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Orthos, I love hearing about your NWN sessions. Do you all use voice chat while playing? How much prep time is it for a GM to set up a session?
We do have a voice channel available, though not everyone uses it. It's also strictly ooc, with all IC conversation happening in-game. We also sometimes use a separate channel for DMs ro coordinate in, so I can tell Scint or whoever else is my co-DM to "spawn encounter 6" or "drop some traps over there" without spoiling the player group.
My prep time is usually somewhere in the range of an hour to two hours per hour I expect the session to go. Most of my events last about 3 hours give or take, so prep usually takes about that long or a couple hours more if it's especially complex. Less time of course if Scint is helping and/or if I'm working with pre-made, pre-balanced assets, rather than having to edit and adjust during prep.
What is NWN referring to?
I've only ever heard of it referring to Neverwinter Nights, but I don't remember there being runelords in that game.
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What is NWN referring to?
I've only ever heard of it referring to Neverwinter Nights, but I don't remember there being runelords in that game.
It is in fact Neverwinter Nights he's referring to.
I believe they are able to inject their own material into the server, it's as much a labor of love as anything.
Edit: Or something like that, I don't really understand how Neverwinter Nights or video games in general work.
Uh, well, I didn't know you could have a nwn server. I've played a bit of the games offline and single player, and thought that was it. Further, she mentioned being gm, which means, not only having server, but having deep controls. Well beyond what I'm aware of as possible gameplay.
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Yes, Neverwinter Nights (1) is what I was referring to.
The game comes with a DM client engine and a toolset that lets you build custom areas. I and several others have been hosting and working on a NWN persistent world since 2005, telling our various stories and plotlines for the community mostly through scheduled DM-run events and interactions.
We're set in Forgotten Realms, specifically Cormyr and the Dalelands, but I've adapted a lot of the Runelord plots to the setting by having them be rulers of Netherese enclaves that went into stasis just before Karsus's Folly and thus survived the empire's fall. So far we've run an adaptation of Rise of the Runelords and homebrew versions of plots for Belimarius and Krune (though the latter pulls heavily from the PFS events that led up to him). The others are future plot stuff.
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With how well Betrayal Legacy went and how this coming Sunday is clear, we’re thinking of a repeat. We finished chapter 6, with a break in between for Whitehall Mystery while one player had a school advisor meeting. (I won as Jack!) Then we started up Forgotten Waters. I played Antonio, the Assassin Pirate and gathered a lot of evidence in part 1, along with a sweet monster tooth dagger. Looking forward to completing part 2 next time.
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Good morning, all!
I'm COVID free, finally, but no game this weekend. I have a friend coming to visit over the weekend, something we'd planned weeks ago. But I'm finally free to start having people over, so gaming resumes next weekend (hopefully).
How about everyone else?
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Quiet weekend for me, too.
My work has confirmed that we're transitioning (again) back to working in the office, so I feel an unreasonable pressure to get a bunch of little chores at home done before I stop spending those extra work hours at home.
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That'll probably take some adjustment, getting back into the commuting and sharing space with other workers. It would for me, at least. Good luck!
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I made my monthly visit to the office this week for our team meeting with the new manager. Turns out someone at the all hands meeting earlier in the day tested positive. I wouldn't worry as much since I wasn't at that meeting but I did snag some of the leftover pizza.
Still, that was four days ago and I can still smell, so I'm probably safe.
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No game today, two of our four were unavailable.
NWN event tomorrow afternoon, running a personal quest for a werebear PC to take up their tribal inheritance. Demons will be involved.
I'm almost afraid to say it out loud in case I jinx it, but we're finally getting a chance to gather this coming Saturday night for the first time since November. I'm almost prom-night-with-the-prettiest-girl-in-school excited about it.
How about everyone else?
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Have fun at prom, Cal!
Not much going on here. One of the kids has a friend's birthday party Saturday morning. Otherwise another quiet weekend at home.
Should be the last weekend without PnP game due to IRL busyness.
Going to be a long busy weekend for NWN though. Had a very fun quest tonight - my paladin and her party finally tracked down the hex dragon who rules the town we've been stuck in for the past few sessions and killed it. There's going to be some fallout from this though, no doubt.
Tomorrow I need to do some setup for my event in the evening, take Sophie out for some outside time, come back home and play in a midday event with my drow PC, then get a short break around dinner time before running my evening event as DM.
