Year End Gaming Roundup

So if you asked, how could things get worse in 2020 - ha! well. I have a few posts on here, not completely abandoned. Still...

So - ignoring (as much as we can) the World Outside for a moment - how did this year go for gaming?

Well - you can't ignore the world entirely. The public games moved on line, but kept opn - more on that in a bit. We shut down playing at the house for a couple months, but started up again, and have proceeded intermittently. It has not been great, though; we play sometimes, but we have a hard time maintaining any momentum, and we end up talking about the games we aren't playing more than playing. We aren't playing other games all that much either, though we've made some progress there lately. It's been bad.

I could sum up things, like I have the last couple years, but the story is the same: Tomb of Annihilation - we managed a couple sessions in the summer, but that is all - we talk about it sometimes, but nothing has happened in ages. The Waterdeep and Jungle games are right where we left them, though both were sort of at good pausing places, two years ago. Sigh. We stopped the Saltmarsh home brew to play a city adventure - and have dropped both.

The home brew Waynesburg game went well - but I don't remember if that was late 2019 or the beginning of this year. It stopped, though it is there waiting. All fo these campaigns are there waiting - given the right combination of time and inspiration they could come back. Though sometimes having this many options is worse than only having one option.

The only home success this year was the Desert Campaign. The cleric owed a favor, so they headed off across the desert and hills to find out why the Hermitage fo St. Ignatius was not communicating any more. Off they went, fighting monsters and throwing boulders and gathering biuts of rumors until they arrived. A  village where everyone was paranoid; a missing baron, bandits and such; and something Bad at the old monastery. So they snuck in through the tunnels beneath the place, fighting various creatures, and getting into some big fights with drow int he cellars. Then that stalled out, a couple months ago. But it is there, and once it starts upwill flow pretty well. It is more combat oriented than I thought it was going to be - I thought there would be more intrigue leading up to some fine boss battles, but all the interruptions have pushed it to a more combat heavy game. That's the danger. But it works.

And? Outside of home - Princes of Apocalypse is still going, we are down to the last bunch of cults - we have shed a lot of the annoyances around that game, so things are all right. Though it is dragging - we are all starting to eye Rime fo the Ice Maiden with great anticipation.

A bunch fo us also got into a playing of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I told you how that went.  The group then picked up playing Ghosts of Saltmarsh. One character has already had to be resurrected there. Only one! Rot grubs, this time.

So there you go. I suppose I could look on the bright side: we have two steady ongoing games, and a third that was going all right for much of the year, and should be again soon. Given the circumstances, that's not half bad.

It's been odd, though. The virus has kept us out of the game stores - I have not spent hundreds of dollars in minis and maps this year, and what I did spent, has been mostly for presents - a couple books given away, lots of minis, a map, and so on. That's good, though I miss having that stuff coming in all the time.  

I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about other games, especially Call of Cthulhu, which looks very interesting - but we have not gotten around to playing it. I don't know if we will - we are all more fantasy fans than horror, so the mythos isn't all that compelling. What I love are the skill systems and the settings - 20s and 30s - we are all fans of Hammett and Chandler, not to mention the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - and I can add a lot of 20s/30s comic strips as well. Terry and the Pirates! Wash Tubbs! I love that stuff - I would love the play a game set in that era, which Call of Cthulhu is. We shall see.

And so: what are my goals for 2021? 

First - play. Keep playing the outside games, get our own games going. The last year or so I have run all the games at home - I hope the rest fo the gang gets in on that action. But playing regularly is the best comfoprt.

Second - I want to develop some things. Especially short, one off type adventurers, either simple scenarios for ongoing characters on pure one offs. We talk about this - I talk about it. I want to do it. We weretalking about doing it for Christmas - that's probably the way to do it. build them around specific scenes, environments, times, events. A Christmas game - a heist game - a ship board game - somethign contained. I did one a year or so ago - The Bard's Pants - that worked very well. Do more fo that.

Third - I want to work more with physical things. Pain my minis; build some terrain. We'll see. 

Finally - I should add that I have been working on World Anvil, here and there, in spurts usually - but I do it. Getting masses of Waynesburg information piled in there this week, when I should have been working on a Christmas one shot. Yeah, that's how it goes. But it is good. Keep that up.

And try to keep this up. We are notorious for sitting around the house talking about D&D - we have to work on getting that stuff into something like a published form. Even just a blog; or a lousy video, buncha middle aged nerds whining about lack of skill guidance in D&D 5E! I don't know. I will try, though I say that every year, and you can see how well I follow up on it.

Backstories

I have been thinking about backstory in D&D lately. There were some remarks made regarding the Princes of the Apocalypse game I am playing in, and they set me to thinking. How important should backstory be in playing D&D? Well! I have thoughts!

