Underdark Without Darkvision #1

Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Darkvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

D_D5E-RageOfDemons-OutOfTheAbyss_1024x1024This week we started yet another campaign and in this one I get to take the seat of a player for a change. The game in question will be the Out of the Abyss campaign for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition.

Sami will be the DM for the campaign (he ran the famous Duck Tales game as well as the Sailor at the Starless Sea last year). He introduced this campaign to me as a “horror game set into the Underdark” and I was immediately sold. We are trying to play this biweekly and hopefully get to finish this (not a given fact considering our past success with campaigns…).

In this series “Underdark Without Darkvision” I will discuss the game as it progresses. I will be playing a human ranger without darkvision (hence the name).

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Endgame

As our current campaign is drawing closer to the end I feel I could share some thoughts about the endgame of roleplaying campaigns.

Last year Aki wrote a lengthy post about the story arch of his character in the “last season” of this ongoing megabeast. And he got quite deep into the difficulty of ending one of these seasons as I like to call them. Continue reading

Creating an Archipelago Game

About a month ago I managed to get into Jason Morningstar‘s Archipelago game “Love in the Time of Khavarner“. I really liked the setting and the style the game worked and began immediately to think how I could hack it. Jason himself said that it is not as simple as it seems. And after working on a game I have to admit he was right.

Without going into details about what is needed for an Archipelago game I must admit that I used the two existing games Love in the Time of Seið and Love in the Time of Khavarner as the starting point. I did not have high ambitions about a truly original masterpiece but an idea about a game I really wanted to take part in. Continue reading

[Door of Shadows] Timey Wimey Off-Road

11011000_1017491551614136_8276613320657869187_nAs discussed earlier I have granted the players a lot of narrative power in our current the Door of Shadows-campaign. One of the more surprising twists that I certainly wasn’t prepared for was that the characters decided to take part on an expedition to Egypt.

Though this post will be mostly about describing the events of an actual gaming session(s) it includes a couple of (more) interesting points about GMing – even if you are not into reading about other peoples sessions. I must also add that this post is a bit lengthy.

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Killing Player Characters

Death and the act of killing a player character in roleplaying games is a controversial subject. The players are quite rightfully protective about their characters but even when not considering about their opinions about the death of a PC the hardest part of such an event is in the hands of the GM.

In my past I have shied away from killing the characters. As a teenager I tended to make all of my rolls in secrecy so I could always fudge the result to keep a character just barely alive. Later on I made the decision of making my rolls open so that the dice would decide wether the character survives or not. But lately (once again thanks to the AWengine) I have had to scrutinise my thinking.  Continue reading

Ropecon 2014: Friday (by Lauri)

This years Ropecon was got pretty close to turn into a total booze fest (again) when the game I had been waiting for did not show up in the signing tables… This happened last year and I went on a bender for the heck of it but luckily the GM was just running late. As the Friday went by I got to take a lot of pictures play two games and wander around the premises. It was a great way to start the weekend!

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A Wayward Son: The Dramatic Arc of One Player Character

I don’t normally like to write about my characters, because its hard to know what will be interesting to other people, because I clearly have a strong bias. I asked for subjects to write about in this blog, and Lauri suggested talking about this character. He too, as the GM, has a bias, but I’m guessing his bias is not nearly as strong as mine, so I’m assuming there’s something about this character that’s interesting to others.

Whatever the reasons, I’ll try to use this as a case study of sorts.

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