DungeonmasterCal's House of Respite

[Azala the Reptite Queen]

Why yes, yes I do. <reptilian cackle>

[Hunt, the PugWumpus]

Hey! Someone left a small pile of free mice here. {wrestles with fear of potentially zombie mice vs easy free meal}

[The Death of Rats]

Hunt, the PugWumpus wrote:

Hey! Someone left a small pile of free mice here. {wrestles with fear of potentially zombie mice vs easy free meal}

SQUEAK. <reaps souls, leaves bodies>

[Hunt, the PugWumpus]

The Death of Rats wrote:

Hunt, the PugWumpus wrote:

Hey! Someone left a small pile of free mice here. {wrestles with fear of potentially zombie mice vs easy free meal}

SQUEAK. <reaps souls, leaves bodies>

Ha! Nuts to you, my soul was already owned by a succubus. I'll probably end up as some caramel- or nougat-based form of dretch.

[The Death of Rats]

<confused SQUEAK>

[Mark Hoover 330]

Hey Cal, just wanted to say I've got my fingers crossed for the best possible outcome from your doc today.

[Orthos]

+1!

[DungeonmasterCal]

Thanks, everyone. Keep them crossed because they moved my appointment to tomorrow! Sheeeeesh. The anxiety is eating me up!

[Monkey Santa]

Waiting's the worst. Perhaps some meditation...

[DungeonmasterCal]

Okay, just got back from the visit to the pain doctor. I saw his APRN today instead of him, and she never mentioned the "discrepancy" with the test or anything of the sort. She is going to recommend my trying out a sort of spinal pain control implant so that's being put into motion. It's a seven day trial with an external control device and if it's successful then they actually implant it in my lower back. I'm perfectly ok with giving it a try but I have to a psychiatric evaluation before it's done. Apparently, some people freak out at the thought of having wires and electronica implanted inside them. I blame the current political times, but I'll force myself to stop there.

Anyway, thanks for all the good vibes from everyone. Today has turned into a good one.

[Drejk]

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

Okay, just got back from the visit to the pain doctor. I saw his APRN today instead of him, and she never mentioned the "discrepancy" with the test or anything of the sort. She is going to recommend my trying out a sort of spinal pain control implant so that's being put into motion. It's a seven day trial with an external control device and if it's successful then they actually implant it in my lower back. I'm perfectly ok with giving it a try but I have to a psychiatric evaluation before it's done. Apparently, some people freak out at the thought of having wires and electronica implanted inside them. I blame the current political times, but I'll force myself to stop there.

Anyway, thanks for all the good vibes from everyone. Today has turned into a good one.

Going the cyborg route?

[Drejk]

I bought a thin softer top mattress today to put over my (not so old) hard mattress. We'll see how good/bad it will be at night. I will be almost certainly buying a new softer mattress on Monday or Tuesday, though I don't know when it will be delivered...

[Mark Hoover 330]

Y'know, Cyberpunk 2020 is a thing, just syain'. I'll continue the good vibes for you Cal, so you have a fun, relaxing holiday weekend too!

[Orthos, Post-Singularity]

Drejk wrote:

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

Okay, just got back from the visit to the pain doctor. I saw his APRN today instead of him, and she never mentioned the "discrepancy" with the test or anything of the sort. She is going to recommend my trying out a sort of spinal pain control implant so that's being put into motion. It's a seven day trial with an external control device and if it's successful then they actually implant it in my lower back. I'm perfectly ok with giving it a try but I have to a psychiatric evaluation before it's done. Apparently, some people freak out at the thought of having wires and electronica implanted inside them. I blame the current political times, but I'll force myself to stop there.

Anyway, thanks for all the good vibes from everyone. Today has turned into a good one.

Going the cyborg route?

I approve.

[DungeonmasterCal]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

Y'know, Cyberpunk 2020 is a thing, just syain'. I'll continue the good vibes for you Cal, so you have a fun, relaxing holiday weekend too!