1. The purpose of backstory is to shape how you act in the story. It explains the character's reactions, why they do what they do. That is how it works in fiction, where it shows why this character is the way they are; it works the same way in games, except there it guides the player in deciding how the character is going to act in the story. You don't need a lot for this - an outline, a few details. It's also something that is really only significant for the player - as much as you need to know to play the character. Maybe it comes up in the story, maybe it doesn't. Maybe your backstory is mainly to explain why you don't talk about your past. The short version is, backstory is a tool, for writer or player, to help shape the character, but it is always secondary to what the character does in the story itself.

2. Should backstories come up in the story? One of the remarks to set this post off was that a villain from a character's past was more interesting than a random monster. This is, in context, a very strange comment, since we are currently 9th level in an ongoing adventure, and we haven't had to deal with anything random since about 3rd level (a year and a half ago, more or less), but we'll pass that. The more general comment I have is that if the backstory is coming up in the story, then it is the story. Now: that can be a very good thing to build into the story - though it is mainly going to work if you have a session zero, and everyone participates. If you can build characters that have a pre-existing stake in the story, or the DM takes elements of the backgrounds of the characters and works them into the texture of the story - you have something, and probably something better than just dropping characters into the adventure. But that beginning stage is important. It avoids the dangers - the idea, say, that a villain from THIS character's backstory is part of the story, but not anyone else's; or maybe worse, that you spend all your time going around the table fighting the next character's childhood nemesis. Again - you can work this into the story if you do a session zero, if the whole group is in on the idea that one character's backstory matters, and so on - but it doesn't work so well in a more generic situation. It has to come up in the story, to work at all.

3. Along with session zeroes to work on complimentary backstories, I think backstory can enter a story easier in a home brew campaign than a published adventure. If the DM is making it up as they go - a series of situations, that aren't preset - backstory is a very good source of ideas for what can come next. Though even there - you would want to start working on this as soon as you can, so have a session zero, or at least push players to make characters that fit within the world of the story, so their backgrounds come up naturally. You still have the problem of why one character's backstory matters more than another, though there can be a lot of answers to that. And finally - if you work this way, you can make it so the backstory is, in fact, part of the story. I did some of this in my desert campaign - one character is a monk, who was a folk hero, who overthrew some kind of tyrant, and later, his monastery was destroyed, maybe in vengeance. That has come back - the party's enemies turn out to be working with another refugee from the monastery, and the two of them blame each other for destroying the place. But that means - the background element is in the story; it comes in from a different angle, so everyone has a stake in it; it is associated with other character's stories. And maybe most of all - in practice, interesting as this idea was as a way to move the story ahead - it was trumped by events in the story itself: the cleric was petrified! That is immediate, compelling and affects everyone in the party, and reminds us all - the story itself becomes what matters, in a decent campaign.

4. The fact is, unless you do the session zero, or some equivalent of to get the characters to fit the story - you don't need to worry too much about backstory. Backstories don't have to come up in the story that often, except as details about the characters, their motivations and so on. You probably should NOT use too many PC backstory elements, unless you have buy in from all the players, or set it up from the start. NPCs are different, though. I wrote about this way back when we were just starting with 5th Edition: how to use NPCs to drive the plot. I would still stand by most of that - PC backstories should be relatively open; they should not be determining the course of the plot - their actions in the story should determine how this story goes. If you need villains tied to the story, if you need to steer the story in a direction, you should use NPCs when you can - they can be focused on something outside the story (as it is occurring); they can have much more specific, narrow goals and motivations, that steer PCs toward the story the DM wants to tell. All that is true, now as much as then. I did this in the desert campaign, too - the party is working alongside a drow cleric, an archeologist type - and he is the one who brings in the plot twists I need, more than the PC's. If the PC's stories come up in the story - great; if not - I can still use elements from the NPC's background to steer the story around, if I have to. That's how I brought in the rival monk - tied him to the NPC's enemies, went from there.

5. All of this, I think, has become amuch bigger part of 5th Edition than it ever was before. It has become maybe - I don't want to say too important, but - it can be treated as being too important. There's a weird tendency in the modern game to make characters into bundles of background - they start up with the sense that they have lived these long full lives, full of adventures and traumas and Significant Events, that have somehow deposited them as first level clerics in this particular story, and that - all that background - continues to be the most important thing in these people's lives. That is very strange in a long, ongoing campaign, like this one. We have been playing it for a year and a half - we are 9th level - we are playing Princes of the Apocalypse, with its plot of literally saving the world from these elemental monstrosities - how can you still have people thinking that something that happened to them as children might be more interesting and important than this? This game has a massive amount of lore and history in it - the PCs have done all kinds of things, had all kinds of wild experiences, we have fought demons and devils, talked to liches and dragons, characters have come and gone and made weird deals with weird entities, in the game - how is anything outside the game supposed to be more interesting than what has happened in the game? People like to talk about immersion in a game, and lack of it - but this is one fo the most egregious lacks of immersion I can think of: to refuse to see the story you are IN. Especially something as epic as this one.

