Be Careful What You Wish For

With a grunt and the scraping of stone on stone, Rhogar forced the chamber door open.  The minotaurs that built this temple many years before had made them heavy and loud, ensuring that no one could enter undetected or without effort.

It also ensured the dragonborn paladin would be leaving this place with a very sore shoulder.

Light spilled into the room from the sunrod being held by one of Rhogar's companions, Zahm; the halfling shaman was already whispering to a wooden totem in his other hand, calling to the spirits that protected him and the rest of their adventuring band.  The eladrin arcanists Fruven and Dayereth readied their implements a pace behind, preparing to hurl spells and curses in their fey tongue if the chamber held as many goblins as the ones they had just finished clearing.

Rhogar's attention was drawn by a gutteral shriek and a the whirling of metal; a crude blade had just been flung past his scaled head, and he could see the goblin who threw it cowering in a doorway across the room.

"Only one?" the dragonborn snarled as he raised his halberd and moved into the room.  "Why can't you just do the smart thing and surrender?"

"Careful," warned Fruven as he scanned the room with his slender wand, "where there's one goblin there's usually something worse nearby..."

No sooner had he said that then the door behind the goblin crashed open, knocking it to the ground.  The doorway was filled with the bulk of a hairy creature as big as Rhogar, carrying a black-bladed axe with runes that glowed a hellish red.  The bugbear snarled at the intruders as more goblins began tumbling around his legs and into the room, filling the air with more thrown blades.

"You just had to say that, didn't you?" sighed Dayereth as Rhogar bellowed a challenging roar, and rushed across the room to meet their foes.

Na-Ain't-Gonna-Happen-Mo

So NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo were complete, flaming wreckages for me. Writing for television news and helping manage our station's Facebook and Twitter stuff has made me a bit exhausted with both social media and creativity in general.  I just have no impetus to do anything when I get home, other than stumble through the motions of checking my WoW auctions, reading a couple of webcomics, and going to sleep.

And something in my head is telling me I could be a freaking news director one day?  What the hell is wrong with me?

So this is me, trying to flog my aching creative muscles into squeezing out a few more dribbles before I fall unconscious.  If I can do this more than one night in a row, I'll consider it a rousing success.

Where to start?  Where else:  the near-death of my D&D party this weekend.

A New Beginning

In two weeks, I should be starting a new D&D campaign with a new gaming group.  And when I say 'new', I mean it; only one of three players I've rounded up have any experience with D&D.  To me, this presents an exciting opportunity to pass along my passion for d20-kickassery and introduce people to the sheer fun of the game.

As long as I don't screw it up, which I have before.

Missteps


A long, long time ago I played Magic: The Gathering with a decent amount of zeal.  After moving to a new city without a prevalent card-playing scene at the time, I tried to teach my wife how to play.  She had been very accommodating of my geeky tastes and wound up sharing quite a few of them, but Magic turned out to be an epic fail with her.  She was having trouble grasping the often-tangled concepts I was throwing out, and stung from losing the first few games I tried playing with her.  She often remarked, "I recognize all these words are English... but I still don't get what they're saying."  After that disastrous process, Magic became a taboo subject and was pushed to the back of the closet with my other forgotten games.

Later I found a pair of very, very well-written articles about applying conventional teaching methods to people trying to learn Magic, and discovered that in my rush to get my wife to play cards with me I had made every wrong move possible.  I had failed to see things from her standpoint, build decks specifically designed to not be overwhelming to a new player, to introduce new concepts like summoning sickness slowly and only move on after they'd seen them in action repeatedly, and above all... let her win.

Evolution

This is something I thought (and kinda hoped) I would never write:

I bought a Pokemon game.  And I'm having a great time.

My first brush with Japanese pocket monsters was when I was around 15 and rockin' the Star Wars CCG something fierce.  Magic was going through the heyday that was the Rath Cycle, and Star Wars was the other big juggernaut on the CCG block.  Pokemon was also insanely popular but looked down upon as fodder for first-graders with sticky binders full of worn cards, or for that guy who wore the weird animal hats and bought manga online.