Thanks, Mark!

[DungeonmasterCal]

Drejk wrote:

Going the cyborg route?

Yes. It'll be the second time I've used some sort of technology for healing purposes. In 2005 I was in really, really bad auto accident where my left tibia and fibula were both broken. I have a steel rod and plate in my leg now that was used to hold them in place while they healed. To accelerate bone growth, I had this thing like a large blood pressure cuff that encircled my lower leg that was attached to a device that sent constant electric micro-shocks into my leg. I couldn't feel them at all, but they would interfere with the radio I kept on my desk at work...LOL. But it helped. I remember the first visit after using it for only a month and he described the progress as "exuberant" bone growth. All I could picture was my marrow doing the Macarena, but hey, at least it was good news!

[DungeonmasterCal]

How is everyone today?

[Ed Reppert]

I'm in hiding. There's this big bright yellow ball in the sky. Scary. :-)

[Drejk]

Fantasy NPC: Dahsus The Sett-Builder. A tunnel-building faerie badger. He doesn't take commissions from monsters and evil-doers. Knowingly.

[DungeonmasterCal]

Ed Reppert wrote:

I'm in hiding. There's this big bright yellow ball in the sky. Scary. :-)

I, too, fear the fire that burns in the sky and drives away the holy night.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Why fear the sun? Paraphrasing from The Lost Boys: That's the problem with DM Cal's House of Respite; all the damn vampires!

[Scintillae]

So my kiddos read "The Story of an Hour" last week. Today, I gave them a prompt for a short tie-in writing response: "Describe a time you felt trapped by others' expectations."

...I'm starting to think I just ripped a bandage off of some old wounds.

[Drejk]

Scintillae wrote:

So my kiddos read "The Story of an Hour" last week. Today, I gave them a prompt for a short tie-in writing response: "Describe a time you felt trapped by others' expectations."

...I'm starting to think I just ripped a bandage off of some old wounds.

Old?! Look at all that blood and bile splashing around! Those are hardly old wounds...

[Mark Hoover 330]

What grade/age range Scintillae? Maybe they've been thinking about this for a while?

A buddy of mine teaches 7th grade biology and I'm shocked at how politically savvy and emotionally aware his students are, but my buddy just shrugs and says this is how kids have been for a while now.

[Scintillae]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

What grade/age range Scintillae? Maybe they've been thinking about this for a while?

A buddy of mine teaches 7th grade biology and I'm shocked at how politically savvy and emotionally aware his students are, but my buddy just shrugs and says this is how kids have been for a while now.

Juniors - 16/17. I'm just used to the veneer of sarcasm and wasn't expecting the level of sincerity I got.

[Drejk]

The new mattress arrived.

[quibblemuch]

I feel like that's the beginning of a story.

The new mattress arrived. Queen-sized, which was nice. Firm enough, but with give for my back. I was happy with the purchase. Till it tried to eat me.

The maw opened up right in the middle. No teeth, just pointed foamy protrusions, covered in viscous clear drool. My cat, who had been mid-leap onto what she assumed was HER new bed, plummeted into the mouth. A muffled howl, a gulp, and I was now in the market for a new cat.

"Huh," I said, as I hunted down the manufacturer's support number. "The salesperson did not mention that feature."

[DungeonmasterCal]

"Now with carnivory foam!"

[Spacecaptain Pillbug Lebowski]

Huh. That mattress is a long way from the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta, where it presumably spent all day flolloping and vollueing about.

Hang on a second. {puts on Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses} Ahh, much better.

[Drejk]

quibblemuch wrote:

I feel like that's the beginning of a story.

The new mattress arrived. Queen-sized, which was nice. Firm enough, but with give for my back. I was happy with the purchase. Till it tried to eat me.

The maw opened up right in the middle. No teeth, just pointed foamy protrusions, covered in viscous clear drool. My cat, who had been mid-leap onto what she assumed was HER new bed, plummeted into the mouth. A muffled howl, a gulp, and I was now in the market for a new cat.

