#matthew mercer i require answers

[sorry-i-forgot]

OKAY LISTEN so I think ludinus wants to absorb predathos to become an eternal godeater mage like there's no way this guy just wants to help some moon people immigrate to exandria the man lives for the drama

also while we're on the subject is anyone else concerned about the magic mound (derogatory) that hungers on the back of his neck or is it just me?

[blorbologist]

Feeding a Flying City

[Aeor, by Pretty Useful Co.]

This started as a little exercise in my worldbuilding thoughts for some off-hand stuff mentioned in my current fic, but I uh. Got Into It. So enjoy, if you're into two thousand words of nerding out about fantasy economics and agriculture and spells. For the sake of context, this is specifically looking at Exandria's flying cities in the Age of Arcanum, working off D&D 5E's rules as written (so I'm avoiding inventing spells).

When tackling the Age of Arcanum in my fanfic, I knew going in that I wanted to use this space to stretch my worldbuilding muscles and fill in some of the space left by Matthew Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan with reasonably plausible meat and bones.

One thing I was excited to squint at was the issue of how the hell flying cites feed their populations. 

The ‘lonely city’ is a common fantasy trope, especially in visual media. Your towering bastion of civilization (or spire of evil) on the open plains, or beside a river, or deep in the mountains certainly makes for a great symbol. A flying city is really the ultimate version of this, completely disconnected from the petty ground below… and the farmland that usually would surround any metropolis. 

See, in medieval times, you only had so much time to transport good until they spoiled. Some could be more forgiving than others - however, given a city often aggregates political and financial elite, there is an expectation that they can get their fresh fruits, and decadent game. Even beyond freshness, if you have a lot of people in one place who are not actively growing their own crops, a lot of more-or-less processed food needs to get into the city daily. And though you could station your acres of farmland just over the hill so they don’t ruin the ~scenic approach~, that will cost more to transport. The fact is, having a lot of people - poor and rich - in one place requires a lot of food, every day, to feed them. And it has to come from somewhere.

(Off-topic note, medieval castles (not necessarily cities) were also there to, y’know, defend the populace. So they had to be both near enough to their peasants to respond to aggression, and near enough for the people to get to the castle for shelter when needed. Which is not relevant to this point.)

Magic, like refrigeration, greenhouses and GMO crops, allows a society to sidestep some of these issues. Which is great! But how the flying cities could use the resources they have to feed their population is half the fun in theorizing. 

To quickly recap what we know to be common to flying cities of the time:

Limited to the city only, usually a location with ground dense with brumestone (i.e., no farmland). 

Their limited ‘undergrounds’ are often fairly dense with more structures (Aeor’s many levels; the labyrinth and tons of administrative locations inside Avalir).

They are nomadic and engage in trade (both with eachother and grounded cities, like Vasselheim).

… but they all likely came from landed roots, and potentially were once perfectly normal cities. 

So. How do you feed your people while flying a path that might take years to travel (ex: Avalir’s 7-year trek), especially between trade stops?

The last surviving flying city is Draconia, which is really fragments of a larger nomadic city that decided to remain fairly sedentary compared to its predecessors. Its answer was probably pretty simple: given that Draconia hovered within Dreemoth Ravine, the tailed dragonborn could just… collect a tithe of crops from the enslaved ravenites. It’s already canon that they were put to work in the mines, so working the land also unfortunately makes sense. It’s unclear how the food then got up to the city (skyships, given they have ready brumestone access?), but given Draconia seems to be an exception to the rules I can (mostly) confidently rule out ‘the Age of Arcanum was built on abusing the grounded cities and towns, potentially requiring an age of magically-enhanced farming to provide for the people above and/or risking the farmers going hungry in favor of the mageocracies’. 

Here’s where magic offers numerous solutions, and just as many weird problems! 

First of all, the stupidly isolated nature of flying cities means that any method of bringing food in has to be extremely structured. Mom and pop can’t just bring the donkey to the farmer’s market to sell their goods in Avalir; to get there you need to fly (more scheduled) or teleport (requires a mage, and limited quantities of goods). So from the getgo a lot of financial control is likely in the cities’ hands. Which… is not all too dissimilar from history, but the lack of flexibility is probably more striking here. Shit, I was hoping to get away from Draconia’s grim worldbuilding.

It also places flying cities in a role very similar to an advancing army, requiring food as they march to be drawn from the surrounding lands. While soldiers can break off and loot towns they pass through, a flying city probably can’t just dock in the middle of farmland, grab all the corn and bolt. So the need for a more organized food transport likely helps protect towns from that exploitation. (Though, with the military posturing of Avalir and Aeor, I could see flying cities strong-arming support from grounded ones in exchange for promised protection/aid if they needed it.)

