GM's of /tg/, tell us about your current campaign. How's it going, what's it like, what's going on right now. What have your players ruined so far, how have your players surprised you or improved your game in a way that you didn't expect.
Need any helps or ideas?
In other words. GM general thread
Do you guys have Intro's to your campaign, to like set up the setting, tone etc?
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhjDnrw34QA
Like so?
>>45647420
Campaign started a little before thanksgiving, we're eleven sessions in. We meet weekly but we missed like a month due to christmas/new years holidays and we can't get together the next two weeks due to travel and one player has to go to a bridal shower. Group is me, three guys and two grills, and we just added a third grill. Prior to this I have never DM'd for more than five players for anything longer than a oneshot. If anyone is interested I'll just explain the entire campaign, what's gone wrong, what's coming up, where I'm currently stuck, etc. I don't wanna type all that if nobody gives a fuck.
>>45647420
Newbie GM here, I'm going to be running a rules-light campaign for my players cos they have next to no RPG experience. It'll be set in present day with fantastical elements, but for now I mostly need names. Anyone have gallant names, wild/mischievious names? I'm basing a character offGriffith.
>>45648601
I like name generators since i lack any ability to make up cool names. Here's one of my most used http://fantasynamegenerators.com/
>>45648032
I'm always interested in other peoples campaigns. It's always insightful and helpful... And stealable.
>>45648799
I can't greentext it into anything remotely succinct because explaining anything requires explaining basically everything else. But if at least one person is interested, fuck it. Starting with the party lineup...
The party was born in 4th edition with a previous campaign involving a time traveling wizard who was basically the Doctor except his mind was broken into a bunch of pieces of his personality and he was trying to get them back together. The campaign was becoming increasingly combat-centric, with non-combat roleplaying increasingly feeling like, "come on, get to the point of the session already." Eventually I declared the story a lost cause (I kinda didn't know where I was going with it anyway) and killed off the wizard, and we played something else for a while. After some down time I realized the system was the problem and proposed converting the party to Pathfinder.
The party rundown:
>Kalsea
NG Dragonborn Fighter. I made a homebrew Dragonborn using the race builder and using half-dragons as a partial guideline. Uses a shield and a falcata because the player is a powergamer at heart and likes the 19-20 x3 crit profile. IRL player is my roommate and coworker.
>Tally
CG Elf Unchained Rogue. She was an Eladrin in 4e and insists she is a "high elf." Also a powergamer, she gets pouty any time she fights something with enough AC for her to occasionally miss.
Kalsea and Tally are "siblings" raised in the same orphanage. They decided to turn the guildhouse into an orphanage and their adventuring company basically pays for the thing. All five players are co-owners.
cont.
>>45647420
My players are happy, I'm pretty happy, but schoolwork gets in the way a lot so we're lucky if we can meet twice a month. We're getting a new player (maybe) who has said he's always been interested in rp but never done it, so that's nice. It's all going pretty damn well.
Also my work to plan is made a hundred times easier because for whatever reason they've decided that they want to be railroaded. Any NPC offers gold or power (even if they are really fucking evil) and they sign up for the full ride, start to end.
Even when their dark patron turned the group against one another and had two of them try to kill another, and almost killed all of the party. After they were done they went right back to serving the dark lord, with little complaint and hopped right back on the rail road.
Now I just write out stuff for what they will do, as I know they'll never tread away from the mission they have for anything.
>>45648895
Party cont.
>Ramdao
LG Human Unchained Monk. I should mention this campaign takes place in a region where humans aren't the dominate race and are actually somewhat uncommon. He was multiclassed to bard previously but is now pure monk, but occasionally pulls out musical instruments for comedic effect. Is otherwise trying to become a supersaiyan I think?
>Chandra
CN Tiefling Alchemist, named after the MTG character because the player is unoriginal. She's a pyro and kind of derpy. Is my other roommate IRL.
>Koru
NG Human Druid. Previously playing a Dwarf Cleric named Baern, but that character got tired of being away from Dwarf Lands and the player made a new character. Spends a lot of his time as a cat; tends to go into battle as a dire tiger. Player has previous played a catfolk, kitsune, and minotuar. I think he's a closet furry. Is Tally's IRL boyfriend and they live together.
We recently added a sixth player but I'll get to her when I get to her.
>background
As mentioned the party runs an adventuring guild to pay for their orphanage and also for glory and shit. They had been doing work for the local elf Lord and Lady and had made a name for themselves in town, but had also made some enemies. In a previous adventure they had turned down a job offer from a lesser human noble house in favor of the bigger elf noble house.
>>45648961
The Elf noble house is without an apparent heir, and a few weeks prior to the start of the campaign there was word of a massive fire in a city to the south that took the lives of a bunch of their family line. The campaign starts with the party receiving a party invite to a celebration for the lord and lady having produced a baby daughter. I give the players two weeks in-game time to prepare, expecting them to insist on casing the joint to make sure everything is safe and secure before someone gets assassinated. Instead they spend a bunch of time picking out what they're going to wear. Finally the butler comes to their guild house the day before and asks them to check the place out. They give it a thorough once-over and determine that with the city guard watching the place like a hawk it should be pretty safe from any conceivable ground attack.
(hint went over their heads)
Evening of the party, the group arrives staggered, with the fighter showing up at the very beginning and the rest various degrees of fashionably late. After some time the baby is brought out and people shower her with presents and shit. Then the captain of the guard makes a beeline for the fighter, points at some shape in the sky, going "Do you see that? What is that?"
