Infinity's Gathering (Inactive)

Game Master mishima

Thank you. :)

In our last campaign my elf likewise had a very fluffy benefit, which was never of mechanical use. Better to have a character whose crunch that fits the character than crunch which fits the dungeon.

Bhoors will be happy to join Nella in the AL game. He might end up wanted by tht Ytepka afterall.

Ken here (Pindleton/Cloudrunner). I've been thinking quite a bit about stating my interest given my occasional lags in posting. However, I am scaling back the games I'm involved in, and am now done with my second job (teaching a couple courses for a semester, I was a last minute replacement professor), so I would like to express interest in White Plume Mountain as long as there are spots.

So, if you'll have me, I'll start working on ideas.

With UA allowed, I have an idea for a Brute fighter, but we'll see. How deep are you willing to go with UA? :) Would you allow the most recent version of the Mystic? I've been itching to try that class someday.

Also, when are you planning on starting? Mordenkainen's is available a week from today and looks to have some fun options in it I'd like to consider. However, if you'd rather get started before then or have time to review and digest it before allowing anything, that's fine.

Thanks!

1st choice: WP
Character? TBD, probably a new one
Will play the other if not accepted to first? Y, but probably moot since there seems to be more interest in AL.

Ken, happy to have you of course. As for UA, I don't keep up with it so will just be looking at whatever options you all claim.

Good point about Mords! Perhaps we should wait a bit.

edit: what I meant to say is I will look at the Mystic right now

So, is the White Plume 7th level to start?

That's right Filios, I'll also allow everyone a single magic item. I need to decide on wealth I suppose, I'll get some more details over the weekend.

As a first choice, I'd like to make a Swashbuckler or Arcane Trickster for White Plume.

What's the character creation information? Like year and location that the game starts, so I can dovetail my backstory.

thanks

We'll start in Neverwinter in 1491. This is an old school start in a tavern kind of affair, so as long as you have a reason to be in Neverwinter you should be good to go!

Because the Raven Queen wills it.

Boltsmelter's Book (AL Game)
1. Natloz
2. Aeshurra
3. Gnomezrule
4. Filios
5. Dan

White Plume Mountain
1. Grumbaki
2. Jubal
3. Ken
4.
5.

Alright, AL game looks full. For White Plume, there is more interest than slots! Those that did not choose WP as first choice, would you guys like to roll random d20 with highest getting in(easy), or competitively apply like a normal recruitment thread(hard)?

I'm ok with a d20 roll. The hard way is stressful...

For white plumers, even though it isn't an AL game, I'm going to use the new character wealth rules that are going to be implemented in Season 8 from XGtE. I think they are neat and will become commonplace in the future. You'll start with 675 gp and 16 treasure points (tp...an unfortunate acronym). TP can be spent on magic items from the table in the following way for a level 7 character:

A 4
B 4
C 4
D 8
E No
F 8
G 10
H No
I No

So for example with 16 tp you could snag a table G and a table A item, or 4 table A items.

Additionally, certain potions and spell scrolls are available. For scrolls, you have to be capable of casting the spell to make the purchase.

I reconsidered.

I'll be rukking bringing Urth to White Plume

Want to switch his spells.

EDIT What chart would be a +1 sword that also is an arcane focus? Or a regular sword that doubles as an arcane focus?

cheers

White Plume Roll: 1d20 ⇒ 13

Cole will be guarding a merchant caravan heading from Waterdeep to Neverwinter.

Where can I find these tables? Link please

White Plume Roll: 1d20 ⇒ 20 WHOOT!!!

OK Urth is done and ready for review.

Magic items:
* Mariner's plate armor
* Folded Boat
* Winged Boots

White plume roll 1d20 ⇒ 1

Womp womp

Shaldinari is up for another AL game if you still room at the table.

Where can I find these tables? Link please

Its the magic item tables from the DMG starting on page 144. I find most of the pages in google images searching for "magic items table 5e". I'll make a list and pm you though.

