#sessionlog

[sntechsupport]

Dead Heir of Void bug was in sessions 52s3336b, 697325738, and 17. Come to think of it, should I be worried about the numbering system?

Interesting. Neither of those three logs has any space for a Heir of Void in it. Like, that person has never existed. I know Void does Void bullshit, but the sessionlogs are fairly unaffected by it.

So uh. Take that as you will.

Don't be worried about the numbering system

Sincerely

SN Tech Support (Gear)

[dungeonsnderp]

Season One: Puzzles, Villains, and Poor, Poor Alber (and also Jarvilli)

What do you mean you haven’t read the plot so far? I used gifs and everything.

Spoiler alert; I’m writing this like 92% because I want to show off my brilliance as a DM and 8% because Dots told me she wanted to know what our plot was like so this is heavily edited and in no real coherent order. So. Good luck.

The Puzzle

Really the only relevant bit here is those weird pieces they kept picking up at each stop on the map. As it turns out  each piece was actually one of a set of tangrams. 

Everyone they’ve met with so far (including the dwarf, Alber, poor guy - more on him later) has been dropping hints that their Arch Nemesis the Evil Planner of this Weird Mind Game Thing is nuts. And very evil. So they roll up to his house and surprise surprise, not only is it a gloomy-ass day and he apparently lives in a mini castle, but he’s got a cool tower and oh yeah the whole thing is built on an ancient burial ground. 

So they scope out the tower first like any rational human being would, and find among other things an interesting scrap of paper.

Thus bolstered by the act of surrender, the flow of battle at last ebbed. Having kept tabs on the seashore it was no surprise to hear that the low tide had laid bare the bodies of the slain, now made rich and stinking by the bright sun.  

Weird, right? But easily forgettable. 

They move on and start scoping out the house/castle. They break in the back, snoop into the first room, and there’s Evil Villain’s mother snoozing in a chair. They try to talk to her, villain himself shows up.

Now Vodal was an interesting one for me. Bottom line is he sold his soul to a deity in return for “eternal life” via vampirism (I share this only because they figured it out already) and enough power to keep around some minions, including the dead, possessed body of his mother, who was killed in a war on those very grounds about 700 years ago. 

Mirasha got to wrestle with the concept of what it means to be an orc, as Vodal’s conversation at her was about reclaiming the glory days of the orcs (he’s an orc himself). 

Eirlys got faced with the concept of having someone you could count on to always be there for you - especially since they’re not gonna die of old age. 

It game them both something to chew on but I had to laugh when Eirlys eventually decided to sacred flame him ;D 

So they start fucking him up, mom gets involved, they end up chopping off a good chunk of his health and he books it for his lair. They barricade mom in the parlor and are faced with the grand puzzle of the hallway.

Remember those tangram pieces they’d been getting for 13 sessions? Oh yeah.

Turns out under the hall rug was a set of floor tiles that their gold pieces just so happened to fit in. And that scrap of paper from the tower? Each bolded word was an anagram for a particular animal on the floor; solve them in exactly the right order and the tiles cascaded down into a staircase shape, letting them into the tunnel under the house. How long they took on it determined how much health Vodal got to recoup in the process.

It’s simple on the surface and didn’t go exactly to plan, but I still like the concept of this puzzle. Next time I need more hints and less handholding though, that was a mistake on my part as DM. Live and learn!

Vodal

I’m also pretty happy with Vodal. I homebrewed him by combining the orc spellcaster with a toned down vampire and got this weird mash of brute force and possession/summoning combat. His focus for the second part of the encounter was pretty simple; get to the alter at the back of his lair and start summoning. He had to preform 5 rounds of successful attempts to request help from his deity...but without chickening out. (Wisdom saves abounded). 