Of course, when docked at another city (Avalir stayed at Vasselheim for ten days in the weeks before the Calamity), they can fairly easily trade with the surrounding towns there… who are also providing for the existing city. Hosting a flying city must be a huge logistics nightmare, but economically worth the headache. 

(Vasselheim likely has a leg up in that it has both a sitting population of mages, such as Vespin pre-fuckup, and the likes of Clerics, who I’ll get to soonish.)

In EXU: Calamity, skyships (and an offhand mention of something called an ornithopter) already exist, which could facilitate the bulk transport of goods. Based on the speed of the Silver Sun in Campaign 3 (4-5 days to cover ~700 miles translates to a speed of ~5-6.5 knots; for context that seems to be about the middling range for a medieval tradeship), this seems like an excellent way of transporting goods that do not spoil easily. Or use arcane equivalents to the canon Bag of Colding to help keep things fresh longer. However, as noted above, this would require a lot of community organization to get crops together when the skyship shows up for harvest.

The tricky thing is that Avalir, at least, follows leylines as it travels. So if there was intent to line up its passes over farmland with their harvest season - to minimize transport distance - it might be difficult to coordinate. Moreover, with an implied many flying cities, and no clear territorial delimitations between their routes (especially if they’re all following leylines; but Avalir at least made stops in Issylra, Gwessar/Tal’Dorei, and Dorumas/the Shattered Teeth at least), I wonder if there would be economic conflict over which cities could be highest bidder for the freshest crops. Which could be Interesting. 

(I wonder if sky piracy, or sky privateering, was a thing in the Age of Arcanum. Nydas is said to have been a pirate on the actual seas, so aquatic trade is still going strong, but given the flying cities are so reliant on limited methods to get food… you could put a lot of pressure on a rival city by capturing a few key skyships full of the last harvests before winter.)

Another option is teleportation. Avalir, after all, has an entire guild devoted to teleporting people around, so critical to its functioning that part of the Betrayers’ plan was to leave them without leadership when they struck. However, teleportation is very much a creature-oriented form of transportation; perhaps you could bring up a herd of cattle for slaughter, but that’s a pretty damn high spell slot for beef.

Avalir is in a fortuitous situation, in that it has a longstanding relationship with the Gau Drashari; druids, well-known masters of plant and animal life. In theory, this could mean Plant Growth casts to increase harvests… but at this time the Gau Drashari specifically only live in Caithmoira, guarding this holy site. So hopping from one druid-boosted farmland to another is unlikely. 

Well, if transporting food to the cities is such an issue, why not produce food in the cities?

While magical greenhouses must account for some luxury fresh goods for sure, I really don’t think the cities as illustrated have enough real estate to actually support their whole populations like this. Like I noted above, of the two cities we know really well, their insides are already full of labs and labyrinths and all sorts of things probably best kept away from your food supply. 

D&D 5E spells offer another answer, and another piece of potentially complicated worldbuilding: Create Food and Water. Per the spell description, it creates enough food to feed 15 people for 24 hours, which seems to neatly solve all our problems! Until you realize the food is explicitly bland (bet you the mages turn up their noses at it), vanishes if not consumed after 24 hours (so that’s a daily 3rd level spell slot from some poor schmuck), and is mostly limited to Paladins and Clerics. You know, godly people, who are so fondly looked upon by the mageocracies. Artificers, at least, are more in line with the Age of Arcanum attitude - but we don’t see any in Calamity, so it’s unclear if the class ‘exists’ per say in the time period. Reducing powerful Paladins and Clerics to food dispensaries - and not even good food, probably for the lower class - would fit in neatly with how the powers of the divine are seen as lesser. Goodberry falls into a similar role: useful, but probably something mages would avoid.

Speaking of spells, let’s get a little fucked up, hm? Who is to say a mage couldn’t just. Summon some pigs to be served up as bacon tomorrow? Well. Conjure Animals specifically says the animals are actually fey, and vanish when their HP reaches 0. Summon Beasts? Same thing. Find Steed? You guessed it. So magic can help us grow food, and transport it, and preserve it, but not actually make it out of nothing. (If there’s a spell I’m missing that completely solves this, please let me know, but I can’t really find one.)

My final little thought came watching geese migrate some time ago. The passenger pigeon has been extinct for… a hundred and ten years, now. But in its hayday, flocks of the birds would literally cloud the sky. Exandria is home to far more stunning beasts than pigeons, and hunting flying game is likely a lot easier when you yourself are flying too. 

Sure, you can apply this to actual fishing when the cities are over the seas, but! Imagine fishing boats but for birds and all manner of winged beasts in great flocks, netting and catching them to haul in. Maybe the magical equivalent of those helicopter boar hunts to deal with invasive populations, but landing at all introduces a whole lot more hassle. Big net and flying device = fresh meat, with an arcane twist.