Then Sunday is part 2 of the drow event, though I'm otherwise free for the rest of the day.
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You killed a six sided dragon? :-)
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Hah.
No, hex dragons were a rare breed introduced in one of the Dragon Magazine articles, identified as "arcane dragons" alongside the tome dragon. They're nasty manipulators, controllers, and curse-slingers, and even at the highest age categories will explode into a sphere of annihilation on death.
Well, shipoopy. The weather forecast is looking more and more grim, with ice and freezing rain in the forecast. Since only one of my players actually lives in the same city that I do we decided to postpone. Again.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
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Postponed my DMed event today due to not sleeping so well/staying up way too late/not having enough time in the day to do setup and prep.
Drow event was fun, we had to smuggle some slaves out of a city and convince the checkpoints and guards along the way that they were "exotic surface animals" for some matron's menagerie. My incredibly-underleveled rogue (ECL 11 in a party that otherwise ranged from 16 to 24) got to contribute thanks to having stockpiled some wands of silence so the guards didn't hear the mewling human noises under the tarps instead of the expected grumbles and growls of animals (provided by the party's bard with ghost sound).
And no, we're not the freedom-fighting rescue-the-slaves types. We're smuggling them out so we can sell them and make the profit in another Underdark city, before the Red Wizards we stole them from can find where we've gone and what we've done with their chattel.
Heh, that reminds me of a Bounty Hunter (NPC class from a Dragon Magazine) I played in 1e and 2e days. I'd track down someone and then make a deal with them. I'd collect the bounty, bust them out of the pokey, and split the reward. Eventually he had a sort of network of notorious jailbreaking brigands and they all became quite well off...lol
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The good news: we got the slaves to market with only a few dead due to issues (mostly that the prior caretakers had stopped feeding them a little before we picked them up and they didn't tell us, so halfway through the trip we discovered our cargo was starving!) and killed most of the mercenary and slave force the Thayans had sent after us to get their goods back.
The bad news: The Red Wizard in charge got away, and noted that we were the most interesting thing that had happened to him since he got this particular job posting so we're 99% sure we're going to have to keep dealing with him as a recurring antagonist.
Alone, his face whipped by the stinging sands of the The Great Gameless Waste, DMCal pondered how best to kill his PCs for nothing but spite.
Seriously, we had to postpone the game again. Grownup stuff plus a death in the family. We will be nerds again. I swear it!
How about everyone else this weekend?
My son's gf has been playing Elden Ring. I'm not an electronic gamer at all but I watched some of the gameplay. It looks great graphically (to my unpracticed eye) but I don't know how well it plays. I hear her screaming a cussing a lot while fighting stuff, but I'm not sure how to interpret that.
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I get the impression that it's super tough and designed for those who want a proper challenge, but that's very much a 2nd hand opinion.
Tonight I have a NWN event where the party will be entering the dreamscape of an evil sword.
Savage Tide should be FINALLY resuming tomorrow. After that we have another NWN event, where my paladin is part of a group helping the newly-crowned queen of Cormyr recover some of the lost Swords of State.
Then on Sunday I'm DMside again with more Krune shenaniganry.
Tonight I have a NWN event where the party will be entering the dreamscape of an evil sword.
Savage Tide should be FINALLY resuming tomorrow. After that we have another NWN event, where my paladin is part of a group helping the newly-crowned queen of Cormyr recover some of the lost Swords of State.
Then on Sunday I'm DMside again with more Krune shenaniganry.
Please let us know about the game about the evil sword's dreamscape of the sword. I'm really intrigued by that idea. I'd also like to know more about the Swords of State.
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Please let us know about the game about the evil sword's dreamscape of the sword. I'm really intrigued by that idea.Tonight I have a NWN event where the party will be entering the dreamscape of an evil sword.
Savage Tide should be FINALLY resuming tomorrow. After that we have another NWN event, where my paladin is part of a group helping the newly-crowned queen of Cormyr recover some of the lost Swords of State.
Then on Sunday I'm DMside again with more Krune shenaniganry.
So the entire Evil Sword plot is a personal questline for a specific PC, a half-celestial elf named Rhea who is a scion of House Starym. Starym were a noble house of Forgotten Realms's sun elves from the city of Myth Drannor in its heyday, mostly occupied by the kind of sun elves that give the subrace a bad name, snooty and highminded and incredibly insular and racist especially against humans, and most of the house abandoned the city when it was opened to non-elves.