Now - all that changes when you are talking about first level characters (though even there, the backstory should not be more important than the story; but you might make your backstory be part of the story.) A session zero should work that way - to integrate those backgrounds, to make the story and backstories fit together. These characters setting out to Save the World should have some connection, some kind of connection to the world they are in - all that is absolutely the truth. But even there, at first level, you have not done much, and shouldn't try to make up too much in your past. And whatever happened in the past should quickly be eclipsed by what is happening in the present. Whatever your reasons for being there, once the story starts, that is going to put it in the background. The villains you encounter in this story are going to be more interesting than the villains from your past; you are very likely to experience things far more exciting, traumatic, horrifying, whatever than anything you could have survived as a non-PC. And not being able to see this, to think that something outside this world-changing story you are in is more important than it is - is a very strange thing to do.

Adieu 2018!

Hello again. This is almost painful, posting here now. Looking back across the year: two years in a row I have begun the year with ambitious hopes for the upcoming - two years in a row, I have not accomplished any of it.

I take that back: hopes for the blog in the upcoming - that is what I have failed at. I have managed to play quite a bit this year: fairly regular sessions at home; I've joined a game at a game store, with some increased interaction outside the house - that has been good. We've put in a reasonable number of hours at the table; some of the home games have been a bit hit or miss, that could get better... But it's been a good year for playing.

For the home games - we were thinking about campaigns the other day - we currently have, what, going?

• Tomb of Annihilation, running online - which has a way of running for 3 weeks out of four, then disappearing for 3 months, as people have conflicts and such, and seem to struggle to get back together. But we did go up a river, fight various monsters, steal a shield guardian, convince a goblin queen that we were sent from the gods to make her their representative on earth, then head off into the jungle in search of - something.... It's been a while.
• Waterdeep Dragon Heist - we've played at that a few times, gotten to the point where we own our own tavern - it works all right.
• A jungle island campaign we started last year and played in spurts - this got interrupted, and in the interim, I got more interested in a desert campaign, so it has supplanted the jungle island one. But it is still alive, and able to be resumed at some point.
• A desert campaign, tomb raiding and the like - which is going strong at the moment. After crossing the desert, the adventurers have found the tomb in question, and have started raiding within. A dungeon crawl section of this campaign, though it has had a couple stages so far.

Besides this, we have played a few episodes in a couple things that might be a campaign if we played them more often. And we have been floating more ideas: a home brew city campaign, a new village campaign, a high level dragon hunt, among others. I'm not sure it's reasonable to keep anything like that many campaigns running at a time, but it would be nice to get some going. It's fun to shift gears once in a while - play different types of characters, different configurations, differing kinds of challenges. But as it is, we play enough, we manage to keep a couple things going - so it's all right.

Playing is good. And D&D development is not bad: I don't work as much on building campaigns and adventures as I should, but I do a fair amount of background building. And I write plenty - playing D&D has always hooked into fiction writing, and I have done plenty of that this year. So most of the things I hoped to do I have done. Just that none of it has made it to this blog. And too little of it has made it to the table, to be honest.

And so? while I will not be so bold as to promise or threaten or commit to anything like a post a month (let alone a post a week), or a video a month or anything wild like that - that is what I am after. To post things. To write about gaming - games, world building, ideas about D&D and other games - anything. Maybe even just comments on games - who knows. "Tangible form" - that is the key. Something in tangible form. One of these years I will manage it.

The Deserts

Let me comment a bit on the Desert campaign I am running. It is a fairly shameless bit of orientalism: deserts, middle eastern and North African settings and weapons and so on - I don't know how to get around that, but since all of D&D is a pastiche of old books, I'm not sure there's any reason to try. Try not to insult anyone, on purpose or by accident, and keep the old books close at hand, I guess...

That said: what is this place? It's a very large desert, basically the big empty place in the dead center of the map on this page. It's kind of an upside down North Africa: an ocean bounding it (to the south, here), with a strip of relatively fertile land by the sea, mountains behind that, and then a great vast waste, bounded in the north by more highlands, that separate the desert from the more temperate lands to the north and west. There is civilization all around the desert - and quite a lot of traffic through it, caravans, nomadic herdsmen moving from oasis to oasis, well traveled trade routes and so on. There are resources in the desert - salt and other minerals - so a fairly thriving economy, though one that seems to disappear into the vastness of the wastes. The desert is a typical desert, not an undifferentiated sea of sand (though some areas are): ridges and hills, mountains, depressions, plateaus, and so on; there is water, but it can be hard to find. It is all hot and dry, and moving through it requires planning - there are a lot of ways to die.