So: how do you feed a flying city? Especially one with a lavish lifestyle as seen in Avalir, or a hard research focus as in Aeor?

Have an extremely regimented relationship with the towns on your path (likely in competition with other flying cities using these leylines when you are) or that otherwise have food you need. Make sure skyships arrive in time for the harvests. Miss that and things get dicey. 

Supplement this with trade, both with other flying cities and grounded ones when docked. However, docked time has to be limited to not risk starving out the countryside surrounding the city hosting you.

Small deliveries, especially of fresh livestock, can be accomplished through Porter’s Guild or equivalent.

Magically preserve food thus obtained to survive until your schedule and harvests of X Y z goods next align. 

City-based organizations can ‘fish’ for birds as the city flies (or potentially even actually fish as they fly over the ocean) for fresh meat.

Hope to gods (but without hoping to the gods because they’re schmucks) that you time your pick-ups right, that there are no famines, or early frosts, that no one steals your fucking skyships our outbids you on a key agricultural contract, or casts Dispel Magic and makes your food all spoil.

When the carefully-scheduled management of the city’s resources fails, turn to your diviners or healers and have them feed the masses with bland crackers while the Somnovem or Ring of Gold continue eating honeyed lamb and figs. 

If you read this far, I'm super flattered you shifted through my rambles! I'll gladly discuss any glaring mistakes or things I've overlooked; this is only what I considered in worldbuilding for a fic, and I don't pretend to be an expert on medieval agriculture or economic practices.

This was still very fun to (over)think about <3

(Water, of course, would be a similar limiting factor, but is easy enough to magically purify, and would not be too bland when made by Create Food and Water, so I didn’t bring it up.)

[utilitycaster]

This may very well come off as asinine. If it does, I apologize. Not sure how to put it otherwise. I’ve been wondering for a while now, given some of your meta, what would happen if you found yourself on the business end of a ‘the table is doing it wrong and I could do better’ situation. Are you expecting a massive course correction from Matt? Somebody to leave and come back as a different character? Is it possible you’ll just lose interest? Genuinely very excited to see what you have to say.

Not asinine at all, and while I have a few other similar questions I think this covers the most ground and will be the main one for my answer!

My initial course corrections would have ideally been, as said, during session zero. If I were Matt at that point I would have at minimum said "hey, I am hoping to do a lore-heavy campaign. Right now, there are no characters with both a reason to be interested in this lore and the intelligence score to back it up. Let's talk through what you want to do: I can change the campaign, but that means changing some of the details I've previously sent you and probably waiting a bit longer so I can rewrite aspects of it. I can also see if anyone's willing to reconsider either their class or their stats; I'm willing to allow for some generous stats rerolling/items to make up for deficiencies since this does mean changing a character you may be attached to." I mentioned Imogen's Open Mind feature and switching that to an INT save; I'd have specifically brought that up to Laura.

(I also would have probably uh...86'ed a couple of the characters from the start as as discussed prior so as not to end up in this situation. Matthew Mercer is famously an incredibly sweet person; I am not, and I do think that there's a way to respectfully tell a player "I'm sorry but this doesn't work." But again, that's getting way too far back.)

The other thing to do is, quite honestly, don't make this plotline come up so early. Later in the campaign, after the party is bonded, I think having NPCs doing the legwork wouldn't be so rough, but right now it means the party keeps kind of being shepherded through by smarter acquaintances. I think if we hadn't had Yu come in and force the Calloway plot which is connected to the Ruidus plot? We could focus on Ashton and FCG, whose backstories don't require nearly the same amount of research, and the party could start to cohere more over that. I think if we spent episodes 25-40 or something on FCG and Treshi and the party had more time to breathe and become friends, you could introduce NPCs more readily.

However, we're well past that so the things I'd do if I were Matt and had recently realized what was going on:

Have a mid-campaign session zero! Say what you didn't say earlier! Say "hey guys, I'm so sorry, and what I planned isn't working. Is anyone interested in playing a different character or having a stats mix-up, and if so, let's talk through what that might look like and how we can bring it in." Like, ideally, yeah, someone would play a new character, but as a DM you can't just make that happen; you do need the players on board. I will say: if Sam has any kind of Charlie to Devexian change in mind for FCG, which I presume he would have talked through with Matt, and which would be a very reasonable point to switch around stats pretty dramatically, I'd talk to him and try to accelerate that timeline quite a bit. However, this only works if Sam did have that in mind.