Alchemist chugs Beast Shape and turns into an owl, flies up. Sees four fucking dragons fast approaching with a rider on the back of one of them. Lands, warns the party. The rogue rushes through the crown, trying to get to the lord and lady to warn them to GTFO. Dragons fly overhead, frightful presence everyone and suddenly the courtyard is a giant crown of panicked nobles. (also panicked the rogue, lol)
>>45649102
Two silver dragons land on walls of the keep thing, biggest one (blue) lands on the roof of the main building. Smallest one (gold) circles overhead. Shock and awe tactics. The rider yells for the lord and lady to stay where they are or all their guests will die. This panics the guests further despite the fighter and guards' attempts to evacuate them orderly. Rider on the back starts monologing, is revealed to be the human noble who's butthurt over the treatment of his house and humans in general. He's wearing an old-looking gold magic gauntlet which the alchemist identifies as some kind of artifact. Party all comes to the conclusion that he must be mind controlling the dragons with the gauntlet. Alchemist pulls out her crossbow and shoots at the guy, and gets a breath weapon to the face for her trouble, nearly dying. Monk tries and fails to stealth. Rogue monologues with the human enough for him to get down off the building so he can be intimidating close up. Fighter attacks, botches what would have been a dramatic flying leap and instead just ends up in front of the dragon's face.
With the fighter in between the dragon and the elf nobles, the rogue sort of grabs them and pulls them away, trying to escape. The fighter and druid engage the dragon and rider in combat and the druid manages to pounce-tackle the rider off the dragon. Now that the dragon isn't being used as a mount and can move and attack a little more freely, it starts wrecking the fighter's shit. Also tail slaps the monk who still can't stealth for crap.
The silvers cut off the rogue and nobles' path and she yells at them to take cover under a nearby table. They both use their breath weapon and the rogue gets hit by one. The druid mauls the fuck out of the human noble, and I realize the druid is frankly too powerful for the noble to actually beat in a fight, and if the noble dies I have no campaign. Time to pull something out of my ass.
>>45649285
I decide the gauntlet can be used for a claw attack. Oh also it's uh.. cursed. Or poisoned or something. Maybe negative energy. I tell the druid to roll a fortitude save, which he rolls poorly on. I tell him he's unconscious.
>justasplanned.jpg
The human gets back onto his dragon and yells that it's time to leave. The rogue critically hits on an attack of opportunity as one of the silvers tries to fly away from her and rolls a 20 to confirm. I tell her to reroll to confirm unspecified super-awesome double-critical, which she rolls like 19 or something. I tell her she stabs between two ribs and into the dragon's heart, killing it and covering the sword and the ground and her with its silver blood. In a later session I decide that the sword now counts as silvered and also has Dragon Bane.
The fighter also rolls a crit on an AOO as the big blue one flies away from him, and takes off one of its front claws. However the blue, gold, and remaining silver escape with their master. At this point the party checks on the nobles under the table, to find them dead. Turns out they were directly in the path of those breath weapons from earlier, and nobles don't have a lot of HP. I am a bastard. I end the session here.
The objective was to have the noble come in and kill the Lord, possibly his daughter as well. I needed the players to be emotionally invested in him as a villain and also I wanted them to want him fucking DEAD, not just arrested or something. Murdering a child seemed like a good way to go. I didn't necessarily intend to kill the Lady too, but they were all together so they all had to go. It was also important that the human escape to kill again, obviously.
>>45649496
Didn't intend this to be a play-by-play, but whatever. Next session.
In between sessions I decide that the gauntlet had a dose of poison applied to it, since the druid isn't immune to it yet. Also it has a cursed wound effect and you can't heal the damage done without removing the curse first. This includes damage caused by the poison, which is cheap, but meh. I don't tell the druid this. All he knows is that his character is unconscious and making fortitude saves every 10 in-game minutes.
Session 2 starts exactly where session 1 ended. Guards and security come running, trying to figure out what happened. Party chugs healing potions and pours one down the druid's throat, but it doesn't heal him. They determine he has a curse of some kind and start carting him around in a wagon because he's still in dire tiger form. The local hospital can't help him and the only spellcasters in town are a rival adventuring guild from a previous campaign. The rivals are uh... LN, LN, CN, LE, and CE. Definitely an evil party. They do the jobs too sketchy for the party to get asked to do.
My intention was for the party to go to the rival guild, where they wound find that their wizard (the only one who could break the curse) had been arrested due to being a distant relative of the human's noble house. They would break him out of jail, he'd remove the curse, and they'd be square.
Instead the party didn't consider working with their rival for longer than about a half second. Eventually the druid wakes up, with like 4-5 con left (but taking no further con damage) and they all decide to teleport to wherever the nest-in-line for the elf noble house lives.
All my games have died last month because shitty players.
Shit sucks donkey dick and I'm terribly bored now.
Been GMing an Deathwatch campaign, set during a Waagh invasion.
Basically the Forge World of the sector the Deathwatch has been sent to has already been conquered by the Orks, giving them a lot of resources and things to play with in order to conquer the rest of the worlds.
The Kill-team is currently on the planet but I told them repeatedly that there are a lot of Orks (enough to conquer worlds) around and that they have to be stealthy.
Their first combat, they instead of closing to melee range and dealing with the enemy like that instead choose to let loose with bolters & the like.
Now I've got them being closed in by two big hordes of Orks and they want to fight them.. do I simply force them to move by throwing even more Orks at them so they can continue their mission or allow them that last stand they seem to be craving at the beginning of the game?
>>45647766
6 Months since you lost all titles, honor, and your names. 5 Months since you were sent to the front to die and reclaim your honor. 4 Months since you (kept) survived(ing), besting all (Shadowland) foes. 3 Months since you last heard your names spoken without contempt. 2 Months since ((((_)))) 1 Month since you found (old) allies. 2 Weeks since the last sighting of Shadowlands creatures and their taint. 1 Week since the celebrations started. 5 Days since you received a message. 2 Days since you arrived in this village. 3 Days until blood flows while pyres burn. Today a meeting.
Unfinished and needs tweaking. but yes yes i do do that.
