Highmoon’s Ponderings

My two play-by-email games are chuggin’ along greatly, so I figured I’d do an update on both. Let’s start with the D&D game.

West to the Empire
Since my last update (back in Nov!) much has happened. Our first quest completed and the minotaur lord vanquished, the heroes set out further west, heading in the general direction of the city of Argalis, home to my knight, Argus Fisner, by picking up guard duty with a caravan. We stopped in the city of Thelport for a couple of days and we all took the time to purse personal quests; myself, I set out to have Fiendsplitter, the sword of my mentor, repaired, as well as trying to find out more information about it. Thelport was suffering from some bad flooding problems, and being the nosy low-level character I am, set out to find out what the problem was. Before I knew it, the paladin captain of the guard had sent me out to the ruins of a mad wizard’s tower named Alaustor to seek out the root of the problem. I set out with two companions, the dwarf Veit and the spellcaster Raquelle, though before long, due to family issues,  it was just me as the sole player (Raquelle is an NPC).

I can’t recall the last time I had played a lone wolf game, but in the pbem format, this was incredibly easy (for me at least; Mark was running three separate groups at the moment in this pbem, and I know that his Star Wars pbem party had also split up) and allowed for really fast game play. In fact, where the first adventure took us a couple of months to complete, this one in Thelport took us about a month and a half, and only because the holidays were right in the middle of it. I won’t spoil the ending of the adventure, but suffice to say we solved the mystery of Thelport’s flooding and vanquished the… wizard living in the ruins. Between the loot from that crawl and the reward we received from the city guard, I was able to have my sword repaired and hire a sage to investigate the origins and powers of the blade, and wow, was that worth it.

There are a couple of things I have done in this pbem game that I don’t recall ever having done in a face-to-face game:

1. During the minotaur adventure, we all left the dungeon to rest and allow the cleric a view of the night sky, which she needs to regain her spells.
2. Not only did we leave the dungeon, I went back into town to purchase healing, and then went back to the group.
3. I did that again in Thelport, going back into the city to purchase magical healing. This is the bane of extensive dungeon crawling.
4. Started an adventure, then dropped it, unfinished.

That last one happened after I was done with my adventure and personal quests in Thelport, but the rest of the party was still engaged in their own adventure. Mark threw out a lead, I followed it, but after starting it out and finding out some of the information to be had, I dropped it because of a lack of local connection to the area, therefore to the adventure itself, and because we wanted to leave Thelport already. During that stint we lost two party members, gained a new one, and lost a player who left for personal reasons.

We have now arrived in the city of Argalis, and here my character apparently has taken center stage. Argus Fisner is part of a minor noble family that is in somewhat of a decline, and he has come home to find his family manor in greater disarray than expected, his father dead, and his cousin, Tobias, who runs the family’s affairs, still the same ass he remembered him to be. Not only that but a cleric of Justicia (the goddess Argus follows), she who really was responsible for turning Argus into more than another bored noble and helped him join the Order of the Red Gryphon, has been murdered and her killer is now wanted. Their names? The cleric was Lady Aleena, and her killer the wicked wizard Bargle the Infamous.

Oh yes, they of the Red Box. Can we say “Revenge?”

On the personal side, I look forward to some intense roleplaying with Argus. They way I set this up, Argus and his cousin Tobias are the only male heirs to the family title and holdings, with Argus having obvious priority. Thing is, since Argus joined the Order of the Red Gryphon five years ago, the one who has really been there to help the elder Fisner run the family affairs has been Tobias, who is understandably jealous. With papa Fisner now gone, the issue of the inheritance is forced, and that means Argus will have to choose where his future lies, as a knight helping out in the world, or as head of his family. Good stuff all around.

Who said that a play-by-email game cannot be intense and fulfilling?

Earlier today my Play-By-eMail D&D group finished Halls of the Minotaur, the opening adventure in our Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign, West to the Empire. After 4 days adventuring, and pulling a dungeon crawl first for me: actually getting out of the dungeon to regroup and going back to the village to resupply, today we finally arrived at the chamber of the minotaur lord, Toth-ror. It was frightening and dangerous, but we won the initiative, and we delivered righteous justice upon this scourge of the weak. It was especially poignant for me, since I am playing a character who was the squire of a knight killed by the minotaur, so that allowed me to put in some roleplaying bits that helped me develop this once-pregen stock character into my personal avatar in the game.

