A Midsummer Check In
So we are halfway through the summer vacation, and at a good spot to ponder about where my current RPG is going. There's a couple of things to consider, but I'm going to take them in reverse chronological order.
Last Friday I finished a two-session run through of the module Song of Storms. It was originally written for D&D 3.0, so it required an almost complete purging of NPC and monster write-ups to be replaced with D&D 5E versions (and a good reminder of whole damnably clunky 3.0 could be). Song of Storms is a great little adventure, mostly because it is not so much a hack-and-slash kill-and-take fantasy locale but rather a quest that relies heavily upon effective roleplaying for the PC's to be successful. Or not successful, should the players try to intimidate their way through the encounters....
Intentionally or unintentionally, I've been switching up the gaming style of my D&D game since I started back at the beginning of the year. I've done small little exploration encounters and big ones. Plot driven stories and ones with almost no plot at all (but just wandering around killing stuff). With the roleplaying-oriented Song of Storms done, I have to figure out the next direction for the campaign.
One thing I've been thinking about a lot is what happened over the Negative Crisis mega-event. I'm critical of big "summer crossover" comic book events that, when completed, have very little impact on the main universe. One thing that happened in Negative Crisis was that the tarrasque was taken out of Grimfest by the main villains to use as a heavy in that adventure. He was last seen drifting through the phlogoston over the city of Sigil.
Now, I can restore the tarrasque to Grimfest, the central location of the campaign, or I can have him continue to be absent and explore what happens to that dark and creepy city when the core of its economy and culture is removed. I had been kind of burned out on the campaign these days, but heading off in a very different direction has really got me brainstorming again.
Last Friday I finished a two-session run through of the module Song of Storms. It was originally written for D&D 3.0, so it required an almost complete purging of NPC and monster write-ups to be replaced with D&D 5E versions (and a good reminder of whole damnably clunky 3.0 could be). Song of Storms is a great little adventure, mostly because it is not so much a hack-and-slash kill-and-take fantasy locale but rather a quest that relies heavily upon effective roleplaying for the PC's to be successful. Or not successful, should the players try to intimidate their way through the encounters....
Intentionally or unintentionally, I've been switching up the gaming style of my D&D game since I started back at the beginning of the year. I've done small little exploration encounters and big ones. Plot driven stories and ones with almost no plot at all (but just wandering around killing stuff). With the roleplaying-oriented Song of Storms done, I have to figure out the next direction for the campaign.
One thing I've been thinking about a lot is what happened over the Negative Crisis mega-event. I'm critical of big "summer crossover" comic book events that, when completed, have very little impact on the main universe. One thing that happened in Negative Crisis was that the tarrasque was taken out of Grimfest by the main villains to use as a heavy in that adventure. He was last seen drifting through the phlogoston over the city of Sigil.
Now, I can restore the tarrasque to Grimfest, the central location of the campaign, or I can have him continue to be absent and explore what happens to that dark and creepy city when the core of its economy and culture is removed. I had been kind of burned out on the campaign these days, but heading off in a very different direction has really got me brainstorming again.
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| For example, he could come back. |
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