Running Dreamland Adventures in D&D

After a month of conferences, illness and Halloween craziness, my regular game group finally managed get back to the table this past Monday. We ran through a session that accomplished something I had been wanting to run for a long time. The adventure we began on Monday took place in the dreams of one of the PCs.

I came up with a few custom mechanics for creating a dream-like feel to the adventure, and I will get to those in just a bit, but first a little back story to set the stage.

Encounter Design: Party Planning

Two weeks ago, I ran the first real session of my second campaign. Because the session picked up just a few months after the climax of the first campaign, my players decided that the wanted to kick things off with a celebratory feast. Makes sense, given that they saved the world, and all.

Celebrations aren't new to this particular group of players. Their characters have thrown several shindigs over the course of their careers. In the past, however, its usually been just a matter of blowing some well-earned loot, bolstering their reputation, and the in-session commitment has involved a bit of flowery description and maybe ten minutes of our time.

This time was different. This time, they wanted something... several somethings, actually.

During a couple pre-campaign get togethers while the players were leveling, upgrading their base of operations and blowing their well earned loots on new shiny things, they hatched a plan for this party. They wanted to use it to advance a couple plot threads left over after the last campaign, and to hopefully kick off a couple more.

Specifically, they hoped to accomplish the following:

1. Reveal the secret royal identity of the party's rogue
2. Legitimize their ownership of their base of operations (gained while the land was in conflict)
3. See if they could find some insight into an ongoing demon-possession problem the party monk is dealing with
4. Look into purchasing an airship from the gnomes so they could go recover the remains of a dragon hoard they were forced to leave in a far off ruin during an earlier adventure
5. Look into opening a trade route via an abandoned pass in their territory to a neighboring country
6. Oh, and of course, endear themselves to the people

That's it, no bigs, right?

Well, of course there was no way I would let them reap the potential rewards to be gained from these various desires with just a bit of description and a few minutes time. There are big ticket items in there, and they would need to work for them! So, I decided to turn the celebration into a session-long encounter, complete with the very real possibility of horrible, embarrassing failure.

Here's how I did it:

New Campaign Kick-off

From CopyPaperRepost

Mustering the Players

We had our first meeting for the new D&D campaign on Monday to talk about things like character progression, adventure plans and to do some shopping with the party's well-deserved spoils of war.

All of my players are back for the new adventure, and most are playing the same characters. The two whose characters were killed in the final battle of the last campaign decided to change things up a bit. Both elected to have their characters raised from the dead, which is a totally reasonable request what with them having just saved the sub-continent, if not the world.

The cleric's body was spirited out of the country by the members of her order before she was brought back. As her player put it, "she came back wrong." I should clarify that she didn't swing towards evil, though she did become more chaotic. She's also got a pretty big chip on her shoulder and looks to be shifting from upstanding tow-er of the church line to somewhat of a loose cannon. Maybe I should brush up on my "turn in your holy symbol and mace!" speech... "YOU'RE OFF THE CASE!"

...ahem

Like this, but with more fur, claws and teeth.

Speaking of cop analogies, after being resurrected, the paladin pulled a Roger Murtaugh, declaring that she was "getting too old for this sh*t". I believe her decision was to retire to start a shrine to her nature deity in the valley where the PC's keep is located.

Her player decided to roll up an entirely new character, which is a bard/shadowdancer/were-bear. If you are familiar with the show Firefly, River Tam is very similar to a shadowdancer. They are incredibly graceful and deadly, and at higher levels can jump between shadows, so to envision this character, picture a dancing bear, who jumps between shadows while throwing knives at you.

I should just end the post here.

but I wont.

Campaign Retrospective: Synthesis

Today, I want to talk about where inspiration comes from, and the little voice that tries to stifle it by pointing out how unoriginal your ideas are. I embarked on my first D&D campaign, in part, to prove to myself that I could sustain an interesting story over an extended arc. I like to think that the end result was a pretty unique tale and a unique experience for my players. However, my story was largely crafted by shamelessly ripping elements from existing stories, which I found inspiring.

Now that my first campaign is complete, I feel like I can discuss my inspiration in a bit more detail without spoiling things for my players. This post reveals, in very broad terms, the sources behind my campaign plot, and how I mixed them to suit my own ends.

The idea for the Westerlands began with a combination of two simple things. 1.) My infatuation with Muse's song, Knights of Cydonia, and 2.) My dissatisfaction with D&D's alignment system. I really wanted to create a campaign arc triggered by a Paladin's dilemma, which pit two essentially lawful good forces against each other.

As I began to flesh out the primary arc, I latched onto the rules for blight in the Heroes of Horror book. I decided to use these rules as a backdrop to a plot constructed by forcibly mashing elements from Hamlet into Macbeth. I added a wicked queen who kills a king and then uses her influence with her husband to hold onto control (Macbeth) In my story, she was actually plotting against the king while pushing him towards an evermore tyrannical rule, citing the need for order in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, the estranged brother of the king sets out to find what is causing the mysterious blight while simultaneously looking for the true murderer of the king (latter bit from Hamlet). The conflict builds through twists and turns until the brothers finally confront each other and the estranged prince summons his father's ghost to call out the true murderer (Hamlet). The queen is accused, forcing her to kill her husband to create confusion before making her escape.