I couldn’t roll for shit and he made four of them in quick succession and then failed something like four turns in a row. It added a certain fateful beauty to the encounter however as they just managed to defeat his summoned minions and get up to wail on him as he completed his last attempt. Some sort of horrible hybrid between gorilla and human the size of an 18 wheeler was starting to push its way between the planes, sporting the same blazing eyes everyone posessed by Vodal had. My players got the last swing in just in time and watched as the portal collapsed but not before Valkek (they found his name later on a number of spellbooks upstairs) got a good look at them. Hopefully he’s stuck to his plane for the foreseeable future, but he did manage to get out I  W I L L  R E M E M B E R so maybe they didn’t get off scott free ;D

The Aftermath

Eirlys picked up a cool new bow to finally have a shot at hitting things. Maybe. Mirasha confirmed Vodal had been a vampire. The house collapsed into a giant sinkhole without Vodal’s magic. All in a day’s work. 

They decided to swing back and check on the two NPCs they’d met along the way. Alber was first - they’d found him bound to a pond inhabited by a baby krakenling a couple session earlier. As it turns out, freed from Vodal’s control he’d finally been allowed to pass on and join his long-dead wife in the afterlife. They gave him a proper burial and it was very moving, props to my players. 

Then it was back to Jarvilli’s house for tea and axe shenanigans. 

Good shit. 

Next Up

Well that wraps up a solid story arc. We made a ton of mistakes (myself most of all) but I learned a lot, built some solid plot hooks for the future and made almost as many good choices as bad. 

We’re heading into Neverwinter next, to visit Stephanie at the Lady Finger Inn and I can’t wait.

[dungeonsnderp]

The Capening

Session 8:  This had been in planning for days as Alex and kh were waiting ever so patiently for the right moment to put the capening into action.

It was a rude awakening for Mirasha as a pair of hands hovered over her throat only to find out it was Eirlys attempting to and failing to sneak a cape onto the half-orc’s shoulders as she slept. After asking for an explanation and some coaxing, “Capes are cool!” Mirasha did put it on though reluctantly. Some Backstory: Mirasha and Eirlys happened upon a piece of drapery that concealed the metal piece while in the Maleah Tower. Unbeknownst to Mirasha(and Kat), Eirlys made sure to collect this piece of cloth as it turned out to be Mirasha’s random trinket! The irony. Go Team Cape!

[dungeonsnderp]

The Plot So Far

Sessions One Through Seven

You asked for it, and here it is. For a note, Kat didn’t jump in till session three (I wanted to start with just one player and see if we were even ready to commit to D&D). Each session will have the actual plot...and some notes from me as DM on what was actually prepared vs what happened. It gets less coherent as we go, whoops.

TL;DR:

Session 1: Half-elf ranger/cleric Eirlys had one of those dreams that really sticks with you, that urged her to leave her temple of Selune and explore the world looking for a place she could call home. She promptly hopped on the road with her faithful cougar sidekick Clay. 

They headed south from Luskan towards Neverwinter (we’re using the map loosely at best, just as starting point for me for basic places) but didn’t get far before encountering a farmer in a bit of a pickle; Rhondor’s wagon had been run off the road by “some kind of creature” and the axle had snapped. After a tense conversation Eirlys was able to repair the wagon and get him back on the road, to his deep thanks (apparently his wife would not have been pleased to find him stuck). 

DM note: Voices for NPCs are super hard when you suck at acting? I think I oversold it and ended up barreling over KH, who’s a slow speaker by nature, so Rhondor kept cutting Eirlys off. My mistake, and I’m glad it happened so early, but still. NPCs are hard. 

Eirlys continued on the road before finding an interesting branch and following it...only to run into a Bugbear ambush. Facing up against two bugbears we both quickly realized that a) she was a lot more fragile than I had prepared for, and b) Clay needed some kind of healing...thing. Enter Healing Lick. It’s gross, but super effective! One of the bugbears escaped, the other was killed. Eirlys died twice, Clay three times. It went super well. 

Session 2: Longresting in a tree nearly went badly when they got ambushed by a single rat, Eirlys went to kick it and kneed Clay instead. I continue to be amazed by how rigged Roll20′s dice are. By this point KH has gotten a good 8 nat 1′s.