>>45649709
They run around town in the middle of the night trying to find someone to sell them Greater Teleport scrolls, which goes nowhere because they don't pick up on my hints that "the stores are all closed because it's two in the fucking morning, wait til the next day." Eventually through dumb luck and a gather information roll the alchemist finds someone to sell them one GT scroll. They then decide to leave in the morning, making their nighttime shopping completely pointless. I mentally facepalm but I'm having to readjust my plans to skip over most of what I had planned for this session so I'm slightly distacted.
(I had already decided that the next target is a Countess, and I knew what city she was in. I sorta knew her personality and her name. Conveniently the town also had a temple big enough to have clerics to fix the druid without much trouble. I just didn't think they'd go there until next session.)
In the morning they get their shit together and the rogue asks me what she needs to roll to UMD a greater teleport scroll. Turns out, she needs to roll 19 or higher IIRC. She throws a fit in game and out. I explain that a regular Teleport scrolls is a lot easier and also costs less money. Someone goes, "But you said there weren't any other scrolls in town!" and I explain for the fourth time that the reason they couldn't find anything is that they insisted on shopping at 2 in the morning when all the fucking stores were closed!
Eventually they buy three regular Teleport scrolls. The rogue fails to UMD the first two and succeeds on the third. They I roll % to see how on-target they are.
>89-96 - Similar Area: You wind up in an area that's visually or thematically similar to the target area.
>fuck.gif
I decide that while sending them to fuck knows where would be interesting, I'm already winging this more than I planned and I don't want to just throw out what I had planned. I tell the rogue, wait, you were the one casting the spell, you should have rolled.
>>45649964
>>45649709
>>45649496
>>45649285
>>45649102
>>45648961
>>45648895
You weren't kidding you'd do a write up. Thanks man.
>>45649964
>97–100 - Mishap: You and anyone else teleporting with you have gotten “scrambled.” You each take 1d10 points of damage, and you reroll on the chart to see where you wind up.
For fuck's sake. I don't want them to be in the middle of whateverthefuck with a crippled druid and no way back. They don't want to be there either. The rogue is pissed at her dice. I tell her fuck it, roll one more time and if it says you go to la-la land again I'm going to go with it come hell or high water.
This time she rolls good. Thank god...
The party arrives on-target, outside a big temple of bahamut. They get their druid fixed and then go see the countess. They warn her of an impending attack and she doesn't believe them. The temple comes and vouches for them and she softens a little. They explain that her cousin, the Lord has just been murdered and she needs to stay somewhere safe instead of her relatively unprotected mansion in town. She reluctantly agrees to stay at the temple for a while, protected by a bunch of paladins and shit. Later, news arrives confirming what the party already told her and she's grateful for them warning her.
The party knows the human noble will need to heal himself and his dragons before he can attack and even flying at dragon speed it'll be a few days before he gets there, so they have some time to prepare. I end the session here.
I made a mistake assuming the party would go to their rivals for help. I could have forced them to do it I guess but it would have been really heavy handed railroading them like that and there was no reason why the plot required it. This session ended a little early and had no combat, no encounters at all. The party didn't mind it! Now that I set the precedent early on that not everything is combat-focused, I can have combat-heavy or combat-free sessions as need be.
>>45650153
I didn't realize how long this would be until I started writing it out. Now I have to write EVERYTHING.
>>45650169
Now that I think of it, this was actually two seperate sessions. Fucking around in the original city with the druid crippled was one session. It ended with the teleport, I think. The spent the next session running around town, fixing the druid, meeting the countess, and then looking for books about artifacts and shit. I think.
>>45650298
There was a session of fucking around in town. The fighter and alchemist broke up a fight with some douchebag that summoned an elemental and went to jail to fill out the paperwork. To my amazement, the CN alchemist with no patience or planning actually stayed and filled out all the paperwork, in triplicate. In Abyssal. For no purpose other than to fuck with the police I guess. Kalsea did more or less the same, with Draconic, but he did it because it's the lawful thing to do or... something. It was really funny at the table, actually.
Meanwhile, the rogue got drunk and got into trouble. Not terribly story relevant, just dicking around lighthearted in between heavy plot stuff.
>>45650366
So, at this point I know when, where, and roughly how the attack is going to happen, it's just a matter of passing the in-game time. By chance we end up gaming on saturday afternoon instead of sunday night, so this session can go long. We plan to ALSO game that sunday, so basically I have two days back to back to work with. I decide to go big.
I build a map of the town out of LEGO, complete with lables for the major landmarks. Prior to gaming it's sitting on the floor with a sheet covering it. We tend to play MTG while waiting for everyone to arrive, so it's sitting there the whole time all mysterious like. Not one single fucking person mentions it. I start to wonder if they'll even give a shit? Eventually we get started.
About 24 hours after the attack on the Lord, the government sends basically secret service to protect the Countess. They send an army colonel and some badass special forces knights as well as a sort of royal wizard called an Overseer, which is basically just someone who can spam scrying over a wide area and can also communicate long distances and use teleport scrolls when needed. The colonel is a gruff mustachioed type so I change the overseer at the last second to be a 17 year old human girl for variety's sake. I can't think up a name on the spot so I ask the party, what's a good female human name?
>Cassandra
The fact that I'm telling you her name may hint at how Cassandra later becomes important.
Side note - the average player, apparently, doesn't know the difference between a Corporal, Captain, and a Colonel. I would avoid using ranks that start with C because they will get them mixed up.
>>45650527
why is the city so sparse
>>45650563
Only had so much LEGO to work with.
>>45650527
It starts raining. I plan for it to rain nonstop for a couple in-game days so the blue dragon can lightning the fuck out of everyone and everything. At this point I pull out an old trick to get the PC's invested in the friendly NPC's and have one of the paladins point out to them that Cassandra has been stationed on the roof, as lookout, for like 36 hours in the rain with no sleep and apparently no food. And the PC's take pity on her and complain to the colonel, who proves to be kind of a bastard. Basically she makes more money than him by an order of magnitude (though it all goes to her family since she's a minor) and he kinda doesn't give a fuck. They go up to the roof and bring her some hot food, which she accepts. She tells them she's okay. They worry. D'aawh.
