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It's been while since the last one, so players of D&D, Call of Cthulhu or any other TTRPG: What's been going on in your game?
It's been a while since the last one of these, so whether you're providing an update or a brand new story: What's been going on in your game? What excitement has transpired in your life-on-paper?
-LTADnD
I'm running a homebrew Starfinder campaign with two separate sets of players. One group is a plucky group of adventurers, trying to right the wrongs that they see in their society. The other group is composed of a Financial CEO with the desire to own everything, an assassin, and a hacker. Essentially Good guys vs. Bad guys.
The Bad guys have decided that they're tired of the Good guys constantly ruining their plans and setting back their progress. They decided to contact the Good guys with a proxy, and offer them significant amounts of money to have them expose rival corporations as evil. It fits the good guys' MO, and it gives them opportunities for blackmail and even hostile takeovers. The Good guys are unknowingly helping the Bad guys take control of the corporate landscape.
The most recently took down OmniCom, the major telecommunications company. Now they've got their eyes focused on EnCrypt and Red Eye. The villains' company, Krypto, will soon have a monopoly on telecommunications, surveillance, and cyber security. What could go wrong?
Hey mate! hope you're doing well.
Last game I read right through what was in my tool packs and I used the ball bearings to our advantage, one of our members had to sit out due to personal life stuff so we had to get creative with how things would go down without being stomped into the ground. It worked better than any of us could've hoped!
The couple in our group has their anniversary coming up so we had to put our next date way off, but a guy I work with wants in so we have a small adventure planned that isn't related to the story that we can give the new guy a feel for the game.
On a somewhat related note, have you got any tips on writing backstories?
I do have some tips. I go through a checklist:
-LTADnD
massive help!! thank you, I'll be able to get a decent start on things with that. I had a few rough ideas already, but they wouldn't have held up with much else.
this will be a decent check off list I can run with, thank you
I started with family and kind of went nuts from there and kept going with the small traits I rolled on the night I made the character, my DM and writer friend who is also playing both liked the story I came up with. So that's a win! thank you for again for the tips
Backstory for your world? Or backstory for characters?
damn thing didn't give me notifications for this. For my character, sorry I should have said that.
No worries.
Already not the best advice in this thread (lol) but I usually pick an existing character I feel I understand and do a riff on that.
My last character was a Rogue/Wizard that I based on Rogue from the X-men.
that's actually what I was thinking about doing, I've gone human Rogue and was thinking about taking parts of Durzo from the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks.
It's been a rather long while since I've been active on Tildes. In terms of original content (if you can call conversation starters that) I'm very much a one-trick pony and there's only so much that can be talked about in the realm of TTRPGs. Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to have been much chatter on the topic for a while, so I thought I'd throw my hat in again.
The most interesting thing in this realm to happen to me I think, is that I started a new campaign. I've taken a group of beginners who have only played 2-3 times previously and I'm DMing Basic D&D (the '83 Mentzer version). This is my first time DMing (and even playing) this edition of the game. It went very well.
The first session occurred as more of a one-shot, both to allow players to drop out if they had second thoughts (thankfully none did) and to allow me to get acquainted with the rules in play. They slayed some orcs in the forest, defeated their magician leader, and found some treasure - very combat and exploration heavy and not much else, but it served the purpose it was intended for.
The next and latest was the opposite in the best way possible. To put me in the mindset of a pre-WotC DM I decided to use Thunder Rift, integrated into the Mystara setting. I must say: I'm very impressed with that book. I began the session with them approaching the Rift's largest town, Milinir, with a quest hook that would lead them to The Knight of Newts (A book that after reading I'm not nearly as impressed with). Instead they spent the entire session in town, meeting NPCs, exploring and by the end had made their way into the Thieves' Guild - it was brilliant. I improvised Black Thomas the Thief Lord as being impressed by the party thief finding his way in, offering the chance at reputation and wealth in the most aristocratically-sleazy way I could muster. It was the best session I've DMed in quite a while.
-LTADnD
Gearing up for the second campaign in the Shadowrun tables I am GMing. Last campaign we had two tables, one with five players and one with one player. The actions of each table affected the other. It was seven runs long. We learned from some of that. While overall it was fun, the solo player, who was solo mostly for logistics, really wanted more players. And the other table would sometimes take six hours to finish their runs.
The first campaign was how our wageslave PCs from DeeCee became shadow runners when one of their friends got in over their head with the local anarchist group, Black Star, and went missing along with his son. The player character are all family members, related in some why, to the son. I gave them all the option of join up with law enforcement, the Shiawase corporation or the Black Star and was pleased with the politics of my table that they all went with Black Star.