If no one wants to change their character but they are cool with changing around some stats: take a page from Brennan's Fantasy High season 2 book and put the characters in a situation where their stats might change or be rerolled. Put them in a dust storm that's eerily reminiscent of the red storm! Have Delilah go ham with the gnarlrock! Do a mad scientist brain lightning moment with the machine next episode? It's going to be a little contrived probably, but we can get past that quickly. This is honestly my favorite option.

This would be risky but could pay off really well: have a trusted strong guest player who is excited to play a high intelligence ally join them for a long (like...Dorian's 14 episodes) arc. As mentioned I think having a guest play an antagonist was a risk that didn't pay off, but having a guest play a quest-giver and ally is a bit safer. The one drawback is, again, the baseline Bells Hells have had more episodes with guests than without, and this could just make the party's fragmentation worse by introducing new weird groups.

If no one wants to change their character at this point (valid! they've been playing them for a while) and no one wants to change their stats...I would probably try to be a little heavy-handed and rail-road-y and make it clear that the Calloway parents, Hondir, and Ira have things handled for Ruidus, get Treshi resolved as quickly as possible as well, and send the party to Yios. At that point make it more of a political challenge to learn information, meted out bit by bit by contacting the right people, rather than one of research. The thing is, you don't need a high int party for D&D in general. I was just thinking that A Court of Fey and Flowers has only one character with good intelligence - but it's a comedy of manners, which runs on an engine of charisma and insight. This party is good at charisma skills and insight as well as sneaking around, and doing this in a university town in which secrets are a source of intrigue and currency lets them play to their strengths.

There's definitely plenty more you could do - pivot to EXU for a bit, give some characters a stopping point there, return with half of a new party, for example - but it's all hard to say. I think my point is that this does require a time out of speaking to the players and laying it out on the table, getting their input, and moving from there. The ways to fix it are endless though most are going to be a little awkward, but they need to be something everyone is on board with.

As for whether I will lose interest: hard to say! I'm still enjoying a lot of the characters, the setting is great, and I still like Ruidus lore. I've mentioned before that EXU Prime and Kymal had plots that don't make any sense to me but the characters and world were fun enough for me to keep on. I think I'll probably keep watching for that if nothing else, but ask me in another 20 episodes.

[c-is-for-circinate]

Has any of the campaign 3 stuff with Ruidus gotten you thinking about that Pern AU you were talking about forever ago? Because it gives me major red star vibes

Oh shit, excellent question.

Ruidus absolutely gives me BIG Red Star vibes, which feels part and parcel with how much this entire campaign so far feels like it's sending regular tributes out to old sci-fantasy. I would completely believe that Matt is making a reference (Matthew Mercer, ubernerd, has for sure read some Anne McCaffrey in his day, whether he was consciously pulling on it for this or not). And, mmm, this is making me want to talk about sci-fantasy as a genre, and how psychic powers specifically get grandfathered in as a science fiction trope rather than a fantasy one, and what that means for Imogen's position and Main Character Energy and...

But that wasn't your question! You were asking about the Pern AU, which is definitely somewhere on the list of AUs I Meant To Come Back To Someday, and which I definitely should. (I have like 3/4 of what should've been the next installment buried in my drafts somewhere! Oh, if you all could only see my drafts folder.)

I think what's interesting here is that...in a Pern AU, Vox Machina are dragonriders and a lord holder and a harper and maybe Pike is a healer instead. They play fully within the rules of the world, even if they are exceptional within those rules; in campaign 1, that means that they fit certain fantasy tropes, that they play by certain genre rules, that they may be dumb chaotic assholes but they do so in a recognizable high fantasy way. In a Pern AU, that means they fit well into the position of dragonriders and Lord Holders, people you'd expect as main characters. The M9, on the other hand, had I ever gotten there, would've been entirely non-dragonriders; they're spies and researchers and Holdless vagabonds, probably working for Harper Hall rather than the Cobalt Soul (it's all blue!). They examine the fabric of the world, start asking questions about the fall of the Age of Arcanum and what Thread is, really, but never quite get answers because they have real-world political problems to deal with and when they touch those cosmic mysteries, they make it through but also it's real weird and surreal there for a while.

Bell's Hells, on the other hand...in a Pern AU, Bell's Hells would be a full-on rewrite of White Dragon and All The Weyrs of Pern, I suspect, with a completely shaken-up cast, because Bell's Hells are in a position to actually encounter and mess with the underlying basis of the setting itself. Part of this is audience context -- we've seen more and more of the Age of Arcanum now, we actually can start telling stories about it! -- but right, FCG is RIGHT THERE being actually from it. The moon that VM never noticed, that the M9 spotted as weird but did not have time to deal with...Bell's Hells are going to go there, and possibly, literally fight it. Bell's Hells don't give a shit about the politics of Marquette-at-large (though they at least sort of care about the politics of Jrusar). They're gonna fight the literal moon.