Shaldinari is up for another AL game if you still room at the table.

Sure Shal you rock, please join.

Looking like Dan and Filios to fill up the WP game (sorry natloz, will get you next time). Anyone else interested in rolling for that one? Will close this and move to separate campaign tabs if not.

So...drop con down from 14 to 10. Raise dex from 10 to 14.

——

Amulet of Health: Raises Con to 19 (10TP)
Mithril Fullplate: no disadvantage on stealth (4TP)

Leaves me with the 2TP remaining. Could I use those to make the mithril armor one and the same with Godric? No body but the armor.

——-

Seems like a good use of his TP. Especially now he’ll have +5 to Stealth. :)

Sir Abrel, lvl 3 Fighter (eldritch knight)

Logsheet It's all DM cred to get me to 3rd lvl.

Sir Abrel's Backstory:

In short, Sir Abrel served as a Knight in Silver during the Orc Wars in the Silver Marches. He was in full support of aiding the dwarves and Sundabar, but was crushed when ego and politics left, what he thought was, their allies to face the threat on their own. When he heard many of his fellow knights laying blame on the dwarves and balking at the thought of sending them aid, he great angry and disillusioned in the Order.

The news of the fall of Sundabar hit Abrel hard. The young knight broke and snapped at his own commanding officer and the Knight Commander, himself, calling the honor of the order a sham. The reaction was swift and soon Abrel found himself in the stocks.

After a week of humiliation, weathering the elements, Abrel was almost delirious. His own commanding officer, accompanied by a couple of younger knights, ordered his release. As the officer looked down on the young man with what seemed like pity, the knight threw a bundle into the dirt before him. The last thing that Abrel heard, That came for you. The Knight Commander's decree is that you are stripped of rank and dishonorably discharged from service. You were a good knight, once upon a time... Such a waste.

The words were lost on the young knight, as his eyes were locked on the bundle... and the hilt of his father's sword.

Grum, Aesh, looking good.

Ken, found a v3 of the Mystic. That the one?

Grum, Aesh, looking good.

Ken, found a v3 of the Mystic. That the one?

Yep, that’s it.

However, I have multiple ideas if you aren’t sure about it.

Its alright, lets try it. What order were you thinking?

Not sure yet. Either Soul Knife if another melee would be fine, or Awakened if we could use more of a caster.

Well, right now its looking like:

White Plume Mountain
1. Grumbaki (as Godric, warlock 1/paladin 6)
2. Jubal (as Urth, cleric 1/wiz 6)
3. Ken
4. Dan (as Molok I assume, fighter 7)
5. Filios (not sure)

Lots of unconventional challenges in WP. Puzzles that require utility, psychological games that aren't dependent on mechanics, deadly skill checks, etc...Lots of combat, too, just saying. Atypical dungeon.

Hmm...could likely use a rogue of some sort then.

Need a rogue or bard, then

Depending on what Filios wants to play, any of my ideas can go skill focused (I usually like to anyway even with other classes).

Well, it is D&D5. Anyone can be a rogue with thief tool proficiency. Sadly it just wouldn’t fit Godric’s character.

Indeed. I think we can go ahead and break off into our groups. At the moment there isn't much in the slides or campaign info, but slowly getting there. I think for sure we will wait for Mords for the White Plume game. Not sure for the AL game. Please chime in there in discussion.

Boltsmelter's Book
White Plume Mountain

I'll close and remove you guys from this gathering thread in a day or two so it doesn't clutter your games.

Dotting for now.

I don't have the bandwidth for another game right now but I'd like to keep this thread on my radar for when I do again.

Alrighty, sounds good Bjorn. I imagine I'll start yet another AL game in a few months.

For those that cannot get enough 5e, I've opened a recruiting page for 5e Middle Earth Adventures. I need rotating Loremasters to make it run for awhile.

cheers

Reactivated for shadow-touched discussion.