The elves of Myth Drannor also had magical, intelligent swords called Moonblades that were wielded by the heads of the houses; their purpose was to ensure that the patri/matriarchs of each house were worthy and good people and all that jazz. The patriarch of House Starym however was a schemey, duplicitous bastage, and he managed to sneak his house's Moonblade out of MD while on a "journey into the wilderness for purification and meditation" before the "draw the sword to prove your worthy or be smited for not being so" ceremony. And while out of the city he took the sword to a hidden shrine of Moander, god of rot and corruption, and tainted it. Thus when he drew it, it didn't smite him for being a sneaky evil conniving jerk, but instead now smites anyone who isn't a Starym elf of sufficiently-pure blood.
The sword - now named Darkmoon - bounced around various Starym elves through the ages, moving from wielder to wielder and inheriting bits of their personalities and matching new magical powers as it went. The house is now pretty much extinct except for a few scattered scions throughout the Realms such as Rhea, who went on a mission to track the thing down and purify it. But it's an ancient, powerful, evil thing, so it's not exactly a cakewalk to do.
So the dream-walk they're going to be doing tonight is the next step in that particular quest.
I'd also like to know more about the Swords of State.
The Cormyrian Swords of State are a set of six magical swords - two shortswords, two longswords, a bastard sword, and a greatsword - forged and enchanted by the Forest Kingdom over the ages. All but two - the greatsword and one of the longswords - have been lost over the ages to war, theft, accident, disaster, and so forth.
They're all big parts of the kingdom's history and the newly-crowned queen is interested in recovering them as a method of more firmly establishing her place on the throne - in our version of Forgotten Realms, things have been extremely chaotic for Cormyr over the past ten in-game years. The last king, Azoun IV, died fighting a ridiculously powerful fiendish red dragon in a big war, and his heir Tanalasta had "died" to an assassination a few years prior (she had actually been saved by the Mage-Royal and placed in a secure place in stasis; she's the newly-crowned queen who's now trying to establish herself). Following this the remaining crown heir was her son Azoun V, who was like ... an infant at the time; he was crowned and his aunt Alusair was placed as regent.
Then Alusair got herself dropped into the Far Realm during a plot and was out of commission for a few years (she's now "fine", as much as a Far-Realm-warped person can be, and ruling her own kingdom there after a failed invasion attempt was turned back by PCs and she was convinced that her place was now to rule there instead of conquer Cormyr); in her absence a Regency Council of three noble patri/matriarchs was in command over the now-age-10 king.
Then a bunch of stuff happened including a war with a Lich and his Red Wizard ally, Tanalasta was revived and put back on the throne, and now she's trying to establish her queenship and stabilize the kingdom a bit.
Terrific! Thank you very much. I remember a little about the Forgotten Realms mythos from 2e days but having never played in the setting I've forgotten much of the lore. I might have to pick a cherry or two from this!
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Have at it! A lot of that is based on a combination of setting lore and reacting to the various plot stuff that our server has run - it's existed since 2005 in real-time and 11 years in-game time. A lot has changed and developed over the era.
Have at it! A lot of that is based on a combination of setting lore and reacting to the various plot stuff that our server has run - it's existed since 2005 in real-time and 11 years in-game time. A lot has changed and developed over the era.
I love hearing about long term campaigns. My homebrew began in 1991 and it's a cooperative world; players contribute as much as I do to make it uniquely "ours". I think I'm incapable of running a campaign less than three years long...LOL.
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Have at it! A lot of that is based on a combination of setting lore and reacting to the various plot stuff that our server has run - it's existed since 2005 in real-time and 11 years in-game time. A lot has changed and developed over the era.I love hearing about long term campaigns. My homebrew began in 1991 and it's a cooperative world; players contribute as much as I do to make it uniquely "ours". I think I'm incapable of running a campaign less than three years long...LOL.
I know THAT feeling. My PnP group has been playing in our homebrew world since about 2013-ish, starting with Kingmaker of all things, so that had a huge effect on the world we made. That game wrapped up in 2016 I think, and we started on a few other games here and there before beginning Savage Tide in 2017, and it's still going on here all these years later (though due a lot to many, many hiatuses).
We've had our hiatuses, too. Like right now, for instance. We haven't played since November and things just keep getting in the way.