I need to think a bit more about this, about trilogies and progressions, about what my genre senses tell me is coming for BH and how realistic those actually are, and we're only 27 episodes in (I'm only 26 and a half episodes in, because New Work Schedule means passing out at mid-break so I can be up at 8 the next day), and there's a lot to explore there. But in answer to your question...shit, yes, I am indeed thinking about it, but also to stick Bell's Hells anywhere into Pern canon would require us to be working either circa Dragonsdawn or circa AtWoP, where the 'oh shit, this is a sci-fi setting' bits of the world are actually visible. Which involves way more engaging with the worldbuilding bones of Pern canon than I feel prepared to tackle at 9:45 on a Sunday morning.

[tophertv]

I’ve tagged it, but fair warning - this post is about death in dungeons and dragons.

Fantasy is primarily used for either escapism or a way to study human nature, and I like to use it for the former.

when I run dnd campaigns (pathfinder specifically) I like to let my players basically do.... whatever they want. I know they’re not going to ask me to narrate anything inhumane or terrible, and we all play the game to have a fun time anyway, so it usually works out fine. you wanna ride around on a giant wolf? you got it. Your character has a strange relationship with interdimensional space time? lets make a thing out of it. You wanna invent a new cooking recipe every night? let’s get ignis on the phone.

these things are structured, of course: players more often than not can acquire what they want through feats or level ups or rolling, so we use the built in system to explore the effects and give the players a sense of progression.

but the system has its.... flaws. sometimes these are flaws in design, like a game breaking combo (I’m looking at you, rage cycling) and sometimes these are flaws in theme, like with death.

death in dnd is not permanent - it’s just a temporary setback. and that seems a little incongruous to me. Like, in video games, a death is a loss of time - specifically, how much time you put into getting where you are from where you respawn. but dnd has two competing models for death, not just the one.

1) death is a setback where you have to stop playing until your allies fix you,

or

2) death is an opportunity to create a new character, and let your old one fade out.

and the designers have limited your ability to overcome death by making death cost something: usually either a material cost like in game loot (diamonds) or a statistical cost like a negative level. and players have to make it a certain distance into the game before they can acquire a resurrection. casting the spell requires the party to have either a higher level, or to find someone of a higher level to cast it, and earning their favor.

now these are fantastic limitations, and I am quite fond of them both, but as the game of dnd progresses further and further, the stakes are supposed to get higher. you’re no longer killing rats in the tavern’s basement for a place to stay the night. You’re now fighting the Lich King Big Bad Evil Guy to save the land from his tyrranical rule.

and this matters! if the players have no investment in the story, then it isn’t so much an epic tale of their power fantasies as it is a new episode of “how I met your mother (which is a good theme, just not the theme I’m going for). If I wanted to play HIMYM, we’d be playing munchkin, not pathfinder. I’m putting more work into this, and I want it to be serious.

but what’s interesting is that as the stakes get higher and higher for players facing more and more powerful foes, recovering from mistakes becomes easier and easier. the players get more HP making it harder to kill them, they get higher stats for better rolls and more chances at success, and they get access to more death defying spells like resurrection!

now, I want my players to feel more powerful the longer they play, but I want them to feel like what they’re doing matters and they have a substantial chance at failure. And I worried that resurrection level spells would dampen that severity, and wondered what whether I should step up the cost of death.

Critical Role DM Matthew Mercer has a similar concern, and he did just that: he changed the rules about death. casting resurrection in his campaign requires the material components to begin a ritual of sorts. but then the player who has died must roll to see if they can come back; and they might fail! the ritual becomes harder and harder each time the character dies, and players may make offerings to the ritual (ranging from a magical trinket to a pledge of love or service) to give the dead character a better chance to come back.

But I wasn’t sure that I wanted death to be that difficult, just more serious. And I was still grappling with this issue last night when we had a total party kill. Well, we didn’t really ave a TPK, but we got close.

the players in my “Rise of the Runelords” pathfinder campaign were tasked with finding the bones of a dead dwarf and returning them to the spirit of his deceased brother, as part of a deal where the ghosts would then lead them to the lair of the BBEG. So they ventured out into a snowstorm to scour the cliffs looking for a corpse, hoping to defeat it’s ghost and return its body.

players who are hoping to play “Rise of The Runelords” at some point should probably skip the next 3 paragraphs to avoid major spoilers.

the complication arose from the death of the dwarf from the hands of a wendigo (not a proper cultural wendigo, mind you, but a deer headed hunger spirit written for gaming purposes. I know the significance of the Wendigo to culture is still hotly debated and misunderstood, but I didn’t write this character into the story to appropriate culture, the adventure path authors wrote it in to make my players face starving in a snowstorm.)

the dwarf’s restless spirit manifested as a powerful ghost with the ability to dominate monsters of the cold subtype, which basically turned this level 15 encounter into a battle on a cliffside against a powerful cannibal ghost and an advanced frost worm. And his is when it gets interesting, because ghosts only take half damage from non-magical attacks, and frost worms.... explode, when they die. in fact, the errata for how this ghost behaves in combat literally included the statement “if the frost wom is getting close to death, the ghost kills it himself with a melee attack to trigger its death throes ability, knowing that he will only take half damage from the piercing effect of the attack, and none of the cold damage.”

