#it's only been 1 session of actual gameplay but so far the enthusiasm for the rp aspect of things has been WAY higher

[vox-off]

after session 0 i had a feeling this was going to be a fun campaign and jeZUSS did session 1 prove me right that was the most fun i've had in a d&d session in fucking forever

i've done so many medieval fantasy sword and board campaigns in the past few years they've started feeling. stale i guess? don't get me wrong, i am still desperately in love with the fantasy genre, but i was getting bored of ye olde setting. it's what my players voted for though, so that's what we did

this time i did not ask, i told. it's urban magical realism or someone else's campaign, bitches. now who wants to play

nine. nine (9) people wanted to play and that is not including me. only seven are able to commit but holy shit y'all

[mlmiii]

@green-dragon-ramblings​ tagged me to add TRPG campaigns I’m DM’ing/characters I’m playing to the ask post from earlier so

Pokérole 2e Campaign (DM: Me, Playing: Sabrina Duncan):  This is one I’m wrapping up this week--I made a custom region and then ran out of steam around the fourth gym. I made the mistake of promising to do custom pixel art for all of the gym leaders the way I often do for my players’ characters. Unfortunately, I’m more of an illustrator than an artist, and I wasn’t giving myself enough of a character concept to work from on the gym leaders. Additionally, while Pokérole has stellar implementation of Pokémon Anime Combat, a party of four including my DMPC just breaks the system apart, as constant 4v4 Pokémon battles aren’t fun and all 4 players challenging the gym leaders and trainers in series has too much dead time for me to enjoy running it. As a Very Final Episode I’m letting them skip the remaining gyms and get straight to the Big Legendary Fricks Everything Up fight that the games have been doing since Hoenn, a couple cutscenes to properly contextualize the fight, and then doing the Champion fight for those still interested. The gist of the plot is that the native inhabitants of this central USA-inspired region fought and imprisoned some eldritch abominations just over a millennium ago and a Kalosian noble family is pulling a big enough British Museum of Natural History to unwittingly throw the sealing wards out of alignment, resulting in the Big Bads getting loose after the 6th gym. The party will be fighting 1 of the 4 abominations this Friday, and the other three will just be left in Sessions That Never Were because I’m too tired of how gym battles were working here to actually play out the whole thing. 

The character I played in that campaign is Sabrina Duncan, who started out with a Houndour and wound up with a team of Houndoom, Mandibuzz, Crawdaunt, Scolipede, Toxicroak, and Dragalge. She’s very much a biker girl archetype, and pretty quickly realized that she was the Team Mom by default, largely by virtue of being the oldest and most emotionally stable. As a DMPC, I frequently left her silent so the players could interact with the world, but she’s a fairly calm character anyway so it wasn’t too far off of how she’d normally be. Since Pokérole is about the Pokémon just as much as it is the characters, a brief rundown of her team:

Brimstone the Houndoom is the team sweeper, and a bit standoffish due to her Lonely nature. While her luck suffered some in gyms, her high Initiative, accuracy, and Evasion let her get away with being a glass cannon. 

Phosphate the Mandibuzz is the team’s support tank, with obnoxiously high defences, Tailwind to buff the party’s Dexterity, and Nasty Plot to get her own Special Attack up to workable levels. 

Deuterium the Crawdaunt is the team’s Ranger-esque skillmonkey, though he can technically off-tank reasonably well, which fits his Timid nature just fine. 

Cyanide the Scolipede is the physical counterpart to Brimstone’s artillery strikes, and unlike Brimstone, he’s had amazing luck in gyms. Given his relaxed nature, I played him as something of an Emotional Support Centipede to Deuterium, which is... not how Scolipedes usually are XD 

Formaldehyde the Toxicroak didn’t get a lot of screentime, but I was planning to have him be a luchador in Tough contests. He did manage to solo a Kingdra in the water gym as a Croagunk with some stellar luck though. 

Mercury the Dragalge similarly was cut short, but she was intended to be the team’s plague rat, throwing debuffs all over the place with Toxic, Smokescreen, Water Pulse, etc. 

