It is rare that you get to end a campaign on a high note but I did so yesterday. The writeup is this week's entry for a thing a week. Colville says that role playing games are the most fun you can have with your brain and I have to agree with him. I choked up a little bit when delivering the last few scenes in the epilogue. I can only hope that the campaign that follows in three weeks will be as good.
Run time weighed in at about 1.1 TNGs and spanned ten players with five regulars. Lots of materials were built or painted for this campaign and my notes spanned hundreds of pages. The Company started with 21 named NPCs and ended with six more by the end. There were 32 more named NPCs in the other factions in the city some of whom were combatants and some of whom got quite a lot of screen time. Another fifteen or so were improvised up as needed. I don't think I'll miss any of the NPCs in this campaign as much as I still miss Zarashi but there were some good ones.
2020/02/23
Ending a Campaign
I'll remember this one as "The Cedarwood Campaign" moving forward. It's a place I've wanted to explore for a long, long time, and one that's been in the background in a couple of the campaigns I've run recently. I pitched it as "The Black Company meets the end of the world" and I think we hit the high notes of that theme. Some of it went really well and we were able to end it on a high note. Most importantly, folks had fun, myself included, which is all you can really ask for. We played 22 sessions with two session 0s at an average of 6 hours per session. That puts us at about 144 hours which is more than Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I didn't need to draw the whole city, but I'm really glad I did! From the opening sessions, the map of the city was front and center and it continued to be a fantastic gaming aid up until the end. In fact, the end of the campaign centered on the city, specifically, defending it from the Forces of Darkness(TM). One of my biggest takeaways right now is that having this kind of prop is extremely useful when you need to improvise up an encounter at a moment's notice. The neighborhood maps also ended up being super useful as a worldbuilding exercise. Lots of the flavor of the game arose out of this exercise.
I'm not a film buff but there's a lot to learn from film in terms of framing scenes. I picked this up from the great Adam Koebel whose shows I watch regularly. This campaign was the first where I really tried to lean into that. It didn't all work out since I'm still learning the techniques and lingo but overall I think it made the campaign better. Also, I love saying shit like "this is where the special effects budget was blown for the episode," and "viewers who watched the first season would recognize...," which is aimed at the players who played in both. Nearing the end I used it to end scenes which otherwise may have overstayed their welcome. I think this is a thing I've been missing and I think it's improving my GMing. I do this in my online campaign, too, so I'm getting a lot of practice.
Along for the ride with the cinematics came a lot of "meta-gaming knowledge" which allowed me to present a lot more information than just what the PCs saw. I did a lot of lingering shots and internal monologues of NPCs which I think is a fun way to reflect the PCs' actions back to their players. I like showing things this way. It's making me think through visuals with a lot more clarity which in turn helps me describe what's going on. Most importantly: my players seem to enjoy the game being presented as a TV show complete with intro and end credit shenanigans.
The large cast of NPCs was a mixed blessing. I had plans and interesting pieces for each of them but we only really interacted with about a third of them and not all of the interesting NPCs were from this exercise. The ones that stuck were quite memorable (more below) but there were many that had almost no speaking lines at all. When you embark on these things you don't get to be sad when you don't use material you spent a lot of time on but didn't get screen time but I like to think that these characters added to the perceived pastiche of Cedarwood, The Company, and its members.
We will remember Throam Greybreaker as the greatest of these both in imagined size and in character. He had a great voice and speech pattern, basically me speaking as slowly as I can stand at the very bottom of my vocal range--it's a thing, and it's cool. A "business troll" from the start, Throam was a mob boss running a particularly sketchy piece of the city. I didn't intend for Throam to be a likable character but the players liked him well enough. It started with running jobs for him against a common enemy and ended up in formal alliance. When I narrated him out of the story in the epilogue, he had become a respected leader of the city--a voice of reason and stability as the world rebuilt from the war.