"Huh," I said, as I hunted down the manufacturer's support number. "The salesperson did not mention that feature."

I might have sunk quite deep in its embrace... I have a thin top mattress (purchased last week) over it, so it didn't try to eat me. Yet.

[Rusty the Rust Monster]

Mimic? Friend? Eat swords now?

[1d4 Ice Weasels]

Drejk wrote:

quibblemuch wrote:

I feel like that's the beginning of a story.

The new mattress arrived. Queen-sized, which was nice. Firm enough, but with give for my back. I was happy with the purchase. Till it tried to eat me.

The maw opened up right in the middle. No teeth, just pointed foamy protrusions, covered in viscous clear drool. My cat, who had been mid-leap onto what she assumed was HER new bed, plummeted into the mouth. A muffled howl, a gulp, and I was now in the market for a new cat.

"Huh," I said, as I hunted down the manufacturer's support number. "The salesperson did not mention that feature."

I might have sunk quite deep in its embrace... I have a thin top mattress (purchased last week) over it, so it didn't try to eat me. Yet.

{shakes seasoning salt on Drejk's foreleg} Naw, that mattress ain't stupid. {gently bastes warm melted butter on foreleg} You don't eat a dragon this special all at once.

[Drejk]

I have removed the "thin" top mattress at it was distorting itself and keeping the old shape making switching sides hard.

<.<

>.>

We'll (later) see how it will work with the new mattress* alone.

*technically, the top mattress is also new (bought on Friday) but it's not the protagonist of this story

[Drejk]

Fantasy Monster: Arachnificer. A spidery construct that maintains your dungeon, mending all those crumbling walls and columns.

[GM Umbral Ultimatum]

Why is everything Drejk makes something I want to use in my next campaign?

[DungeonmasterCal]

GM Umbral Ultimatum wrote:

Why is everything Drejk makes something I want to use in my next campaign?

I know, right? His creations are brilliant!

[Orthos]

It doesn't help that the next game I plan to run after Savage Tide is finished is basically "Locke Lamora versus the Forces of Hell", an urban campaign set in a single large metropolis and its immediate environment, with the PCs starting as freshly-minted new gang members, pulling things as needed from Curse of the Crimson Throne, Council of Thieves, Shackled City, Hell's Rebels and Vengeance, and Shattered Star.

So lots of need for devils (especially the extremely bureaucratic kinds), fey, and urban monsters, which Drejk seems to have done a lot of all of those lately. =)

[Quibblemodeus]

I’ve run the same group through Hell’s Rebels, followed by Strange Aeons. The overwhelming consensus is everyone WAY prefers devils to lovecraftian horrors. Devils you can reason with. They make sense. If a devil has hundreds of mouths, it’s probably to ironically eat all the buffet items while the tortured souls of gluttons watch. Shoggoths? The elder things bred them to be brute labor. All those mouths do NOTHING!

Hell is clearly preferable. Desirable, even...

[Orthos]

I'm currently running Savage Tide, which mostly features demons. Before that was Kingmaker, with the fey stuff ramped up to eleven.

For as much as I am known as The Far Realm Guy on our NWN community, I've never run anything really Lovecraftian in PnP. The closest being having one of my ST PCs be a Warlock with a Lovecraftian pact - her familiar is a baby shoggoth hiding in a cat disguise with too many eyes, and her cohort a murderous psionic will-o-wisp. Though I could do something with qlippoth to kind of straddle the line....

Maybe I'll run something in that vein after the big urban campaign. Too soon to think gthat far ahead. Have to survive 2020 first.

[Mark Hoover 330]

When conceptualizing a new campaign and not using an AP or other pre-made stuff, how in-depth do y'all get? 2 of my current games are running through pre-written material but for the third I only knew I wanted a hex-crawl in my homebrew setting, knew that the wilderness was secretly being fought over by a Green dragon and a Silver dragon, and that for as long as possible I would have the characters secretly being used as pawns by one dragon or another.