Now, we’re a good portion of the way into this fight, and the worm is down to about 25 hp left of 200, and the ghost is down to 15 of 161, when the party gunslinger gets a critical hit on the worm and deals 45 damage to it, killing it almost instantly. I take a look at the death throes ability on the frost worm’s stat block to see what happens, and I am met with 12D6 cold damage and 8D6 piercing damage in a shockwave that hits everything in 100ft. for those of you not familiar with D&D terminology, that means I need to roll 20 dice that have 6 sides (your standard cubic dice) and add up the numbers: 12 of those will be of type cold damage (meaning iceblooded magical creatures might ignore some or all of it) and the other 8 dice will be stabbing damage from the shrapnel of the exploding worm. fortunately, the ghost (who only takes half of the 8d6 piercing damage) takes 15 damage and dies. but that’s not where it ends.

To those of you who skipped the spoilers, welcome back. After rolling out all the dice, we find that the party’s main healer (a witch), the healer’s familiar (a goat), and the ranger’s animal companion (a mountable wolf) are completely dead. the party’s tank, a dragon disciple, is at exactly 0 hp, and will start bleeding to death next turn, and the remaining party members are heavily injured. The rogue is down to 14 hp, the ranger is down to 9, and the gunslinger is the only one who succeeds on the reflex save to avoid the blast, and is left with 45 hp out of her starting 80.

this party isn’t even injured anymore - they’re just mostly dead. but the fight is over for the next 3 rounds, and the players have a moment to recuperate. of course, in a moment or so, the players will face the boss of this area (spoiler: It’s the wendigo who created the ghost that they just beat (also, just to reiterate, cultural appropriation is bad)). it’s about this time that 4 things dawn on me.

1) I’m a murderer

2) this is the perfect opportunity to explore death in pathfinder

3) if I drop the boss on them now, they won’t survive

4) oh my god I’m a murderer

now, the gunslinger multiclassed bard early on to get some healing spells and support abilities, and she casts her cure wounds spell on the party member that’s at 0. The dragon disciple wakes up a moment later, and realizes that the party is mostly dead or injured and trapped on a cliffside in a snowstorm. she uses her daily extraplanar portal ability to pull the party members out of danger, and send them all to their cleric, who is able to cast resurrection.

this cleric is a good friend of the party and owes them some favors, so he casts the spell for no charge. the players are fairly rich in gemstones, so trading out for diamonds is no issue. mechanically speaking, the players will get out of this situation and recover as if nothing was wrong, and I know this.

So I decide to do something a little... mean. I begin to narrate their deaths.

I describe to the ranger that his wolf is unmoving. I tell him how he runs is fingers through her fur and calls her name, but she does not answer.

I describe to the party how their witch friend is still. how her body is contorted from the blast, twisted into an uncomfortable position, and making no effort to right herself. I describe how the goat’s eyes hang open, unblinking, unseeing, staring without focus.

I describe to the witch what she sees when she reaches her afterlife. how she meets her patron, how her patron thanks her for the work she did, how her patron regrets that the journey ended so soon when there was so much left to do, how she welcomes her into an afterlife without her familiar and companion the goat.

and then I describe to the players how they find the cleric - playing with a small child in a moment of peace and education, to juxtapose the moment where the dead and dying meet the young and living. I tell a few jokes to make the players laugh, and then dive right back into the death, the stillness, the wrongness.

and then I describe the casting of the spell and the resurrection and the healing that he cleric provides, and I bring the party back to normal - fully healed, all their HP restored, all their wounds gone.

and in the end, the players recover from their encounter as if nothing was wrong. they managed to beat the monsters they were fighting and will get to fight more monsters in the future. but for a few brief moments, I drove home to the players how very close they had come to failure. how very sudden and silent and still death might be.

and I learned in that moment that death CAN be final, even in pathfinder/ Dungeons and Dragons. that if everyone in the party dies, the party dies. that there i no coming back from a TPK.

the campaign has been really easy up to this point, with a few hard moments in the middle. so this was the first time that the players really had to face the possibility of a hard loss. and I think I managed to create that moment with narration; a tension and a consequence and a feeling of importance - this matters. I don’t think I’ll have to do it again, either. not in this campaign. the players will forever know that even though they have safety nets, even though they have great power, there will always be a chance that they can fail. And that will lend meaning to the struggle towards the end, I hope.