After about four solid days of rain, the streets are starting to flood due to a lack of drainage and general overflow. In the morning, the dragons attack. Cassandra scrys a bigass blue dragon missing a claw, a black dragon, and over a dozen black wyrmlings fast approaching the Countess's mansion. Luckily everyone is safe in the temple. The black and blue totally demolish the mansion while the party watches remotely on what is basically a hologram viewing window thing that Cassandra is projecting. The city guard comes pouring out of their barracks to deal with the attack, and the Blue goes to intercept them. Realizing that like fifty people are about to get lightning'd to death, the rogue teleports to he guards' location via a new teleport scroll (taking the party with her) and yells at he guards to scatter and take cover. The fighter goes "HEY ASSHOLE REMEMBER ME?" and the dragon breathes at him instead. He's wearing all metal armor, in the pouring rain, standing ankle-deep in water. I think he rolled like a 2 or something on his reflex save too. He loses like 4/5 of his HP.
THEN the alchemist remembers that she prepared Resist Energy.
I am kicking myself after botching a really big moment in a campaign recently.
It was a dumb mistake too, and one I have no idea WHY I made. Basically, I had been prepping this big occult ritual to ressurect a fallen party member, and it was all set up, and all the work was already done, so all I had to do was really just run the ritual and make it creepy and atmospheric and engaging.
But for some reason, the players seemed to be tuning out, and that threw me off and I ended up like, stumbling through it and not narrating it as slowly and properly as I should, and I didn't communicate it well and it went....not as well as it should.
I don't really have anything else right now, I'm just trying to get ready for the campaign to get back on track, and maybe find a way where I can write this big, ancient occult tome they have into the campaign in a bigger way.
>>45650735
Electric resistance is passed out to the party and they yell a the guards to retreat to the temple of bahamut and to help defend the countess. The guards and the PC's basically all split up and take different routes through the city to get to the temple, so they don't present on big target for the dragon to breath at. I want to be clear here that splitting up was the party's idea, not mine.
The monk makes it to the temple first because he's the fastest, and it looks like the dragons are coming this way. He remembers that Cassandra is on the roof, exposed, and runs upstairs to get her to somewhere safe.
The rest of the party make it to the temple and sort of hold the door while all the guards rush inside, with all the dragons basically flying their way. When the last guards get inside they tell them to bar the door and not let anyone in or out. The mass of wyrmlings swarms the party and they fight them off without too much trouble. One or two of them get acid breathed but it doesn't do a lot of damage. Luckily they remembered to heal the fighter.
The monk makes it to Cassandra as the bigass Blue is swooping in for a landing on top of the building. He grabs her causing her to drop her crystal ball, which rolls off the roof and shatters on the ground below. They run downstairs while the party deals with the black dragon. Although they're a little hurt from all the fighting, it's four on one and the black isn't actually very powerful. The blue shoots lightning from the roof every once in a while but it has trouble getting a line of effect that won't also hit the black one. The party dispatches the black dragon as the monk makes it to the ground floor. They open the door just long enough to let him out, just as the blue one lands on the ground to attack the fighter.
If people are interested in campaign write-ups, I have 17 out of the 29 sessions my group has played of this campaign written up here:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2sdzt?Askrens-Curse-of-the-Crimson-Throne
I'd get around to writing the rest, I've just been completely wrapped up in all the shit that goes with the other game I run, plus maps for both games, writing work for both, etc.
>>45650894
Long story short, the party kills the big blue dragon. The party is level 8 and the dragon is supposed to be CR 12, but it's missing a claw attack and the party is kinda powergamey. I even increased its HP by, uh, a lot. I basically had it live long enough to feel like a challenging fight, and then die. I think in the end they did like 600+ damage to it? That was over the course of four or five rounds.
Then there's kind of a lull. Are there any more dragons? Are they in the clear? Where's the human noble? Hey, somebody should go check and make sure everyone inside is safe. Check on the countess too.
They go to the office she had sort of claimed to find her sort of leaning against her desk looking impatient. She asks them if it's safe. They basically say they're not sure. She tells them to go make sure. They leave her office, go back to the main area. The druid thinks she might have been acting strange, so he sneaks back to her office and casts detect magic through the door. He detects a transmutation spell and an illusion spell.
>oh_fuck.png
The party assembles and prepares to barge down the door and dispel magic. They'e going to feel really stupid if this turns out to be nothing, but, they have to be sure. They break down the door and dispel the illusion that was disguising the dead bodies of the Countess and the Colonel as a desk, as well as the silver dragon's Polymorph spell.
(turns out, they can do that three times a day. multiple failed knowledge checks failed to reveal this fact.)
Basically, the silver dragon disguised itself as a city guard, and got into the temple as part of the crowd. Once inside it waltzed right to the Countess's office and murdered her, they disguised as her to hide the body until it could escape. The now-full-sized dragon is kind of stuck in a room too small to maneuver and the party makes fairly quick work of it.
And that's where we stopped that Saturday.
>>45647420
Sadly every time I try to run a campaign the schedules get fucked up for my players.
One of my most recent campaigns were a 2 man group that I built a not!europe for, with a number of great houses ruling over the land under the authority of different draconic bloodlines, with the ruling house being run by an ancient gold dragon.
The political landscape ended up like that after a horrific and drawn out number of proxy wars between warlords who fought for, under, or in the name of various chromatic and metallic dragons, eventually resulting in a group of metallics coming together, selecting a bloodline they each felt was best suited to rule the mortals, and leading them to slaughter the chromatics and their forces.
The campaign fell apart before they got to figure it out, but the gold dragon vizer of the newly crowned child emperor was actually a carefully polymorphed red dragon bent on rebuilding an ancient cabal to resurrect their ancient draco-lich leader.