Spoiler:

A lot of the details: the starting organization being an adventurer's guild ripping off the PF Society, the first mini-boss, and the general plot threads of the first few adventures, were all constructed after getting input on the characters my players were going to be running.

One PC was a 1/2 elf Swamp Druid with a thing against a Lamashtan cult. Another PC was an elf wizard, conveniently interested in draconic lore. The 2 other PCs we started with were a 1/2 orc barbarian with a tribal vendetta against kobolds and a goal to join a mercenary group and a human druid who is really into birds.

The first mini-boss was an elite kobold, looking to usurp the current chief by switching allegiances to a green dragon from the dead black dragon the tribe had been worshipping. Said kobold, in order to get some muscle, found an unholy tome in order to resurrect a Lamashtan cult and get them active in the area. The kobolds had begun to spread like an infection around the hinterlands of the main town of the campaign, while the cult was trying to change unborn babies into horrors for their deity.

All of this activity had gotten noticed by a chapter of the regions-wide adventurer's guild (stand-in for the mercenary group the barbarian wanted) and the silver dragon assumed a mortal form and posed as a captain of the guild in order to found a new chapter house in the town and keep an eye on things. The characters then began as some of the first members of the fledgling chapter and went on missions directed by the disguised silver dragon.

Now the game is at level 10, but that's taken us 2 years to get to. Since I started with a loose outline a lot of this has mutated or disappeared over that time. The green dragon/kobold thing was replaced with a group of evil alchemists. The human druid was replaced by a ratfolk investigator/wizard; the elf wizard died and was replaced by a skinwalker bloodrager/brawler/fighter.

The game I'm running today has almost NO hexcrawl elements, has abandoned the secret war between 2 dragons, and has long outgrown the need for a guild giving the PCs missions.

Having evolved beyond my original plans, the campaign has been fun for my players so far but a major departure from what I originally wanted. I sometimes wonder if I either should've been more well-defined in what I wanted up front or if should have been more direct in guiding the players - maybe not a linear plot but perhaps forcing some strings to lead back to what I wanted versus what they wanted.

[DungeonmasterCal]

Sorry to just now getting around to this, Mark. I meant to write something the day you posted this but then the week went sideways.

I used to try and plan/map out my entire world before I began a campaign. It was fun in the early days, but over the decades it's just become something I don't enjoy doing. I used to place important cities all over the map, write up extensive histories and backstories of nations, cities, heroes, deities, you name it. But over time, as my group evolved, it became much easier, and really more enjoyable, for me and my players to just explore something as they discovered it without having to memorize the world's or region's history. The last time I tried to write up a detailed timeline of one of my campaigns I discovered not all of my players took the time to read it. The ones who did so found it useful as background flavor but that was it. It didn't really impact their characters at all.

Sometime back in the 3.5 days, designer Monte Cook posted a blog entry about his way of developing his campaign worlds, which was to really just create what you need at the moment or for the very near future. In a fairly realistic setting, almost no first level characters, or even high-level ones, would know the entire history of the world, the home country, or maybe even down to the county level. The more literate ones might, or maybe their class would call for having a more in-depth education.

I always have a little bit of something in my head that hopefully will help answer a player's unplanned questions and I think I've gotten pretty good at that. I know most of the history of my campaign world after over 30 years of playing in it and can whip something out in a flash, then in my scattered and totally disorganized way it becomes canonical and can be used for further references if needed.

Also, doing it this way allows for my players to have a greater degree in adding their own bits of history about their characters or their backgrounds. If one guy wants his character to have a somewhat pre-feudal Russian background, with a mostly blank slate I can then create a region with that sort of culture and history and place it where I need it. If I were to design my own setting in whole from the outset there might not be such a place and it would then be difficult to work in a character with such a background and nationality. This way, the player feels more invested in the campaign world and enjoys the game more.

I don't know if this answered your question at all, but I hope it at least touched on it to some degree.