Two other standouts were Heofar the Mountain, a Kezhor Hand of Ilmar, a larger than life drunkard with a similarly sized personality and Reinwald the Unsteady, an elderly Word of Ilmar scholar with a bad limp. Both of them had fun voices and the places where I played Reinwald well, I think were some of my best acting moments in the campaign. Heofar was plain fun to play between heavily drinking most of the time to his dark humor, to narrating the graphic ways in which he dispatched his enemies. Apparently I'm good for a handful of memorable NPCs per campaign.
There were too many great moments in our not quite 150 hours but I'll leave a few of these here. Goodhands wrestled a sewer croc while zapping it with an electric damage shield. The meat of the croc was served as a stew in the PCs' adopted home: the Skylight Inn and Tavern. Despite the fact that I got shade thrown on my youtube channel, the PCs loved making dex and then reflex checks to catch the mugs of kobba slid across the bartop by Meat, an NPC who started as a PC. Wings named his rooftop scouts the "Up top division" which at one point resulted in a hilarious conversation between him and a former Ork skorcher named Rider. Goodhands once went on a serious bender which resulted in the infamous line: "I took a nap in the bacon."
I've run many campaigns and successfully ended six. I think I'll remember this one fondly and right now I think it's the best I've managed so far. Part of it was undoubtedly digging into the things I do and why I do them for youtube. Some of it was listening critically to Koebel working his magic. Some of it was shifting the game system around to a thing that does what I want better, but most of it was due to the awesome players I've gamed with over the last fifteen months or so. Thanks, guys!
I didn't need to draw the whole city, but I'm really glad I did! From the opening sessions, the map of the city was front and center and it continued to be a fantastic gaming aid up until the end. In fact, the end of the campaign centered on the city, specifically, defending it from the Forces of Darkness(TM). One of my biggest takeaways right now is that having this kind of prop is extremely useful when you need to improvise up an encounter at a moment's notice. The neighborhood maps also ended up being super useful as a worldbuilding exercise. Lots of the flavor of the game arose out of this exercise.
I'm not a film buff but there's a lot to learn from film in terms of framing scenes. I picked this up from the great Adam Koebel whose shows I watch regularly. This campaign was the first where I really tried to lean into that. It didn't all work out since I'm still learning the techniques and lingo but overall I think it made the campaign better. Also, I love saying shit like "this is where the special effects budget was blown for the episode," and "viewers who watched the first season would recognize...," which is aimed at the players who played in both. Nearing the end I used it to end scenes which otherwise may have overstayed their welcome. I think this is a thing I've been missing and I think it's improving my GMing. I do this in my online campaign, too, so I'm getting a lot of practice.
Along for the ride with the cinematics came a lot of "meta-gaming knowledge" which allowed me to present a lot more information than just what the PCs saw. I did a lot of lingering shots and internal monologues of NPCs which I think is a fun way to reflect the PCs' actions back to their players. I like showing things this way. It's making me think through visuals with a lot more clarity which in turn helps me describe what's going on. Most importantly: my players seem to enjoy the game being presented as a TV show complete with intro and end credit shenanigans.
The large cast of NPCs was a mixed blessing. I had plans and interesting pieces for each of them but we only really interacted with about a third of them and not all of the interesting NPCs were from this exercise. The ones that stuck were quite memorable (more below) but there were many that had almost no speaking lines at all. When you embark on these things you don't get to be sad when you don't use material you spent a lot of time on but didn't get screen time but I like to think that these characters added to the perceived pastiche of Cedarwood, The Company, and its members.
We will remember Throam Greybreaker as the greatest of these both in imagined size and in character. He had a great voice and speech pattern, basically me speaking as slowly as I can stand at the very bottom of my vocal range--it's a thing, and it's cool. A "business troll" from the start, Throam was a mob boss running a particularly sketchy piece of the city. I didn't intend for Throam to be a likable character but the players liked him well enough. It started with running jobs for him against a common enemy and ended up in formal alliance. When I narrated him out of the story in the epilogue, he had become a respected leader of the city--a voice of reason and stability as the world rebuilt from the war.