We have just started playing, the PCs are in the foothills of one of the mountain ranges, looking for lost tombs, with a drow archeologist who has taken them on as his protectors. As I mentioned before, I expect to keep the "plot" of the campaign fairly loose - probably arranged around tomb raiding (Mummies!), but able to go anywhere. A series of shorter missions, really - find a tomb here; explore a ruined castle there; visit a town or city somewhere else; cross the desert, thwart a villain, etc. I hope that means they will end up traveling all around the desert - one of the features is that you are likely to move around a lot, if you are adventuring in the desert, moving back and forth between the wastes and towns, north and south, east and west, etc. I hope.

The desert is surrounded by mountains and civilization. So - some of the places of interest: in the north, the desert is bounded by mountains and a river - the Little Dragon mountains and river, something called Dragon Lake - and Greyhawk, imported directly from the old books, placed here. This is a fairly prosperous area, though it is far enough south to be fairly hot and dry. The city is old and large, and has the feel of a city on the edge of two cultures - like in the Balkans, or southern Russia, Turkey and Greece. It is a major trade center, being tied to the desert caravan routes and to rivers flowing west, the Makeesa, which flows to the Greatflood, which flows to the sea.

To the west of the desert are mountains - the Fire Mountains prominently - a high, forbidding range. On their northern edge are the Sapphire Hills, which are the center of a large dwarven kingdom, and a human country called Ritmark. In the eastern foothills of the Fire Mountains (the western edge of the desert) is the city of Phoenix - ancient and mysterious, with strong links to the mountains and the desert. And on the south-west edge of the desert is a vast high plateau called the Dead Lands: this is a completely barren, desiccated, unlivable place, though it might be the stronghold of the Githyanki, on the material plane.

South of the desert are the Altas mountains, and south of that the Southern Ocean. These mountains rise fairly high in places, and stretch across most of the southern coast of the continent, west to east. The strip between the mountains and the sea has a very pleasant, Mediterranean style climate - this is where most people live. There are several cities along the coast. The largest of these are Al Aben and Arcabar, major ports, surrounded by farmland and other resources, sustaining significant city states. Al Aben is further west, larger, more open, more of a trading center, both across the sea, and into the desert - indeed, it is a major terminus for the desert trade. Arcabar is to the east, smaller, more sheltered, especially on the land side, and somewhat more hostile. It is a notorious haven for pirates, who have deals with the legitimate government, and can be a dangerous entity at times. Around them, are numerous other towns, small counties and principalities, more or less independent and prosperous.

At the eastern end of the Southern Ocean, a vast river flows in from the north-east. This ends in a major delta, which has been civilized for millenia. The premier city here is Xandria,a sprawling port city, an ancient power. Up the river are a number of other cities, some very ancient, some very large. All of this area,not surprisingly, has an Egyptian cast to it. And south-east of this is a large Peninsular or Isthmus which itself is nothing but desert and coastal settlements. But that is not where this campaign is going. And on the east of all of this are the Dragon Mountain - a vast range, running north south, and dividing all this area from lands to the east.

All of these southern cities have been there for 1000s on 1000s of years - this is where civilization began. (Human, at least.) They have risen and fallen through the years - there have been great empires - the Black Empire, which originated in fact in Phoenix, and spread back to the east, run by religious fanatics using monstrous armies and magic to conquer all. They eventually collapsed, and were followed by centuries of smaller empires and kingdoms that eventually fought themselves into fragments. All that happened 2 or 3 thousand years ago. Another wave of conquest came from the cities south of the deserts about 500 years before the present - conquering the southern lands, then crossing the desert and invading the north and west,sparking a century or two of warfare that went back and forth across both the deserts and the north, leaving its own traces. The last hundred years or have been relatively quiet -
trade has replaced warfare as the primary means of interaction between the desert cities and the rest of the world, and the various kingdoms and city states of the region have developed individually. There is, in fact, a lot of trade between these places and the north and west - though this is the kind of trade that is, itself, often as much a form of war as not.

That is the setting, ver roughly. It is ancient; it has been conquered and reconquered dozens of times over 5000 plus years; it is very active, in that there are constant connections between these places and other parts of the world - though the distances and the emptiness of the space between helps mask that. The southern cities are rich and powerful; they are, for the most part, open to trade, so they welcome outsiders; and there is all that empty land to move around in - which provides opportunities for evil. Plenty of places for monsters and villains to hide.