They eventually stumbled on an old graveyard and completely ruined temple. I wanted to test out dungeons and we spent the whole session bumbling around underground. It went decently despite both of us rolling poorly, but the only thing of note was that there was a tapestry with nagas being killed on it and Eirlys ripped it down (rolling too low of a perception to notice the hidden doorway behind it, I might add) and made it into a cape. For Clay. Her cat.

I’m gonna make her pay for it later.

As a DM sidenote; these two first sessions were ROUGH. Neither of us had played before and for every 20 minutes of actual play there was probably 10-15 minutes of googling and flipping through the rulebooks to learn how stuff worked. I’m still pretty sure KH rolled attack rolls wrong both times, and I kept fucking up perception rolls. We also couldn’t stop laughing and had to pause a couple times to resume breathing before continuing on, so my best advice is just to chill and not take things too seriously. 

Session 3: I knew I was ready to fold Kat in, so I actually took the time to do some planning to give us something to do. This was actually super rough; I knew Eirlys was going to be given a map so I started drawing it and let it just kinda flow. I figured fuck it, I’d build a game around whatever I came up with. I...don’t actually recommend this method, but it’s worked pretty well for me so far. All I really had planned was how to pass the map to Eirlys, and how Kat was going to make her entrance. The rest I left up to chance.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Somewhat recovered from all of the death, Eirlys and Clay got back on the road, and quickly discovered that not only had Rhondor made it past them, his wife Tiria (half-orc, very grumpy and sparse with words and emotions both) had caught up with them. One only kind of awkward interaction later and Eirlys had been (grumpily) thanked for her help and given a cape cloak. In one of its pockets was, you guessed it, a map. 

I’m so creative.

She just so happened to have spotted a tower in the distant distance earlier (you can totally see where I went NOW KISS with my plot ideas, oh well) and jauntily set off through the most boring plains known to man. A good couple hours of traveling later and she stumbled into the middle of a battle with a couple giant rats and her accidental new travel mate, half-orc fighter/rogue Mirasha. 

They “bonded” over the world’s longest and most awkward walk to the tower known to man. I’m just kinda sitting there listening to them interact like

Points for being in character for both of them, for sure, but good god. Hilariously awkward.

They reached the tower finally and I got a good chance to step back and let them drive. I had loosely planned the “puzzle” of this tower as that it was very tall, had a secret room up top, and the only way up was through one of four identical trapdoors in the floor which contained some kind of mechanism to get them upstairs. I had phrased the rhyme for this area to indicate the west door (sleeping sun) and figured I’d make the rest up on the fly. 

Seriously this rhyme is so bullshit, let me break this down for you;

A spire tall and hidden feet a message for the snoozing sun beneath the floor a giant sleeps wake him gentle to rise as one

I went, OKAY IT’S A BIG TOWER WITH A SECRET IN THE FLOOR THAT BRINGS U TO THE CEILING and this was born. Super subtle. 

Eirlys hugged the phallic tower to get a feel for it, and also decided she was going to ring the bell if it killed her. Mirasha tried to actually solve the puzzle but picked the wrong door and I went “shit I didn’t prepare for the wrong answer” and went HEY magic animated possessed scarecrow yay! They did manage to kill it.

Seriously about 80% of each session is me realizing I didn’t prepare for something and scrambling to come up with a result. I gripe and bitch but it’s honestly where the fun is for me. 

Session 4: We had to stop shortly after the battle due to time constraints but picked it back up a day later. They cracked the (admittedly laughably easy) puzzle to ascend the tower (I hadn’t planned on there even being a “puzzle” down there, but after the break it seemed super anticlimactic? I don’t regret putting it in but it was very lame.)

Up top was a trapped chest containing a strange shape, and the bell. Oh god, that fucking bell. Eirlys absolutely had to ring it and I was admittedly kind of sad when she succeeded her checks to ring it with her body and then cling to it as it swung back and forth. Flinging her off the tower would have been hilarious. 