Two other standouts were Heofar the Mountain, a Kezhor Hand of Ilmar, a larger than life drunkard with a similarly sized personality and Reinwald the Unsteady, an elderly Word of Ilmar scholar with a bad limp. Both of them had fun voices and the places where I played Reinwald well, I think were some of my best acting moments in the campaign. Heofar was plain fun to play between heavily drinking most of the time to his dark humor, to narrating the graphic ways in which he dispatched his enemies. Apparently I'm good for a handful of memorable NPCs per campaign.
There were too many great moments in our not quite 150 hours but I'll leave a few of these here. Goodhands wrestled a sewer croc while zapping it with an electric damage shield. The meat of the croc was served as a stew in the PCs' adopted home: the Skylight Inn and Tavern. Despite the fact that I got shade thrown on my youtube channel, the PCs loved making dex and then reflex checks to catch the mugs of kobba slid across the bartop by Meat, an NPC who started as a PC. Wings named his rooftop scouts the "Up top division" which at one point resulted in a hilarious conversation between him and a former Ork skorcher named Rider. Goodhands once went on a serious bender which resulted in the infamous line: "I took a nap in the bacon."
I've run many campaigns and successfully ended six. I think I'll remember this one fondly and right now I think it's the best I've managed so far. Part of it was undoubtedly digging into the things I do and why I do them for youtube. Some of it was listening critically to Koebel working his magic. Some of it was shifting the game system around to a thing that does what I want better, but most of it was due to the awesome players I've gamed with over the last fifteen months or so. Thanks, guys!
2020/02/16
A thing a week 2020, week 7
I would be a better artist if I focused on fewer things and did them consistently. I know this; it's part of why I'm not a good artist. I also know that the more I try to force it, the worse results I get, and the worse results I get the less likely I am to pick it up again later. That means I do less of that thing and as a result I'm less good at it.
Life is about tradeoffs. There may be a day that I regret this but I'm making the decision with eyes wide open. Thus, to maintain the joy I take in my art and as a result do more of it and get better at it, I've learned to not force it. Maybe that'll change in the unforseeable future but that's where I am right now.
2020/02/09
A thing a week 2020, week 6
A couple weeks ago I built a map which was cool but we found out in play that it was too small. I've fixed that. This one is 24" on a side with some of the extraneous stuff pulled out and with clear zone boundaries. Turns out that when you playtest stuff, you can revise and make them better!This campaign is coming to a close in a couple weeks which I'm sure I'll write about at some point. There's always something bittersweet about ending a campaign but we're already over one Star Trek The Next Generation's run time.
2020/02/02
A thing a week 2020, week 5
I'd intended on doing some illustration in last year's challenge but never really got around to it. These three marked a significant and sadly normal drought. The last reasonable piece I worked on was something like early 2017 and, since I was never really happy with it, I never posted it. Before that we're goin' way back here to the heady days of 2016 (and even that was a sketch done a year earlier).I won't tell the whole story but I ended up with not a lot of time on Monday night and I didn't want to do nothing. Maybe it was the random art tutorials I watched on youtube last week but I ended up horking around on pinterest and not even drawing inspiration from the bajillion such pins I keep for that purpose. I picked something that I didn't like a whole lot but that had a good pose and started from there. The armor is mine but the pose, face structure, and really all that hard compositional stuff is all from the original art. I'm trying to understand non-metallic metals prior to slapping paint on a fig and selling that in graphite is a step along that path.
I found this experience enlightening. Apparently mini painting has given me a lot more control and patience than I ever enjoyed when I arted more frequently. Aside from some screwing around on the first day, everything else went pretty easily. I wasn't drawing for any particular reason except to do so and these didn't go toward any larger work which is unusual. Maybe these were easier because I didn't care all that much and could focus on the art. There's probably a lesson there. Each piece was an hour or two.
Techincal crap (if anyone cares): 0.7mm HB mechanical pencil, non-kneadable eraser, and EF Ebony 6325 vintage pencil I bought before it was vintage on folded over 8.5"x14" printer paper bought around the same time. You can be part of a long line of people being snarky over my choice of art medium if you're into that kind of thing.
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