I recognized that Pokemon had some strong gameplay at its base and probably other vaguely-redeeming values, but as the craze took off onto Game Boys and TV shows, I turned away and said "No thanks; not for me.  It'll burn itself by the time these kids hit middle school."

12 years later those kids are in college, I'm standing at a GameStop needing a new RPG fix, and I hear Professor Oak whispering like a creepy guy on a street corner wearing a trenchcoat...

"Just give it a try.  What can it hurt; nothing says you gotta catch 'em all, right?"

Starting from Scratch

Moving to Baton Rouge meant leaving behind a bunch of awesome friends, including more than one gaming group.  I'm the kind of person that takes their time getting to know people or finding new friends, and being able to connect with those old friends through things like Facebook and Skype are helping make some of the transition easier, but reforming those weekend D&D games is taking longer than I expected.

Working in TV takes up a lot of my time, and with a wife studying for her PhD there's not much left over for us to get out and check out the local gaming scene.  I find myself back in the same spot I was five years ago when I first moved to Fort Smith; spending more time at home playing video games on the weekend, forlornly reading Wizards.com and other websites, and browsing through gaming shops while resisting the urge to buy a book I can't use at the moment.

Five years ago I joined a gaming message board group and managed to find some people who lived less than an hour away and needed another player.  Once or twice a month I would drive to Fayetteville to sling polyhedral dice and get to know these folks, and over time developed some great friendships.  So far those same avenues aren't paying off, so I've had to be a bit bolder.

"The Star Heart Saga"

When Farscape was on TV, I watched a lot of it.  Not necessarily every episode, but I tried to keep up with what was happening to the best of my pre-DVR ability.  And so when I sat down to think about planning a new D&D campaign set in the Astral Plane, Farscape jumped to my mind.

The campaign would revolve around the same thing the show did; a living ship.  In Farscape, human astronaut John Crichton and his ragtag band of alien outlaws banded together to free a living ship named Moya, and then traveled throughout the Uncharted Territories battling evil forces and exploring that region of the galaxy.  So, the players needed a reason to wind up stuck in the Astral, a living ship they could use to sail it, and an enemy to eventually battle with it.

The Heroic Tier


Because the Astral is intended for paragon-tier characters, I decided to slow-play the introduction of the living ship by letting the players do some tomb raiding while I feed them info about the setting's history and their eventual foes.  They get a patron that has them find and assemble an artifact, the Star Heart, which he then uses inside a dungeon at the end of the tier to reveal that the entire place is one big, big ship.  The whole thing lifts into the sky and shifts to another plane, bringing the players along for the ride.

Red Dead AWESOME

During my "extended vacation" from work I sat down to finish Red Dead Redemption's main storyline.  I had actually expected one of two endings:


A) John Marston finds out his family, who were taken by US Marshals that want him to hunt down his former outlaw buddies, were killed by the people that took them.  Marston kills everyone he sees, and rides off into the sunset and/or a shallow grave.


B)  John returns home after the last outlaw is locked up, everyone on the homestead's alive and ornery, roll credits over some spaghetti western music.


Instead, you are given an entirely new chapter of the game, doing missions to help get the ranch back up on its feet and actually meet the people you and John have been fighting for this entire time.  It made me wish Rockstar had given the beginning of the game a similar treatment; during the long train ride to the middle of nowhere, Marston falls asleep and dreams of his family being taken away while the players go through a tutorial on movement and combat, and actually experience his loss.  It would have made the end of the game even that much more poignant and satisfying.


Two moments made the hair on my neck stand up:  the first was when Marston walked through the doors of his barn toward the firing squad, and you knew you were going to get a chance to go down shooting.  The second was the final duel, when the other Marston turns away from the body of his enemy floating face-down in a Mexican creek, and then the logo pops on-screen to the guitar's twang.

To quote another vengeance-seeker, "I got bloody satisfaction."