Author: Thrythlind aka Luke Green

Conclusion to the first case of our City of Mist campaign. Kelsey’s player takes the GM seat next time. We’ve decided our opening monologue is in the voice of the character belonging to the GM saying what they heard about the case later.

Also. The unnamed Rift of Chang-e (the sleeping woman) got hit with a status 6 hit and will never sleep again unless some serious transformation happens later. Though my character doesn’t know that yet.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2018/01/patricias-wellness-journal-consequences.html?m=1

Interesting idea I had today. I’ll probably be posting this around in a couple of places because it is a general concept that isn’t solely applicable to a specific game or genre. Going to be discussing a specific case but the ideas are applicable to similar amnesia style stories.

The idea started when I was creating a test character for the gorgon sorcerer heritage I had created. I don’t remember the exact process but the end product was a wood elf of the gorgon heritage who had worked as a servant in a high elf household only to be dismissed after two years and having those two years be extremely fuzzy and hard to remember. Her gorgon heritage was triggered a bit later when she was in a village watching some children play and was struck by an intense, unexplained sadness.

My idea was that she’d been subjected to repeated applications of memory altering and charming magic such that her memory is rather permanently shot. Some things she can’t forget even if she wants to and others just won’t stick.

For example, she might function well enough during an adventure but once it’s over she might forget it happened or else remember as a story she’d heard instead of something she lived. This is mostly to avoid the RP causing headaches for other players.

I figured maybe discuss things with the GM ahead of time to give my ideas on what happened relating that those would be the character’s subconscious suspicions (in this case, high elf nobles wanted an heir and one was sterile but they didn’t want to admit to it or give whatever legal compensation was due a surrogate. So memory and charm magic followed by kicking the surrogate out afterwards.) on the idea that these could be wrong.

For ongoing issues with the damaged memory the idea came to me of make an Int roll on events to see how I remembered them and record them in appropriate notebooks. Seared in mind here. Forget one element there. Forget everything somewhere else.

Then I started thinking about how to handle this as a GM because I might end up building this character and doing a GM emulator deal.

And I’ve been watching Risk Legacy on LRR’s AFK stream as well as getting to play a couple of scenarios of Gloomhaven. And the idea of having envelopes set up with different memories sealed in them that might be unlocked at certain points. In my case with the idea of a GM emulator this would require me knowing the triggers which could be a subconscious thing for the character.

Plus you could bring a bit of PbtA to it and in a partial success/hard choice sort of circumstance you’d have to decide between two or more envelopes with the others being destroyed, never to be read.

Possibly also have an envelope on hand for if some other player (in a typical campaign) tries to read or alter the character’s mind or memories. Which, if I’ve played the character well enough to that point might be the first clue the character’s more than just quirky and/or absent minded.

Which does come to another point for standard campaigns. To keep this something the other players aren’t immediately aware of the envelope thing would have to be handled very subtly. Perhaps with private messaging or text. It would be relatively easy in a digital game since there’s lots of ways to unobtrusively pass notes.

From RP perspective this is RPing mental illness. Pure and simple. You’d have to be careful to make sure it doesn’t become a caricature. The character would have a lot of coping mechanisms to avoid the situation being noticed and they’d have to be functional or you’re going to frustrate other people. As I said, done right people might just think your character’s a bit quirky until the final reveal.

It’s a very work heavy concept. And one I don’t think I’ll get to play both because it’s unfair to demand that much work from a GM and because of time constraints. Elements might be used here and there in games now that I’ve had the thoughts though.

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

The main point of this is to take the same concept and recreate it in multiple game systems, right now there are three. D&D 5th Edition, Fate Core, and Hero System 6th edition

I will likely do other versions of Fate later (especially as games like Strands of Fate use a very different character generation system) but am unlikely to do this with other editions of Hero or D&D. As I did the D&D version first I’ll probably end up looking back at that and seeing if there were additional things I wanted to say.

I chose the gorgon archer because: A) I liked gorgons as a concept; B) It’s an unusual concept for a PC that isn’t going to be pre-built in many systems; C) it’s primary focus is on martial skills but also has a touch of supernatural abilities.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/10/the-gorgon-archer-in-multiple-systems.html

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

Well, of all the mages so far, Vanifer has put up the best fight. She managed a dominate person, which admittedly could have been against a better target but Fennle was the one chasing her and in view. So at least it lost Fennle one full action. Fennle also lost actions to putting out fires on herself from the elemental attacks.

Control abilities really won this fight. Shield Master, Grease, Channel Divinity, and also just avoiding allowing Vanifer from getting a firm place to cast her more dangerous spells from.

My original plan for this was to start Ignatia and the Chimera closer to the fight, but then realized that her message spell wouldn’t reach them. She knew about the alarm spell though and was able to maneuver the hobgoblins and elements. Then she used a scroll to cast the hallucinatory terrain before triggering the alarm and using an effect for a loud voice to call for aid.

