Update from the Lich Queen 9/4/17

Art

D&D: Saturday Session

Things went well, except for drama and what not. We had a good ol' time at the siege, but people brought some inter-party conflict that really drug things through the mud. Anyways, next week should be better.

Next Week?

Yep! I have a large dungeon played, based on one of the player's goals. Delving into an ancient temple of a god that went from a goddess of protection to a goddess of shadows. They're looking to retrieve artifacts to kill the Naga.

Even more D&D?

Well, Pathfinder. I got invited to a little game of like, four whole people. Doing Gestalt classes, and I'm highly debating on Bard / Sorcerer combo right now.

Update from the Lich Queen 8/28/17

Life

I got my name and gender marker changed! It's official now, according to the state I'm a girl. Fantastic. It's both exciting, and a little scary. In general though, it's awesome. You should've seen me, I was shaking so much through the whole thing. I've been crazy busy.

Art

I actually have done a bit of artwork. Here you go!

https://hunter-64.deviantart.com/art/Ghost-Rowan-701162466

Starcraft

I got the remaster, and let me tell you, I'm addicted. Played through most of the campaign, and uh, played a few ladder games. I suck again! It's a good feeling though, the game is enjoyable. I'm playing Terran at the moment, I used to be a Protoss player but so far that is slowly changing, as I'm highly enjoying the slow push of Terran siege with mechs. I'm not a huge fan of bio in all honesty, but it's not because it's bad, it's because I have a giant bias towards robots. However I'm practicing both, and I can pretty confidently beat an AI, players are another story. I've beaten one or two, and lost all the rest.

I'm considering making some posts about Starcraft actually. I think it could be fun.

D&D

So this is actually going to be two sessions since I didn't make a thing about the last one.

Session 1

The party mutinied and was about to throw the captain overboard, our CG character stopped it and the CNs agreed that we'd keep him died up for the time being (spoiler alert, the CE finished him off later). They went to town inspected the goods they had and made a deal, which down in a shady part of town. After an obvious ambush and a showdown, they made off with their loot and were about to head back to the ship before we ended.

Session 2

This was rather fun, we were missing some people, they explored the missing people reports and were ambushed by a doppelganger and his Naga men, a plot to lure helpless victims to captivity. The players had brought a sizeable force to combat them, and were able to fend them off. However one of them escaped, and the Naga decided to launch their attack before the town could ready their full defenses.

This worked out in the Naga's favor, and it wasn't really about the players losing in this section, it was more about an epic cinematic set piece that I got to show off. I know, people aren't fond of cinematic style gameplay, but this was one of those cases where I thought it would work. This was all improv too so I didn't have time to debate the whole thing.

Either way, people seemed to enjoy it. The players went to the front lines and held the forces off while all the ships on the dock loaded every spot they could with civilians and guards. Eventually, they hopped on board the captain's ship, the rogue throwing a bomb to fend off some of the Naga as the remaining men hopped on board. As they sailed off back towards Dock Town, they heard this massive roar as a hulking Kraken jumped from the water, it's limbs flaying around as it began attacking to last few boats. The players all began firing at it wildly, the ranger rolling a fantastic crit and hitting the beast in it's eye. It recoiled in pain and dunked it's head back into the water, trying to get away from the accurate bow fire. It was only a delay, but it was just enough to ensure the rest of the boats could escape.

In the end, the town belonged to the Naga, but everyone seemed to have a good time.

Update from the Lich Queen 8/14/17

Legal Stuff

I had to go talk to someone about putting in paperwork to get my name legally changed. As tiresome as it was, it was also incredibly exciting and rewarding. Additionally, due to my shitty circumstances I'm actually going to be able to get the whole $116 fee payed for! Awesome.

Contradiction

Is a fun game, you should check it out. I watched somebody do a full play-through and I don't really regret it much.

Artwork

I did some artwork for a friend as a commission, and it's totally 100% NSFW unfortunately. I can't show that here, but I'm also working on a little secret project that I hope to unveil sometime later. The project involves a mixture of writing and artwork, and hopefully to prove to be a fantastic outlet for my creative energies.

Saturday Game

Was unfortunately postponed. Scheduling issues.

Update from the Lich Queen (7/24/17)

Hey! It's lich queen Naomi again. The last two weeks have essentially been non stop work. Writing, map designing, digging through the monster manual, etc. I've had to learn 5E's rules, look through it's changes, talk to the players, introduce some people to the game, etc, etc. It's been a bit tiring actually, but it's had some excitement. First off there is the one-shot I ran.

