New Campaign(s)

I am super excited for a character building session tonight with the folks in my weekly D&D game. We recently retired our 4th edition campaign, which spanned from 1st to 11th level and 16 months. The last game wrapped up with our halfling Rogue retrieving the missing half of his soul from a powerful lich, a phased combat that absorbed most of the session.

The next campaign's plot will be more humble. I have a tendency to turn every story into an epic yarn with the characters at a vortex of world-shattering events. I’m devolving to a town-dungeon-castle triumvirate that houses the entire world much like one of my favorite video games, Shining in the Darkness; more recently, Torchlight (of course, no castle here). I wonder if Torchlight's creators played Shining in the Darkness?

Speaking of devolving, at least numerically, we're giving Pathfinder a try. After a handful of paragon-level combats in 4th edition I was ready to tear my hair out; tracking status effects, every player frozen in encounter or daily indecision, total inability to challenge a party with 2 leaders because some combination of healing and neutered stock monsters is broken.

I've been spending some time on terrain and modeling for the new campaigns (the above, plus the game I now run monthly for the formerly-of-Ossining crowd). My desk is currently a clutter of miniatures, paints, coffee stirrers, and more. Expect more terrain- and craft-related posts in the near future.

Lastly, I purchased my ticket for PAX East 2011!

Ansolon

The urge to run another Dungeons and Dragons campaign grows stronger every day. Below is an idea for a campaign setting I cooked up after some discussion in IRC about whether or not the moon's destruction would end life on earth.

“The moon crumbled; a glob of bright paint on the canvas of the firmament slowly smeared from one horizon to the other. We watched and cried, our grief mirrored in the fiery tears that spilled to earth from the heavens. We witnessed a goddess fall and, though light and justice prevailed in that conflict among the gods, every night thereafter would be darker for it.”

Ansolon is a world lorded over by petty and bickering gods. It was once orbited by a small, pale moon which collapsed into a belt of dust and rocks that now cinches the planet. With the destruction of its sole satellite, Ulna, Ansolon entered a calamitous age. The days passed more quickly and raging winds tore down the ramshackle huts and canopy shelters erected by men and elves. Earthquakes, fires and floods rewrote both the surface and underbelly of the known world.

While most of the moon remained in the heavens to stripe the sky, some of its magic-laden pieces crashed to the earth. Wherever they impacted, the seeds of chaos were sown; flora and fauna mutated into twisted mockeries of the natural order, the landscape warped and the influence of the deceased goddess tainted the essence of magic and life. Ulna's servants, for everything near these descended fragments fell under the goddess's sway, now seek revenge. The night crawls with creatures infected with the dead goddess's malice and madness, bent on the desecration of Ansolon.

After 200 years, the combined efforts of the civilized races have restored some semblance of order to the seasons, but the hold is tenuous at best.

Well, maybe the stars will align and I'll find a regular group and a place to play.