Sent Lexi the link for the thread. I didn't know if you had been in contact or not, so I figured better safe than sorry. :)

So, just to consolidate things here, I figured I'd summarize what I had in mind.

When Raseri reaches ninth level, she would cast Eidetic Memory on herself in the hopes of it revealing something that would be of use in helping Lexi with her problem. She then casts Greater Restoration on Lexi, and that's where things go sideways. Lexi and Raseri wind up going on a vision quest through both their minds, learning things about themselves and each other as well as encountering hidden dangers and threats ('cause this is the Shadow Realm, and I'm sure that shade infecting Lexi is not going to want to move out.)

One of the things I wanted to discuss was how to include the other players, or even if we should include them. Maybe they play things that we meet along the way, or maybe we decide to keep this a secret while we play it out and reveal it at the appropriate time. There's arguments for both ways, I think.

Another was what do we consider core concepts and themes of our characters, and each others' characters. Considering we're traversing a landscape made by the melding of two minds and that everything in it is going to be a metaphor for something, I think this is going to largely define the setting of this jaunt, and perceptions are going to be just as important as self-perceptions. In short, it's going to be both Lexi and Raseri and how Lexi sees Raseri and how Raseri sees Lexi.

Any thoughts or other ideas? I'm open to suggestions. I'm also curious as to how GM Infinity sees Raseri and Lexi and what he feels are the core concepts and themes that encapsulate them.

I'm here, and I agreed with what Master Warnock has said.

I'm interested to see what Infinity views as the core concepts of each of our characters, and how it compares/contrasts to what we each see as parts of our characters.

Thanks, been a busy week but yeah, been mulling it over. Im a fan of the vision quest concept.

Im no English major guys, so wtf do I know about characters. But my thoughts are that Lexi and Raseri share the theme of endurance. Raseri is the oddity that has broken a centuries long cycle of abuse, risen above tradition and constantly fighting the powers that bind her fate. Lexi is similarly the death engine born from abuse and a society that looked the other way, fitting the mold that has been crafted for her.

Both have been betrayed or at least been used by the ones they thought sheltered them. Now they have found each other, see their reflections in themselves, and perhaps think the other is too innocent to repeat the past (betray or use each other again).

Im fine either way whether or not you include the others in this exploration. Lexi and Raseri have been together since the beginning of the adventure with their initial mission in the theatre.

One sort of meta piece of info, is that the setting is about to drastically change again. By the time you can cast Eidetic Memory, there may be a very different situation in play. But feel free to lay the groundwork and let it flow from here.

I have no problem opening things up for the others - if nothing else, they could see the memory I wrote for Lexi in character, and a few others of a similar vein that I have kinda percolating in my brain.

Also, playing a character who is genuinely nice is oddly harder on me than I thought it would be; not sure what that says about me as a person though =P

I'm no english major, but I like to write stories and I have made it a point to study the craft because I one day will complete a novel, if I can keep from bouncing from story to story. :P

So, the major themes that I see Raseri has developed over the course of the game are the nature of fate, fear of the unknown and failure, and principles winning over fear (which is part of the endurance that Infinity sees, I think.) Raseri doesn't know much about her past, and every revelation so far has lead to more questions than answers. She's afraid of what she'll discover, especially after remembering parts of her childhood. To be honest, when she does cast Eidetic memory, it's going to cause a lot of problems for her. She is afraid of what she doesn't know about herself, which makes the second fear, the fear of failure, all the worse for her. It's part of her growing inferiority complex. It feeds off of the fragments of her own memory that she can remember. She feels that she has failed Lexi and that is part of why her temper is on hair trigger where this version is concerned. She doesn't want to let others down, which is why she was torn between helping the priests and seeing her and Lexi's charge home at the very beginning. She's loyal, and a genuinely good person, which is why she's willing to throw herself into a nightmare for a city that looks down on her. She will keep getting up to fight or help as long as she can, even if she's scared or convinced she can't succeed.

