#tho it’s gaslamp fantasy actually

[minister-of-silly-walks]

ITS GIRL GENIUS ADVENTURES IN CASTLE HETRODYNE LAUNCH DAY!!!!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

If anyone needs a fun and adorable puzzle game to get you into a new series have I got a recommendation for you!!

Girl Genius is the story of a world ruled by MAD SCIENCE!! (Tm) in which young student, Agatha Clay, at Transylvania Polygnostic University has the worst day of her life. This terrible horrible no good very bad day leads to the discovery of a terribly horrible family legacy that every Mad Scientist Despot Tyrant would like to control, one way or another and it’s now up to her to decide what to do with it.

And part of that legacy is a Castle, horribly broken and incredibly protective of the secrets that it holds. Yet someone has invaded the castle and unlike everyone else who’s done so in the past some odd decades, this one apparently actually stands a chance of getting them. Which brings us to the game!! In which we, Agatha Clay, are trying to repair the castle to prevent this plunderer from taking our legacy before we can figure out what to do with it.

….

I think. Don’t quote me on that, I’m too excited to figure out how to explain this to people not familiar with the story. This is like….. my 7th attempt?

I dunno man. But y’all should check it. Yakknow. FOR SCIENCE! And other reason. :p

[utilitycaster]

Session Zero: why tho

So here’s my take on why one does a session zero, since it’s not universal (but you should do it for a long term campaign unless you know your players super well already)

One part is to get some logistical stuff out of the way - when to meet and how often, virtual meeting tools if applicable (hint: currently applicable), if anyone needs to borrow the books/get a PDF copy, and so on. But that could have been an email. Why a session?

1. Figure out what your players want.

I don’t think this is a very spicy take but it might be new to some people; not all players are down for “hey here’s my cool campaign idea meet me at 2 pm on Saturday, bring dice”. The DM is not the storyteller. Or rather, you’re not the only storyteller. If you don’t want the players to break your cool premise, write a novel, but if you want to build something together, have a session zero. That doesn’t mean you can’t put in some restrictions, and you shouldn’t run something you’re not excited about because the DM is going to be working hard, but this is a shared world and your players will be more invested if it’s theirs, too. Do they want dungeon crawling? monster hunting? political intrigue?

This is also a good time to cover no-go topics (triggers or just things people don’t vibe with) and things people really want (sometimes someone really wants there to be a dungeon. or a dragon), and to talk about structure. Do you want a sort of sitcom structure of “problem arises at beginning of session, is resolved by end” or do you want something more overarching, or a mix? All these approaches are valid, so it’s a matter of being on the same page.

2. Party balance and also a note on what you want.

I am opposed on a philosophical level to that tweet about how an a party of all tiefling bards is not unrealistic because it misses the point to the extreme. It’s not unrealistic for a friend group to share a lot of similarities. A D&D party, however is not a friend group. It becomes a friend group, and even a family, but it starts as a group of people with some kind of shared motivation, which may be as tenuous as “a troll attacked the tavern we were all in”. It’s less a friend group and more putting a heist team together (either on purpose or by accident); the uniting feature is not “we’re all the hacker” because that would be a really bad heist.

What I’m saying is balance is subjective, and the DM is allowed to say “that won’t work.” Don’t force anyone to play something they hate, and give people room to play a character they’re enthusiastic about, but if everyone’s first idea is a rogue and that’s not the premise you want to run, you don’t have to. And also, from limited experienced I’ve found that most people either are open to suggestion because they don’t have a specific character in mind and just meant that rogue might be cool, or on the flip side have like ten PCs they’re itching to run and will happily switch to a different one.

3. Other restrictions

This can be practical/mechanical (I asked players to run any unearthed arcana subclasses past me before committing in case they seem super broken), making the DM’s job easier (I asked for no evil characters on the grounds that I don’t know if I can run a mixed evil and good party yet), or just personal preference within reason. I decided to let the players choose their deities if applicable, but I am not going to have all several-hundred deities listed in the D&D published material play major roles so I figure those who are linked to a god can pick theirs and then I’ll come up with a smaller pantheon; someone else might have an idea in mind (eg: the Norse gods) and tell their players they need to pick from that list.

4. Come up with the premise/setting

Once you have some idea of what the players want, there’s your premise.

Things players had brought up: two expressed interest in clerics or multiclassing into cleric. One couldn’t make it but had floated a few suggestions including a rogue. One had an idea for a druid, and one is relatively new to D&D and wasn’t sure. We also talked about settings; I expressed my concerns about running a modern setting but said gaslamp fantasy works okay, and people were generally into something other than Generic High Medieval. Between all of that we settled on a world in the early stages of an industrial revolution that the druid opposes, and full of the social upheavals this kind of economic change causes (it makes the noble background super interesting; it provides some hooks for the religious establishment to get involved; it opens up a lot of room for social encounters which people stressed they wanted a lot of rather than Kill These Rats, You Murderhobo). That’s about all I have now; once the players have their backstory I’ll flesh it out more.

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Obviously you can do what you want, but I will say for session zero a lot of internet advice seemed to trend towards this weird combination of “tell your characters your setting...and then let them create whatever characters they want with no input from each other” when the opposite approach makes way more sense to me!

It’s actually funny: the only reasonably fleshed out campaign premise I’ve ever come up with was a world that had been on the brink of a major industrial revolution that was foiled by unknown seemingly extraplanar forces, went into a relative dark age, and is slowly emerging a few hundred years later and the campaign is to figure out what happened and prevent a relapse into the dark ages (definitely influenced by me taking a walk in a public green space while thinking about D&D and seeing a bunch of lampposts overgrown with vines; probably influenced by my general love of planar stuff and The Vorkosigan Saga and some other sci fi works). Based on what my players were interested in...they might not have enjoyed that, and it’s also great because I get to see the opposite perspective of the players perhaps being the ones doing the foiling, and why they do it! It’s really exciting and it’s going to push me in an interesting way. I had previously toyed with just trying to write stories set in that campaign premise universe, and this will again force me to see multiple perspectives.

[aniseandspearmint]

I just stayed up WAY too late watching Carnival Row. Mom’s not gonna be able to complain about it tho, because she was right next to me going, ‘NEXT!’ when the credits hit after each episode. ;D

DAMN this is a GOOD show. EVERYONE needs to see it if gaslamp fantasy is up their alley.

The COSTUMES, the MAKE-UP, the twisty and awesome wtfness of the PLOT. 

The world building is so wonderfully done I actually searched to see if it was based on a book series of some kind because you don’t usually get something as in depth as this show unless there’s a book series to take it from. 

But no, no books. This is all new stuff.

You will start out hating some characters and come to love them, you will like some characters only to hate them by the end.

There are two over reaching romances to follow if that’s your thing, there’s a very twisty murder mystery, several other mysteries I can’t talk about without spoiling everything.

There ARE some sex scenes (less than ten iirc correctly, I usually got up to get a drink while they were happening), but they actually made and effort to create believable romance and chemistry between the characters so they’re not as bad as they could have been, and there are FAR less than there are in the average season of GoT.