One-Shot

I ran a one-shot with only two of my players (they were the most readily available) to try and get the gist of 5Es rules. I personally have an easier time learning when I'm just doing what it is I'm trying to learn. My players seem the same. I also wanted to get those two up to speed, so I could focus on teaching the new players separately once we are running the main campaign. On top of that, we were all kind of itching to play, so it wasn't exactly a bad idea to me.

The setup was actually kind of simple, it was a 3 person game, just Maggot, Dunmur, and myself as GM. We generated characters real fast (Fun fact: I generated Maggot's character and had Maggot generate Dunmur's character) and I threw them into a game they had NO CLUE what has going on, and this is intentional. It's intentional because I have a more long-term purpose for this game, and I don't want the player's influencing it too much. That's not to say I'm railroading any aspect of this, but instead I had a simple concept that has one or two important aspects, and I need them there to get this idea to work without a hitch.

Side note: We're playing online using Roll20, the name's I'm using are their online aliases, I know their real names but I don't feel like using them.

Things didn't go entirely as planned but it did work out ... sort of. See I kinda misunderstood the CR guidelines (and forgot that 5E's CRs suck ass), and almost killed both players. The players were on a boat before it got attacked by this giant tentacley kraken like beast, the boat was destroyed and they were knocked out unconscious. Their bodies slipped into the water and as their vision faded to black, something happened. They were taken down into an underwater prison, where they finally awoke inside a damp cell. I was pretty lenient on what they had, most of what was taken from their person was simply weapons or things that could open the cells, I of course made an exception for the rogue's Thieve's Tools.

The first fight was pretty fun, Maggot (our Rogue), gets clever and starts throwing objects at the naga guard he runs into. The two of them gang up on it, take his weapon, and finish it off. In a way, they got a bit lucky since everything went off without a hitch. They round the corner, find their stuff, and turn around to notice that two naga have started coming that way to investigate what's going on. Dunmur (our Bard) is just like "Nah, fuck it, 2v1 I can take both of you!", and actually rolls intimidation to get both of them to come fight him. While Maggot is trying to hide around the corner and slip away, however he doesn't want to abandon the bard, so he stays kinda close. The naga charges up annnnd the next thing I know both of them are at 0 hp. "Uh oh ... I think these guys are a bit much." I took a pause for a second and took a thought. The naga knocks out the bard using non-lethal damage, he's dragged off and hastily thrown into a cell, they don't even strip his gear. The other was dragged off by a civilian that they freed, who knew a thing or two about medicine. He heals him up, takes the healing potion from Maggot's body and administers it.

Skip forward a bit, the bard escapes his cell, and the rogue has been unlocking all the cells while the naga were distracted. They gather all of the men and go for the front door, which is magically sealed. Maggot realizes this and is a bit perplexed, and looks over to Dunmur for assistance, he has knock, right? Nope. He used both level 2 slots in the first fight because, reasons. I make up some bullshit about one of the NPCs knowing how to undo the lock but he needs a few minutes, in which they need to guard him, but Maggot isn't going to sit for 5+ minutes. He wanders off to the side and checks one of the store rooms where there is another equipment chest. I look down at my notes and see that I had an item pile that was meant for the research lab, and realizing that the fight in there will be way too tough for them right now, I just move the item pile to that chest. It has a little circlet, a potion, and some explosives, of course that's the hint for the players to just blow the fucking door up, and they do. They're essentially in the clear all the way to the exit now, so I make things a little more tense by throwing two giant naga at them (for reference I was using a Yuan-ti Abomination, CR 7), and they simply slither towards the party, trying to cut their way through the other prisoners. They scramble around, find the potions of water breathing I left around, and make their escape with some of the NPCs who helped out.

I didn't get to show everything, but Dunmur did clearly ask "wait ... were they turning the humans into those lizard things?", I thought ... should I let him know? Fuck it, why not. I say "yes, absolutely, you guys didn't get to see the rest of the hints but that was the idea". They talk about it for a bit, and Maggot even asked "can you keep that character sheet? I'd actually like to play this character later."

Postmortem

I think the important thing was that the tension was high enough and my GM skills aren't that rusty as I was able to improvise, make things a bit fun, and really make the situation seem doable. They got out alive, had to make sacrifices (they couldn't take all of the prisoners), but in the end, they were free.

I'm actually some what excited to potentially play a game with Dograx, the rogue, as he was kind of a neat character. While we randomly rolled most of the characters, Dograx was a dragonborn, rogue who was raised by wolves. Maggot took that as a sign that while Dograx knew some common, he communicated mostly in growls and signals, and did not like speaking if he could help it. I may run a solo game with him provided there is time, and additionally, I have another campaign idea stored away for later that he could be apart, especially since the players were not informed which world this took place in.