What they did manage to do was swindle a shady magic item dealer that was somehow was involved in everything they did (your pic related) to steal a sword from a caravan of smugglers that happened to be a lost relic of a great house, made a name for themselves as skilled mercs by bringing the head of a bandit leader to the capital as a gift to the emperor during his coronation festival, stonewalled the vizier's attempts at hiring them, and joined a recruitment camp along the coast that is secretly working for a long lost deposed royal house believed to have worked for the chromatics that is currently crusading in a distant land.
They had an elite squad of NPC mercs at their command by then, including a chaos sorcerer with self confidence issues and uncanny luck, a stoic monk who has dedicated himself as the player monk's apprentice after his defeat in a duel, a half-mad desert dweller rogue/fighter with a prosthetic warforged arm, and a dwarf ranger with a shoulder-mounted repeating heavy crossbow.
>>45651071
Sunday.
At this time, nobody finds it suspicious that the dragons knew to go to the temple. They could have just been following the guards I guess, but that doesn't explain how the silver got in and got to the countess so easily. I've already decided that Cassandra is responsible. She's been feeding information to the enemy.
So, the party expects that the temple can just resurrect the countess and the colonel. I tell them that the temple of bahamut isn't exactly full of a bunch of high-level clerics. It's actually mostly paladins. Luckily, there is also a temple of Pelor in the city, and they would likely have a high enough level priest to perform a resurrection. So they stuff both corpses into their bag of holding and head over there. The high cleric fetches the material component, 10,000 worth of diamond dust. He tries to resurrect the colonel, who declines. The party shrugs because they didn't like him anyway. They tell him now do the countess.
Except, the cleric only had enough diamond dust on-hand to perform one resurrection. The party balks! The cleric explains that they don't exactly keep a huge stockpile of diamonds in the temple in case they need to bring someone back to life. The average NPC is happy to go on to the next life. Adventurers are the only weirdos who would voluntarily come back for more.
The party grumbles. They have to head to the next town over to buy more diamond dust. It would be about a week's journey on foot, and they're in a hurry, so they teleport.
It's not raining here. The druid realizes that four days' worth of rain should be a big enough storm to have at least cloudy skies here as well. That seems to suggest that someone/thing was manipulating the weather! The party does nothing with this information. I'm pretty sure that as of this writing they have totally forgotten. Sigh.
>>45651204
The other most recent campaign was a game for two friends, and one friend's gf. They played two fighters and a sorceress. Was asked to make something "generic high-fantasy" so the not!holy roman empire has let out a call to adventurers of all kind that the empire is in need of heroes to stop the hordes of beasts wandering its lands while its army is away putting down a war of independance in a cluster of economically critical islands that mark the only reliable trade route between the empire and the elven lands.
The party makes their way to the marshy highlands that make up the empire's most distant north western border province, a region filled with ancient ruins of a long lost era, where the natives have little love or temperament for the heavy hand of the legion, but are nonetheless under siege from the armies of hobgoblins and their goblin slaves.
They fight off several hunting parties that attack their caravan, and meet the local legion commander, who gladly accepts the help of any willing, and tasks them with a number of quests that need doing but he just doesn't have the manpower for all of them.
The party then 9/11's a tower and blows up an ancient druidic site in the process, and learns that the hobgoblins are utilizing the ruins to transport their forces about the land, and that they are being organized by a third party. After some further study, they (would have, game fell apart the session before) that the ruins serve as links between the real world and the feywilds, and that the goblins are being led by a coven of hags, who were in turn engaged with grander trans-dimensional political drama with a number of extra-planar beings of conveniently escalating power levels.
>>45651242
Long and slightly silly short:
>party finds apothecary
>buys "diamond dust"
>shopkeeper gives them a great deal, about 12k worth for only 10k
>nobody questions this
>they teleport back to the temple of pelor
>high cleric tells them "this is mostly salt"
>party is outraged
>WE'VE BEEN ROBBED!!!
>teleport back to apothecary
>it's closed
>how convenient
>door's locked
>rogue goes to pick lock
>rogue triggers trap that that she was too angry to remember to search for
>rogue evades
>everyone else gets hit
Except Cassandra, who they brought along because she can use wizard scrolls easier than the rogue, and was standing at the back of the group. I think the monk was out of range too? He would've evaded anyway.
>disable trap
>pick lock
>open door
>just barely notice trip line in time
>manage to not set off second trap
>disable second trap
>send in the rogue!
>carefully searches the shop for more traps, finds none
>party enters
Meanwhile.
>druid is waiting outside
>guarding the door or something, with Cassandra
>turns into cat
>smells for shopkeeper
>smells scent trail going around back
>finds handprint on wall
>opens secret wall panel with black portal
>extradimensional space of some kind?
>party drops what they're doing, examines portal
>rogue peaks head in
>/run .bat.cone_of_cold.exe
>again, rogue evades, others get hurt
>shopkeeper is ogre mage
>has their money and a bunch of treasure
>party murders him
>takes his stuff
>literally treasure chests full of coins and gems
>"Are there diamonds?"
>have party roll on tables
>yes
>more than enough for resurrection
>success.wav
>>45651357
Next session.
The party is out of teleport scrolls, so they stop by a scroll vendor to buy some more with the newly acquired coinage. The dude is basically a retired adventuring wizard who is nice enough to convert the diamond gems into diamond dust via a Fabricate spell. They teleport back to the temple of Pelor and hand over the dust for the resurrection.
At this point we have a like 15 minute discussion of the pros and cons of the Countess coming back to the land of the living. For one thing, she can get revenge on the motherfucker who killer her. We decide that there's a 80% chance that he accepts the spell. I offer to let one of the players roll it, and they do.
>nope.avi
"WHAT THE FUCK DID WE JUST WASTE ALL THAT TIME AND MONEY ON!!!"