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I've been playing PbP with a group set in a land called Praemal since 2006. Praemal is the world surrounding Monte Cook's campaign "Ptolus: The City the Spire," which is this giant, massive book (and a few other smaller books) all about the primary city, Ptolus. Aside from a world map and a few sidebar articles, the rest of Praemal is mostly undeveloped, and that's where most of our adventures have taken place. It's full of homebrew material, published 3rd party material, and a fair amount of lifted Golarion content. I even ran the first two books of Kingmaker (set in the Cherubar Mountains of Praemal, where the Nomen centaurs were replaced with the flying Cherubim elves.) The campaign involving our original characters is still going (although it feels like it's going at gunpoint, nowadays). We switched systems from 3E to Pathfinder, then to Castles and Crusades, and finally to 5E, which I still don't really know how to play. Emus Graymullet, dwarven multiclass barbarian/druid is still kicking along.
How about everyone else this weekend?
Tonight, my son is going with a friend to watch Return of the Jedi at the symphony, where the musical score is being played live by the symphony. My wife and I are taking our daughter to an outdoor showing of Encanto at her elementary school's playground. Tomorrow, my mom and sister are coming over to finally celebrate my son's and my birthdays, which happened in December and January, respectively, but were delayed due to Covid and a surgery. We'll be having fajitas and ice cream cake! Sunday, my daughter is going to a friend's birthday party.
Dangit, I gotta start thinking about getting taxes done.
No games AGAIN at Sweet Home Calabama, but this time its weather related. It's supposed to drop from 50º F (10º C) to below freezing, start snowing, and the go back up into the 50s tomorrow. Ah, Arkansas weather.
How about everyone else?
Likewise no PnP here, niece has a thing this weekend so her mom/my SIL won't be available to play.
Wrap-up event for my paladin in NWN tonight following up on the hex dragon storyline, then DMside Sunday for continuing the story for the Werebear PC.
Dangit, I gotta start thinking about getting taxes done.Around here the government and employers do most things tax related for you. I can, if I want, assume they have done everything right and not even have to look at them.
Sadly in the US it doesn't work that way, as much as we'd like it to. Blame the tax-preparation companies like TurboTax, H&R Block, etc.
As a thanks for being awesome players I'm getting everyone Hero Forge minis and commissioning portraits of the PCs.
Wow, how do I get into your games?
:)
No D&D this last Tuesday, so we played a Paranoia one-shot with a recurring underpants motif, which was a good laugh; Shadowrun last Sunday was off, too, as the GM was off doing airsoft, but should be back on this Sunday.
Both quests went well. Party in dragon quest spent far longer chatting with NPCs and trying to bolster the spirits of the poor paladin girl who'd been captured by the dragon than the DM expected we would. Also got a shiny new set of dragony armor for my paladin.
Werebear quest party learned a bit about the history of a local lich from ~350 years prior, how he's probably responsible for all the demons in the area, then were pointed north to look for the werebear sage elder they came here looking for. Fought some bandits and demons on the way, arrived at the northern town. Next part is in a couple weeks, they go into the northern mountains to find the werebear sage and try to figure out why he's gone mad.
I'm actually free until Wednesday now, when my priestess of the goddess of misfortune will be participating in a gambling tournament; then Friday I'll be on my other priestess, this one of the god of wanderers, trying to help a wizard get her body back from the Arcanaloth that stole it from her. Then back to Krune stuff next Sunday!
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Rise of the Runelords has gone well. We're on the cusp of book six, which should hopefully run quickly according to the GM.
Later, we're looking at playing some Adventure Card Game out of the Mummy's Mask box. Two scenarios in, the kineticist is a very different play experience than the other characters.
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I'm going to save so much daylight this week!
We spent most of Sunday at the carnival and the livestock show at the Houston Rodeo. We rode rides, we watched an FFA pig competition, I saw a Hereford bull bigger than any animal I've ever seen outside of a zoo, and I tried my first deep fried Snickers bar.
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We spent most of Sunday at the carnival and the livestock show at the Houston Rodeo. We rode rides, we watched an FFA pig competition, I saw a Hereford bull bigger than any animal I've ever seen outside of a zoo, and I tried my first deep fried Snickers bar.
The livestock exhibits were just about my favorite things when I used to go to the county fair each year. And carnival food...fried everything. mmmmm