The forges prevented the efreet and others there from hearing, but most everybody else came running. I also lost time not having Ignatia cast mage armor and fire shield before hitting the field, but she managed some good effect as well.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/10/vanifer-burns-out-princes-of-apocaverse.html

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

The direction of this session was decided when we looked at what the book called an “arrow slit” but appeared as a five foot gap on the map. It allowed the heroes to avoid some nasty defensive measures and make a pell mell assault deep into the center of the temple.

This is rather similar to what they did with the Earth cult outpost earlier but with some added issues. Namely, while there is a safe place they could rest a day on this map, they are nowhere near it. They’ve made a lot of noise. Killed two of the lieutenants and rested an hour while the villains organized.

Next session will be interesting.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/09/the-heat-is-on-princes-of-apocaverse.html?m=1

I’ve been signal boosting the con a bit but not sure how much good it’s doing. Not looking forward to being able to run anything as close to time as it is. Will have to see about playing something. I’m sure my regulars wouldn’t mind me going to a convention for one week.

Me: Let’s try to do a sort of simple monster-hunting game based on this board game for 30 minutes of after school play.

Japanese Teacher: Okay, let’s try to make unique cards.

Me: Okay, 4 locations decks of 10 cards each?

JTE: 1, 2, 3,…40 cards. sure.

Me: By November, right?

JTE: sheepishly Maybe October….?

Me: Uhhh…..I’ll try?

We’re using the board from Flying Frog’s “Touch of Evil” as a focus thing, but not actually using dice just having kids say “I go here.”

Goal is to get kids to talk and answer questions or tell parts of a story.

The cards and such are to facilitate that.

Thinking a mechanic based on number of sentences the student says resulting better situations for them.

Junior high school kids, native Japanese.

Anybody else have ideas?

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

Mariah the Blue, City Watch Investigator of questionable excellence and draconic sorceress of blue reports on the continuance of her quest to secure the aid of the Knights of the Silver Oak for the sake of her the independent town of Athlin and the lord who runs it.

I did a bit of damage with my Crackling Sphere (a lightning version of Flaming Sphere) but mostly it was used for generating light and herding creatures so that they went in specific directions. Still, that was very useful.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/09/watch-report-insufficient-lighting.html

Okay, in the interest of not flooding too much, I’m going to post the other two reports I finished here and just use separate reports when I’m posting to various blog-update sites.

In addition to the Monster of the Week Campaign report, I also have my playtest campaigns for Divine Blood, the third playtest campaign ended some months back and I had just now gotten around to writing the campaign’s last play report when we’re planning to start the fourth playtest tomorrow.

In this case we did sort of rush the last ending because we’d all pretty much gotten our fill of combat-centric Fate stories for a while and had had this great idea for a new campaign we were eager to get on to. But I could have stretched this out a bit more if I wanted. I could have had them come close to being discovered and deliberately had them avoiding combat and contact so that they wouldn’t ruin the simultaneous operation. In any case, we found some issues were taking into talks about a revised version of Divine Blood some minor issues to add to the grammar fixes and the plan to match the graphic design to something similar to what we did for Demon Next Door.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/08/divine-blood-wasps-among-butterflies.html

Which leads me to the last report, which is basically just linking the campaign front page for the fourth playtest campaign. We’ve got a couple of targets here.

On the one hand we’re looking at the Gestalt Mind advantage from Strands of Fate and trying to adapt it with an eye toward A) handling larger numbers of personalities. B) more playability and less book-keeping.

On the other, this is the first time we’re seriously delving into the extradimensional space around Earth. We’ve had some occasional peeks at Yomi and Nirvana in the past, and a battle within an office built into extradimensional space by a faerie court enforcer. We’ve also ended a campaign with the characters ending up in a Socrates Group base, mostly likely on Shangri-La. But as of yet, we haven’t extensively looked at the various shards created, abandoned, settled, forgotten, and found within the surrounding cosmology.

And we’re doing it from the cabins of a luxury, high-tech air-ship.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/08/airship-lost-fourth-divine-blood.html

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

Okay, there’s still something like 11 to 15 random NPCs I have to hunt down photographs for and post to the Suspects and Witnesses pages, not to mention finding pics for the one or two new critters that have shown up in the game in the last three sessions. But at least I am now completely up to date on the M-Com play reports.

We’re coming round to the finish line here with only the Mexico City and Louisville rituals left to run before we can close out this season and the players’ home reality is safe from the multiverse-devourer (need a better name for it) for at least another thousand years, during which time they can start to look for ways to protect the rest of their multiverse or even destroy the creature when/if we come back to this setting.

Incidentally, after this, my brother has a plan to run a rather odd D&D campaign. We’ve run a few prologue sessions already, should be interesting.

Also, Man With the Plan, Connect the Dots, and the Flake move that detects lies are pretty powerful story movers.

Man With the Plan and Connect the Dots are the only reason I failed to blow up that Air BnB they decided to use.

http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2017/08/m-com-mission-report-operation-jealous.html

I recently heard there was a Gauntlet discord…where is that?