Gaming and reading updates

Marshal Hathaway
(not a character in this campaign)

Last night was supposed to be the next session of our game. Well, it was, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped. A couple of days ago, the 6th player, who came from the original group that I "inherited" confirmed that he's not going to be available for at least the short term, although the timing is indefinite. So, we're five players, and I've had all five of the characters in a session already at least twice now.  The other "new" player came again, and this was her second session. Another guy was iffy; he's got a lot of work issues going on, and his availability is, in general, kind of flaky. He didn't come. Another guy we knew was traveling for work, but he was supposed to be back yesterday, and there was hope that he'd join the session. He didn't make it. So, we were down to the husband/wife team, and the "new" lady... except when I got there, the husband had a migraine, and although there was "hope" that he'd join later, he never did and I didn't see him. So, where I'm now in theory only a single session away from finishing the "first" adventure of my campaign, I only had two players, and we didn't even have access to anyone else's character sheet, so I was definitely reluctant to get them in over their heads, or move too aggressively towards the conclusion. I spent some time getting them to flesh out their character backgrounds a little more; mostly in terms of giving me things that will be interesting for me to play with as GM. Tanya's character Ombra, for example, was raised as an orphan in a weird shadar-kai monastery village. While she thinks she knows her background, she was very explicit that her character could very well be wrong about what she thinks. By the luck of the dice, her character was picked as the lookalike for the Enemy Within Kastor Lieberung caper... but now I'm thinking of adding to it the Mako SWTOR stuff, i.e., not only is "Fraulein Benedicta" a lookalike, but there will be other lookalikes that pop up, with hints of a shady conspiracy that led to these "cloned" versions all being created for some purpose... but then they somehow got out into the wild. I don't have any development for this yet, but I've got plenty of time to think about it.

Erika's character doesn't remember anything from the last couple of weeks or so. Last she remembers, she was with her "clan" in a part of the world that is unfamiliar, and then she woke up in the basement of the insane asylum where the other PCs found her last session. I don't know if Erika herself didn't get it, or if this was part of her character's confusion, but even though I said flat out that this was not in the Forgotten Realms (I'm a little miffed, honestly, that FR and D&D in the latest edition is treated as if it is one and the same) so her character kept talking about Faerun and stuff. Nobody knew what she was talking about. This could easily be her being confused and/or crazy. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if all of the memories that she has are actually fake, implanted, and maybe something about the same group that created the clones messed around with her too. But we'll see. This is till the introductory adventure. It's not even the "real" chapter 1. I've got time to figure that out, and without the time we had last night, I wouldn't have had all of these juicy character options to bite in to.

We also had them running around looking for clues, investigating and generally getting into some trouble, but not too much, because I didn't really want to do any combat with just the two of them. I really hope, however, that we have enough people to actually run the true introductory concluding session and I can set them up to start the real chapter one.

Who else do I have as characters? Jared's character, who will be one of my most reliable guys, I think, is a gnome cleric of Tyr named Vorgin Jones. Or maybe Vorjin Jones, since that's how he pronounces it. He also pronounces Tyr like Twr. I think he's trying to approximate the actual Old Norse pronunciation, which would be more like the German vowel ü, so Tür. There isn't any such sound in English which is part of the problem, but Twr isn't really  the closest approximation of it. I think he mostly just wants something that he can say that isn't exactly "teer" like people would normally say. Whatever. It's not like he's going to go around preaching the doctrine of Tyr as a major character trait, or meet the guy, so I don't care how he pronounces it; it'll almost never come up. He's a gnome too. He admits that he hasn't yet really gotten a roleplaying handle on his character, or what his deal is, and that he doesn't think that he's quite yet an interesting character, honestly. In his own words. 

John's character, Fenwick Hallstedder, is a human monk, with a noble background of some sort. He's either slumming, or perhaps on some kind of penance or temporary exile, or "you're in time out until you grow up and straighten up your behavior" kind of thing, but he's missed the last two sessions, all of them since we started doing this campaign "for real" so he's not a character that I have a real handle on anything interesting to do with either... although I'm thinking some branch of his family might be involved in the shenanigans with Ombra and ... whats-her-name.

Justin's character is the one that I'm obviously the least interested in, and the rest of the group kind of feels the same way as near as I can tell. What can you do? He's a nice enough guy, and I inherited him as part of the group, but he's obviously not the kind of player that I normally look for. His character is named... "Hey, new guy." Apparently, he ran a whole campaign with the group with a character named Pastrami on Rye. He's obviously the kind of guy who likes hanging out with the group, getting some social time in, and interacting mechanically with the game, but I have a funny feeling that the rest of us will all spend most of our time ignoring his character, and mostly pretending like he doesn't exist, except in combat and occasionally here and there when he helps with solving some puzzle or investigation or whatever. Sigh. Getting any meaningful roleplaying out of him may not be worth the effort, so I'm unlikely to really engage much on that front unless he starts engaging first. 

Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining that I have him. I don't mind him being in the game. But from the perspective of the "story" of the game, he clearly doesn't fit, isn't meant to be taken very seriously, and so... won't be. If the game were ever converted to a story or screenplay, like the Critical Role show, his character wouldn't even make an appearance at all.

So, we'll see what happens next week. Tanya, who's usually my most engaged roleplayer and most engaging character (and the DM of the Tyranny of Dragons game) isn't available, but we think that she's the only one who will be missing. Kind of a shame, but I don't want to not hold the session for one player, even if she is otherwise the most consistent and most engaged of the whole group. This is, after all, the finale, sure, but just the finale of the introduction. There's plenty more that I have planned going on.

Oh, I also tagged this as reading. I did finish "House of the Beast" last night before going over to the game. I also finished some of the other material in the book, but I still have about twenty pages or so of "supplemental material", namely the "set piece" mini adventure, the Elaine Cunningham short fiction, and the Bestiary. It was significantly better to read than Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, but it's still not as engaging as I'd like, because it was still a dungeon-crawl, after all. I'm much more interested in the (we'll see, but claimed) urban intrigue adventure that's the next one in the trawl as soon as I finish the last little batch of minor sections that are in the book but which follow and are supplemental to the adventure itself. 

While I have some other products from other trawls queued up in my SumatraPDF reader, I'm not likely to read them until I finish these last Paizo D&D 3.5 products. I've got four Campaign books to read, four stand-alone modules, and four more chapters of Legacy of Fire. After I cross the Rubicon of D&D 3.5 to PFRPG, I won't care quite as much about keeping them in synch; I'll mostly just be reading which trawl products in which trawl that I'm interested in. I don't believe that I'll really do a lot of stuff out of order, necessarily, but I'll only dip into the trawl that I feel like reading next rather than trying to keep them in lock step. Once I finish this Paizo stuff, I'll at least read a new Eberron book and a new Forgotten Realms book (as well as finishing the Dark Worlds SPCM campaign) and probably also read Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and Curse of Strahd and Monster Manual IV. That means that it'll be a few weeks before I dive back in to Paizo.