With the country reunited, the players were left to deal with the blight. I turned to Conrad's Heart of Darkness to inspire the feel of the long journey into the blighted lands to the East. The players had to move past outposts where strange behavior was becoming more common as human needs ran up against scarcity, fueled by the influence of creeping evil.

Once the party reached the source of the blight in the mountains near an ancient, ruined capital, I turned to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for inspiration. I even had hobgoblin thugees, a corrupted ally and a minecart chase encounter planned. The cart chase never became necessary.

For the final battle, I didn't really draw from specific sources of inspiration, except to mine as many fantasy battle tropes as possible. The speech from Independence Day, an allied army of good vs. an army of evil nastiness, last minute reinforcements showing up to propel the protagonists through to the final confrontation. Flinging magic, squadrons of marauding skeletons, flying beasts… I basically just poured it all in before having the party confront the evil masterminds just as they were attempting to bring their grand plan to fruition.

That is the overall plot arc, but within that story, I drew inspiration from… to name a few:

• Blazing Saddles
• The Elenium
• Ghostbusters
• Harry Potter
• Henry IV
• Invader Zim
• The Legend of Zelda
• LOL Cats
• Mass Effect
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Naruto
• Night at the Museum
• Star Trek

As I progressed through the campaign, and in my personal life went from an unempolyed, single 20-something to a full-time employed, married 30-something, I felt any anxiety about co-opting existing stories begin to fall away. Now, I never copied an existing property in its entirety, but felt no qualms about mining them for good ideas. Not only did this spirit of borrowing lead to a richer story, but it also served as an excellent time-saver while prepping around a busy life.

If you are getting ready to create a fictional story, whether it is a book, a play or film script, or a game, I encourage you to push the harping little voice that accuses you of unoriginality aside, because just as each new child is born of generations of previously existant people, so too can a unique story arise from existing good ideas.

Between Campaigns: Planning and Re-Organization

Now that the wedding craziness has passed, I find myself slowly shifting back into D&D mode. I am currently in what I suspect is a rather rare situation: having successfully completed one campaign and gearing up to start another with (mostly) the same characters in the same world.

I am trying to use this intermission time to get my game notes in order so I can approach the next chapter with a better system of organization. This is not to say that I am changing my current system, just that I have not had a chance to fully implement it. Well, now I'm implementin'! and holy carp is it tedious to do so!

I've been trying to break my tasks into manageable chunks. The first step being to get the character records in my OneNote into a consistent format. Even this is proving daunting as I would often pull in stock descriptions from the 3.5 SRD website to avoid having to pull out a monster manual in the middle of a game, but when I had some time on my hands or was creating an NPC from scratch, I would use my own custom mini-stat template. If I was making a group of allies or baddies, I would often just shorthand a single block and then indicate a couple key stats to tweak up or down when rolling for the group's leader or other unique characters. Well, now that I am faced with getting my DM house in order, I look at this mix of desperate time-saving measures and I want to scream.

I'm sure I could move forward just fine without cleaning up my mess, but knowing that its there really bugs me. I also know that once we get wrapped up in the next campaign that I will never get around to cleaning up this pile, so I need to do it now, or not at all.

While I'm busy on my own trying to get my notes organized, my players and I are also starting to plan out some intermission sessions. These will be less formal get togethers to discuss things like how to incorporate any character swaps, what improvements to make to the party's base of operations and to go shopping with all of their reward money from saving the world.

Have you ever had to get organized between games, or even other creative projects? How do you handle it? Is it worth it?

Re-cap: When Things go Really Right

What could possibly go wrong?

Warning to my players! This post contains spoilers! Not about the story, but about my techniques for crafting encounters and heightening engagement. If you don't want to be overanalyzing my future motives, approach with caution.

Monday night's game was one of the best sessions I've run in a long time, and I've been mulling over what went right since the dice stopped rolling that evening. The session focused on a very complex situation involving a ton of moving parts, which had plenty of opportunity to fly off the rails or get seriously bogged down. GM's often spend a great deal of time navel-gazin', soul searchin' and introspectin' when they have a problem at the game table, but I feel like when things go right, we often follow up with a "that was awesome!" without looking at the "why" in the same way.

Make-it Monday: Map, Lastholt Valley

This past week, I started planning for the epic final adventure in my D&D campaign, which is about to hit its fourth anniversary. I drew up the first in what will likely be a series of battlefield maps as my players march with an army of goodie two-shoes in an attempt to beat back a fiendish invasion.

The map shows a valley on the edge of an ancient, ruined city where the two armies will most likely meet. Over the next couple days and weeks, I will make versions of this map with troop positions, movement and plans of attack and defense. But first, the calm before the storm.