But part of me worries that I’ve overdone it. Part of me worries that by trying to create a setting where story matters, I have sacrificed the escapism that the game lends. We’re close to the end of the campaign, and I look forward to running a new game in a new setting with these players, so I don’t want to drive them away. I hope it all works out.

anyway, death is an important part of dnd, and I wanted to write about it.

[xt1erminator-blog]

“Celebrity” DMs That Slay

I love Dungeons & Dragons. I love playing it, DMing it, reading about it, watching YouTube videos on subject matter relating to it (Nerdarchy, Matt Colville and Drunkens & Dragons: Play D&D Like A Badass are all great YouTube channels with quality content).  Some games are even great to watch live streams of, especially observing talented “celebrity” Dungeon Masters working their magic, some of them admitting a lot of their “performance” and the content they come up with for their players is improvised and off the cuff.  It takes a lot to pull that off.  Most games out there however, are very difficult to watch and enjoy. There are too many distractions among groups when streaming stuff and it can be boring.

So, for anyone new to the D&D hobby that might be reading this blog, I just wanted to write up some stuff on three of the best publicly known Dungeon Masters out there thanks to the Internet - most of us into D&D will know who they are, and they are all are on a lot of people’s Top 3 Dungeon Masters Ever lists I’m sure. These guys put in some crazy hard work to help the online community better ourselves as Dungeon Masters. Thank you.

(And you know, I should have mentioned this in one of my first posts on this site, but I’m not a professional blogger or even a good writer. This is just my space to shoot the shit (probably mostly talking to myself no doubt) about one of my favourite past times, D&D). Warning: some of this post may seem out of logical order, sorry in advance :)  I had to go back and edit it a few times. Apologies for any inaccuracies as well but I’m pretty confident it’s solid.

Chris Perkins, “Celebrity DM to the Stars”

Being a semi-regular reader of Dungeon magazine for quite some time, I didn’t really pay attention to names of the authors of the short adventure modules published within the magazine’s pages.  When I reconnected with the hobby a couple of years ago after hearing a lot of good praise about 5th Edition D&D, I did more and more research about the people behind it, and naturally stumbled across reading about Chris and the Acquisitions Incorporated live games run at some of the PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) Conventions with the Penny Arcade guys (Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik and Scott Kurtz, as well as occasional appearances by celebrities/TV personalities like Wil Wheaton and Morgan Webb, author Patrick Rothfuss, etc.).  Then I went back through old Dungeon magazines after reading that’s how Chris got his start to getting his foot in the door, and have since become a fan of his. He’s even replied to Tweets of mine once or twice. Woo.

I am very entertained by how Chris runs his live games. It’s quite easy to see why he is held in such high regard. I started to lose a little interest in his work however when his regular weekly Dice, Camera, Action web series started. They were starting to run a series based on The Curse of Strahd just before the book released. The PAX games are still great, as are the in-studio AI series episodes, however with Dice, Camera, Action things seemed to really be a struggle and it was hard to follow and really get in to. Between technical difficulties in the first few episodes, to things taking a long time to pick up due to excessive chatter which was in my opinion a waste of time (get on with the game ffs! This happened quite frequently), it was hard to keep myself entertained and motivated enough to finish watching each episode. By the 6th episode or so, I stopped watching D, CA entirely. I decided to revisit it recently and while the presentation is a bit better and they seem to have worked out the kinks in the system, I have come to the conclusion why it wasn’t a success for me: the cast picked for this series is not very good. It’s not Chris - how can it be. The guy is probably the most dedicated and passionate Dungeons & Dragons fan, Dungeon Master, works for the company who makes the game (Wizards of the Coast), and spends a shitload of time on Twitter answering questions from fans with his unique sense of humour, I love the guy (not that way).  The cast though. Very weak. Generally speaking they are either too silly to take seriously or not entertaining enough in role playing their characters (hey, I’m not very good when I play and probably an even worse DM so I’m not tooting my own horn by any means), etc. but they are on camera for this and I really cannot believe so many people like this show like they say they do. The whole “Waffle Crew” thing I just don’t get I guess. The cast isn’t exceptional and I think Chris should be spending his time with a different group doing bigger and better things. Again, I am a heavily opinionated bastard as stated in the header of this blog :) “ProJared” is probably the weakest link in the D, CA group. He just doesn’t bring anything to the table and quite honestly, his attitude sucks. It is a puzzle to me how he was chosen to partake in this show with the legendary Christopher Perkins, DM. Just watch his videos on his YouTube channel, ProJared Plays I believe it’s called. I suggest watching his video entitled “Worst Player Ever”. Wait for the part where he describes how he “loses his shit” with “Steve”.  But enough about him... Chris rocks.