I think I learned a lot about CR from this game, and I also tried an important little technique I learned from the well-known Matt Colville. Don't go easy on the players. It's not to say that you can't change things slightly or alter a tiny part of the dungeon, but instead to try and avoid the downward spiral of nerfing everything in your dungeon until it's no longer challenging. I kept a lot of it the same, but changed just a few things and then said to myself: "Nothing changes from here, let them figure out what needs to be done."

In the end? They got inventive, they weren't just doing the "I attack the naga ... again" routine, which I find happens in some of my games as players are trying way too much to play it like a video game where the only thing you can do is try harder until you die... If this weren't a one-shot where the players were stuck in a prison, I probably wouldn't have even let them get away given the fact that it probably would've been their fault.

City Campaign

I have something in the works, a West Marches inspired campaign setting where players are trapped in a large city as part of a resistance force against a massive army. The details are being worked on, but sooner or later I'll do a post about it's success or failure.

Choosing your game, and why it matters.

Tabletop gaming isn't exactly serious business, it's about having fun. However that doesn't mean we can't try to squeeze out as much entertainment out of the precious time you spending playing these games. Obviously, having an incredible and fulfilling game in a system that is perfect for your players is much more rewarding than having a pretty good game with something that didn't quite fit. So how do you go about doing that? Let's start with what aspects we should be looking at.

What to ask yourself

What are your 'player types'? I find that one of the best places to start is with is the players at the table. You might not really know much about them, but it's not a bad idea to ask. If they aren't familiar with tabletop games, don't sweat it! Find out what their favorite genres are in any medium. Video games, film, TV shows, books, music; anything. Do they like movies with complex narratives, or are they more the type to binge watch cheesy action films? Do they enjoy the adventurous style of The Hobbit or prefer the grand, larger than life scenes from Lord of the Rings? These sorts of answers can help inform you about what kind of player types each one falls into. I won't go into detail here about what each player type is, but they really boil down to what the person wants or likes. The 'optimizer' is generally going to gravitate towards games that give them the ability to customize and fine-tune their characters, while the 'actor' wants to play out a character in a story.

Tabletop Experience. This one is essentially just asking yourself, and everyone at the table if they've played tabletop games before and what have they played. This can help you a lot, as if you have a whole table full of people who are all familiar with D&D, then it can be a huge relief. If you fall back on playing D&D again, they're familiar with it and will likely have an easier time focusing on enjoying the game. If you switch to another system they will probably have no problem learning some new rules. It also matters for the GM, as lack of tabletop experience can make things difficult. It's hard learning a whole new game while you're still learning the basic concepts of being a game master.

What level of complexity are you looking for? There isn't really a handy chart for this, so it's going to be a generalized 'level' of complexity. This comes down to:

• How many factors will be influencing the average die roll?
• Per action, how many rolls have to be made to determine the outcome?
• How extensive is the list of actions and skills that I have to keep track of?
• How many mini-games inside of my tabletop game are present? (I'm looking at you, Shadowrun)

The lower each of those are, the lower the complexity; the higher they are, the higher the complexity. It's pretty simple and for newer tabletop players I often will recommend going with something that is low to medium. It's one of the reasons I frequently recommend D&D 5E, Pathfinder, Exalted or even older editions of D&D to start out with. Once players are more familiar with these kinds of games (or if they ever want to move beyond them), I fully encourage people to check out other systems such as Vampire: The Masquerade, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, GURPs, Burning Wheel, etc. They may be harder to run, but once you get the hang of it they can be incredibly rewarding.

What are YOUR skills? As a game master, it's important to know what you're good at. Tackling a complex political game with a heavy emphasis on writing and roleplaying isn't exactly a great idea if you think politics and story are your worst areas. It's good to improve those by practicing but it's not exactly fun for the players if they're expecting one type of game and get a half-baked version of it instead. In my humble opinion, it's better to slowly introduce those elements until you feel comfortable diving head first into it. However let's get away from what you're bad at and focus what you're good at. Are you good at number-crunching and encounter designs? Pathfinder will likely be able to let you take advantage of those skills. Are you more the type to write intricate plot lines with a dark and gritty atmosphere? Well I think you'll like Cyberpunk ... You see what I'm getting at? Additionally, you may want to take your non-gaming skills such as art, coding, architecture, game design, etc, into consideration; these may be able to influence your decision as well. I really like creating old-looking fantasy maps, and so D&D is a natural go to for me; not only am I interested in it, I'm good at it. The players definitely notice and appreciate when the GM goes just that extra little mile with the map.