The high cleric apologizes, the spirit is unwilling to return. He explains that the subject knows the name and alignment of the one attempting to call them back. Maybe she doesn't like him? The party decides on plan B. The druid can cast Reincarnate, and conveniently picked up the material components from the apothecary. (and this time it's legit, they checked it thoroughly) Maybe if one of the adventurers protecting her calls her back, she'll accept?
They decide not to do this in the middle of the city, since the spell requires "natural environment" to work. They find a secluded copse of trees just outside town and cast the Reincarnate spell. This time she accepts. Now I tell the druid to roll to see what she comes back as.
>Halfling
Hmm. The spell's description doesn't actually mention this either way, but should the subject always come back as the same gender? Or possibly a different gender? The party agrees that there's precedent in fantasy reincarnation to come back as a different gender, so I roll. Odds she's female, evens she's male.
>6
It's been going on for 19 months.
>>45651518
"What have you done to me?!"
Her clothes don't fit. Her house got wrecked by dragons. She can't prove who she even is anymore. She basically has no access to her wealth or reputation in this body. Her new form is humiliating and awkward. The first thing she does is try to beat the shit out of the druid, but the fighter restrains her. Someone makes a short joke and she basically just breaks down and cries. It's too much. The party takes pity on her. She tells them they're all fired. They say she never technically hired them for anything, or paid them. The party and the countess go back to town and explain to the temple the (mostly) truth of what happened:
The Countess was grievously injured in the attack, but she is alive. She is however indisposed and wants to be left alone.
So now what?
Previously the party had tried to do research on the gauntlet, trying to get more information on it. Presumably looking for a weakness or a way to destroy the thing. They had found a detailed description of a gauntlet that ALMOST matched it in a 12th edition copy of an old book of artifacts. They theorized that an older edition might have more "first hand" information and be more accurate. Cassandra had previous scried for the nearest copy, and found it in some kind of abandoned ruin out in the wilderness. The party decided that the Countess, who they had nicknamed Bob at this point, was probably safe from further attacks in this form. They decided to teleport off to the place Cassandra had found, again taking her with them since she had seen it in her scrying and she can still teleport more accurately than the rogue.
And that leads us to the closest I've ever come to a TPK in a campaign. I made a mistake and it lead to a situation that blew up in a way I never intended, almost resulting in the loss of the whole party.
>>45651651
Here's what's supposed to happen:
Cassandra scrys where they're going to go and sees the rival adventuring party from before. The party decides not to go charging in weapons-first, instead either being stealthy or being diplomatic. The other party happily explains that inside the temple is a big magic ruby embedded in the ceiling that counters any spell that is cast in its vicinity, and it disrupted their cleric's control of few dozen undead they had created for menial labor and whatnot. Also, there's a bigass golem, with four arms and fists big enough to turn a man into pulp. But it has a weak point, a gemstone on its back that connects it to the ceiling gem, which is its power source. They want to get in there to find an old atlas, but 4 of their 5 party members are spellcasters and they're kind of stuck. If the PC's are brave enough to go in and deal with the undead and the golem, and can disable the ruby in the ceiling, they'll trade a +2 Tome of Clear Thought for the ruby. The ruby is magical and worth a lot of money to the right buyer, but without the right person to sell it to it's only worth a fraction of that. The tome is legit, and worth more than the gem's market price, although secretly the other party has a buyer to sell it to for way more than the cost of the tome.
If the party snuck in stealthily, there is a secret control panel to disable the dispel gem, and the golem's weak spot could be easily dealt with. The undead were zombie town guards or soldiers, with armor and weapons but not terribly powerful. The party could have easily dealt with all of this, got their book, got the magic gem, traded for the +2 tome, and been on their merry way.
Here's what happened.
>>45651752
The party sees the rival party and FREAKS THE FUCK OUT. It's those motherfuckers, from before! What're they doing there?! We have to go now!
They teleport to the back of the ruins, away from the rivals' camp site. The ruins are basically a squareish building with a central chamber with stairs going down. They sneak to the building, being careful not to alert the others. The druid plans to use stone shape to make an opening in the wall. Then someone notices a large white bird fly just overhead. It kind of looks like the familiar of one-
The alchemist shoots it. Doesn't think, just reacts. She pulls out her crossbow and shoots a fucking bomb at the witch's albino raven familiar. The witch is the CE member of the rival party, and past experience has shown her to be a little, uh, crazy. And the instant the familiar gets hit, the witch feels it through her empathic link. Something over there is attacking them. She screams in rage, and the party hears it!
The party panics. Stone shape quick! Run down the stairs! Down down down! Don't stop and think, those assholes are going to be right behind us! They run headlong into an unlit chamber full of zombies . They have no idea what's down here. They hear the stoney stomping sound of the four-armed golem coming after them. Someone lights a torch, for those without darkvision, and they realize they're surrounded. The druid's wild shape is dispelled by the ruby. The rogue has no idea about the golem's weak point. Nobody is thinking about looking for a disabling box. On top of all that, there's a part of five enemy adventurers on their way down the stairs, blocking the only way out.
>>45651752
Why are you typing all of this out?
Do you need some sort of validation for your campaign, or do you legitimately think that your campaign is interesting enough to warrant this short novel you're writing?
If the latter - it's not. You can keep typing but I don't think anyone is interested or invested enough to care.
>>45647766
Im gonna be starting a skeleton gang rape game with me and my buds for shits and giggles.
Any ideas for tropes/quirks/quests/jabs/characters?
So far i have a Captain Jack Marrow and Baron von BonerKill
>>45651898
Someone literally asked him to.
qre you this insecure that you need to belittle someone from posting? Do you feel less pathetic by attempting to make others look nearly as pathetic as you?