The whole thing culminated with a trip to the astral plane to stop some bug spirits that were trying to merge the DNA of the son with that of a horror in order to bring another half horror into the world.
This paragraph is about the nitty gritty of the story, feel free to skip (If you're not familiar with Shadowrun lore, this might not make sense anyway). The whole plot was set-up by a research group from MIT&T that wanted to bring an AI into the astral plane. Shiawase got wind of the project and wanted to modify to bring people into the astral plane for profit, by stealing the research. Finding out about this research, the half-horror Thais manipulated the situation to see if he could create another half-horror, so he has Shiawase use an expendable group of mercs from Black Star to get a child into the astral plane using the rift at the Watergate bunker. That's where our PCs come in, table 1 is a woman from the government that the MIT&T group recruits in an attempt to get back their technology because they know it was used on her son to get him in the astral plane. Table 2 is a group of relatives that get caught up in the Shaiwase, Black Star and government fallout of getting the baby into the astral plane. The two tables finally met up in the final run after reconstructing the technology to enter the astral plane in the flesh, and made the choice to save the child from becoming half-horror and come back to the real world with nothing to show for it but a job well done. This doesn't go well, as of course the Watergate bunker is heavily valued by the government and now half my PCs escaped and the other half are captured.
Overall, we all had great fun. So, I am learning from our misteps on how to more cater the game to my players. I am in the planning phase on the second campaign right now. We set the dates for both tables. We added another player and then moved one player from one table to another. And then I reduced how many runs are in the campaign. So instead of seven runs, there are five. I'm also going to work on making them a little more compact, so they take more like the desired three hours or so and less these super marathons that go from the afternoon well into evening.
The story, I can elaborate a bit since none of my players are on this site, will involve getting the child from the first campaign into space via the Space Hook. The reason is because magic gets weaker as one moves further from the planet earth (actually not 100% how it works, but close enough for this post). But the Skyhook is in panama, which is a war zone, smack in between Amazonia and Aztlan. Add in that an anti-magic madman wants to use the skyhook to make a colony in the atmosphere of non-magic users, and he wants to flood the skyhook with lava from the Baru volcano to do it (which requires making a dormant volcano errupt) and that the dragon community is now aware of a child with some horror powers in the world and it should be fairly interesting (I hope!).
Had a PC pull a knife on another PC in game, totally unprovoked. Pretty much killed that game. So there’s that :/
That sucks. Was this a new player who did that?
-LTADnD
Not at all! It was so confusing and upsetting. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive them for that. Completely derailed the campaign. I felt like I had wasted so much time world building especially because it ended like that.
Still nothing sadly.
We are putting the finishing touches on moving in so maybe soonish?
A friends D&D game fell through so that gives me another local player but I would REALLY like to do a Rifts game (as in the theme/environment) but using the 5E system. I might just start the game and we learn as we go since most of the players will be newish or brand new.
The long distance game has gone nowhere either since I havent had the time to invest in Roll20 to learn it. Sigh.
So the lizardfolk fighter in my group mentioned off-hand during his backstory that his people were afraid of him because he looked like the reincarnation of their Demon God... So I ran with it. Two sessions ago, after drinking some strange green water out of desperation (they've been in a desert for weeks now) the lizardfolk had a dream of his God being exiled from his tribe (just as he was), taken in by Aaraakrockra (sp?) and becoming a terrible warlord. Last session they ran into an giant Cactii city of the Aaraakrockra set right next to a large pyramid where the Demon God ruled, and they pledged to fight for him (waaaay in the future) if he proves himself the reincarnation of the Demon... or they might turn on him if not ;)
We are in the middle of a "heist" arc. Our group had been contacted by the big bad to assassinate a city official. We have a huge plan in place to make it seem like we are assassinating him, to lure the big bad out of hiding. Our player group is quite small, consisting of a secretly evil but very personable Warlock, a goody two shoes half-pint cleric, and a sniper Warrior. The plan basically is to use the Warlocks ability to disguise themself add the official, and the sharpshooter's ability to... shoot sharp, and a bag of holding to make it appear as if an assassination has taken place (there's more to it, but that's the gist).
A lot of plans floated around, including actually killing the city official and then revivifying him so that we could truthfully say we had killed him.
Ugh, the DM moved to Georgia for the summer, so we tried to play online with roll20. All of a sudden it seems like nobody wants to make playing any sort of priority, so we've only really had like one game since the beginning of June :(