Matt Mercer, He’s Pretty OK

One of the players in a campaign I run is a very, very big fan of Critical Role. If you don’t know what CR is, Google it. It’s one of the reasons she became interested in Dungeons & Dragons and wanted to try it out, which opened a huge floodgate for me that had been closed for several years, and caused my re-connection with the hobby a couple of years ago. The addiction resurfaced and hundreds (OK, probably thousands) of dollars later I am the proud owner of a collection of nerdy D&D stuff that has been amassed. Damn you, Liesl.

Anyhow.  I was curious and tried watching some episodes of CR. At the time, I wasn’t into it. Not at all. I wouldn’t say I am now either, but I have probably watched around half of the 80+ episodes and find quite a bit of entertainment in the performance everyone in that group delivers.

So, at the time we started getting into 5e via the infamous Starter Set, featuring the introductory Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure module. Naturally, I ran it improvising mostly everything and only referencing major area and plot details when absolutely required.  I admittedly do not care much for running any of the current 5e premade adventures and therefore probably won’t ever run any of them in their entirety (I will pick apart things, and throw in content from an old Dungeon magazine, even 4e source book, etc. or borrow a part from some other WotC hard cover adventure campaign book, that, like I said, will never run in its entirety). There’s good stuff in there, but it doesn’t play like modules back in the good old days. Anyhow I think it went well. The more we played, the more references were made to Critical Role and how Matt did things. So I got more and more curious and gave Matt and CR another chance. Glad I did.

It turns out what I really went back for though after thinking I didn’t like CR, was Matt Mercer (after awhile the cast of that show grew on me, but I was paying particular attention to Matt most of the time). It’s absolutely unlikely I would ever be able to pull off 1% of what he can do with voices, and describing and gesturing things when he spins his tale - but I try to absorb everything I can, and hope my poor little brain remembers just a smidgen of it and it enters my game at some point and does just a little bit to help my improvisational skills. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt performing NPC or monster voices, but who knows... like they say, you’ll never get anywhere with it if you don’t just start doing it, no matter how much of a fool you think you are making of yourself. There is a reason why Matthew Mercer is regarded as one of the best Dungeon Masters in the world, because he truly is just that damn good.

Also - FORCE GREY IS AMAZING. It’s a short run series Matt DM’d for several other celebrity players including the immortal Brian Posehn.

Matt Colville, the YouTube DM Activist

Finally, I think my personal absolute favourite "popular” Dungeon Master these days would have to be none other than Matt Colville. He claims to be a normal person just like anyone else, but he’s totally a celebrity now, to me anyhow. Ha ha. Dude, you’re on a now-quite-popular YouTube channel. You’re awesome. Thank you.

Matt is a writer by profession. He’s got a couple of fantasy novels he’s written that you can find on Amazon.com (Priest, and Thief I believe are the titles - check them out).  He’s also lead writer at Turtle Rock game studio in California. Makers of games like the Mercenaries series on consoles, and more recently the party vs. big bad enemy shooter Evolve (he says he’s most proud of this title), all of which Matt did major writing on. From the game sessions I have watched that he has posted on his channel, it is evident that he is very creative and an extremely bright person more than capable of running a really great game that is well thought out and has all the bells and whistles and logistics of everything worked out just right (in my opinion). I wish I could run my games with his brain :)

The last few videos I’ve linked on my blog here are a few of my favourites of his, and they have really kickstarted my brain. So now I am thinking of better ways to run my games, and attempting to infuse a similar kind of quality material that Matt seems to ooze out of his noggin.  Watch his videos, all of them. When I first discovered his channel, I was amused. However, after watching maybe a half dozen more videos, I had to stop. I think it was the rapid rate at which he discusses the topics presented, it was maybe overwhelming me. I took a break for a couple of months and avoided his channel.  Then a colleague and I were discussing him, and in hindsight I realized I really totally dug his stuff. So when I went back to checking out his videos and gave some thought about what it is that he is doing with his channel, and what he is doing to help Dungeon Masters (new or old) better the quality of their games. I watched every single video (and rewatch several frequently for inspiration) and it’s now my top rated Dungeons & Dragons influenced channel.

I respect his genuine passion for the game and how he conveys his message to us, and appreciate the time he takes to create such brilliant content for the DM crowd. I highly suggest subscribing to his channel. If you can get past the fast paced talking, it’s worth the time to check his stuff out. If there ever was such thing as a “Church of D&D”, Matt Colville should be the high priest of it.

In the words of Mr. Colville:

“Peace. Out.”

And now, enjoy some whiny ProJared! (”he’s such a dumbass!”)

-runDMsteve