Session 5: This was an accidental sudden session and I had zero prepped. I had already picked out a couple of enemies in case I needed a sudden battle and decided to have a griffon swoop in on the attack. They brought it down to like 2 health and then chose to knock it unconscious, tie it up, and then interrogate it once it woke and I’m just here like 

Pulled a griffon voice and plot out of my ass yep okay. Incidentally, griffons totally know when you’re lying. Or at least when Eirlys was lying. They did a great job talking it around to revealing that it didn’t remember how or why it had chosen to attack them. (It also had a family and kids, just saying.) Our heroes pieced together that both the scarecrow and griffon had had an identical flaming eye thing going on and correctly deduced that something was possessing them into being hostile. 

I say possessing like I planned this or had any idea who or what was doing the possessing ahead of time. I did not. I do now, because I had to back my claims up somehow, but that was a plot point I had not planned lmao

Session 6 & 7: (These two were back-to-back with no plot break in the middle so I’m lumping them.) I’m here like yep I have this under control now. We’re going to Spiderweb Vale, I actually planned a puzzle this time around, AND a dungeon, this is totally under control.

Boy was I wrong.

Eirlys attempted to fling herself off a clifftop, they nearly turned around at the dungeon entrance because spiders, and then got stuck on the puzzle and needed a bunch of hints. I had planned a maze based on a sort of crosswords-style puzzle and had no idea how well it would go.

All that being said, it was a blast. I had such a good time adapting things on the fly for them. Kinda forgot to plan anything for the dead ends and played that super fast and loose, and had also forgotten to theme the dungeon and so pulled a description out of nowhere, but we muddled through.

Side note, dungeons are really big. And kind of repetitive. I used a lot of DM power to slide us as smoothly as possible through the whole dungeon (we might have skipped like half of it through handwavey magic)

But we got through it and they did fairly well against the phase spider mega boss and got the second shape bar thing! 

I’m learning more and somehow prepping less every session as we go, but as long as everyone’s having fun I consider it a success. I have more of the end-game fleshed out and some loose ideas for each landmark and we’re just gonna chill and see what happens. 

So now, onward and upwards to the Dead Man’s Cave!. 

[dungeonsnderp]

Session 9

I don’t even have a funny quote from this session, it just went really well and was a super satisfying bit of plot. 

I’m not saying there wasn’t a shitton of fuckery and laughter like usual, but I got a kick out of letting them get a glimpse of the bad guy, slapping Eirlys upside the head as the local deity, AND I got to fight as bear twins who each took half of the other’s damage when injured. What’s not to love?

[dungeonsnderp]

#6: Spiderweb Vale

As an excellent indicator of our party’s mentality, they approached a mile-wide ravine/valley and Eirlys immediately went “but can I jump it though.”

She could not.

[dungeonsnderp]

Session 4: Having successfully defeated the Maleah Tower, our intrepid adventurers continue on their journey now carrying a mysterious burnished metal parallelogram with strange runes on the sides...and one hell of a headache from The Bell That Bites Back(TM)

Eirlys just had to ring it.

[dungeonsnderp]

#5: Surprise Session

aka The DM Was Unprepared and Wildly Pulled A Griffon Out Of Her Anus

It had a family, man, think of the kids.

[sntechsupport]

Alright, then what happened to everything *in* the session. Namely everything that. Yknow. Died mysteriously? Or how about that Glue can't see these asks, but you can. ~Heir of Stage

The Sessionlog is not in its best condition, so retrieving some data is rather tricky but apparently someone caught a very hard Macabre Charge and annihilated... everything. Not a cool move.

As for Glue... She is very weakly resistant to Macabre Charge. Like, super weak. I mean it. But because she is part of the game now, it would make things very difficult for everyone if she simply Charged, so the game is very nice to her and prevents it whatsoever! That means it doesn’t show to her anything that could tip her Macabre Incluence over the top! Like your messages.

xoxoxo Fluffle.

[sntechsupport]

Wh- no Law player? What the fuck? What the hell is he doing here then? ~Heir of Stage, Session cHnf2R,

I don’t know, pal. But according to your Sessionlog, there is no Law Player in your Session. I don’t see any Law Player in your Session. I don’t see even any excess Land.