Setting. This one kind of goes without saying, and is sort of in the 'player types' paragraph, however this is more about taste and set pieces. If your players are absolutely in love with Star Wars, it wouldn't be a bad idea to look into the Star Wars RPG. However this also extends to things not directly linked to an intellectual property. Seriously, if all your players talk about is Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Fifth Element, Deus Ex, and the future of humanity with the oncoming of rapidly advancing human augmentations ... then you might want to ask if they're interested in Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun. Or tell them to shut up and stop worrying about the coming dystopian future.

Not sure how to find a new game to run?

Don't worry the internet has got you covered ...

Google. Yep, I said it. I know you probably hate me now, but I had to add this one. There are plenty of websites out there with lists such as Top 100 Tabletop Roleplaying Games, and honestly, the lists usually aren't all that bad of resources. It's not going to tell you what you should play, but it may give you some leads to follow up on.

Reddit. If you hang around the tabletop subreddits enough you'll hear people mentioning all kinds of games, hell I learned that Eclipse Phase was a thing through seeing it in comments. Additionally, you can just ask, most of the subreddits are nice enough as long as you follow their rules.

Ask your players. They actually might have a suggestion, or they might even know exactly what game they want to play. If you have a more experienced player at the table, they might even be able to give you a list of recommendations so you don't have to do the digging yourself.

Just wing it! Don't be afraid to try a game. Dip your toes in a bit, try a ready-to-play module, skim through some rules online. You may find that simply reading the rules will get you interested, I know that happens to me way too often.

Altering your game ...

When all else fails and you're not quite sure, sometimes it's a safe bet to go back to what you know, and alter it a little bit to fit your needs. Here are some suggestions as to how you could go about doing that.

Thematic Changes. You're philosophically obsessed players are ready to go, you dropped the mention of cyberpunk and they're already calling you up to find out when they can start rolling up character sheets; but there's one problem, Cyberpunk 2020's rules are just too clunky. Someone is going to disagree with me on that I'm sure, but honestly, the mechanics might not sink in with everyone. My approach here would be to find another game with decent mechanics, D20 Modern, Shadowrun, Eclipse Phase, and strip out what you don't like. Strip out SR's magic rules, put Eclipse Phase on pre-fall earth, try to make D20 Modern not a god-awful mess ... Okay that last one I really can't recommend, it's gonna be a pain to do.

If you want something that's not sci-fi as an example, you could turn D&D into a low-fantasy game by simply disallowing any magic items and all the caster classes.

Change Rules. You might want to only change a rule or two, maybe you're altering the armor system in D&D to make characters more fragile, or your simply house ruling a few changes to make it more enjoyable for yourselves.

New Content. This doesn't necessarily mean to make new content, but to add new content. Add firearms to D&D, add extra classes to fit the campaign setting you're in, throw in some different races to spice up the mix. You can do a lot with almost any game by adding new content, and it can really change the tone of your game as well. For some systems you will likely be on your own, but for popular ones such as D&D and Pathfinder, you can find TONS of content online for use, and it's all user made. I can't guarantee that they will be quality posts either, so you'll have to at least skim through stuff before you add it, and I'd really recommend doing more than 'skimming' through class additions. If you do end up making your own content, I wish you luck, and hopefully I'll be making that into it's own post as well (or series of posts, it's a huge topic).

Well with that, I'd love to hear from you about any game systems you'd recommend. Preferably something you took a dive on and ended up loving.

Update from the Lich Queen (7/17/17)

The blog is up and running! I'm going to hopefully rebuild the website's appearance and fine tune it to my liking, but in the meantime I'll be focusing on writing some content. I'm going to be busy for the next few days, but I hopefully will have something written up for Friday, I've been reviewing the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons material, and skimming over the rules to prepare for an upcoming game which brings me to my next talking point.

I've been building a map for an upcoming 5E game with some older players of mine who have always been somewhat fun to play with.

Welcome to the world of Aldoras!

http://hunter-64.deviantart.com/art/Aldoras-Regional-Map-692820288

I spent sometime practicing mountains and this was sort of a test to see if I could get an alternate style, and I think it worked. They'll be starting in the region of Oldorf, as a party of travelling dwarven musicians. Additionally, I'm toying with an idea which I'll probably write a follow-up later; fog-of-war. Roll20 comes with a built in fog-of-war system, and with a little patience I think it can be a fun tool for the overworld map, letting the players explore on their own and discover things slowly. It looks barren right now, but imagine what it will look like when the players finally uncover the whole thing?