[Drejk]

Connor with mustache and sideburns but no beard look like a Monthy Python Jr.

(Cal might or might not agree with my opinion)

[DungeonmasterCal]

Drejk wrote:

Connor with mustache and sideburns but no beard look like a Monthy Python Jr.

(Cal might or might not agree with my opinion)

LOL!!! That is EXACTLY how he looks now. He doesn't have a full beard any longer, just sideburns that reach down to about his upper jaw and a full on 70s porn mustache. All my friends say he looks like he stepped straight out of 1975.

[Scintillae]

Kiddos have been running with declaring ideas to be either "big brain" or "small brain." It came up that it's more about the wrinkles, which led to the comment of "that's why you should never iron your clothes," a fear of sapient pants, and an argument about dryer sheets.

[Lord Sidelong-Glancington]

(¬_¬) Pants

[Mark Hoover 330]

I run things very similarly to Mr Cook's advice. For the one campaign that I came up with a hexcrawl for I made the main city, a map of the hinterlands and lots of empty spaces.

As far as backstory, I took some stuff I'd used before in the same setting: a massive empire at this time, the empire broke up at this time, there was a global catastrophe that followed the end of the empire, and the game starts 25 years after the last recorded incident of said catastrophe.

For this specific region, since I knew there'd be dragons, I added one extra layer about a black dragon pre-dating even the time of the empire, which is why this area is rife with kobolds and sorcerers. However sorcerers still, after all this time, get a bad rap around here. Then I figured case closed, that's more than enough to get started.

The issue isn't with backstory though, but with the development of the campaign.

The game I made up was more of an open-ended sandbox, an homage to Kingmaker. My players have made it into Rise of the Runelords.

Early on they sought connections that weren't there, to a conspiracy they essentially invented, and counted on agents of civilization to provide them with "filler" adventures between big bads, kind of like a season of Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I SUCK at intrigue though. I purposely made a sandbox so I'd only have to plan one 5-room dungeon in the wilderness at a time. 90% of my map doesn't HAVE any civilization, so over the course of the last 10 levels these characters have basically helped one of 5 settlements over and over.

The players were having fun with it so I ran with it. The problem with intrigue though is that you kind of have to think a few moves ahead, so that there are clues to guide the players toward the next point in the web. Remember: I made this campaign so I didn't HAVE to plan.

So now after 10 levels I'm starting to wonder if I should've been more deliberate, more intentional with my original campaign design. SHOULD I have planned more, just in case? See the players are having fun, but I'm not.

I'm not an intrigue GM. Couple that with the fact that due to personal issues my memory is garbage. I make stuff up on the spot to nurse the game through THIS week's installment, but unless I'm super-diligent about running home, opening my notebook and making a bunch of outlines I forget half the stuff I made up that relates to the larger bad guys.

I've burned out on this campaign twice now, stressing about connecting dots before the players. It was starting to bubble up a third time but a couple months ago one of my players had a health scare and we've put this campaign on hiatus. We're getting to the point however where my players are talking about meeting up again so I know I'm going to have to get this ball rolling again but to me it feels like I'm Sisyphus rolling that boulder up a hill.

Phew. Sorry for the rant.

I guess I'm just wondering if I should've been more deliberate with my campaign, more, I don't know... selfish?

[DungeonmasterCal]

Damn. I had started what I hoped would be a decent answer to this question and halfway through what was going to be a pretty long post I got called away to give a ride to someone. I forgot about the post until just now, seeing it only at the EXACT moment I refreshed this page and now it's lost forever. I can't remember a bloody thing from it.

[Ed Reppert]

Oops.

[Drejk]

Fantasy Monster: Miscriber Gremlin.

When gremlin ate re-wrote your homework.

[Master Pugwampi]

Drejk wrote:

Fantasy Monster: Miscriber Gremlin.

When gremlin ate re-wrote your homework.

Huzzah! A new addition...and just in time for contract renegotiations with Rysky! :D