Star Wars Saga Edition (DM: Friend from middle school, Playing: A9G-M028 “M0″ (pronounced “Mo”)):

M0 is an A9G Archival droid reprogrammed to be a field medic, and spent a few years as the property/coworker of a mercenary band up until a few months before the campaign, when a sudden engine failure in their airspeeder resulted in everyone being stabbed through the torso by the twisted metal of said airspeeder’s wreck. M0, being a droid, survived long enough to patch themself up, but had to watch hopelessly--while being a medical droid--as their crew/masters bled out slowly. M0 met up with the party over a run-in with Jabba’s water collection goons, and things... got out of hand. M0 just wanted to team up with these idiots to minimize casualties, and then suddenly there’s four dead gangsters, with another barely stunned unconscious. Highlights after include spending a session trying to get the gangsters a proper burial while the team planned the heist, accidentally burning Jabba’s summer home down while trying to escape the heist (I thought the room was made of sandstone! I left one loaf of bread and an egg, stacked on a pan b/c M0 doesn’t know how to cook, on the oven so the guards would get distracted with the smoke!), spending all night repairing a speeder only for the party to bring it listing back at 4hp, and getting in a theological debate with some Tusken Raiders about how a being with no mouth is supposed to partake in not-quite-Communion. Another thing of note is M0′s insistence on setting their pistol to Stun, despite that doing half damage to organics and no damage to droids--they’ve gotten a couple other party members in on the stun train, and with any luck we’ll be able to cash that good will in on some mercy returned if the party is ever captured. 

The Jawas we’ll be fighting next quest, however, will not get this mercy, as M0 considers their tendency to capture, memory wipe, and resell droids as profiting from both genocide and slavery. As it so happens, M0 has enough money to buy a low-end spaceship, and Jawa Sandships don’t have anti-air defences...

I don’t quite think the DM realized what happens when a droid with a strong moral compass is told to retrieve another droid from a Sandcrawler. 

Starfinder Campaign (DM: Me, not playing a character):  As someone who loves sci-fi and runs a lot of Pathfinder games, you’d think I’d love Starfinder, right?

Well, problem is, it’s kinda... bad. Unsalvageably bad. “Just do Pathfinder, but in space, using the Starfinder environmental and hacking rules while disregarding literally everything else there” bad. Originally I was going to do a custom campaign, but as enthusiasm bleedover from playing Rimworld started drying up when I realized that the genres didn’t match well enough to cut-and-paste gameplay rhythms, I decided instead to shift plotlines a bit and use the Dead Suns adventure path. We got through the first book (with some... notable absences here and there, since the party was both underleveled and unoptimized) before I put it on hiatus to run the Pokérole campaign, and now that I’m playing with timeskips, I plan to run the party through the interesting parts of the adventure path, with maybe some episodic sessions scattered here and there to allow for more character development, if the party gets invested enough. Once that’s done, I plan to get back to the other game I have on hiatus.

Pathfinder Play-by-Post Campaign (DM: Me, Playing: Morsel): On hiatus since December, since one of the players got busy with a more standard campaign, is a campaign I made into a play-by-post to work on without needing to deal with scheduling issues. If it weren’t for who I was playing in it, I’d’ve just let it die, but...

Well.

It’s Morsel. 

I’ve posted about Morsel before, and you can read her backstory there, but suffice to say that I’ve been trying to get this fungus child some freaking therapy since 2013 when I made her and I’m not about to stop just because one of my players went missing. Add to that that she didn’t talk to her parents before running away this time, and her lack of need of sleep meant that she heard them crying themselves unconscious some nights, well... there’s a Lot of angst Morsel’s going through. 

As for the campaign itself, it’s a collision of Morsel’s long-term plot to resurrect her first meal/adopted sister, the party mermaid’s long-term plot to reclaim artifacts stolen from her people when the Deep Ones did enough murder/pillaging to nearly wipe her people out, and an episodic monster-of-the-week plot, since the party was hired into the king’s League of Extraordinary Ratcatchers, aka The Dudes Wot Get Thrown At The Weird Noises In The Woods