if not we'll roll with the PCs we have for some time as I'd rather not bog things down by trying to introduce a new PC now. In the meantime, I'll bot Bannock.
Dark Powers |
Been a week since I PM'ed Bannock and I have seen him posting in other games so I will assume he is no longer interested in this campaign. We shall move along without him as we still have 6 PCs in the group after his departure.
Dark Powers |
Sorry for the delay there, every time I tried to get to this something kept interrupting me!
Dark Powers |
OK between vacation, nonsense, and illnesses I've been away from this thread since August. Sound off if you are with me. We know that Bannock is no longer among us.
Thanks!
----
The plot is before you essentially, meeting with Arikel is what sets the course of events in motion.
Now, this is no railroad so if you want to abandon her pleas and head elsewhere, now is the time to decide that IC.
Dark Powers |
Go ahead and do any shopping for good here in Discussion. Let me know what you spend and how much you spend it on. No local currency needed as so much foreign coin comes through the minting is not relevant.
When I have a moment, I'll put the group on the road as its clear you are done in Harmonia :-)
Storyteller Shadow |
We done here, or are we waiting on something?
@Darkpowers: if this is done, please remove the thread.
Please dot into this thread which I keep up to date at least every few days. RL been real nasty lately Bankruptcy and Divorce at the same time are enough for even me to lose focus here and there.
I'll be updating within the next few days.
Dark Powers |
Alright, better than my last stretch but not as good as I want it to be.
Good news is that I'll be filing the final Divorce paperwork tomorrow. Then a meeting with the Judge and that'll be behind me!
Storyteller Shadow |
It’s pretty late at night as I am writing this. I’ve been through a significant amount of struggles through the past two years (actually through the past 41 but especially the past 2). I’ve had worse stretches of time before but I believe that these past struggles were due to my own lack of maturity and self-awareness at the time those events took place.
Likely those events were necessary for me to experience to survive the events of the past two years and get through them as well as I have. Physical ailments, getting older and requiring more sleep, bankruptcy, and ultimately divorce. You know life is not going swimmingly when going to work feels like a vacation.
Regardless, when I first started getting involved in PbP on the boards it was a chance to play, finally! I’d been DMing for the bulk of the time that I’ve played table top that I was enjoying being able to be a player for once. Then with so many damn flaky GM’s I just started running games and well, things snow balled from there.
Life was fairly stable at the time the normal ups and downs. Then about two years ago, I started getting into PbP as a way to escape reality. Sort of the same ways drugs were casual and enjoyable for me as a teen and ultimately led me as close to suicide as I ever want to get again.
I am not saying that PbP has made me suicidal but I am saying that I recognize that I was using PbP as a coping mechanism to avoid a bad marriage. PbP did NOT lead to the failure of my marriage but it did contribute to my ability to tune it out.
I make a decent living but between bankruptcy and divorce I’ve little to show for it (well except for this killer book and RPG collection ). I could point the finger at my soon to be ex-wife but when you point one finger at a person, three more point back at you. I could have prevented things from becoming this bad and I chose not to. I did it, ironically, because I believed that if I had the marriage would have ended and ended badly, so much for best intentions. I am not going to second guess myself, what happened happened. As divorces go, this one has been rather amicable as we have put our daughter first and ourselves second.
Being married to someone who makes as much if not more money then you (depending on sales that year) places one in a position to “take it easy” when it comes to being aggressive about making money (well it placed me in such a position anyhow perhaps because making money does not move me).
Early on in my career I had an opportunity to become a premiere M&A Financial Services Tax Attorney in a Big 4 Firm. It’s a big deal and potentially a lot of money but I did not really want it because I knew I would be working a lot and traveling a lot. My ex agreed that I should turn it down as she did not want to be married to a workaholic and that was not who I wanted to be anyway. Nor do I want to be that person now. (In yet another twist of irony, she has become a workaholic, funny how things turn out).
I do not regret the decision though I do lament the loss of income that such a decision would have brought to me.
All of this rambling nonsense is leading to the point of this post, I need to work more. Not at my current job nor do I want to get a new job, I actually like being there as odd as that sounds (to me). I need to get a second and perhaps a third job, side gigs. At 41 about to turn 42 with no retirement and no savings for my daughters college, I can no longer hope that the ex’s business will come through as an investment plan. Even if it does, I will not be the beneficiary of that largesse. I need to make up for 11 years of being “comfortable” simply working.
Thus, it is with heavy heart that I am announcing that I will need to close down a number of the threads I run and withdraw from a number of the games I am a PC in.
I suppose this decision will not be a surprise to many of you as my posting rates have been abysmal since these events took a turn for the worse (in some respects the better to be honest) since Thanksgiving of 2017.
I am not generally a person that feels remorse or guilt but I do feel a level of disappointment with having to make this decision. I apologize for disappointing many of you who put work into PCs relying on my consistency as a GM/DM over the course of the past several years.
My plan had always been to run a hardcore dose of RPG’s until my daughter was a teenager and then, spend my free time writing the novel I had been working on since before she was born. I had hoped that over the next 9 years or so I could wrap up most of these campaigns and the few that remained would be more manageable.
Life has not worked out that way.
The good news is that I will still run several games but the current load is too much for me to handle in this transition. The further good news is that I believe this will allow for those games to move along much more quickly.
By tomorrow I will have made my decision as to which games I will keep and which I will shut down.
Thank you all for taking the journeys with me despite the lack of length or resolution of so many of them.
I will still be around just in a diminished capacity so this is not goodbye just a “be seeing less of you”.
Khalid de la Poer |
Hey Storyteller, I'm sorry to hear about all of the negative things happening in your life in the past few years. It sounds like you've used these experiences to gain some focus with your life though and i hope that nets a positive for you.
Whatever you decide happens with our jaunt through Ravenloft, you have my support and my thanks for having picked this game up in the first place.
Good luck!
Storyteller Shadow |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I have decided to keep this particular game IN the rotation. Look for updates Wednesday night.
Storyteller Shadow |
Have the best laid plans of the GM faltered?
Only temporarily, see my Status thread.
Storyteller Shadow |
Life is finally starting to get a bit less hectic. Thanks for the patience, I will be back to normal posting again this Sunday.
Carella Fletcher |
I’ll be away on and off for the next two weeks.
May 25-28 Paizocon
May 29-May 31 Regularly scheduled programming
June 1-June 5 on vacation.
It is incredibly unlikely that I’ll be able to post each day during the con and the vacation. Please don’t let me slow the games down, and feel free to bot me. I’ll check in as I can.
Dark Powers |
As I only have one original "cast" member left, I have decided to Recruit for at least two more Doomed Souls to walk the mists with your group. They will join within this scene by the end of this weekend.
---
Carella will be back June 6 so the card game will be on hold till then giving the other PCs a chance to mingle should they so choose.
Brother Lazlo Krykski |
Hey there everyone! I'm KingHotTrash and this is the character that I'll be bringing to the campaign. A good ol' fashioned Cleric here to help the people of Kartakass.
Thank you Dark Powers for bringing me in, I'm really excited to join you all. I've read up on the story so far and am eager to see what will happen next.
Storyteller Shadow |
Sorry guys, losing steam here, I will either update tomorrow morning or Friday night.