Kudos go to Mark Gedak for running an awesome game, a game that understood the medium in which it was developing, and took advantage of those, a game that was as much good ole dungeon crawl as it was a challenging excercise in cooperation and focus. Thanks go to my fellow players also for an excellent time and for the effort put in the game as well as in developing your characters (even if the road you took for development makes me groan from time to time).

We will be putting together adventure journals of this adventure, and I’ll be sure to share it here as well.

Now, more adventure awaits, and I am ready for it.

Ever since I posted that I was going to start playing in a D&D/d20 Play by eMail campaign called West to the Empire I have not said anything else on the subject. It has been mostly due to real life stuff and my attention drifting to other things, but fret not, I have been playing and it has been awesome.

This is my first time playing pre-gen characters–Squire Fisner, in my case–and while, indeed, at first I had absolutely no attachment to the character, little by little that faceless pre-packaged set of stats has become MY character, Squire Argus Fisner, of the noble Fisner family of Argalis, novice in the Order of the Red Griffon, and now heir to the honor and legacy of his falled mentor, Sir Galwaith. I very much look forward to playing Argus a lot more.

Mark, our DM, has been doing a bang up job running this play by email game. The main problem is the lag time between actions, and at one point or another we all have been either waiting or causing the wait; it happens, it’s part and parcel of the format, you deal with it. One thing Mark has been doing that I am incredibly glad for is that, as a DM, he treats this as a narrative, so even though the technical part is a bunch of statement declarations and dice rolls being emailed back and forth, Mark takes the time to, every Action, weave all our disparate orders and rolls and whatnot into a narrative block of description that incorporates all the ambiance of our environment.

So, to summarize, it’s been awesome, and now we are heading back into the dungeon to begin the final act, and track down this minotaur that has been terrorizing the forest and villages nearby, and enslaving a tribe of kobolds to do its bidding.

You can check out the West to the Empire website Mark put together for our mutual benefit.

After a loooong time in the works, after a lot of interruptions and other projects getting in the way, after I got off my lazy butt and put the finishing touches on what I was missing, my wife and I are finally ready to start our Victorian Age Vampire chronicle in about a week or so. We’d start this weekend, but we’ll be out of town on a mini-break, though I plan to use the driving time to talk about the game and her character, as I try to get as much info possible to weave the story around that of her PC.

This will be a New World of Darkness game as far as system, using the Victorian Age Vampire book as thematic source material, but for the most part I am looking forward to creating a semi-new mythology for our game; as I told my wife, you might meet a vampire that calls itself a member of the “Ventrue,” but you simply cannot assume you know what “Ventrue” is or means based on your player knowledge. I’ll go into the reasons more in depth later on. I’ve actually set up a tag for “Victorian Age Vampire” so it’s easy to follow the development and the game play.

Fortune of fortunes, I am now also playing in a D&D play-by-email campaign built around Goodman Games‘ Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventures. The campaign, West to the Empire, one of the suggested Adventure Paths in DCC #35 assembled from various of the DCC modules, is being run by the excellent and tidy Mark Gedak (who has done a lot of HMP work both for and with me), and aside from myself, there are two other players, a fella named Kurt and David Jarvis (of Reality Deviant Publications, my collaborator on the DaVinci Labs line for HMP). I am playing a 0-level aristocrat named Squire Fisner, a pregen that came with the first adventure, DCC #35A Halls of the Minotaur (part of DCC #35 Gazetteer of the Known Realms). I’ve already customized this pregen a little by giving him the name Argus and a bit of a backstory which I hope to expand as we play. Though I’ll admit play-by-email is not necessarily the optimal way to play for me, I’m just happy to be in a game, and Mark is organized and detailed enough that I feel good about the whole enterprise and about the opportunity to actually do a bit of roleplay via text. I’ve also created a tag for “D&D PBeM” to track thoughts and play reports from this game.