Overscheduled

My girlfriend and I frequently have discussions about scheduling and over-scheduling. While we have many things in common, which cause us to like each other (like, like-like), we also have several distinct differences. One very prominent difference is that she is a "planner" She likes her schedule orderly and full. If she hasn't started working on her Halloween costume by August, she starts to get nervous. She fills her week with classes, dinners with friends and other forecast events weeks and months in advance.

By contrast, I prefer to take a more casual approach to my activities. I can handle one or two weekly commitments, but I like having the option of sitting on my butt in front of the tube if I'm exhausted from work. I don't want to put myself in a position where I feel forced -dare I say, "railroaded?"- to hang out with friends or do something I would otherwise enjoy if I were approaching it on my own terms.

So, why this ramble about relationships and personality differences? Well, I realized during last night's D&D session that player characters in an RPG can be overscheduled as well. As a DM running a weeknight campaign (3-3.5 hours of play with a hard stop time) I get really wrapped up in moving the story along. I want to get my players to the next boss fight, the next town, the next big reveal. I worry that the pace of the story is dragging, so I crack the whip in my head and bellow, "Hyah mule! I say, Hyah!" In short, I regularly try to squeeze too much play time into our play time!

You have three waves of orcs to defeat before piano lessons mister.
You're having fun, dammit!

Last night, it finally hit home that much of my recent malaise over my campaign might be because I overfill my sessions. While I try hard to avoid railroading my players, to give them options for approaching different situations, when I try to fit four encounters into a three hour session, I find myself getting impatient when my players start deliberating over those options. My irritability starts to show, and my players don't get the time to reach some of their more creative and innovative ideas. The play starts to feel hack and slashy and downright bland.

Well yesterday's game was different. I didn't let myself worry that we have only been playing three hours a month for the last three months. I didn't try to force things along quickly and I presented my players with several very open-ended situations:

• You know you are traveling through hostile territory, what's your plan for avoiding detection?
• You know you will have to cross the enemy lines, how do you want to do that?
• You've been discovered by a patrol that is suspicious of your alibi, how do you respond?
• You've made it through the initial checkpoint, but need papers and/or authorization to make it through the next one, how do you get them?

Most importantly, however, I allowed my players the time to discuss their plans for answering each of these questions before moving on. I felt like the game play last night had a creative spark that has been dampened for a while. My players were thinking both inside and outside the box, and when I inevitably poked at the holes in their plans, they were quick on their feet to try and plug the gaps.

half-orc monk: "Oh, hey Mr. patrolman, I wasn't hiding behind this tree, I was just having a piss, what can I do for you?"

Loosening my death grip on the schedule for the night made the game actually feel fuller, like we got more done than during sessions where I line up the encounters like dominoes. Bonus: My players got to a great cliffhanger stopping point, which was right where I  was hoping they would end the evening. I liked that feeling. I was happy to be a part of it.

So, the plan moving forward... maybe... if I feel like it... is to worry less about driving the plot forward by cramming in the encounters, in favor of preparing to meet the creative approaches my players dream up.

Focus

In this post, I want to focus on a couple of things having to do with... focus.

SQUIRREL!

But seriously:

Focus on the numbers:

My posting has slipped a little in the past couple months, mostly because my workdays have been getting busier and busier. This is a trend I expect to continue for close to a year at least. This is a good thing, but it does make it more challenging to post to this here blog on a regular basis.

Despite my lapse in bloggage, my page views, seem to be doing quite well. In July, I came within 50 views of breaking 2000 for the month, but slipped back to about 1600 in August. Still, that means each of my posts for the month was viewed 160 times. I know this is really small potatoes -like, nanoscale- in the world of blogging, but it makes me feel good.

Focus on the story:

This is actually more of a re-focus. Last week, as I was struggling with how to plan my next game session, I suddenly had an epiphany. Borrowing from the school of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) I decided to ask myself the very simple question of, "What is the objective for the upcoming session?" as in, what do I want my players to accomplish? When I set a single, concrete story objective, everything else suddenly seemed to fill in. Ideas for challenges the players could face immediately started to form in my mind, all designed to make the achievement of said objective feel like a worthwhile accomplishment.

It may sound a bit like railroading, but the objective was born of a plan expressed by my players in a previous session. Also, I will merely present the various challenges along the way and leave it up to the players to decide how to overcome them. Choices abound!

Now, if only I can remember in the future that this technique really helps.

Creative Stumbling Blocks

I'm back from my business trip and have started looking ahead to my game session tomorrow, and with a bit more dread to the final act of my grand-mega campaign of doom. As I mentioned last month, many of the newbie mistakes I made two years ago while starting this campaign are now threatening to trip me up. The biggest challenge weighing on my mind at the moment is figuring out how to create a satisfying payoff for my players as they proceed into the third and final act of the current campaign structure. I wish I had known about Rob Donaghue's Underpants Gnome theory of adventure design when I first started DMing. The premise is Zen-like in its wisdom and simplicity. Having missed the underpants train, the myriad threads of my grandiose plot loom before me like the tangled arms of the mighty Kraken, threatening to pull me under. Deep breath... you can do it. Just tie them all together with lots of blood and explosions.