>>45651863
I give them some leeway. The witch would need some time to run over to where her familiar fell to the ground, see the stone shape, and follow the path. The party has at least several rounds alone with the zombies and the golem. Still, it's a tough fight. The ogue can't sneak attack anything. Buffs are dispelled or countered. The monk takes a critical hit from a big angry four-armed power swing which could have killed him in one hit had I rolled higher on the damage dice. Finally the figher gets a smart idea; he's been using an adamantine weapon this entire time, and never once used it for sundering. So he decides to cut the golem's leg off. It takes a couple hacks, but he takes it off below the knee, hobbling it. It has to use one of its four arms just to keep itself balanced. Now things are starting to look fixable.
Then the witch dominates the fighter. She tells him to go murder the alchemist.
The fighter charges her and starts whaling on her. Her AC is shit, but luckily he doesn't critical and the damage dice are kind. The ruby dispells the dominate a moment later, and he's fine. Then the monk uses Shatterpunch on the golem's weak point, destroying it. The ruby shuts down.
The alchemist considers fighting the witch, and realizes she's nearly dead as it is. She heals herself on her turn. Then the witch turns her into a newt with Baleful Polymorph. She fails both the Fortitude save and the Will save. The rogue has had enough of this, and attacks the witch.
Critical. Roll to confirm.
20. Reroll to confirm.
20. Good enough for me.
The rogue stabs the witch in the throat, through the neck, and into her brain stem, killing her in one hit. That's the description I gave the party, and the whole table winced.
>>45651959
>>45647766
Sorry didnt mean to quote you
>>45651898
You're in luck, my fingers are sore and I'm starving and sleepy. If this thread is still here, and if anything still cares at all, I'll type more in the morning. I think maybe one guy is interested at most so I might just decide fuck it.
>>45647420
Session went fine, players seemed engaged, but it felt like a massively inconsistent clusterfuck on my end. Not really new but I feel like the cracks are starting to show.
I've made the mistake of trying to tell a story that's way too complicated while trying to ensure they players have as much agency as possible. More often than not I walk out of the session with a headache from trying to keep everything straight, and it impacts my ability to effectively draw players into the moment when I'm overwhelmed on the back end with everything that needs considering.
I wish I'd gone with my original idea of quiet small town adventures in a lore-rich and well put together small region, but ended up with a continent spanning intrigue plot that I have to work out entire chapters of backstory for every time they meet a new character or explore another region.
I wonder if it's worth it sometimes, and if my players just humor me because they know I'm putting too much effort into it.
Mostly just screaming into a void here. It helped a bit.
>>45647420
>Been running Out of the Abyss (5e module) for the better part of six months, if not more with a groupfinder group I lucked out on.
>Everyone seems to enjoy the adventure
>I've modified boring bits of the campaign so it doesn't drag on as badly as it does in the module's book.
>We just started a homebrewed Forgotten Realms campaign that I'm developing as we go.
>Party is the following: a noble knight who followed his lord.
>The lord (nicknamed Dr. Doom OOC) who is beset by a curse that he left his fiefdom to find a cure for.
>A cunning senior member of the Thieves Guild with a weakness for women.
>A young mage slayer woman from a family line cursed with beastlike attributes seeking redemption.
>One other character TBD.
Really excited to get things rolling in the new campaign. Two sessions in and they've already helped evacuate a city through an ancient portal as it was being put to siege by an army of undead, then seen a darker side of the noble queen they met in the beginning.
I would almost not mind GMing forever. This was my second attempt finding a group of fa/tg/uys for a campaign on GF threads. Glad it worked out so well this time.
All my games died becauseI am a shitty DM
How should I try to fix this?
>>45653246
You have to be more specific on the problem.
Something causes your DMing to be shitty.
What is it?
>>45653119
Summary of last session. Vague and probably confusing as fuck because I have to omit details since one of my players hangs around here.
>exploring a lost ruin of a city that was experimenting with magic, magic is dangerous and heavily controlled in my setting, not much is known of what happened there
>party on their way from point A to B comes upon this, learns from a local Sorcerer Raider Lord that there is a wellspring of magical energy that erupts from these ruins, and he's here to harness that power
>party being mostly arcane classes decides to stick around and see what's up
>ominous figure whose been stalking the party shows up at just the right time to drop them all into the magic reactor, turns out to be an abyss of a well several miles deep
>there's a lake at the bottom, sorc casts fly not to hit the water, tries to save party, most of them fall into the water
>I could have just let them die, especially given what I'd planned for next, but I basically handwaved them ashore unconscious save for the sorcerer and the fighter who pulled some physics-defying momentum arresting maneuver I never should have allowed
>they're eventually found by a strange floating orb surveying the beaches of the underground lake, it leads them to a ruin it's been the keeper of for centuries, possibly millenia
>it leads them into the complex, where they quickly discover numerous, suspiciously similar dead bodies, in varying states of decay
>unbeknownst to them, they are discovered by a beast that lurks these ruins, I make them roll a succession of checks to flee the monster, while they make the checks, I tell them nothing.
>several Nat 1's later, they are consumed by the beast and killed, here's where it gets wierd
>still looking over the pile of bodies, they fade into a sequence of strange visions (relevant to muh storee but way too much to put in here) and awaken in strange capsules, without gear and without memory of what just happened
>cont.
>>45653254
It's hard for me to keep a group of people together.
It's hard for me to be reliable.
It's hard for me to have confidence in my work.
It's hard for me to let players take the reigns sometimes.
It's hard for me to not be too picky.
It's hard for me to gauge feedback and make adjustments accordingly.
Here's some of the things off the top of my head.
>>45653317
Maybe tomorrow, fuck it got late.
>>45653505
>Keep a group together
Do you think of scenarios that align with the interests of all the characters? Or find a hook that makes it hard to just walk off. Or are you talking about physically not being able to keep people coming? Because if that's the case, then fixing the other issues will fix this one generally.
>Reliable
How is that hard? Are you late to sessions? Do you sometimes not have things prepared?