Then there's the nature of Fate. Raseri believes herself to be fateless, cursed and beyond help. She is doomed to a horrible end because she is a blasphemy against existence itself just by living. One of the things I'm hoping to get into is the nature of Fate and why Raseri is wrong about herself.

Lexi, for me, is a little tougher to crack. I think that her themes would be of dualities. Control versus emotions. Ruthlessness versus compassion. Loyalty versus pragmatism. For all of her logic and pragmatism, she followed us into the Shadowlands. She is ruthless to her enemies and bottles her emotions to keep from feeling them and losing control.

Speaking of dualism, Raseri and Lexi are pretty god foils of each other. Raseri wears her emotions on her sleeves. She's an open book as far as how she's feeling. She it loud and brash to hide the hurt and wounded girl she is. Lexi, on the other hand, is calm and reserved. She keeps her emotions on a tight leash. She hides what she is truly feeling behind a mask of tight control. She's trying to hide that she is a scared and lonely girl.

And while I do get that the setting's about to change, I don't think it's going to change how Raseri is feeling about herself or Lexi.

Well, shoot. That's the third post I've made this week that got eaten by Paizo.

Hopefully with the site changes it fixes the stability issues.

The TL:DR of my post is that Lexi really doesn't feel emotions, since they're been mostly burned out of her. She does, however, have fear of the Shadow Realm and fear of physical intimacy, due to what happened to her mother and the fact that her mentor made THAT a requirement of her apprenticeship.

As for Raseri, I had said that I feel like Raseri's self doubt comes from an external source, not an internal one; specifically, I think that Labelling theory applies (which is the theory that calling someone something like stupid or ugly leads to that person and others believing it to be true). I think her "true" self is badass lightning chick.

The last thing I said is that we should probably stick to 2-3 scenes each, since we don't want to dominate the game for a long period of time.

The Post Monster must find your writing delicious. :P

Yeah, two or three scenes each would work.

But back to Lexi and Raseri for a moment. I do think that Lexi does feel emotions, but she is an expert at repressing them, or rather, she's has them repressed for her by whatever her mentor did to her. I think that she sees herself as emotionless as a defense against the pain she has had to endure in her short life. At the beginning of the game, it was when Lexi started to let her emotions show that she slipped and revealed herself. Then we have just now in the giant fight when Raseri was trying to convince Lexi to go help the others. Part of it was that Raseri thought that Lexi fighting to help kill their opponents more quickly was the better course of action to take, but the other, bigger part was that she was ashamed at her weakness and didn't want anyone to see her in that state. Lexi's anger, to me, seemed to be driven by the fact that Raseri was denigrating herself.

I would also argue that fear is also an emotion. I think that Lexi latched onto the fear because that was all she had and was allowed to feel, even if she wasn't allowed to show it. It's not healthy, but it's better than feeling nothing at all but dispair.

All in all, I think Lexi is capable of other emotions, but it's a fear of losing the joy and happiness associated with good memories that has her trying her best to not feel anything at all.

So, how do you guys see the vision quest playing out? What can I do to facilitate?

I'll shoot you a PM with the scenes I had in mind. I was thinking that you could be the voices of doubt in fear in Raseri's head at least. I'm not sure what Lexi's player is planning, though I know it will be something good given how things have gone so far in game.

My thoughts are that I would showcase two-three scenes that have more or less lead Lexi to becoming who she is; something like a "highlight reel" of her most important character moments, and I'll reference the party back to the short fiction I wrote and make that IC knowledge as well.

Here's what I'm picturing: a gray scene with her parents > her village burning > escaping into the streets of Zobrek > becoming feral > meeting her master > meeting the group; nothing very long, but it would give the ability for people to comment on what is shown.

That all sounds great (especially the 'becoming feral' part), only requirement I'm sticking with is that someone spend a 5th level spell slot or equivalent resource. As written, its Restoration or Dispel Evil though Kjeta has thus far only been hinted of the former.

That's the plan. :)

Reactivating for extended playtesting...