On the other hand, what I see is a rather gory vaguely once-human shaped scattered corpses of what was probably a Stage Player. Tough to determine their Class (GT pyjamas are shreds) but it looks like the Stage’s green, in places where there isn’t blood or oil all over it anyway.

It isn’t helping that according to your Sessionlog all the Players in your Session are dead. Have been for a while. As in, you specifically have been dead for seven weeks before even sending that first ask. I didn’t tell you because a) it would disturb you, b) I was too busy freaking out.

The thing that concerns me is that after the wipeout the Session should have shut down immediately. But it is still online and running...

Sincerely

SN Tech Support (Gear)

[sntechsupport]

Alright, Fluffle. Riddle me these. What happened to our session, who was that Law player, what happened to me, and what the fuck are you hiding ~HOS

Oh, so in order: I don’t know. I have no idea. There wasn’t any Law Player in the first place. You died. I am hiding my stash of sweets away from Glue.

My best guess is that you are a lingering ghost, who hasn’t yet figured out how to let go. Being a ghost is an uneasy experience to someone who is not used to it, so I’m sure that Gurl has some very scientific term for it, but I’d say that your mind has developed sort of like an inner world where it managed to cycle itself in in order not to go all crazy from being dead!

Uhhh... It’s actually quite probable that this happened, because Gear has just opened your Sessionlog for me and there is very huge Macabre influence basically everywhere! No wonder the place is so gory and that your spirits are still milling about. The Session probably can’t shut itself down because in a way you are still in it as ghosts.

But now that you know it, youcan break yourself out of the cycle and scuttle off to the Dreambubbles or the afterlife, where you can be happy!

xoxoxo Fluffle.

[sntechsupport]

Now I understand most of the classpect questions you'd get would be a little bland or as easily solved as walking to your local sburbian public library, but I'd like to think this ask a little more interesting. Let's just say me and my comrades have found a surefire way to, say, influence some things, including our classpects with no consequence. Onto my question, are there any best classpects you could tell us about? If not, could you perhaps tell me about my original title- Lord of Blood? Thx.

So I’m going to skip all that textbook ramble about the ways of your aspect and how should you play it and get more… behind-the-scenes, I suppose?

Lord of Blood. I can’t really say anything about Lords that hadn’t already been said on this support page/blog/whatever already. Maybe except that half of the other classes get a huge roleplaying boost when they step on the Lord’s cape. When it comes to the cape, the best way to boost your RP bonus is to find some Page Player and make them hold your cape while you walk. It looks less epic than it sounds.

All Aspects are similar to each other in one way or another. Blood combines the Star’s trust, Might’s unity, Stage’s keep-going-on and most important of all Life’s… well, life.I kid you not, Blood is the only offensive actively healing Aspect there is. As in it can do damage while you create life. No other Aspect can do that. don’t confuse it with Life’s transferring life, that’s different.

Lord of Blood is quite a rare title to generate, but when it comes to it, it isn’t hard to play. The rarity is simple: Blood is Aspect very closely linked to motherhood and therefore assigned to motherly-behaving and motherly-thinking players. Gender stereotypes aside, for this reason is Blood usually a female Player. I have no idea what exactly are the qualifications for the Lord Class (except for a super low self-esteem, thanks Gurl, I didn’t need to know), but if you’d be looking thorough the sessionlogs (that you can’t, cause it’s developer-only option), you’d find out that no female had ever been assigned Lord. Transgeders, genderfluids, nonbinaries, hermaphrodites even, sure. But no woman, it is a mystery.So Lord (non-female Class) of Blood (mostly-female Aspect) is therefore rare to generate.

But when it does generate. it abuses the whole “Lords can’t create” aspect of the Class like hell, since Blood is mostly about creating.You literally shape the creation. Which is, like, OP as fuck.Things gets worse when it comes to fighting then. Lord’s combat skills depend solely on the Aspect’s destructive ways and Blood has no destruction in itself unless you find a loophole (Transpositioners, Performers, Encryptors…) or you are destructive by your Class nature (Destroyers, Protectors, Champions…) or you are hella creative (Muses). Sucks to be a Lord of Blood when it comes to fight.

SincerelySn Tech Support