>Confidence
Praise from players will get you this. So just improve everything else.
>Hard to let players take the reigns
Part of this is not having confidence in your ability to come up with things on the fly. See what I said about confidence to fix this.
>Hard to not be too picky
Picky about what? Rules? Character backstory? Playstyle?
>Feedback
On your campaigns? On your style? What about the feedback makes it hard to adjust to, do you just physically have problems adjusting behavior?
Had to fudge a roll to stop a tpk. I feel kind of dirty.
I am running a mecha anime themed game. The PCs are not quite "fell into cockpit" level, but they are young recruits whose training is incomplete.
They had their first battle last session, and ran into an ambush from an enemy gunship. They escaped, but one of them had his unit take pretty heavy damage in his first ever mission, which was supposedly a milk run.
Would it be fair to have the character suffer some psychological consequences from this? Something like a willpower test next time he gets in his mech otherwise he suffers a stat penalty for the next battle?
>>45647420
Fuck me, this'll take awhile
>PBP 1
>Due to two player deaths, PCs jumped ahead in the story and have now jumped back, coping alright with it. Two players MIA, one replaced and one being botted for the foreseeable future.
>PBP 2
>Ongoing for three years. Story requires a connection made by one character ages ago to come back to haunt him. Given the choice of the character who made the connection but also had a new player take over and a character who didn't particularly make the connection, I chose the former. Mildly regretting it.
>PBP 3
>Group's posting rate is slowing down but I believe interest is being kept at a sustainable level. They're enjoying my homebrew adventure, some good character interactions.
>Skype game
>No session last two weeks due to player illness. Two drop-outs, recruitment and then drop outs again. Campaign commencement delayed for weeks by player who ultimately didn't play. Morale mildly low, campaign good and character interactions good when we actually play.
>>45653572
You did the right thing.
I've been dming (for the first time) a burning wheel game for 3 of my friends (none of whom are very experienced with rp) over roll20 for about 4 months. We've gotten about 6 or 7 sessions done.
They are all heretics on the run from a currupt church after murdering two cardinals.
A fourth friend (who is super experienced with rp) just joined the campaign as a guide through the countryside while they are on the run.
I feel like my skills at dming are awful. I don't think I describe things well enough, or do npc dialogue good enough, but all of my players constantly say I'm doing a good job, but I think they're the kind of people who even if I did the shittiest job in the world, they'd say it was great to be nice.
Tl;dr things are going swell, and I think I'm a shitty dm.
I'm currently preparing a campaign set in a city threatened by a druid-led revolution. Luckily no one in my group has played Thief, so they won't know I'm blatantly copying the Pagans.
I'm also trying to re-establish magic as something mystical and eerie, and on that note the group will meet one of the Fair Folk out in the wilderness. The thing is, I want this to be a non-combat encounter, where the party has to convince a powerful being to let them go. On the one hand I'd like to give the party a reminder that there are still some enemies that they can't beat in open combat, on the other hand this would allow some of the more magic- or intelligence-focused characters a place in the spotlight. I was wondering whether any of you guys had tips for or experience in designing such an encounter, because I feel like this could get pretty obnoxious if it isn't done well.
>>45657183
Don't have the being appear in person, instead let the magic users figure out what's happening as fighters try to make sense of and survive its attentions.
>>45658939
Thanks, I was already thinking about using a Glamour effect, but your idea does sound a lot more tense. I'll try to work that into the encounter.
>>45647420
Arcane/Divine magic using and airship/tech building Alliance of Kingdoms vs Monolithic Psionic Theocracy.
The players are to be on the Alliance side flying airships and fighting 1700ft tall golems crewed by Psionic casters of varying kinds. Plus their freaky-deaky bioegineered magical beasts.
I'm only having two really big problems with the game
1: We all have work on college and it's impossible to meet up.
2: I described the game as an epic scale slaughter-fest with constant combat and after character creation they go, "it would be nice if combat was only once in a while and we got plenty of RP/NPC interaction/side quest sessions.
Fuck. There are so many better session ideas I could have done for that, but now I've spent ages writing shit for this, and they spent ages crafting characters for it and now they tell me.
So I need to think of a way to get the players other things to do than combat, that actually makes sense, when they're on the front lines of a pretty hardcore war effort to which they are crucial.
>>45659846
Work and college*
I swear I've made more typos in the last 24 hours than I usually do in a week.
>>45649885
Why would gunfire immediately make all the orks think 'invaders'?
They're orks. On an ork controlled world. There would always be the sound of gunfire in the distance. Always.
Pretty interesting. They managed to take out 8 cr 1 creatures at level one in a four man party with one party member incapacitated, the caster had 1 spell left, and their support caster couldn't use magic. They got creative and actually worked together, which I have been having trouble getting them to do up till this point. I was actually pretty proud that they rendered to gnoll base I had written out uneccesary.
>>45647420
well i have made my own system (worked on it for 3-4 years still not done, why? because i used to live in a small village and there was no way for me to get my hands on a D&D rule book and my own rule set stuck with me) and so far i have only played once with my family and the fist session went okay i forgot some of the rules and such but they loved it and so did i, next time is gonna be a lot more free run for them because the fist session was very railroady so that they could get familiar with the rules.
>>45647766
I'm running a pirate game, and each game starts out with the players in an old tavern by the ocean hearing an old man tell the story of the characters the players play as.
>>45660287
post the rules? i'm sure it'll compare favorably to when a friend made his own system. It was fascinating, he rejigged pathfinder with no knowledge of how the system worked and why.
>>45660341
well im not sure how to share the rules. Also the game is far from done im mearly play testing and im to embaresed to show an unfinished game
so far its 53 pages of rules and info. Here is an image of my google drive, also i relised that there is a game called divinity so i will change the name, i wish i dident have to tho
>>45659947
True but Bolters do sound different from shootas and these Orks are nearby enough to hear the difference.
